I have minus time right now: back in Liverpool, should be revising, insanely hungry with no food in the house and I must must MUST go out & get some. All of that means that today's Monday words business will be a bit sub-standard, but I hope I get points for doing it anyway.
When I was enjoying the comparatively mild weather this morning (no snow, anyway; haven't the last few weeks been insane?) I found myself wishing it was the summer, for the weather and the freedom and all the excitements we're beginning, already, to plan. Wishing it would be summer always makes me think of my favourite fictional summer, so I knew what I had to pick for this week's text. An extract from a novel at last, instead of a poem! I suppose I'll just leave this here:
'It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together - and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebsatian. "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."'
- from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
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