Journey of the Magi

I don't know why, but I really love Epiphany. I look forward to going to an Epiphany service as much as a carol service. I think it reminds me that Christmas isn't quite over - well not just yet, and not to rush onto the next thing but to savour the season fully.  

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey

T. S. Eliot Journey of the Magi

journeying

Happy Epiphany to you x

Goodbye, my love

We all travelled home on Sunday for a farewell lunch for Pops. Tomorrow he leaves for three months volunteering in Palestine with EAPPI. 

'Language was inadequate, after all. One used the same words for a parting which might be for years... as one did for an overnight business trip. She put her arms tightly around him and said, 'Goodbye, my love.' Mollie Panter-Downes Goodbye, my love in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

au revoir

He's only going for three months the words the same as usual when we say goodbye after a family weekend but the tears and the longer, tighter hug spoke of a different au revoir.

unseen, but certain

The final quote that I really liked, that in its way concludes the book.

'She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest, and always, trough or crest a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.' Dorothy Whipple

sea

love and courage

Rachel mentioned that she'd be hosting a read along of Someone at a Distance in the second week of November and lo and behold I just happened to be reading that novel. Rachel will I'm sure write the most wonderful and thought provoking posts. So I shall mainly focus on favourite passages. There were two that really spoke to me, passages that stick with you and one hopes to remember and return to when needed.

'You must go on with love and courage... and trust to God to carry you forward through your life.'
.... 'I think the way to grow in faith is to behave as if all God's promises are true, and miraculously, you find that they are.' Dorothy Whipple Someone at a Distance

faith

scurry along

Having had a glorious rest I'm now back into the commuting. My journey is fine, even better if it could be a little shorter. It's open air, no tunnels, apart from when we go under the Thames at Greenwich, and I tend to get a seat.

'Miss Catherine Birch trotted through the lobby of the ministry where she was employed, automatically waved her pass at the doorman, and joined the hurrying throng of men and women pouring down the London street towards the bus stops and tube stations. Their haste was contagious. she began to scurry along as though a vitally important evening lay before her.' Mollie Panter-Downes It's the Reaction in Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

scurrying

How do you travel home from work?

Paris in July

Paris in July started very slowly but then sped along. I managed to read Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard and The Mirador, Dreamed memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her daughter, Elisabeth Gille.
The best part though was our day trip to Paris for the day in the month of Paris in July.
It was my birthday gift to Warmth and was fortunate enough to be joining him.

A brutal alarm at 5.00am so we could catch the train and tube to Kings Cross St. Pancras ready for the 7.30am Eurostar to Paris. A snooze, a good book and a queue for coffee.

We walked to Monmartre from Gard du Nord and had an explore of Sacre Coeur, the stained glass windows were a delight.

Then a lovely meander through the streets of Monmartre, a stop for a croque monsieur and plotting castles in the air where a daydream apartment would be.

Semi seriously thinking about coming for a night in December for Christmas shopping and staying in this area.

A quick hop on the Metro. A glimpse of the Tour Eiffel from the Tuileries Gardens.

A walk along the Seine glimpsing, Paris Plage then to Musee D'Orsay (two for the price of one with our Eurostar tickets.) Discovering a new artist, Odilon Redon.

Odilon Redon

Truly time for a late lunch now. Searching for a  Luxe Guide recommended restaurant led us to rue St. Honore. Although our walk took a long time I enjoyed gazing in shop windows and along streets that together we would never walk through. We popped into Colette, a shop I've read much about. A glimpse at Annick Goutal's windows. Finally we found a lovely place for lunch, sitting outside with our Orangina and steak. Then up and onto another walk, crossing over the Seine again and to the Left Bank to search for a Luxe recommended place L'Heure Gourmande.     

We ordered a cafe, a chocolate tart, a chocolat ancienne and assorted dry cakes. The waiter came up to check the same person hadn't ordered the chocolate tart and the chocolat ancienne. A delightful sit in this cafe. The place where one would possibly daydream of resting and reading if fortunate enough to live in Paris. 


Repleat with flavour and food we then stirred ourselves. Walking through Ile de France, wishing I could remember more of Marie Antoinette's life from the biography I read. A hop on the Friday evening commuter metro to Gard du Nord for a biere and vin rouge before boarding our return journey.

A most lovely day, talking about the previous time we visited together on our first holiday, enjoying the sights and senses of having the day here and plotting when we'll return and what we'll do.

Thank you Karen and Tamara for hosting another wonderful Paris in July

Absolute Bliss

Even though we are no longer in our thirties I hope to still have moments like these...

"Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and burned it in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?..." Katherine Mansfield Bliss in Something childish but very natural

unknown

In fact I hope they continue forever...

The glory of May

'Slowly, laboriously, the years swung through the cycle of the seasons, crawling up to April, tumbling over into the glory of May, waning, falling away like a dead leaf, and leaving behind them as little impression as is made by a leaf's fall. Catherine wondered that so much trouble should have so little result.
The same tomorrow, and the day after that, the same next spring, next autumn, next year, the year after next.' Elizabeth Cambridge Hostages to Fortune

glorious outside drinks

After our wet April here's hoping to a glorious May. 

What do you have planned? 

The forest in spring

And now to spring in Russia.

"He reflected again that he thought of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way, but in the form of images taken from the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the deciduous wood are thin and poor... But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds and you can hide or lose yourself in a leafy maze. During this transformation the forest moves with a speed greater than that of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants; yet this movement can be observed. The forest does not change its place, cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of moving. However much we look at it we see it as motionless. And such is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing life of society, of history moving as invisibly in its incessant transformation as the forest in spring." Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

forest


This passage is almost poetry in the way I don't quite understand it but feel it.

Flimsiest of papers

I joyfully joined in with Venice in February partly as I knew we had a book I could read, without having to buy another one. It was Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers. I had been forewarned about this book. My is it eerie. Read Bellezza's review and the comments to find out more. After finishing it I felt the need to return to Miss Pettigrew lives for the day to restore my faith in the comfort of strangers.
I shall just post on this passage, quite near the beginning, which made me smile.

'A variety of maps was on sale. The least significant were produced by commercial interests and, besides showing the more obvious tourist attractions, they gave great prominence to certain shops or restaurants. These maps were marked with the principal streets only. Another map was in the form of a badly printed booklet and it was easy, Mary and Colin had found, to get lost as they walked from one page to another. Yet another was the expensive, officially sanctioned map which showed the whole city and named even the narrowest of passageways. Unfolded, it measured four feet by three and, printed on the flimsiest of papers, was impossible to manage outdoors without a suitable table and special clips. Finally there was a series of maps, noticeable by their blue-and-white striped covers, which divided the city into five manageable sections, none of them unfortunately overlapping.' Ian McEwan The Comfort of Strangers

map 

How is your map of Venice?

.

A better world

I'm using Dickens in January as an excuse to post some of my favourite Dickens quotes. I first read Great Expectations at school but it was the re read, having watched Gwyneth Paltrow's film, that changed my thoughts on him. After that I tried to read a Dickens a year. I've slightly slacked recently but still hold Dickens dear and claim him as one of my favourite authors. Maybe this will kick start me to read another Dickens this year.

"If you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you." Charles Dickens Great Expectations

promise

Oceans are moving

"A whole year passed, unremarkable, one of those periods of consolidation in change when one is growing and filling out into the spaces of a life the shape of which has been set but not yet seen: the time will come to stop shout, and look, up and around at the walls, the ceilings, the staircases leading from here to there, that one has built around oneself out of daily dabs of mud. Or the year was like a ship; inside it seems much the same town you have always lived in... But beneath the patterned carpet oceans are moving past your feet; and you yourself have determined this with a ticket you bought months back." Nadime Gordimer The Lying Days

For us 2011 definately wasn't like a ship - we knew we'd moved...
@
What was 2011 for you a staircase or a ship? And how would you like 2012 to be?

Frailty and Endurance

Sunday would have been Granny's birthday. I didn't manage to post this before she died but I think her final months expressed how true this quote is.

'...human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time.' Irene Nemirovsky Suite Francaise
ballet

Regretting Rien

As well as collecting quotes from novels in my note books there are also a few from newspaper articles. This one is from The Times (2oth November 1999)

Alan Jackson: "And when you look back at your life, meanwhile, are you Frank Sinatra-ish 'Regrets? I've has a few.' Or do you come down on Edith Piaf's side, regretting rien?"

Qunetin Crisp: "Dear boy, you can only regret things if you turned down alternatives. Why did I marry such an awful woman when I had the chance of this one or that? Why did I stay so long in this dreary job instead of taking the offer of that one? ...No alternatives, and so nothing to regret."
Edith Piaf

Are you Sinatra or Piaf?

Through groves of orange

We're off to Seville. In preparation I re read As I walked out one midsummer's morning by Laurie Lee. Inscribed in the front cover 'A present to take with you to Spain love mum'

(That would be when I went on a school trip aged 13 years.)

'Ever since childhood I'd imagined myself walking down a white dusty road through groves of orange to a city called Seville....

In fact there was no white road, not even a gold-clustered orange tree, but Seville itself was dazzling - a creamy crustation of flower-banked houses fanning out from each bank of the river.' Laurie Lee As I walked out one midsummers morning.

Tiny white Daisies

See you soon x

Great Uncle Henry

So today we're off to celebrate Great Uncle Henry's 100th birthday. He still lives by himself in the home he and his wife bought over fifty years ago in Bow, East London.

A quotation about how we change through life seems appropriate today.

..."there is no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be." Sebastian Faulks Charlotte Gray

we heart it

Happy Birthday Henry x

The Edible Woman

So after yesterday's quote from sixteen year old me. These two Virago quotes about how we change seem appropriate.

'It was one thing to be admired because one was lovely, and quite another thing to be admired because one was still so lovely. She did not belong to the sort of woman who, half-way through her life, can change her manner and inaugarate a new existence;' Vita Sackville-West The Edwardians 1930

'Whatever was going to happen to Clara had already happened: she had turned into what she was going to be... She only wanted to know what she was becoming, what direction she was taking, so she could be prepared.' Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman 1969

woman
I've mentioned before that many of the quotes I save refer to travelling through life. Do we stay the same, how do we change? I've changed alot since I was sixteen yet yesterday's quote still strikes a chord with me.
Virago, or indeed books in general, speak to the teenager, the young adult, the adult and journey with us as we mature and beyond.

Which Virago has travelled with you through your changing life?

Warm and Human

Visiting the Rene Grau Dior Illustrations reminded me of Mrs Harris and her quest for Dior.

'It would not, it would never be the same again. But then neither would she.
For it had not been a dress she had bought so much as an adventure and an experience that would last her to the end of her days. She would never again feel lonely, or unwanted. She had ventured to a foreign country and a foreign people.... She had found them to be warm and human, men and women to whom human love and understanding was a mainspring of life. They had made her feel that they loved her for herself.' Paul Gallico Mrs Harris Goes To Paris

ruffles

So today's post was planned just in case yesterday was a 'certain breed of Tuesdays'. We may need something to make us smile today.

And in another year everything will be different yet again.

A quote for New Year's Day.

'She thought a year ago I would never have dreamed...that we could be here, like this, that I would feel as I do, that I could have become a new person. And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.' Penelope Lively Consequences

reflections

How do you feel about last year?

Wallis Simpson

A while ago we had a week of not used wedding passages. I decided on a winter week as we had a summer wedding - but oh how lovely to have a winter wedding. We had a country wedding yet we live in London - but oh how lovely to have experienced marrying in a city.

So the theme of this week is my imagination and planning a second wedding same man daydream.

The Confirmation

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.

I in my mind had waited this long,

Seeing the false and searching for the true,

Then found you as a traveller finds a place

Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong

Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,

What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,

A well of water in a country dry,

Or anything that's honest and good, an eye

That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,

Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,

The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,

The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea.

Not beautiful or rare in every part.

But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

Edwin Muir

An alternative dress, Wallis Simpson - no idea if it would suit me but I love it.

David Fielden

Julie Kim

And a real bride wearing it.