Rain

No option but stay in, read, knit and watch films bought cheap and left unwrapped waiting for a time like this:

So I finally finished A.S Byatt's "The Children's Book". It is set at the turn of the 19th century in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and focuses on the intellectual and artistic circles of the time. To be honest I skipped a fair few of the more didactic pages about the literary and political background, but really enjoyed following  the main characters' lives, and how most of them ended up victims to  harsh social prejudice in times of peace, or simply to the senseless stupidity of the war.

Et puis j'ai terminé un Saroyan en mérinos bleu nattier, qui attend sagement que la pluie cesse pour être "bloqué". C'était un ouvrage "accompagné", puisque j'étais inscrite au KAL de Ravelry.

And to celebrate  Hallowe'en in style, we watched Ken Russell's "Gothic", a rather grotesque costume piece in which  Lord Byron, Shelley, his wife Mary and her half-sister Claire, assisted by a weird Italian doctor, evoke an evil spirit on a suitably sturm-und-drangish night, and spend the whole time wandering round Byron's mansion: lightning flashes every time they pass a window, severed heads appear out of the blue, flayed cadavers tumble down stairs, and ghosts ride out into the night.

In the morning, they all look normal enough, and except for the fact that it's supposed to be the starting point of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein's monster", the viewer is left wondering what it was all about. The soundtrack, by one Mr Dolby, is as horrifying as the rest. For some reason we sat through the whole movie, but then I was knitting, so it was not time wasted.