[...] When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and the first spray of it in its advance, had begun to overwhelm the city.

     Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing into a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

     Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

- from A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second, Chapter 5

Charles Dickens

Probably one of the most memorable openings ever in English literature was written by Charles Dickens in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.

A fuller quote reads: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way’.

In these words did Charles Dickens so eloquently describe the parody of life – that paroxical tapestry containing both greatness and stupidity, of good and evil, of optimism and negativity. And those contradictions can be found not just around us but within us too. We have our moments of generousity and other moments of callousness, moments of profundity and clear thinking and other moments of murkiness and indecisiveness. Moments where the world looks like a bight place and other times where everything looks despairingly bad.

If we are to believe the media, we are certainly living right now in the worst of times. Economic doom and gloom is all that they see on the horizon. But Dickens’ timeless words are equally as applicable today as they were back when he wrote them. So it is quite likely that we are living both in the worst of times and in the best of times and that there is a silver lining to the current economic situation.

It turns out that those heady days of constantly rising asset prices that existed before the recession hit was just a bubble after all. But living in a bubble is living a lie of make-believe. Ultimtely human beings are far happier with the truth even when that truth is not as pretty as the deception.

So how has the recession affected us in a positive way and how are we in fact living in the best of times? The following report from ‘Visit Britain’ is very illuminating in that it holds up a mirror to our innermost thoughts and desires particularly the desire to get back to the basics of defining and living a good life.

Their meticulously compiled report which utilises source material from Trendwatching.com is titled ‘Overseas Visitors to Britain – Understanding Trends, Attitudes and Characteristics – September 2010′ and makes very interesting reading. Here is an excerpt:

‘Savvy consumers in advanced economies know the difference between brands who want to sell happiness and brands that want to facilitate it, and they will endorse those brands that help them find and create happiness within themselves. Values that cannot be bought such as family, love, and friendship are very much at the forefront.’

‘This provides a challenge for companies to capture such emotions in their products. Brands would do well to associate themselves with something carefree, possibly to the extent that it makes people “feel like a child again”.’

‘There has been a definite shift towards “simpler lives” as a backlash against extreme consumption. Consumers are realising that having more doesn’t necessarily make us any happier. Consumers are becoming more focussed on what makes them happy and are finding that true happiness comes from a life that acknowledges the good in the small and everyday, that finds happiness in the now and the present, that sees worth and abundance in what we already have and feels prosperous in the simple presence of life and nature, friends and family.’

‘As a result consumers are starting to consume less and really examine what they buy. There is a realisation that a constant desire for more, new, fashionable stuff is not necessarily the road to a happy and fulfilled life. Similarly consumers are trying to “make do” with things they already have, as much of what we throw out or replace is based on perceived obsolescence. Look after, fix up and make-do has become the new craze. Sharing, borrowing and renting has also become trendy. There is an acknowledgement that we don’t need to buy items we rarely use and most things are available to borrow or rent. This in turn reduces clutter in our homes, saves money and reduces waste.’

‘Shopping has become a worldwide pastime or even hobby. On the weekends the shopping centres and malls are filled with people eager to spend hard earned money on all kinds of stuff. The more time we spend surrounded by stuff to buy the more likely we are to buy it. However as consumers strive to become more satisfied with less, it is likely that shopping will be swopped for alternatives such as visiting art galleries or museums, the park or a walk in the countryside.’

So, in essence there is much that is positive about our current situation. As a group we are being more real, honest and in touch about what constitutes ‘the good life’.

Every company working in the retail or tourist trade would do well to consider the content of the above when considering how best to market themselves. We at www.goodwheelrentabike.co.uk certainly emphasie the various aspects of our product that has wide appeal for the consumer which are: a value for money bike rental service, the uplifting feeling of being out in the great outdoors getting plenty of fresh air and exercise and the opportunity to meet people, engage socially and feel the rhythm of the city when out in the open.

We hope you indeed find fulfillment in these simple  pleasures of life.

Well I have finished reading A Tale of Two Cities, and it absolutely blew my mind. It took me so long to get into the story and pacing, but once I did – once the French Revolution started and everything with Darnay started happening, I just couldn’t put it down. I will write a full review in the next few days, I just wanted to make a quick post.

The new adaptation of Great Expectations starring Helena Bonham Carter comes out in cinemas today, so I will hopefully see that over the weekend, and do a review shortly afterwards.

In other news, my trip to England has been postponed. Long story short, the tour company I was going with – COSMOS, cancelled my tour and couldn’t get me in on the only other date I could do, so I got a full refund on my tour and accomodation. I couldn’t get a refund on my flights though, so I had to transfer them to different dates, so now I am going to England for two weeks in September with the hope of making it back in the northern Summer 2014 to do my full six week trip including the Dickens Festival. It’s all pretty disappointing, but I’ll manage. I am now going to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, and spending a few extra days in London.

Bye for now

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, I consider to be a modern classic. I love it and read it every year in January when setting my fitness goals for the year. I’m always reminded that, yes, I can do whatever I set my mind to.

I never tire of Henry Lawson’s short stories. I’ve been a fan for years and love his stories of life in early Australia.

technical

Scaffold (noun):

1. a temporary structure for holding workers and materials during the erection, repair, or decoration of a building.

2. an elevated platform on which a criminal is executed, usually by hanging.

Whenever I hear the word “scaffolding,” I see Ronald Colman being led from the tumbril to walk, step by step, his face beatific, up the scaffold to the guillotine at the end of the 1935 film “A Tale of Two Cities,” based on Charles Dickens’ great novel about the French Revolution.

Watch it the next time it is on Turner Classic Movies. It is the only film in which Colman appears without his trademark mustache. Well, actually that is not true, but never mind…

THIS scaffolding serves an entirely different purpose, thank the gods!

personal

Martini Shots!

The lonely tree at the end of the longest walk seems particularly striking on this day. I sit beneath it on the ground and look up at the sky through its bare branches. After I complete the Master Naturalist course next summer I will be able to tell you exactly what this tree is. Now, though, it is a solitary leafless oddity down at the end of a rugged and hilly hike. And I love its incongruity. Bella, as you can see, does not care for the tree. She is looking down the fork in the road. Come on, she says. Let’s go!

Ronald Colman as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities (MGM, 1935)

Fifth Episode of our nWoD game. We all decide to discuss things with Hammer, who ended up being rather agreeable. Then he asked us if we wanted to do a little job for him… Once again involving that damn drug Crimson.

Vampire Session 5 Dropbox

Vampire Session 5 Mediafire

Lets get this out of the way first, Here are the first episodes of of this AP. Episode 1 and the embrace sessions were not recorded.

Session 2: Part 1

Session 2: Part 2

Session 3

Session 4

Let’s start at the very beginning….

Desperation and despair set in this week…….well as one knows, I do love a little melodrama in my life, dear Reader.  Jerry and I looked at six houses and not one had any merit!  Too small, too much to do, too damp, too far from the station, the list went on and on…..I felt positively more and more like Goldilocks with each house we entered!  Jerry and I weren’t nearly so fussy when we bought the beloved cottage!  The damp farmhouse with huge garden and 2ft of water in the cellar looked ever more promising until a call from the agent revealed that someone had signed and sealed the letting agreement the day after we had been to see it for a second viewing.  Downcast, I sulked for a day or so muttering under my breath that Jerry had ruined my chances of living the good life forever.  Remember what I said about a little melodrama, dear Reader….  Jerry took it all on the chin, adding rather bluntly that the farmhouse could only ever have been my dream house if it had been gutted and had had hideous amounts of money thrown at it.  Something which, as it was a rental property, was unlikely to happen.  Of course, he was absolutely right which left me infuriated and more sulking ensued.

Thinking that I could not sulk forever, I turned my attentions back to my list of Margot’s New Year resolutions.  I have been remiss of late and far too focused on house hunting to sink my teeth into anything else.  With only 4 months until the Big Move, I was worried that I might not have mastered all the requisite country skills needed to wow my new villagey neighbours.  How would I ever be adopted into the bosom of the countryside WI, if I couldn’t complete no.18 on the list: Knit a tea cosy?

With that notion firmly planted in my mind, I recalled that at the start of the year, one of my favourite Tweeters, the lovely @Twickermum blogged about the relaxing properties of knitting….’meditative properties’ no less!  Well, surely that could take my mind off house hunting for a while and have me skipping all the way to my first WI meeting in the village hall?  Killing two birds with one stone as one would say.  I even had all the crafty implements for this one squirreled away.  Dear Mamma added a beginner’s knitting kit (for 8 years old and up) to my Christmas stocking last year and I hid it under the bed, in the full knowledge that if it stayed there long enough, I could avoid having to make something with it.   Knitting has been my arch crafty nemesis for some time.  I am hopeless at it and what makes it all the more awful is that, my dear Mamma is an amazing knitter.  Her creations have been worn by many in the family and even friends of mine who have had babies.  From berets to christening shawls, Mamma can knit anything!  Just in case one was wondering, knitting skills are not genetic and the ability to turn long thin noodles of yarn into garments has not been passed down to the next generation.  It would be fair to say that Mamma has long despaired of my lack of craftiness and has tried many times to teach me but it would seem that I am rather a lost cause.  Disappointing.  Especially as Primrose has been dying to learn how to knit.  Casting these negative thoughts aside, armed with a knitting pattern, stitch instruction booklet and some wool, I set about facing the woolly enemy.  Sitting in bed with yarn all around me, gesturing and ranting loudly at something ridiculous on the television over the click clacking of knitting needles, Jerry commented on my rather striking resemblance to Madame Defarge from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.  I bet she didn’t struggle with knit one, purl one, otherwise the names of impending deaths would never have been encoded in her knitting.  After a few hours, some swearing, more ranting at the television and at Jerry for making me drop stitches, the result was rather…..well…..let’s just say I could do with some more practice.

Oh dear….

Not sure I got much further than one side of the wretched cosy before I became purposefully distracted (momentarily of course,  I really was trying to take this knitting thing seriously…) by a questionnaire in The Telegraph……no prizes for guessing why!  Are you a Good or a Leadbetter?  Attempting the Good Life quiz, I realised, even before I got to the second question, that perhaps I was going to have to work a lot harder on my transformation from townie to country bumpkin.  Turns out (most unsurprisingly) that I am still mostly Margot.  Well, dear Reader, one can lead a horse to water…..  It would appear that Primrose had been thinking the same thing and had little faith in my ‘Good’ly abilities, especially once she had seen my failed beginnings of a tea cosy.  This is perhaps her best picture of me yet!

Take a look at that industrial sized G&T! P knows her mother well!

Must dash, dear Reader…..off to change into my maxi-dress and turban before dinner.  Knitting my tea cosy will just have to wait.  That G&T is calling to me!

However, I had an idea pop in my head that seemed to be really out of nowhere. … Well, kind of.

For as long as we have been married, Adam has always been the deep cleaner in the relationship. Try as I may, he just always seems to do it better than me. He never tells me I’m bad at it, but he quietly goes about his way, re-doing what I have already done.

This, out of anything in our relationship, has probably brought about the most strain. It’s not that I don’t like a clean house, or that I am ungrateful that he cleans, it is really that I am always trying so hard to keep a clean house, only to always be outdone. It has been more of a role thing for me, than anything.

Needless to say, the other day, while being “out-cleaned,” the words “A tale of two cleaners” popped in my mind. Being an avid reader, I knew that this was a play on A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.

It has been a while since I have read it, or even referenced it. But, the words from the first page came to mind, and as I went online to read it, the ideas started to flow.

I was so amazed how well the stories were able to parallel. It was really a fun write. I had my husband read it first, and he gave me the big, OK … especially since I noted in there that he had huge biceps . Here is the article.

here are his super-human biceps. Rrrrr!

We really are in love. Can’t you tell?

Anyhoo… On a running note (since this is primarily a running blog), I found out last week that I get to be a pacer for the Salt Lake City Marathon on April 20th! I will be pacing the 3:35 pace. I have never done this before, but am so excited to help others reach their goals! I can’t wait!

About two years ago my mom and I started reading Great Expectations together. We were making fine progress, and had gotten through Part 1, when BAM! This guy comes into my life and messes up my reading schedule!

Okay, so I was more than willing to let him do so, but you get the point: book forgotten.

Now I’ve been married for almost a year and my reading schedule is slowly returning to normalcy. I’ve finished four books so far this year (Yay me!) and I’m finally ready to return to Great Expectations.

Dickens wrote Great Expectations a decade after the somewhat autobiographical David Copperfield, and while similar in themes, his change of perspectives on the gentry and upper class had changed, and Expectations came to a very different conclusion. Although A Tale of Two Cities is next on my Dickens to-read list, I’d like to read Copperfield and see just how his earlier and later perspectives play out.

I am 19 chapters into A Tale of Two Cities. I’ve been pretty lazy with my reading so far this year. I’ve really only averaged one chapter every two days since I started reading it. It honestly took a while to get into, for one, it’s written in a very different style to anything of Dickens that I’ve read so far. It’s not written in the first person like Great Expectations or David Copperfield, and it doesn’t solely follow the life of one character like Oliver Twist. The main characters aren’t children when the book starts and the pacing moves more like a movie than a novel. Each scene tells a different part of the overall story, and the small trivial stuff (that OT, GE and DC all include) isn’t dwelt on.

Sydney Carton has just told Lucie Manette that he is in love with her. I like the lead up to this chapter – Charles Darnay telling Dr Manette that he loves Lucie, followed by Stryver telling Mr Lorry that he is in love with Lucie. Maybe it’s just my modern female personality, but I like that Sydney actually talked to Lucie about his feelings first – before involving anyone else. But I do already know what happens at the end of this book, so I will just take it all with a grain of salt.

So far I am enjoying it – it has definitely taken me a while to get into it, but I’m on a role now, so hopefully I’ll chug along and have it finished soonish

Bye for now

As I was saying I have lots of unread books in my room. I see a bargain and I buy them and then I store them. So I decided that I should make a small list of classic literature in order to motivate myself for some reading. I do not include contemporary/ non classic books in the list since I am a sucker for classics and I believe that I would be even more motivated. The goal is to see how many of those books I would manage to read during 2013 and to try to keep a review/diary in here.

THE LIST:

Well, I have no idea where to start, I just know that the Russian books go to the end simply because they are so large and right now I am not feeling like it. I would love a suggestion, if anyone is actually reading this.

Literary genius, Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870.

Today in 1812, Charles Dickens – a timeless literary genius – was born. One of eight children born to John and Elizabeth, he considered himself a ‘very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy.’

Even as a child, Dickens was a furtive reader, especially enjoying the novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding.

Throughout his life he was able to recall poignant memories of his childhood. This near-photographic memory enabled him to use real-life memories and events as a basis for his writing.

Dickens partook in private education during his early childhood. However, due to financial difficulties and continuing to live beyond his means, his father, John was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison in 1824. Not long afterwards, Dickens mother and youngest siblings went to join  their father, as was custom at the time.

Boarding with family friends for a time, Dickens was forced to leave school to work ten hour days at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. He would earn six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The working conditions were strenuous and often cruel, which made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his writing.

The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.

These early years are undoubtedly the influence for Dickens’ later novels. He developed an immense anger towards the treatment of the working-class, using his memories to explore the socio-economic and labour conditions in his writing.

Amazingly, these experiences are the reason Charles Dickens is still considered a genius today. It is both fascinating and admirable that somebody so young should endure such cruelties, yet rise stronger than anybody would have thought possible. Dickens used his talents as a writer to speak his mind – to shun the social hierarchy he was accustomed to. Because of his passion towards this matter, his writings are still some of the most well known books today.

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens.