Middlemarch

I am struggling with Middlemarch. I read it once before, when I was a student and had an essay to write on George Eliot, and I read Middlemarch one night and Daniel Deronda the next, and unsurprisingly neither of them left much of an impression. But I've always thought that I ought to have another go. So I took it on holiday with me this year.

Usually I take four or five books, to give a bit of variety and allow for disappointment, and expect to read them all or mostly all. This year I decided just to take Middlemarch, figuring that it was a good thick book, that I was bound to enjoy it and that it would be pleasant to be reading about life in a small town in nineteenth-century England, while I was sitting in the Portuguese sun. I thought it would make a piquant contrast.

But I found that I couldn't get on with it. For a start, I couldn't find anywhere comfortable to sit and read. I used to lie and read on the beach, but I'm getting too old and stiff to find it comfortable to be lying flat and reading; back at the apartment, the roof terrace was too hot and it was too stuffy to sit indoors; and anyway, to be able to settle and read happily I have to be either on my own or with someone else who is also reading companionably and silently (isn't it enraging to be trying to read beside someone who keeps laughing out loud at their book? But that's by the way). So circumstances conspired to make reading difficult.

It didn't help that you have to put an awful lot of effort into the beginning of a book like Middlemarch. There are so many characters in it, and they are all related in all sorts of complicated family ways, and all those intricate relationships affect the plot so you can't just ignore them. You can't afford to get Mr Featherstone mixed up with Mr Farebrother, or forget who is whose sister-in-law. It is all a lot more difficult than The Archers, and even in The Archers I sometimes forget who is who, despite the writers giving me a lot more reminders than George Eliot does. Perhaps it would have been easier to sit and read it in one huge burst. As it was, struggling through a dozen or twenty pages and then putting it aside for a day, by the time I came back to it I had forgotten who everyone was and what had happened.

And I started not to care. None of the characters are very engaging, being variously vacuous, vicious, naive, deluded or just plain dull. There's nothing like a bit of social comedy, but you have to like at least some of the people some of the time. Otherwise it is just like real life.

So of course I started playing truant from Middlemarch and reading other things instead, Dawn French's autobiography for one, which was more fun than Middlemarch as well as being shorter. It certainly has better jokes.

I'm still reading Middlemarch on the train. I don't like to be beaten by a book and it would be just too shaming to have to give up on George Eliot. I'm about halfway through, which still leaves me 400 and more pages. I am trying not to spend the journey looking out of the window instead...

Lasagne

There were grandparents on the train yesterday morning, making the most of the whole grey-haired twinkly grandparent thing. They had a mound of luggage and their two grandsons, and obviously, from the overheard conversation, they were taking them on holiday. The boys weren't being bad, but appeared to be chafing already against the constraints - no doubt their parents had impressed upon them the importance of behaving really well with granny and grandpa - and there was the teeniest hint that the grandparents were beginning to rue the whole idea of the holiday. In particular, grandpa seemed very keen to stand by himself, in order to keep an eye on the luggage...

But what struck me was the question one of the boys asked granny - in bewilderment, "Can you make lasagne from scratch?"

Sprinting

I had to run for the bus this morning and it made me wonder...

Greyhounds chase a little stuffed rabbit round the track. Would our sprinters run faster if a bus was driven along just in front of them?

Dressing gown

Of all my clothes, my dressing gown is the one love the best and the one that works hardest. I have pretty little wraps in the wardrobe, simple white cotton ones for summer and slinky ones with matching nighties for weekends away, but a dressing gown isn't a wrap. A dressing gown is for comfort, and you can't be comfortable in something that is constantly coming undone. A dressing gown isn't for display. It's for concealment and warmth and protection.

My dressing gown is big and grey and fleecy. It's pretty much like what Friar Tuck would have worn, but without the constraint of a rope round the middle. It goes from throat to wrist and to ankle. It's baggy and hides everything underneath - the wobbly bits and the tatty underwear and, on cold days, all the other bits and pieces put on for warmth rather than fashion.

When I've been out in the evening - especially if it's been somewhere posh, or for work rather than pleasure - then the dressing gown is the second thing to go on when I get back, after the kettle, and before I make the tea and the fried egg sandwich.

The dressing gown is not only coverall, but also overall. Being grey, it doesn't show the dirt (not too badly) and the sleeves come in very handy when you notice dust on the dado rail, or smears around the light switch that need a bit of spit and a rub. It doesn't snag, so it's pretty good when you have to comb the cat and get the fleas out. A bit of fur doesn't show. In fact, even quite a lot of fur doesn't show. Not much. It's just what's wanted when there is a fried breakfast to cook (no point doing that in some flimsy little negligee that's always falling open). It does for running down the garden and getting the washing in when it suddenly starts to rain, or in the middle of the night when the caterwauling starts.

But more than all the practical stuff, my dressing gown is a great big comfort blanket. Forget about breastplates of righteousness, if I'm in my dressing-gown I am safe from evil of all kinds.

Mrs Charming

We have just come back home after a fortnight in a holiday apartment near Lagos, in Portugal. This was a palatial apartment - huge rooms, designer sofas, massive rooftop terrace, en-suite bathrooms, all top-of-the-range equipment (Bosch this, Siemens that) - and on a small gated development with Moorish-inspired grounds, kept impeccably manicured by an army of gardeners.

Nothing like home, which is dusty, untidy, cluttered, smells of cat and is surrounded by an equally untidy and louche garden. No maids, no gardeners. The hot tap on the bath is temperamental, which makes showers exciting, and one of the armchairs (the one I still haven't got round to covering) is draped in an old sheet with rips from the cat's claws.

Having said which, it is nice to be home, back on the battered sofa that noone minds if you put your feet up on, and the saggy old bed with its comfy duvet, much more comfortable than the brand new divan with its stiff white Egyptian cotton sheets.

I wonder if Cinderella felt the same. I expect she was thrilled to be whisked away from her hovel by the impossibly romantic Prince, and set up in the palace with handmaids and wardrobes full of frocks and delicious banquets every night. I bet she had three baths a day, and bossed the servants about, and complained to the cook if her breakfast egg wasn't boiled just right, and wore a different pair of shoes every time she went out in her BMW convertible coach.

But I wonder how long it was before she got bored, and fed up with the maids tidying things away that she hadn't finished with. I bet the time came when she would have liked to go out into the garden and done a bit of weeding, or pottered down to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. Six months on, I bet she would have swapped Prince Charming for Buttons and the palace for a starter home.