Well, look at this - we're all here. We made it back again. I hope you're half as happy to be here as I am. Just saying that reminds me of a story, and since telling stories is what i do for a living (and to keep myself sane), i'll pas this one along.
Owl is Billy's best friend, the only friend he's got to play with. Until, that is, the 'Spaceman' comes to live in his road. Billy has all kinds of adventures with Owl and his new friend, including a trip to the fair, a visit to a new school and a wedding.
Thankeray's upper-class regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.
Having moved, like Paula, from a smallish draughty house in London to a larger, even draughtier house in the country, I identify so much with what she describes. Marvellously funny, perceptive and sometimes poignant.
Griffin has the knack. With enviable skill he doles out humanizing detail for alarge and colorful cast, and you care what happens to virtually all of them.
The formal ball usually begins with the rigodon de honor, a qudrille by seven coples, six along the hall's lenght and one in the middle, underneath a ball of mirrors spinning on its axis, piercing space with the pink, blue, yellow, and purple of reflected light, reflected images, its harsh brilliance
Is a villagebuilt entirely in the Ancient Egyptian style, inhabited by some 300 Egyptians living in the Ancient Egyptian atmosphere and practising all the agricultural and industrial activities wiyh the same tools and implements used in Ancient Egypt.
So this bitch at over says to me, "everyone who leaves is allowed threesuitcases. That's the quota. A special regulation of the ministry."
Each morning she watched the procession of nursesand invalids as they made their short, slow journey to gather at the lakeshore. They came from the town's hospitals and convalescent homes, the converging tributaries of a single flow, the nurses mstly young women, the invalids mostly young men.