Blackmail material
… was the fiendish plot I had in mind when inviting my suspiciously civilized fellow-bloggers back to my place for a quiet cup of tea post-Ban’quet.
I would have had far better leverage had my camera battery not died after taking only three pics. The third one (not featured here) is a lovely but misleading one of Kathryn (White) and Sophy (Kohler). Kathryn looks all perky (and is still inside her dress), while Sophy looks as if she’s just shot up. (She was actually the most sober person present. Or was that Karina? Alex was hypoglycaemic, and everyone else was under the table. Except for Kathryn, who was on the ceiling.)* So in spite of Sophy’s brilliant capacity for capturing my seldom-seen fourth chin in her Book SA portraits (she crouches at my feet and aims her lens upwards), I have been magnanimous.
Ben and Rustum do not get off as lightly.
Ben’s speech bubble: ‘Hey, guys, look! I can hold two bottles of wine in one hand! And dance at the same time!’
Rustum’s speech bubble: ‘Where’s my goat?’
Henrietta’s speech bubble: ‘Bad Rustum! Leave the poor creature alone!’
* plagiarism alert: this is actually Emma Thompson’s line. From her diary of the making of Sense & Sensibility — the film.
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It’s tempting to list a serious book under “XX is reading…” For most of us, I suspect the truth is that we have several books on the boil at once (I have three or four going at any given moment). There is always something complex and beautiful I’m trying to linger over, plus several junk or confectionary items I tend to wolf down in the bath or just before falling asleep. Sometimes these are good enough to be memorable; in this category, The Last Juror is the first John Grisham I’ve enjoyed in a while — nice strong plot with an interesting twist (remember the pointless one he wrote about learning Italian and wifi laptops?)