it's the rain before the storm
Monday, 29 September 2008 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtCape Town is having no truck with this spring nonsense - this is the latest, longest, wettest winter I can remember. Today the climate decided bugger all this drip and drizzle nonsense, let's rain. Fifteen minutes of solid downpour, in which I could barely hold up my umbrella because of the weight of water. I made it to the car laughing like a loon, with my characteristic flowing skirts kited up to my knees and sodden nonetheless. Unsurprisingly, I love this weather; apart from anything else, the last month's pattern of two warm days followed by three or four of rain, has made everything with halfway pretentions to photosynthesis go suddenly, tropically mad and leap skywards with glad cries of "sproing!". The garden has a lawn for the first time in years, all the greens are GREEN, and the brickwork of the paved area in the corner is covered with moss. Also, puddles, rain drumming on the roof at night, and a plethora of exceedingly happy geese.
As a downside, I have a cold. Again. I'm proposing to ignore the little bugger and hope he goes away, and that he doesn't disturb the cosmic bulk of Sid the Sinus Infection lurking in his R'lyeh slime-cavern. But I must add that I think it's a Cosmic Conspiracy to keep me away from the gym.
I'm slightly running out of September in which to do Retro Kiddielit, and should state, upfront and for the record, that the last two days are going to be filled with things that randomly occur to me rather than any crowning essential of children's lit. Thus this one, which is one of those books which sticks in the mind mostly because it's kinda odd. Pauline Clarke's The Twelve and the Genii pushes two of my happy buttons, the one being the adventures of tiny people in the mould of Lilliput, the Borrowers or Mistress Masham's Repose (which is a bonus kiddielit classic by T.H. White which follows the adventures of a colony of Lilliputians in England, and should be read by all right-thinking people, particularly those who enjoy political satire). The other, of course, is my litgeekiness: The Twelve is about the twentieth-century children who discover the twelve wooden soldiers which once belonged to the Brontë siblings, who wrote stories about their adventures. The soldiers, of course, come to life; but the huge appeal of the novel is the personalities they have, their sharp, lively delineation as characters in their own right despite their size, and the curiously realistic pragmatism with which they face their giant world. The relationship between them and the boy who finds them, and his desperate protectiveness of the twelve, is beautifully drawn.
As a downside, I have a cold. Again. I'm proposing to ignore the little bugger and hope he goes away, and that he doesn't disturb the cosmic bulk of Sid the Sinus Infection lurking in his R'lyeh slime-cavern. But I must add that I think it's a Cosmic Conspiracy to keep me away from the gym.
I'm slightly running out of September in which to do Retro Kiddielit, and should state, upfront and for the record, that the last two days are going to be filled with things that randomly occur to me rather than any crowning essential of children's lit. Thus this one, which is one of those books which sticks in the mind mostly because it's kinda odd. Pauline Clarke's The Twelve and the Genii pushes two of my happy buttons, the one being the adventures of tiny people in the mould of Lilliput, the Borrowers or Mistress Masham's Repose (which is a bonus kiddielit classic by T.H. White which follows the adventures of a colony of Lilliputians in England, and should be read by all right-thinking people, particularly those who enjoy political satire). The other, of course, is my litgeekiness: The Twelve is about the twentieth-century children who discover the twelve wooden soldiers which once belonged to the Brontë siblings, who wrote stories about their adventures. The soldiers, of course, come to life; but the huge appeal of the novel is the personalities they have, their sharp, lively delineation as characters in their own right despite their size, and the curiously realistic pragmatism with which they face their giant world. The relationship between them and the boy who finds them, and his desperate protectiveness of the twelve, is beautifully drawn.
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no subject
Date: Monday, 29 September 2008 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, 30 September 2008 10:46 am (UTC)Will go off to look for the T H White & the Twelve.