Dombey And Son

I've nearly finished Dombey and Son. Dickens is at the stage where he's tidying things up, getting people married off, awarding after lives. It's like the final scene of a Shakespearian romance, only very much longer. I'm tempted to skip.

The first two hundred pages approx- corresponding to the first six issues of the book in serial form- are as good as anything he ever did. Thereafter he treads water, then sets off in another direction. There's some excellent comedy, some rousing melodrama and far too much about the sufferings of Florence Dombey who has to be the wettest of his many submissive, everlastingly weepy heroines. She weeps when she's sad, she weeps when she's happy. She's the very model of a self-pitying emo kid and everyone around her thinks she's an angel.

Next up, in order of publication, is David Copperfield.

In Our Time, Of Our Time...

Our doorbell plays "O, Susanna!"- and I find myself singing along as I trundle downstairs to open the door to the Sainsbury's delivery man.

I love Stephen Foster. (He wrote mistrel songs. He had to. That was the market. He was a man of his time so shoot him!)

Covid rules still apply. The delivery man stays outside, puts his baskets on the step, I transfer the contents to bags and carry them indoors.

The cost of our weekly shop has increased by £20. We're not buying anything different, it's down to the profiteers the increase in the cost of living. If in doubt blame Putin.

It saddens me how many people including some I call online "friends" have been taken in by the anti-Russian propaganda that comes spurting out of every mainstream source of information. You'd think from the tone they take- echoing their biased sources- that we were actually fighting this war instead of merely prolonging it by supplying the side we favour with weapons. Do you trust the media? Do you trust the people who tell them what to write- the state, the secret state, the banks, the corporations?  If so, more fool you!

As I said to one of them, "There are two sides to every war. It doesn't absolve Putin to acknowledge how badly he has been provoked by the USA and NATO."

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!