Fagette by Athens Boys Choir

Fagette is a trans-fabulous Sunday in the park. It’s croquet gone gay, drag-tastic cheerleaders, and synchronized dance, all in an Astroturf wonderland.

Rain on the terrace

Jane Austen mug

When Nicky was over here visiting me last November, we both bought one of these great Jane Austen mugs.

It says: “Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” – Jane Austen.

poetry, blurry eyesight, art and architecture

A couple of weeks ago, Paul and I went to a members’ morning at the ICA and saw a brief talk about an exhibition they have at the moment called A Recent History of Writing and Drawing. They have a few hand-held dot matrix printers where you wave the printer over the paper while pressing a button to spray the ink on your paper. It was very cool. Each day of the exhibition, the printers will print out a selection of newspaper headlines.

Last week I had half an hour of blurry vision while at work. After going to casualty at an eye hospital, and getting my eyes tested by an optician, it sounds like I had a visual migraine. I have very good eyesight though – the optician said I’ll probably need reading glasses when I’m 45 but not before.

literary tattoos

I have just found a website with lots of pictures of literary tattoos, Contrariwise (I heard about it on the Radio National Book Show). There are some I really really like. There are (Tolkien) Elvish tattoos, the Little Prince, e. e. cummings and Kurt Vonnegut. I like some Sylvia Plath quotes and I kind of like the Death Eater tattoo (from the Harry Potter books).

Book Clubs

A week ago, Paul and I hosted our second bookclub. This month’s book was Spud by the South African John van der Ruit. It was a funny, very easy-to-read book set in an elite boys boarding school in South Africa in 1990 – the year that Nelson Mandela was let out of jail and that apartheid was ended. It wasn’t very political or deep but it made me laugh a lot and I even cried. Next month we’re reading Y: the Last Man, a comic set on Earth where all the male humans and mammals have died except for one man (and his male pet monkey). I have read the first two volumes and wasn’t that impressed – it was interesting but I got the feeling that the writers thought they were being feminist but I wasn’t all that convinced that they knew what they were doing.

We're on youtube

Paul is loving taking photos and films on the go (on his phone) and uploading them to Flickr and Youtube straight away.