Netherfield Hall is let at last...

Well, Mr. Bingley may not ever have actually lived there, but the actor who played him certainly graced the halls with his striking ginger presence. So did Matthew McFadyen and Keira Knightley. That's right: Basildon Park, aka Netherfield Hall in the 2005 P&P is the target of my latest attempts to get employed. And by employed I mean tragically working for free because paying jobs are impossible to find. I'd be researching the 18th Century kitchen in the house and figuring out how to get it set up as a presentable visitor space. As the guy at the interview today said, it would be my baby.

So aside from what might be a heinous commute to Pangbourne each day, my fingers are crossed for the privilege of getting to have my own pet project (that for once, might actually live beyond infancy and be implemented!) and enjoying the experience of working at Basildon Park...as well as enjoying the later experience of getting to have it on my CV.

The downside? Spending early mornings at the gym rather than in bed. Oh sleep. I shall lament your loss.

Oh Cruel, Cruel World

I may not be Miranda, of Shakepeare's The Tempest, but I feel inclined to paraphrase her:

Oh harsh, cruel world that hath such

shipping restrictions in it!

Now that I've absolutely changed the tone of that particular speech, it brings me to my complaint. There is a set of Christmas ornaments I really want to have. Basically, I'm idealising the Christmas decorations of my youth. A cheap set of 48 ornaments made of wood: bells, Santas, snowmen, angels...the set below, actually. Apparently made by a company called Kurt Adler.

Anyway, in an attempt to find a suitable alternative to blowing lots of money on a few very pretty, but prohibitively expensive Gisela Graham ornaments, I tried searching for this old set of Yuletide decorations. After some resourceful Googling, I found the set I was looking for, and looked it up on Amazon. The problem? It's on Amazon.com...I am now in the auspicious dominion of Amazon.co.uk, and this particular vendor most emphatically does not ship trans-Atlantic.

My fit of petulance will not be quelled! They're cheap, they're cute...that satisfies all criteria I had for buying ornaments. Perhaps Ms. Graham and her workshop of Hobbit-sized artisans are more deserving of my money after all, if Mr. Adler and his diminutive minions can't be bothered to find distributors who ship to the UK. Okay, so neither of these companies probably employs either Santa's elves, little people, or the tiny humans (a.k.a.: children), but it makes it all so much more pleasant to imagine.

In the meantime, Gisela and I will have to renew our acquaintance over some of the finer points of this year's collection...

To Whom It May Concern

Dear Trustees of Jane Austen's House Museum,

can we please consider heating the loos? I feel obliged to inform you that:

winter weather

+ a porcelain toilet seat

- indoor heating

______________

a sad frozen bum.

This is a situation that must be remedied. A girl can only squat and hover for so long.

Sincerely,

your newest intern.

PS - making unpaid staff sacrifice warm rears to heat the seat for others is *not* an acceptable option (see: Roald Dahl.)

Jane Austen and Her Mid-Century Fan Club.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of a university education must be in want of a job. Especially if that university education was in the liberal arts.

So it was, that Thursday morning found me whizzing down the A31 towards Alton, to the tiny village of Chawton and the Jane Austen's House Museum. First, let me say: this place is idyllic. It's beautiful, the village is tiny, there's a pub across the street next to the appropriately named 'Cassandra's Tea Rooms.' The house is gorgeous, and even though the wallpaper is not authentic, but is rather Laura Ashley that wishes it was authentic, it's the perfect place for a Regency Era junkie like myself.

My job involves going through the personal and business letters of the guy who founded the museum: Mr. T Edward Carpenter (how many times have I typed that in the past 48 hours?), who was the first Chairman of the Board of Trustees. It feels like there should be a rap lyric in that...

Anyway, Our good old Mr. Carpenter, Esq. had some interesting characters writing to him. My first favourite (from a palaeology standpoint) is Lt. Col. Satterthwaite. Forget everything else about this guy: talk about one heck of a last name! Satterthwaite. It sounds like the kindly but bumbling character, put in only to advance the hero's plot line in a Dickens novel. Also, the dear Colonel has [almost] the worst penmanship I've ever seen. Seriously; who taught this man to wield a pen!?

Next on my list is Col. Satterthwaite's fellow in the Jane Austen Society: Mrs. Dorothy Darnell. Her handwriting is almost as interesting as the Colonel's. Though her round, bubbly cursive reminds me quite a bit of my step-mom's handwriting, Mrs. Darnell either had a very leaky pen [that she presumably used on *every* Jane Austen-related letter for *years*] or she just liked putting useless dots all over the page. Seriously. When her loops and swirls degenerate from letters into something even the good Dr. Rorschach couldn't find meaning in, I'm hard pressed to decide if those dots are sitting on top of 'i's or are meant to cross 't's, or if they're just for artistic effect.

Dr. R.W. Chapman is another palaeographic wonder. *His* letters look like the heart beat monitor in a hospital room.

(Beep...beep...beep...beep...beeeeeeeeeeeeeep.)

Then there's the entertaining Mrs. Purvis, who is in a league of her own. Apparently related to, or married to someone related to, Jane Austen, Mrs. Purvis is the sort of charming crazy person who (though probably long dead) makes my day so much more interesting. Let's forget, for the moment, the fact that given half the chance this woman would, I'm sure, build a shrine to Jane Austen like Queen Victoria did for Prince Albert. Mostly, I'm amused that she signed most of her letters: "Queen Mary Rose (Mrs. Purvis)". Wow! Option 1: her parents were really that loony and named their daughter "Queen." Talk about a diva complex. Option 2: Somewhere along her many years of privileged life (this was a woman who would afford to "send the car round" for visitors, implying not only a nice car, but a driver to go with it.) our lovely Mrs. Purvis decided that Queen Mary Rose was a much better alias than the common name with which she was saddled by uninspired parents. Whatever the "Roll of Fame" is, Mrs. Purvis wanted Jane Austen on it. Jane's works Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, were (according to her) deserving of the title "Immortal". Yes, all these words are capitalised...whether such capitalisation was necessary or not.

I think, for once, that Nicolas Cage summed it up best of all:

"Go one step short of crazy what do you get?"

"...Obsessed."

"No; passionate."

Library Angst

Why are all the good public lending libraries only to be found in Anne Arundel county, Maryland? Seriously - other libraries need to get their acts together. My AACo library card let me do all sorts of things I can't seem to do anywhere else:

1. check out DVDs without a rental fee. And it's not as if this was a paltry collection of nothing but second-rate children's shows and cheap old BBC productions of Shakespeare from the '70s. Granted, those things were there, too, but there were good old movies, film noirs, Disney, recent action flicks, historical dramas, rom coms, and the invaluable British television section with series like Inspector Lynley Mysteries and Midsomer Murders. Those things provided hours of entertainment. (Particularly laughing at the omnipresent foresight of murder mystery killers to dress themselves in all black 'sneaky-suits' before committing their crimes. Seriously? How many people keep black trousers, gloves, tops, and ski caps in reserve for just such occasions? Do they go to Monsoon and River Island and the Gap thinking, 'I may lose my grip with reality or break into a homicidal rage at some point in the future...I ought to have an outfit for that!'??) If I wanted to pay to rent DVDs, I'd join Blockbuster or Netflix.
2. Reserve books without a £0.50 reservation fee!!!! Yes, Lynn Truss, I'm baldly and unrepentantly abusing punctuation to properly over-emphasize my point. I've never seen this until just recently trying to reserve an otherwise unobtainable book from the Hampshire library system. Really? Really, Hampshire Libraries? You can't keep enough copies of the book in-stock or decently enforce your return policies and so you're making me pay for the privilege of getting the books I want from the library? I thought your whole raison d'etre was to keep popular books in stock so people could read them for free?

Yes, I'm harping about a paltry 50p - I do get that - but it's not the half a quid I'm lamenting, it's the principle of the library as a free public service. You pay when you abuse the system and lose stuff or forget to bring it back on time or put dirty additions on illustrations (or make vulgar illustrations all on your own), or deface the book in other ways. Yes, anonymous prude who likes Agatha Christie, that includes using White Out to remove swear words. (Unless you own the book, I suggest not censoring it. Other readers will pen the swears back in while muttering vengefully about your probable ancestry and uncultured nature. True story.)

(That's right, Agatha, you write what you £*%&-well please. Hmph!)

To start the 'nickel and dime'-ing process on things like borrowing certain types of media or asking to be assured of getting a particular item, it sets a bad precedent and opens the door to all sorts of other ridiculous fees that begin to annoy like an itch you complain about but can't quite be bothered to scratch.

Get it together, libraries. Do charity drives for children's literacy in the community or something, but find ways to make money that don't involve fees to reserve stuff I can't find on the shelves.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's that time again: time to wax euphoric over the smell of cold crispness and hickory wood fires in the air. That's right people, it's autumn! Also known to frequenters of McSweeny's as "decorative gourd season." (I'd recommend the article, but for the high percentage of the text that's just obscenities added for humorous effect.)

It's time for long walks in the nature (that's right, The Nature), it's time for pumpkin picking and leaves changing colour. Time for apple pie and pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie. Time for my favourite sport to watch: football! (Go Deacs!) And yes, Mr. McSweeny, it's time to find some tiny gourds and pumpkins embalmed in wax and put them on your dining room table to look festive! (These samples below are quite creepy looking little monsters. These are the deformed children of the gourd world who are generally left in churches to ring large bells.)

Heck, let's just bring all of the outdoors to the indoors: giant coniferous trees of various descriptions; when the snow starts coming, get some Ilex aquifolium in a circle on the door, hang a few bunches of Phoradendron from the lintels in the house (and keep some breath mints handy just in case!).

I love the autumn. I love layering my clothes and wearing jumpers and scarves. I love the pristine clearness of a perfectly cool and sunny day in October. I love the indescribable smell of cold on the air. I love the excuses to make comfort food like buttermilk biscuits, and corn chowder, and split pea soup, and chicken pot pie. I love consuming ever-growing assortments of cranberry-based food and drink. Most of all, right now, I love that I'm not in school any more. Joy! Rapture! For the first time in 18 years of my life I am perfectly free to enjoy all the delights of autumn without wasting the precious daylight hours in class!

Autumn: I salute you.

(PS: to my lovely readers...10 extra points if you realise that I was talking about holly and mistletoe, respectively, without knowing enough Greek and Latin to decipher the names.)

(PPS: I will now be singing The Holly and the Ivy for the rest of the day. Play it again, Sam!...)

Why?

Why does the apartment upstairs from us constantly emit a sound like a laughing sheep with a basso profundo? Seriously; I'd love an answer to this question. I have a feeling that it may be the water pipes, because I hear it most often from the alleged security of my shower. Still, it didn't start until just a few weeks ago, so I can't imagine what they've been doing upstairs to put the pipes in such a passion that they need to bellow their discomfort like dehydrated cows.

As another note about our building:

After locking ourselves out the other night (it was bound to happen, and of course the night just after we had keys cut and forgot to hand them to our friends down the road!), I realised that conversations and general noise in the flats travel VERY well into the main corridor. And I do mean, VERY, incredibly, disconcertingly well. I could clearly hear the slightly winging conversations our neighbours were having about some friends of theirs and running out to get booze. I could also hear the family below us having dinner with their petulant colicy baby. This lack of soundproofing worries me. How many of our conversations must our neighbours hear!?

In the meantime, I will try not to worry about advertising all of my activities to the neighbours and get back to some good old-fashioned reading. I have a historical detective novel to sink my teeth into and it's begging for some more quality time.