(2/20) Village Diary Read Online Free PDF

slow at the time. Say she'd been driving this pace, now, she'd very like have lolled herself outright. Having no consecration, you see, she couldn't stop quick.'
    I was glad to reach Caxley and drop the old misery outside the Post Office.
    I bought a very dashing pair of tan shoes, which cost far more than I can really afford, but I consoled myself with the thought that February is a short month—a specious piece of reasoning, which I shall not delve into. Also managed to get a new book from the library, much praised by the critics.
    I felt rather wobbly on the drive home—probably lack of consecration—and so horribly tired this evening that I went to bed early with hot milk and the book.

    I spent most of Sunday in bed, with what I can only think is a particularly unpleasant "flu germ. My only nourishment was four oranges and about a gallon of lemon water, the thought of anything else anathema.
    The book, of which I had read such glowing reports, I hurled from my bed of pain about 11 a.m., when the heroine—as unpleasant a nymphomaniac as it has been my misfortune to come across—hopped into the seventh man's bed, under the delusion that this would finally make her (a) happy, (b) noble, and altruistic, and (c) interesting to her readers. Could have told the wretched creature by page 6, that, spinster though I am, this is not the recipe for contentment.
    I am heartily sick of books from Caxley library—all termed powerful' by their reviewers, (and in future I shall steer clear of any with this label) which give the suffering reader a detailed account of the bodily functions of their main characters. If the author has such a paucity of ideas that he must pad out his 300 pages with reiterated comments on his hero's digestive, alimentary and productive systems, I am sorry for him; but I don't see why he should be encouraged.
    To have a heroine who does nothing but climb, regularly every thirty pages, from one bed into another, is, to my mind, not only inartistic. It is worse. It is tedious.
    I spent the evening huddled over the fire, refreshing myself mentally with The Diary of a Country Parson, and physically with sips of lemon water. On opening the larder door, I nearly had a relapse, by being faced with a leering joint of fatty beef, some cold cooked sausages embedded in grease, and a pot of cod liver oil and malt.
    Retired early to bed, and felt the greatest sympathy for James Woodforde who found 'Mince Pye rose oft' sometime in the 1790s. I lay awake for several hours and noticed, not for the first time, how peculiarly significant inanimate objects, such as chairs and tables, become when one's energy is low. It is almost as though they have some life of their own, a silent, immobile, waiting one, rather sinister—as though they were saying: 'Yes, we were here before you came. And we'll still be here, standing and watching when you—poor ephemeral creature—have gone.'
    I suppose the logical reason is that all these things are used and taken for granted, and hardly noticed, as one bustles about with all sorts of plans to occupy one's mind. But when illness comes, then one becomes conscious of their presence, and imbues them with more power than is really theirs. I had worked out this interesting theory at about 2 a.m., and was toying with the idea of writing a letter to the Caxley Chronicle about it—with a rather well-turned aside, about the Romans' Lares et Penates—when I must have dropped off.

    This has been Black Monday. The telephone rang at 8 a.m. and Mr Annett, who sounded quite beside himself with worry told me that Mrs Annett had a high temperature and was too ill to come to school.
    'I'm so sorry,' I said, 'it's probably this ghastly 'flu.'
    'Don't expect her this week at all,' said the harassed husband, 'I am insisting on her staying in bed for at least three days. She can't be too careful at a time like this.'
    I should have liked to ask Mr Annett to explain this last remark. Did he mean, I wondered,