Girls

Hugo started to pant heavily as soon as we turned off the Aldeburgh road towards Snape, but this time I had taken precautions. He was wearing my old shrunken polo neck sweater firmly anchored in place by his harness, temporary substitutes for the swaddling bands I've ordered, recommended for easily stressed dogs. I think it worked because when I returned to the car nearly four hours later he was asleep and calmly watched me as I opened the door. The panting started up again when we were halfway home, but he soon recovered as we trotted down the lane for a last comfort break, manfully struggling along with his dangling sleeves. Once indoors and stripped of his covers he rolled around on the rug, legs kicking joyfully in the air. I didn't take any photos, it seemed too mean to prolong the embarrassment, but here he is in an earlier photo minus the harness.

The evening was nightmarish, a collection of great Suffolk bands with the biggest, loudest amplifiers imaginable. I already have tinnitus, a gift from an evening long ago when my then 15-year-old baby went to her first gig at the Pyramid Centre in Southsea and, fearful for her safety among the moshing crowd, I surreptitiously hid beside the gigantic amp, prepared to dash in and rescue her if the going got too rough. Next morning the tinnitus had set in and so it remains 22 years later, worsened considerably this morning. Thanks Snape.

My American friend Mike responded to my piece about mistakenly reading A Girl on A Train, and this is what he had to say about it:

Your comments on both A Girl on A Train AND The Girl on The Train were amusing.
And then, in today’s mail, I received the current issue of The New Yorker magazine.
There is a review of The Girl on The Train film by The NY’s Anthony Lane.  Let me, 
at a risk of boring you, quote from his review (The New Yorker, October 17, 2016):

“Half the sentient beings on earth appear to have read the book, alleging with near
unanimity that they couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t pick it up. I tried, frequently, but it always fell from my grasp, tugged down by the dead weight of its prose. The tale is set largely in a suburb on the Hudson [River], and nothing is duller or more stifling, as a rule, than people who wish to make it perfectly plain how stifled they feel by their dull suburban existence.

“Does it matter that the plot is so full of holes that you could use it to drain spaghetti? (For a more water-tight version consult Agatha Christie’s ‘4:50 From Paddington,’ in which a passenger—a chum of Miss Marple’s, thank heaven—sitting in one train spots a strangling in another.) Last, and least, there is the title. Whether there was an overt attempt by [the author] and then by the film-makers, to cash in on ‘Gone Girl,’ I cannot say, but in both cases an enfeebling example has been set. By any measure, the principal figure in both works are women, and to label them as girls is to taint them with childishness, as if they were easily cowed by circumstance or stormy feelings, and thus more liable to lash out, or to sink into a sulk, rather than submit their troubles to adult consideration. In 1942,
Katherine Hepburn starred in ‘Woman of the Year’ as a prize-winning political columnist. Try zipping back in time, telling Hepburn to rename the movie ‘Girl of the Year’ and see how far you get.”

Thanks Mike. I suspected as much. You've saved me from another boring read.

And lastly, I mowed the lawn yesterday and clipped the edges, and though we're halfway through October there is still plenty of colour, and I had to admit it looks darned good. It's a little over two years since the transformation from donkey paddock to garden began, so for the record here are the comparisons.

Hedges on L and R lopped right back, stables gone, donkeys gone!

Getting there