“Can’t make the woman out at all, myself. Know what she said to me this morning? Asked me if I’d slept well, and when I told here that it beat me how anyone could sleep at all, with a dashed lot of cockerels crowing their heads off, she said that rural sounds exhilarate the spirit, and do something or other to languid nature!”

“Cowper,” said Kitty, in a depressed tone. “‘Restore the tone of languid nature.’”

“Well, it’s a bag of moonshine!” said Freddy. “What’s more, I always thought so! … It’s my belief, Kit, the woman’s touched in her upper works.”

“No, she is merely addicted to poetry,” explained Kitty.

“Well, that just shows you!” said Mr Standen, reasonably.

Oh Freddy! For you I’d give up my favourite most comfortable pair of pyjamas with the holes in and wear nothing but the most uncomfortably and beautifully tailored clothes forever. Cotillion has one of Georgette Heyer’s typical heroines, kind and forthright and gratifyingly resistant to overwhelming crushes – though she does fancy the pants off her sexy bad boy sort-of cousin, Jack. Kitty’s guardian (Jack’s uncle) issues an ultimatum: Kitty must marry one of his nephews or else his fortune shall be given away in his Will. Of course Kitty is furious when Jack doesn’t turn up to offer her his hand in marriage, and decides she is going to go to London and escape her boring life anyway, and be damned to the lot of them. Freddy, one of her guardian’s nephews, is tricked and flattered and grudgingly persuaded to pretend to be engaged to her so that she can escape, and what follows is a series of adventures which ends up with Kitty deciding, that, actually, Romance novels can keep their sexy tall dark and dangerous heroes like Jack, and she’d much rather have somebody dependable and funny and kind like Freddy. Very sensible girl.

I’ve read Cotillion, Arabella, Bath Tangle and I’ve just gone onto the Grand Sophy, which has some smashing bits of dialogue:

“Since you have brought up Miss Wraxton’s name, I shall be much obliged to you, cousin, if you will refrain from telling my sisters that she has a face like a horse.”

“But, Charles, no blame attaches to Miss Wraxton! She cannot help it, and that, I assure you, I have always pointed out to your sisters!”

He said stiffly, “I consider Miss Wraxton’s countenance particularly well-bred.”

“Yes, indeed, but you have quite misunderstood the matter! I meant a particularly well-bred horse!”

“You meant, as I am perfectly aware, to belittle Miss Wraxton!”

“No, no! I am very fond of horses!” Sophy said earnestly.

Before he could stop himself he found that he was replying to this. “Selina, who repeated this remark to me, is not fond of horses, however and she -” He broke off, seeing how absurd it was to argue on such a head.

“I expect she will be, when she has lived in the same house with Miss Wraxton for a month or two,” said Sophy encouragingly.

I do have a bit of a problem with The Grand Sophy, though, in that absolutely everything Sophy does is perfect. This is true for all Georgette Heyer’s heroines, which I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it has taken me 4 books to twig. I knew something was bothering me and was making them a little dull, but I couldn’t quite see what. The most any of them ever does wrong, I think, is when they high-spiritedly decide to get a quick bit of revenge back on whoever the hero is. Still she did write an awful lot of them, I suppose we must forgive her some things.

In actual fact, although the dialogue is crap in comparison and it’s nowhere near as well written, I think I prefer Sophie Kinsella/Madeleine Wickham’s modern day chick lit. Well, I find the heroines slightly less annoying anyway. Maybe. I really liked Twenties Girl, just because of one of the main characters who is the ghost of the heroine’s great aunt. She’s manipulative, shallow, flawed and still has integrity and courage and a really big heart. I really liked the heroine in The Hunger Games too, who is selfish and single minded and occasionally a bit of a simpleton.

Actually I take that back, modern day chick lit just isn’t as enjoyable as stuff set in the regency period. I think it’s got something to do with me being absolutely fed up of this day and age and society, and the main reason I actually read in the first place is in order to slip into a different world for a bit. The less like my world the book is the better. That’s why One Day bothered me so much I think, because the characters and the story hit a bit too close to home for comfort.

Of course, best of all the chick lit heroines is Elizabeth Bennett. But the internet is so full of us all singing her praises that I don’t really see the point in adding to the tumult. I think everyone agrees though, we love her for her flaws. Same with Scarlet O’Hara of course, although I’m not sure I would characterize Gone with the Wind as strictly being chick lit. I suppose it is, given it’s so character driven and heavily based on relationships with the occasional bit of framing and context with the war. But then I suppose then you could give all the academics heart attacks and say by the same rules that Anna Karenina is chick lit too, apart from that awful long dull philosophical dirge by Levin sitting in a heap on his stupid farm (I suppose you have to be in the mood for that sort of thing, but frankly, I really wasn’t).

Anyway, in further news it turns out I was spot on about my travel insurance refusing to pay me a single penny and I’ve lost all R30 000/£3000. I must say even though I have had a particularly shit time lately I am glad to be back in Cape Town and I’m glad to be able to walk in my botanical gardens again, it’s so beautiful at the moment it gives me shivers. I’ll have to take some pictures.

I’m going to count my blessings, I might have had a shit time but I got to see my friends and visit some art galleries (I saw Ophelia and Mariana and loads of new stuff I really liked) and at least I wasn’t bitten by a puff adder (apparently some puff adders were discovered right by my office while I was gone, so who knows what might have happened). According to my draft notes I wanted to end this post “Alluringly yours,” which I must have read somewhere and I still think is absolutely awesome but I can think of no way to fit it in. And I have no idea where it came from, and nor does the internet it seems. So! There we go.

1. Don’t imagine that just because you’ve been having an incredibly shit time that you deserve a holiday. The universe will soon disabuse you of this idea.
2. Don’t lose your passport
3. If it’s lost, don’t try and then get an emergency passport
4. If you try getting the emergency passport, don’t forget to ring up before hand to ask what you need so you don’t have to spend ages queueing at the police station in the city before they tell you that you need to report it at your local police station
5. Once reported at the local police station, don’t forget to get an affidavit
6. If you forget the affidavit and return to the consulate and realise you only have 45 minutes to try and get another affidavit, then don’t go to the nearest police station and spend ages queuing assuming you can get an affidavit there
7. Don’t bother with tears and trying to elicit sympathy from the major general in charge when the police officers refuse to give you one
8. Don’t try phoning your parents and asking them to get an affidavit for you on your behalf at your local police station even if people at the consulate tell you it’s possible.
9. If you somehow manage to get back to your local police station a 40 minute drive away in time to get the affidavit from there, make sure you know for sure what time the consulate closes
10. Once you’ve got your emergency travel passport, and somehow managed to catch your plane despite the insane traffic, don’t get the circle line from Paddington because it will terminate on a platform which will mean you have to drag your suitcase up 3 flights of stairs in order to get out.
11. Don’t bother trying to catch your flight via the USA the next day, they won’t let you on without a visa if you have an emergency passport
12. BUT everyone in the airport will helpfully tell you to change your flight and go via amsterdam the next day instead. When you ring up your travel agent and find it costs over £300, don’t be silly enough to agree to the change.
13. If you did agree to the change, make sure that your taxi at 3am the next day knows absolutely and exactly where your flat is.
14. Do not exit the flat and stand in the freezing cold carrying your heavy bags up and down Goswell road for the next 40 minutes trying to find the taxi.
15. Close your eyes when the taxi driver pulls insane moves, jumps red lights and goes down 20mph roads at 70mph. Otherwise you will arrive at Heathrow so high and jittery on adrenaline you will find it difficult to walk for the next few minutes.
16. Once you’re at the airport, don’t bother trying to cry and pull the sympathy card when the airline doesn’t let you board because your emergency travel passport says you were supposed to land in Peru yesterday. Don’t bother pointing out that 5 different airline and immigration officials studied it yesterday and all told you to change your flight the way you had.
17. Don’t bother ringing lastminute again for the next few days, they will have had a computer system failure. And then it will be the bank holiday weekend. And then KLM’s ticket system will not be open.
18. Best not to investigate idly out of interest whether you could have travelled on your other dual national passport. You’ll find out that you could have after all and then you’ll be kicking yourself – self recrimination is not what you need right now.
19. Don’t assume TFL’s trick of forcing you to drag your suitcase up 3 flights of stairs was a once off. Oh and don’t imagine any of those charming young english gentlemen pushing past you impatiently will bother offering to help you either.
20. When you sleep round at someone’s house, don’t assume they won’t chuck you out of your bed at 4am so they can party with strippers and cocaine
21. Don’t be surprised when their crazy ex girlfriend comes round and you get caught in the middle of a huge fight
22. Don’t raise your hopes and think you might actually be able to fly after all and escape this miserable city. Of course KLM won’t agree to change the tickets twice, you idiot.
23. When they say you will get a refund don’t imagine it will be anything close to the £1200 you’ve forked out, and don’t feel like you’ve been stabbed when they offer you £150.
24. Try not to think about how long it took you to save up that money, and how unlikely it is the travel insurance will pay up.
25. Don’t attempt to cheer yourself up/distract yourself by looking at facebook. Your ex will have posted pictures of himself cuddling his new girlfriend and you’ll end up exactly where you were 3 weeks ago when he dumped you.
26. Don’t imagine you will learn whether you can change your flight back home to leave earlier so you don’t have to stay in a stupid horrible grey cold rainy city you hate. You’ll have to wait 24 hours. And then you’ll have to pay for a seat upgrade, say goodbye to another £500 probably. Well, I guess we’ll see. The saga is ongoing!

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:–
Stripp’d bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

I like to imagine dogs howling mournfully at this point, and big black thunderclouds with lashings of rain.

I saw the original of this once in London at a Millais exhibition, it absolutely took my breath away. It’s one of the most beautiful and detailed things I’ve ever seen, it glows so much it feels realler than real, if you know what I mean. I occasionally think about it and always thought it was the Lady of Shalott, even though she was looking out the window. I just looked it up and it’s actually supposed to be Mariana, from Tennyson’s poem. Which actually, I love, so that’s quite a revelation. It’s so cool how you can look at a painting like this, or read a poem, and … and… It’s like the most amazing music sweeping you up and carrying you away in its strong manly muscly sexy arms, it’s like:

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Anyway, here’s a tutorial on how to do a quick key map for ctrl+s http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_Ctrl-S_to_save_current_or_new_files

Oddly enough, this seems to be rather difficult to achieve with Drupal. There’s a Workflow module which lets you do something similar with user roles, but associating individual users with individual nodes is not something that’s intuitive using Drupal.

In the end, after researching lots of different modules which dealt with similar almost-but-not-quite things, I ended up using the revision moderation module and the 3 great building block modules of Drupal 6: Taxonomy, CCK and Views:

• Taxonomy in order to create a workflow vocabulary with statuses to categorise nodes.
• Revision Moderation to allow new unpublished revisions (with different workflow statuses of course) to be saved.
• The CCK user reference module to save user ids, so a CCK user reference field might be created called “Authors”, taking multiple UIDs as inputs, ditto with Viewers and Approvers.
• The Views module was then used to create ‘task manager’ views for users, taking their UID as input. So the task manager view retrieves the latest revision of all nodes which are currently unpublished and which have the current user’s ID stored in the Authors, Viewers or Approvers CCK fields.

In addition to this I created a very simple custom module which uses hook_node_form_alter and hides and shows various CCK fields based on their workflow status. The workflow taxonomy dropdown is always hidden, and instead the custom module added custom buttons linked to custom form submit functions, so for example a new ‘Save and send to Approvers’ would change the workflow status before the node was actually saved.

In this way a great deal of flexibility is possible without the addition of many extra specific modules. It feels like more of a Drupal way of doing things – pretty much anything is possible with Views, Taxonomy and CCK. Porting it over to Drupal 7 should be fairly easy too. You can read a more detailed write up on the Drupal website, here: http://drupal.org/node/1371596.

More prosaically, the other thing to keep in mind when painting a cat on a bowl or a plate or any ceramic item is proportion. It has to really claim the space (if it’s an open surface) or compliment the form (if it’s a closed or cylindrical surface). Because every painted mark is permanent, it’s quite easy to get this part wrong!

Otherwise, all you need is a paintbrush, some oxide or underglaze and a fondness for cats.

Here is where there should be a photo gallery of painted cats, showing a range of more- and less-successful efforts. But all I have to offer are the following two images:

This cat knows how to pose for a photograph, but the photographer has left a lot of white space…

Also, the glaze is too thin, so the end result is a bit watered-down looking. Will have to have another go at this one. It needs to be bolder and the blue needs to be richer to do justice to this noble looking specimen (he looks just like Vladimir Nabokov’s father – I refer only to his expression, of course!).

I like this bowl quite a lot. This cat has found a comfortable spot to curl up, and is trying her best to be inconspicuous, but those stripes are pretty strong! I bet she’s a great mouser.