Long putts and feminist plays

Hey ho, I'm feeling surprisingly calm today. What an astonishment for us all indeed. It was great to be able to stop angsting for Britain (is it an Olympic sport, as I'm sure I'd be in with a chance ...?) and get out and play some really quite bad golf with Marian. The weather was great (yes, I know I sound like a postcard, but I'm getting into training for next week) and there was absolutely no-one else on the course but us. Weird. That has never happened before. We were so spooked by it that halfway round we began to wonder if aliens had landed and taken off all the other inhabitants of Godalming. And whether they planned to replace them with large, confident women with whicker (sp?) baskets. Bloody difficult to tell the difference then ...

Anyway, I sank a hugely long putt at the ninth, in spite of an appalling round, so honour was satisfied. It was at least five miles long. Honest. I then popped into Godalming to pick up some shopping and have bought some eucalyptus oil, which I hope to snort when my nose gets bad. Well, it's cheaper than coke, eh. Ho ho. And you don't have to deal with the bubbles.

I then spent the rest of the day dragging out a mere 300 words to add to The Bones of Summer - a process even more fraught with difficulty than getting cash out of my stepfather. And, believe me, that's not easy. The last time Jim's wallet was opened, we actually found Lord Lucan. We never said anything though. Some things are best left a mystery.

I've also screwed my courage to the sticking place and booked an appointment with the Hormone Doctor(as recommended by Steph at the University Health Centre - thanks, Steph!), so will be toddling off to the Surrey Park Clinic later in October to get my bits checked out. Oo-err, missus then.

Tonight, Lord H and I are off to see a dramatised reading of Virginia Woolf's only play, "Freshwater" - which is about Julia Margaret Cameron (the photographer). Which is ideal in its way as it combines one of my favourite writers with Lord H's favourite ever photographer. And comes with a free glass of wine. What more could you want? Well, actually, the fact that it's taking place at the wonderful Watts Gallery is just an added bonus. Verily, our Victorian cup runneth over.

The only fly in the proverbial is of course the horror of missing our essential Friday night pizza & wine night - which we are postponing until tomorrow - and having to video a thousand and one things on the TV. Including the welcome return of "Ugly Betty", which I really can't live without.

Oh, and I've just finished reading Anna Wigley's poetry collection, Durer's Hare. Um, well, I liked one or two of the pieces, including the title poem, but there was just too much ruddy Nature in it. With nothing behind it either. Surely, if poetry is about anything at all, it should be about something other than what you're apparently saying? And it should be utterly and devastatingly human. Or am I missing the point entirely? I do hope my own Nature poems (and I don't really do that many - well, okay, I've done a lot of bird ones recently, but apart from them ...) are actually saying something else other than "Oh what a lovely xxx and look how pretty the yyy are". And are at least more human. I live in hope anyway.

Today's nice things:

1. Golf
2. Eucalyptus oil
3. The play.

Anne Brooke
Anne's website