Issues.
Brisbane is all clean blue skies and crisp tall buildings and newness. Australia seems even newer and more plastic than ever after Paris, although that is also why it's so lovely here. They call this winter - ha! We have been out sunbathing all day. The disparate members of our family are gradually coming together, which is always a huge pleasure because I love my family. My nephew has grown enormously since Christmas, and is now a lot more interactive, dancing and chuckling away happily on request, like a performing monkey.
The wedding is at the weekend, along the coast at a place called Surfers Paradise, which I assumed was a resort or something but which turns out to be a city. They have a city called Surfers Paradise. I mean come on. Have some self re-cocking-spect.
Thank you for reading suggestions. I would love to do something from Karenina, but I reckon it would probably mean more to me than her. In the end I think I am going to go with the following Robert Bly poem, called The Third Body:
A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long
at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born
in any other nation, or time, or place.
They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.
Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.
The man sees the way his fingers move;
he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.
They obey a third body they have in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.
Also I need to update those of you who were very kindly sympathising with my horrendous flat-hunting nightmare: we have been offered a place! It is only a temporary solution -- it's a furnished flat for three months to live in while we look for a long-term choice -- but it really takes the pressure off, and it means we won't be homeless when we get back to Paris and will have a real address to register for everything with. It's in such a wonderful area, and I will post all about it when I get back and can show photos.
Now let me make a small linguistic excursus, if excursus is the word I want. I am reading A History of Histories by John Burrow at the moment (Hannah's verdict on Twilight by the way: "really fun, except annoyingly like an anti-feminist rewrite of Buffy"), and I was totally thrown by the following sentence. See if this makes sense to you:
But, for Livy, Roman patriotism is overriding, and this issues, of course, in an antiquarian attention to the city's origins.
The issues...in bewildered me, especially being split the way it is. First I thought maybe it was a strange variant of "issues from", but in fact the meaning is exactly the reverse. The OED defines this sense as "to have as an issue or result; to result (in)". I can't tell now if this is new to me or if I was just confused by the way it's used here. But I thought I'd throw it out there to see what you-all thought.