The at home doing nothing process
I'm sated by the amazingly long holiday I've taken, and how little I've done with it. Basically, aside from some amazing social time, I've sat around on the laptop at home demanding amazing dinners with mum and dad and avoiding work.
I'm re-reading for the fiftieth time the Lucia books - the ultimate comfort read and, in my view, even better than Wooster. Whereas Wooster does actually have stories, Lucia's world is just the long delicious spooling of character and society. It is episodic in a way but really it's pure, indulgent form, and EF Benson does it impeccably. You're honestly completely hooked across all their deadly social battles, from Elizabeth Mapp's invincibly curtain-twitching petty busybodyness to Lucia's totally pretentious cultured loftiness, and then no-nonsense Diva Plaistow who talks like a telegraph somewhere between them and Georgie Pillson, the 'young bachelor' with his cross stitch and his cabinet of bibelots who doesn't know that the whole of Tilling knows that he dyes his beard that gorgeous auburn to cover the grey. And Quaint Irene, the madcap artist in trousers who worships Lucia and will do anything, including making a parade making her six-foot maid carry a portrait of Lucia down the high street, to advance Lucia's (ultimately failed) bid to become Mayor.
An interesting side note about the books was that EF Benson was gay, and I think he was closeted a lot of the time, so the characters of Georgie Pillson and Quaint Irene - as stereotyped as they are - seem to have been a way of playing about with gay identities, or at least their 'acceptable' face. In fact probably only the form of social farce and gentle stereotype made it possible to create identifiably (but not named) 'gay' characters. I don't know. I guess as someone who reads as and mostly acts heterosexual, and certainly accepts the privileges of heterosexuality, I'm problably going to make this reading.
Never seen the TV series, I must watch it but I'm scared I'll not like it and it will ruin the books. But then again, Prunella Scales? Born to play Mapp.
I'm re-reading for the fiftieth time the Lucia books - the ultimate comfort read and, in my view, even better than Wooster. Whereas Wooster does actually have stories, Lucia's world is just the long delicious spooling of character and society. It is episodic in a way but really it's pure, indulgent form, and EF Benson does it impeccably. You're honestly completely hooked across all their deadly social battles, from Elizabeth Mapp's invincibly curtain-twitching petty busybodyness to Lucia's totally pretentious cultured loftiness, and then no-nonsense Diva Plaistow who talks like a telegraph somewhere between them and Georgie Pillson, the 'young bachelor' with his cross stitch and his cabinet of bibelots who doesn't know that the whole of Tilling knows that he dyes his beard that gorgeous auburn to cover the grey. And Quaint Irene, the madcap artist in trousers who worships Lucia and will do anything, including making a parade making her six-foot maid carry a portrait of Lucia down the high street, to advance Lucia's (ultimately failed) bid to become Mayor.
An interesting side note about the books was that EF Benson was gay, and I think he was closeted a lot of the time, so the characters of Georgie Pillson and Quaint Irene - as stereotyped as they are - seem to have been a way of playing about with gay identities, or at least their 'acceptable' face. In fact probably only the form of social farce and gentle stereotype made it possible to create identifiably (but not named) 'gay' characters. I don't know. I guess as someone who reads as and mostly acts heterosexual, and certainly accepts the privileges of heterosexuality, I'm problably going to make this reading.
Never seen the TV series, I must watch it but I'm scared I'll not like it and it will ruin the books. But then again, Prunella Scales? Born to play Mapp.