My stationary indoor bike
Friends and readers,
I am relieved because I am not yet up to it. I cannot as yet walk outside with my rollaton that easily. So I would not be able to take public transportation, which I would need to do to go anywhere during the day and some of the evening. I would need a wheelchair in the airport after a short while of walking.
I also was intensely reluctant to put my Ian pussycat in the boarding place by himself for 8 days. Hitherto he always had Clarycat with him.
So please to carry on as usual being my blog, internet and listserve as well as friends from elsewhere this week. I will be in physical actuality in this old house alone but for Ian.
Tonight I’ve been reading the intensely imagined The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen by Lindsey Ashford. Thus far a first-person narration by Anne Sharp (“She is an excellent kind friend”) telling of her first experience of Jane Austen’s friendship begun at Godmersham in 1805. Among other things, they travel to the nearby seaside, a place that today calls to mind Austen’s Sanditon — perhaps Worthing, which I read about and gazed at many contemporary engravings of in Anthony Edmonds’ Jane Austen’s Worthing: the Real Sanditon), and experienced myself in one of the towns Jim, I, and Izzy visited one July, perhaps 2007, when we stayed in a Landmark Trust “Duke’s Lodge,” near Chichester (a cathedral close is in it), and went swimming at one of “the Chitterings,” a pebbbled beach. I bought my 5 volume 1804 set of later 17th through 18th century plays in a used bookstore there. Soon I shall turn to Catherine Peters’ literary biography of Thackeray as I finish reading and posting on Vanity Fair with a small group of listserv companions. When I tire, I’ll watch an episode or so of one of the five British made serial TV adaptations I’ve been watching in tandem while I read (1967, 1987, 1998, 2018). This is a good evening for me since I napped during the afternoon just before my zoom meeting with my austistic women’s group (we discussed Daily Life I: the importance of routines, self care, and an ideal of independent living). The meeting went well: we had good supportive talk.
I wrote about Biden’s withdrawal of his candidicacy just afterwards: I remember Cat Steevens, “Morning has broken” (the early evening he was declared winner in November 2020), and sent the final version of my essay-review for the Scriblerian of an essay on “Jane Austen and Death” (I’ll come back here and put it on academia.edu and link the text here as soon as the editor okays it.
Ellen