Boxing Day may be much nicer than Christmas Day as you don't need to eat so much food, and you can go out and do the things you like doing. There are fewer family games and quizzes. And yesterday we went for a short bedraggled walk in the rain, rather muddy and I had forgotten to take waterproof boots with me, but today looks gusty and bracing.
I got a great number of books for Christmas which is lovely. I received from F: Weeds, by R Mabey, which I will read with recourse to the internet because it doesn't have illustrations of all the weeds. I have Plants from Roots to Riches by K Willis and C Fry: which does have illustrations and (some of them I saw quite recently in a programme about the history of gardens with Monty Don which was very informative) and this book I can't wait to get to grips with. But first I must read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) for the book group. I thought this would be awfully drippy because I saw a film of it recently in which the women were all equally gorgeous in their long, floppy dresses and the whole mood was very slushy. But the book is a better experience as it is quite slyly acerbic and as frank as it can be about sex without actually mentioning sex and women's attitudes to it. I think Elizabeth von Arnim is quite an amazing person. I am not surprised she had an affair with H.G. Wells; although he was appalling to his wives (bad point) he could cope with women who wanted to be open, honest and experimental with sex, which shows the courage of his convictions about feminism.
The next Book Club book is called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. A man called Tom suggested this as I said I would like to read a serious book. Tom is one of two men at the book club and he seems extremely well-read and well-informed.
The book that's driving me mad at the moment is Elena Ferrante's The Story of a New Name. I have read it all out of order because I kept skipping ahead because it's so long and wordy, but I must read it again properly to make sure I haven't missed anything so I can't really say I have finished it, but I sort of hate it because the protagonist is making such dangerous decisions and one feels menaced. I have part three of this series to read as well. Italian torture!
I have also had an interesting understanding about Virginia Woolf. I read all her pieces of memoir writing in a book called Moments of Being, and I loved her style and her calm air of understanding what went on about her, then the tragedies, and how she felt about them, her judgements and her love for those she lost. I read it all twice. And in tandem with this, I read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, which I am nowhere near the end of. It gives you quite a shock to realised that Mrs W. was an unreliable narrator, because she left out the fact that she herself was often very ill physically, in pain and unable to eat, and that during periods of her life she was insane, psychotic or otherwise mentally ill - was violent to Leonard, who had huge strength of character in taking her on (quite the reverse of his tiny physicality). Mrs W doesn't mention what a pain in the neck she had been to Vanessa during their adolescence, and to her sister Stella who had charge of her during her first madness, and how people said: "It's very bad for Stella to have Ginny with her all the time." I imagine she had a doleful intensity that could make anyone feel depressed. From the standpoint of her own memoir, Virginia is a rock of sense! I imagine when she read this out to the Memoir club*, Vanessa was sitting in a corner either laughing quietly to herself or shaking her head and rolling her eyes, sketching or designing something all the while: Vanessa went to listen but always kept her hands busy. Vanessa was a remarkable person in herself, and Virginia could have done nothing, I think, if Vanessa had not been so staunchly determined to be an artist and to be a Bohemian, because Virginia was too weak to do all that without her.
We gave the daughter a pair of Clarks stout leather boots for Xmas, (although she was faintly tempted by Doc Martens), also party clothes and ridiculous shoes (for nightclubs), a jumper, a purse, a scarf - oh, many things, it was fun to get her so many things!
*A Bloomsbury thing: Lytton, Morgan, Maynard, Leonard, Duncan, Clive, Virginia and Vanessa, maybe some others.
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