Here I am awaiting a little Pride and Prejudice ( Sort of).

Jane Austen, it has been a while.My reading schedule is impossibly full so revisiting the reading of my youth is unlikely.

I was briefly youthful this afternoon, as I explained to comfortably seated theatregoers that I was 19. My seat number, not my age. But in that moment I identified as 19. At 19 I was much more familiar with the works of dear Jane. I have always wondered why she didn’t write a novel called ‘Judgement’

Review of the play from a proper reviewer below. I was too busy enjoying it. Not that I enjoyed it as much as others. Proper Austenites got every clever joke milliseconds before me.  I am an unashamed laugh out loud kind of woman but I was in the presence of people laughing and whooping to a whole new Tena Lady level of mirth.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/nov/03/pride-and-prejudice-sort-of-review-silliness-and-sensibility?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I was hugely entertained. So I am doing what the poster on the stage suggested.

I have migrated from the East of England to the West with some  long term living in London and the South East. On this map I grew up in pale blue and have lived on both green and dark blue areas. I currently reside on the cusp of red and grey my words for the evening meal have never altered.

Lunch occurs between noon and  2pm.

Tea is almost always just a drink unless it becomes an event with cake and sandwiches and is called afternoon tea. Small children have a late afternoon snack which I could call tea but never do.

A meal after 6 pm is supper unless I am in a restaurant choosing from a ‘dinner’ menu but I would still call it  being ‘ out for supper’

All this written before breakfast which seems pretty secure in its identity as the first meal of the day unless it slips rather too close to lunch and becomes brunch. Actually my favourite meal.

Here we are in the actual mid-winter. Mid January to Mid February. Lola had a moment of a real photo opportunity on a red Chesterfield in a Bikers cafe today. She is a dog that loves both sofa’s and cafes. Her perfect life would be as the companion dog for a food critic. Lola is not a fan of mid-winter.

I was feeling a bit mid-wintery this morning. Just a bit bored of my winter clothes and wishing for sunshine. Last weekend’s glorious days were just too much of a tease for me to happily revert to the greige of this weekend. The cure was a jar of marmalade.

I have absolutely jumped the gun with this purchase. A good friend makes the best marmalade on the planet. But she is a purist and only makes it when Seville oranges are in season and available in February. Hers is dark, bitter and bursting with flavour. Only Frank Cooper gets close and on a day when the sun has failed to make an appearance I need marmalade to bring some colour to my life almost as much as Lola needs a sofa!

Visits to Art Galleries and Museums are one of my life-long pleasures. I really loved my visit to Penlee House and I am sharing the Bloomberg Connects QR code to explore the Galleries for yourselves.

This blog is more trivial than an appreciation of a really great gallery.

The artist responsible for the rainy promenade picture is Norman Garstin, his daughter Alethea was also an artist.

It was this fact that jumped out at me.

Many years ago when I was first pregnant my mum had lent me one of her guilty secret novels. Guilty secret, because she didn’t always read great or worthy books. She often read books that she described as ‘ pulpy kidney novels’.

The heroine of this fiction book was a talented artist called Alathea Heron.

I have no idea if the author deliberately chose two Cornwall based artists to create the name. Alethea Garstin and Patrick Heron.

Unusually for one of my mum’s pulpy kidney books this one was very readable.

My hormones were madly in a state of flux and I immediately thought I would call my possible foetus Alethea and that she would become a great artist.  At the time I was an obstetric ultrasonographer in Brighton and I quickly realised my foetus was a boy and the name Alethea dropped out of thought and mind until this week.

By the time I was pregnant with a daughter I was living in Cornwall and despite being very aware of Cornish artists, when I chose her a Cornish name Alethea did not cross my mind.

Which led me to a very trivial ponder. Do people carry over their name choices for each pregnancy. Should I have kept the name Alethea close to my heart until I actually had a daughter or is it entirely normal to discard the unused name and choose afresh for each pregnancy.

I suspect my daughter is very grateful for my fickle mind, her actual name is much more suited to her character.

This whole trivial ponder has just cost me 75 pence with free postage! The book was published 40 years ago but Abebooks had several. I wonder if the heroine will impress me as much as she did 39 years ago, or was it just hormones?