Bird of Limbo

I've just worked out how to add images. Check out this and Joan Didon and the dusty Mirrorball below! I wonder how I managed to add Alice herself? Curiouser & curiouser!

Any way this is the Bird of Paradise or Strelitzia flower. They're amongst my favourites. I planted a strelitzia (or what I thought was one) in my garden about 11 years ago and while it has grown to a towering height, it didn't flower at all until quite recently when some greyish spikes started to push their way through the 7 foot tall foliage! The variety I bought seems to be an albino giant! Not a skerrick of the conventional gorgeous colours and 4 times taller than any strelitzia I've ever seen anywhere else!

I'll post a picture and see if I've bred a freak of nature or if it is just some seldom cultivated variety. It certainly wouldn't be grown for its looks!
'
STOP PRESS; It's a stelitzia nicola and it may reach 25 feet!

The Book Group

My sister and I and our dog walking friends have started a book group. We had our first meeting last Sunday and all agree it was a raging success. This is despite choosing a book that 3 out of the 6 of us hated and only 2 really felt pleased they'd read. It was Joan Didion's (left) The Year of Magical Thinking which is not the jolliest text you will ever encounter, dwelling as it does on the aftermath of her husband's sudden death from a massive heart attack right on Christmas and when their adopted daughter lay critically ill in hospital. You can't fault the authenticity of the way Didion renders her experience. You FEEL each tremor of pain, doubt and delusion. So powerful a writer is she that she replicates grief and its accompanying disorientation. It does your head in. It was a brave first choice especially as our group includes women who have suffered sudden and catastrophic bereavement. Turned out to be a book we could admire though maybe not like. It does succeed as a great monument to John Gregory Dunne (her partner of 40 years) as her portrait of him and her quotes from his work have inspired me to seek out his books! Our next choice is safer, fiction by David Malouf, the novella Child's Play I am already romping through it and enjoying every phrase and image. If the others feel like I do it should be a joyous December meeting.

Mirrorball Epiphany

Dust is, according to Marjory Dawes, a good low cal snack! It is also an apparently endlessly renewable resource! It certainly replenishes itself very promptly chez moi. Scudding over surfaces with a piece of fluffy acrylic stuff on a stick and flourishing my poor battered vacuum cleaner once a week diminishes it only fleetingly. I should have heeded Quentin Crisp, who said it doesn't get any worse after the first 12 years, and never started the sisyphean labour at all. Any way, thankfully actually noticing it's there is only sporadic - like when you're obliged to sit in a dentist's waiting room or outside the principal's office and you fixate on details like a bit the painters missed or a crooked picture frame!

So it is that I only recently noticed dusty surfaces at work. The area behind my computer, the parts of the floor at the furthest reaches under the desk etc. Most significantly though, there is dust on the mirrorball! No, I don't work in a disco. I'm in HR and the lime green faceted bauble hangs over the Recruitment section. At first I thought it was a Christmas decoration but I've been here 3 years and it's been hanging there all that time and presumably longer!

It is - appropriately, considering this is a public service department - attached to the ceiling with red tape! I noticed neither the mirrorball nor its ironic tether until some weeks after I started here, when, as I said, the season led me to think it was a festive adornment.

Those were my salad days (well I certainly ate more salad and fewer cakes than I do now) and all was rosy, or in this case shiny and chartreuse! Now familiarity has led to dust-noticing and I am tempted to create hugely mixed metaphors to express how my early enthusiasm for my job and the organisation has given way to my current disaffection and fatigue.

A mirror ball is meant to spin. It needs vibration and light and dark to distribute its glitter. It borders on cruel to keep it static and dust accruing. It can not be true to it's dance floor enhancing function. I think there's a message there!