Seven Quick Takes: The Diaries of Barbara Pym Edition

A cabin-feverish day. Reading novel after novel, deliciously, and then A Very Private Eye, while probably neglecting children's education. Other children got snow day, so why not they? Or perhaps this is rationalizing? Eventually settled down to some copywork. H:  I do not write sentences out of my science book. 

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Thinking of writing a novel using names from my spam filter. Today:  Barr Chong Kim Wong, Mary Jones, Mrs. Lovet Johnson, Samantha, Habiba Gammoudi. There is also my long-lost relative, Marinda Thomas, not to mention a Mr. Doug Nosworthy, who wants to ask a quick question about my business. What fun one might have with a Mr. Doug Nosworthy, business or no business.

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Mid-century English women writers who are elderly and/or dead;  vicars, romance, and lots of tea;  or, in case you haven't heard of Barbara Pym, Kerry here saves me the trouble of explaining.



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"Dearest," Mrs. Lovet Johnson typed, then paused.

"In Christ," she added after a moment's thought. Quickly she composed the body of her email.

I am Mrs. Lovet Johnson from Liberia   ; My Doctor told me that I would not last for the next Eight Months, due to my cancer problem. Having known of my condition (cancer of the lever and stroke).

Marinda, passing from the galley kitchen into the bathroom, stopped and read this opening over Mrs. Lovet Johnson's shoulder. She snorted derisively. "Of the lever? Cancer of stroke?"

"Shut up," said Mrs. Levet Johnson, who in real life was twenty-three, unshaven, from not Liberia but Des Moines, and named Douglas Nosworthy.

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[Insert description of church jumble sale here.] At the last one I went to, I bought a silverplate butter dish, a stack of napkins which appear to be real linen, a drain rack for the sink (although I already had one;  I liked the color of this one, and it does look nice under the sink, where it currently resides, holding spare rolls of paper towels), three or four books, and -- here I wish I could write something really climactic, like "a mounted rhinocerous head," but after I'd bought all the rest, I think they gave me a cupcake on a napkin, and that was that.


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Mary busied herself with the flowers, watching the new librarian -- what was his name? something multicultural? -- who loitered beside the card catalog. Do libraries of anthropological societies use card catalogs in this day and age, she wondered. And whatever happened to people with names like John? Does no one write novels about them any more?

Dr. Habiba Gammoudi also watched the new librarian from behind the monograph he had brought her, a heavy volume on the marital habits of the Xfili people. Didn't he have work to do? Was it her attention he was attempting to divert, or that of the fiftyish spinster in her crisp linen suit, rearranging three calla lilies in a glass vase? Who was she? Dr. Gammoudi had never been able to make out quite what her position at the library might be. She was simply always there, a conscientious, busy woman who looked as though she ought at all times to be handing people things.


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Girls for a walk to town. I washed my hair. Jen v. kind to host Seven Quick Takes. The vicar, once again, did not come to tea.