Sixteen November revisited continued

 

Bratsche

The dress with the extreme skirt is my favourite dress in the universe . . . the ninety-seven yards of skirt on my dress

Oh, pictures please? Pretty please! Even if it has moth holes, I’d still love to see your favorite dress, especially if it has ninety-seven yards of skirt!

Why don’t you come up and see me some time?

I realise I should post photos of me in it and I’m sure there are some but the only one I can lay my hands on easily is a lot better of me than the dress.*  Peter won’t touch my current camera because it has too many buttons** and I am not going to race upstairs and put the dress back on the next time a non-camera-phobic friend drops round.  So this will have to do.  It’s a very very fine wool—you’d need like .00001 needles if you were knitting it—and the bodice fits snugly and then the skirt drapes and swirls from the seam, including that fabulous deep V in the front, which is what really makes it.  ALSO THE SLEEVES ARE LONG ENOUGH.

Because I am a silly person I’ve left it sitting on the sofa.  It’s very like having a friend visiting, even if she can’t take a photo of herself.  Although I’ll have to put her away soon because in this weather the indoor greenhouse’s need is greater.

Mrs Redboots

. . . but you were so busy talking about the champagne that you forgot to tell us what you ate!

Not exactly forgot.  One gets a trifle shuffly-footed about what one puts on a public blog:  menus are like holiday photos, most people groan.  I had chicken liver pate because I always have foie gras or chicken liver pate any time it’s on offer, cod with lentils, and petit pois with bacon.  And a chocolate pudding.  Peter had onion soup and swordfish—yes and red wine:  the sommelier produced something that could cope—and wilted spinach, and then he sat there drinking coffee while I ate my pudding, although he helped me with the ice cream since I shouldn’t really eat any ice cream.

EMoon

. . . And that was supposed to have a paragraph suggesting that accessorizing the Doc Martens with painted roses and rhinestones might make it perfect for the dress. DUH.

I totally understood that!  No need to explain!  And I’m sure ANY regular reader of this forum ALSO understood immediately!  We’re a highly intuitive bunch!***

Diane in MN

I think it’s perfectly okay to be slow after a birthday celebration, especially one that included several glasses of champagne, which I find quite stealthy in producing its effects: a big red wine is up front about its alcohol content, but champagne seems so innocent until it isn’t. Hurtling hellhounds in heels must have had a few interesting moments.

Yes about champagne:  it’s all jolly and effervescent and it slides down so easily,† it can’t possibly hurt you.  Um.   Oh, and heavens, I changed my shoes before I took critters out—!!!

* * *

* Yes, it is from quite a few years ago.

** He’s right about this.

*** Also we’re mostly girls.  Girls make sideways leaps of topic, logic and network-iness with grace and aplomb.  Well . . . maybe not always grace and aplomb.  But we do it, and we think it’s normal.

† Especially when it’s very cold.  That was the other problem about Peter’s free glass:  you want to drink it while it’s still cold.  I won’t say I chugged two glasses of champagne on a nearly empty stomach, but they did go down pretty briskly.^

^ It’s probably just as well I didn’t get Astarte out and try to type anything.  Did I tell you we printed out, to have another look at, the beginning of GHOST WOLVES from . . . I forget, some restaurant celebration of yore.+  It foundered because we had no idea where we were going, and while Peter has written most of his books that way++ I tend to like to have some vague idea of what’s ahead, and this ridiculous attitude was holding up progress.  And I know some people collaborate easily but Peter and I each suffer from Minds of Our Own.+++  However we’ve now got a workable plot-idea, so all we have to do is . . . go out to eat a lot++++ and the typist must not have champagne.

+ http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2012/01/04/anniversary-2/

++ I would have sworn I’d told you the story that goes with the fabulous ending of Chapter One of YELLOW ROOM CONSPIRACY but I’m not finding it from ‘search’.  Here is the fabulous ending of Chapter One of YRC:

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2012/12/09/hot-news/

The point is that this was the first Peter Dickinson book I read from the beginning of the beginning.  I must have told you this story . . . oh, maybe it’s back on lj.  Well, I’m not going there.  But when Peter and I decided to get married, I was in the final edit of DEERSKIN and I really REALLY wanted to get it finished before I blew up my life, and my ability to concentrate, by frelling packing everything up and frelling moving to England.  This ended up meaning that Peter lived in Blue Hill with me for about two months, and after he put up shelves and redesigned my garden# he needed something to do, so he borrowed my ancient manual portable typewriter and started YRC.  After a bit he gave me the first chapter.  I read it, gasped, and said, What happens next?

He replied:  I haven’t the least idea.

# Garden cough cough garden.  I didn’t start gardening till I moved over here and married a gardener.

+++ Yes, each of us has several minds of his/her own.

++++ Way too distracting, trying to do it over dinner at the mews.  Place is full of critters.  Also there’s a piano.  And books, some of them unread.

* * *

PS:  Yes, I know the caption is a misquote.  But it’s a misquote that has entered the language, and the original doesn’t work (say I).  And this ought to be a footnote, but I was already here in the WordPress admin window when I put the caption in, and I can’t face changing all the headings with WordPress having the screaming meemies, which it would.