Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Price of Spring
Delecting (not a word but it should be) what felt like the first day of spring in London, I sat in Kensington Gardens to watch the buggies and joggers. There were snowdrops. I walked down the east side of Green Park, staring at the various gilded palaces of sin that line Queen's Walk and watching a springer spaniel being driven to delirium by a tennis ball. The daffodils were almost in bloom. Then I stopped at a pub in St James and got charged £2.05 for a tomato juice. Once it stops being such an egregious rip-off (not long now), London can relax and be beautiful again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Yep the days are already a little longer, the sun a little higher and so brighter and my wife has already go me the jet washer ready, so spring it must be.
ReplyDeleteDoes that involve a great deal of preparation, PB?
ReplyDeleteHi Bryan,
ReplyDeleteJust found your blog (thanks to your viral self-marketing in The Times at the weekend!) It looks great!
-And as for London, perhaps you'd disagree but personally I look forward to the end of rampaging development - leaving me for the time being a few remaining dark and Dickensian corners of the capital to discover before they too get turned into stadiums, flats and web marketing offices!!
Make the most of it, the great War is on its way, soon all the cities will be heaps of charred ruins. Best stock up on military surplus gear and tinned food and prepare a compound asap.
ReplyDeletei always feel like this on Tuesdays.
Egregious – now there’s a word. Hands up those ( and no cheating – no surreptitious scrambling for dictionaries before you answer!) who know precisely how to say it, never mind about precisely how to spell, or use it.
ReplyDelete“Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism are all very good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism.....” Thus spake {the egregious} Mrs General in 'Little Dorrit'. Dickens did not, to my knowledge, refer to Mrs General as egregious: it only seems to me he might have done, had he been absolutely sure of its being the word to fit the case. Dickens was not often stumped - though he did get mutual wrong of course; and egregious might well have had the better of him too........
Mrs General herself, come to think of it, might well have held egregious up to her young ladies as a word that was very bad for the lips. (Try saying it before a mirror, and see the effect.) But then Mrs General was a lady who would almost certainly have known better than to attempt a word she could neither say nor spell....
All of which is just my rather circuitous, non-sequiturial way of saying “Hats off to Bryan, for throwing egregious off with such insouciance!”
Is it possible to have an egregious spot on one's face? Or egregious buttocks?
ReplyDeleteIt's quite possible to have egregious buttocks - if you get too hooked by the Appleyard Adjustment
ReplyDeleteIt takes a lot of thinking about Bryan, planning, scheduling, checking if all the parts are still available ect.
ReplyDeleteI noticed all the gardening books are off the shelves too, its looking ominous.
It's gotta be spring, the female pheasant appeared at the bird table this morning, unfortunately the dog got it.
ReplyDeleteSwings and roundabouts eh, Mystic?
ReplyDeleteWhy all those question marks in my published comment, I wonder?
ReplyDeleteThe piece went out immaculately quotation-marked from this laptop.
I take it as a sign from Blogger that I just don't have the appropriately blokeish approach for these pages.
Don't take it personally, I B, it's a peculiarly feature of Bryan's eccentrically gremlin-riddled blog. Basically if you cut-and-paste anything you have to re-do all the punctuation in HTML, otherwise the dreaded question marks strike.
ReplyDelete