Fifth Avenue to the Sargasso Sea

Quick! Today is Jules Verne's birthday (183rd) and the Google Doodle is an amazing interactive underwater view. You too can be Professor Pierre Aronnax.

I had thought that Prof. Aronnax was James Mason, but was thinking of him in Journey to the Centre of the Earth. James Mason is Captain Nemo, and with a beard.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea has one of the best armchair travel quotes I have ever read. Not, as you might think, his descriptions of deep water caverns or terrifying ice shelves, but his useful information about the route from the Fifth Avenue Hotel to the Brooklyn pier where his boat was moored.

"The carriage, available at a fixed fare of four dollars, went down Broadway as far as Union Square, proceeded along Fourth Avenue as far as its junction with Bowery Street, turned into Katrin Street, and pulled up at Pier 34. There, the Katrin Ferry transported us, men, horses and carriages, to Brooklyn, that great suburb of New York, situated on the left bank of the East River, and in a few minutes we arrived at the wharf where the Abraham Lincoln was belching clouds of black smoke from her two smokestacks."

Urgency AND accuracy. I do love Jules Verne.

Brighton Zoo

We have been collecting pictures of animals from Brighton and Hove, which you can see here. More to follow soon.

(Ceci n'est pas un chat)

Interestingly, Mr JT pointed out to me that there was a real Brighton Zoo until the 50s, at what is now the Withdean Stadium, soon to be vacated by Brighton & Hove Albion. Further rummaging also reveals that there was a menagerie at what is now Park Crescent, although it only lasted a year from 1839. Although the 1990 Encyclopaedia of Brighton says that the lion and lioness on the gates were removed in 1987, they have since been restored.

Brightoners, are there other zoos I should know about?

Age of Wondering

It has been proved to be the coldest winter since I was much too small to remember, and there has been too much ice and not enough talking.

This year, because I am very very very lucky, I went to a hot and sunny place for a week, with lovely people and a suitcase with 4 jumpers in that I didn't need. In February next year I will look at pictures of the hot and sunny place, have a bath and retire to bed with a pina colada and a fat paperback.

And shall we do this? Because it would be excellent.

Two Short Lists of Not Much.....

2 Things I Have Not Been Doing:
It is very cold indeed. I have not written anything here for a while but am not hibernating.

8 Things I Have Been Doing
I have been running about trying to buy presents with appropriate care and attention but without having to go to a shopping centre on the Saturday before Christmas. I have written about my Christmas preparations before, and this December is proceeding pretty much as expected, although this year I have been making vast quantities of mincemeat.

I have also been telling everyone how excellent leg-warmers are. I have excellent thick, dark red wool leg-warmers. They are MARVELLOUS and I love them. I have also been showing them to people, enthusiastically pulling up my trouser leg and waving a woolly ankle in the air - "Look! Aren't they great! I'm so warm!!". This is not always appropriate.

I have been wondering how much it might snow tonight. If you have a snow day tomorrow I have ideas of what you can do with it here.

I have been listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I have been amused by Christmas perfume adverts.

I have been stalking sydthecat, trying to take a photo of him with a Father Christmas hat hovering above his head. With limited success.

(Some) Books of the Year (2002 mostly, it seems)

And so we come to the end of 2009, and also to the end of the decade we (rightly) hesitated to call the noughties.

I wasn't really prepared for the end-of-the-decade thing this time, as the last one was also the end of a century and of the millenium and so was heralded with nostalgia, smugness and predictions of technological meltdown and apocalyptic doom.

I do not have my ear to the ground or my finger on the pulse or my anything else on the whatever of the zeitgeist, so cannot give a definitive top [insert number, preferably multiple of 5 or 10] [insert cultural experience of choice] of 2009.

I can, however, exclusively reveal the list you have all been waiting for (subconsciously, probably, but waiting nonetheless):

5 Good Books I Have Read This Year.

Exciting stuff.

In no particular order then:

1. The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future by Jenny Uglow.
This is really, really good, and there is plenty (500+) pages of it (and with pictures). A group biography of members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which includes Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles, polymath), Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly and James Watt.

2. Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin
This was Whitbread Book of the Year 2002 (see?) and is marvellous.

3. Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Neurological case studies of music and the mind. Very interesting indeed.

4. The Golden Age of Couture, Paris and London 1949-57 ed Claire Wilcox
Absolutely gorgeous big dresses. Beautifully cut tweed suits. Yum.

5. The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
All of Douglas Coupland's books are good, but some are too sad for me to read. This one is quite sad, and is also very funny.



These are not all the books I have read. They may not be the top 5 - I'm not sure. I also read Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark by Haruki Murakami as well as Norwegian Wood, and I read (sections of) lots of Political Philosophy books for work. I note that mostly I have been reading non-fiction and this is interesting. I shall go on as I started, as I have just launched into Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

So there you are. Furnish your Christmas list with listingslightly. Coming up, some music released sometime which I have listened to somewhere at some point, collated for your enjoyment.

It's the thought [of spending $2640 on partridges and pear trees] that counts

The Christmas CD is playing in Starbucks today and the festive season is upon us. This takes over from their rather pleasing late 70s/early 80s compilation, so rather than being haunted by Squeeze I now find myself humming Dean Martin songs in the afternoon. Or, less pleasingly, Jingle Bell Rock*, which I CANNOT STAND. (In fact Christmas songs that have me fleeing shops or leaping for the skip button make a long list in themselves, so it is just as well I decided long since to stick to non-grumpy lists....).

This year, inspired by spotify playlists last year, we will be filling up on mince pies and sherry to the sounds of Nat King Cole, the Snoopy Christmas CD and James Brown's Funky Christmas. Oh yes.

The best Christmas song is, of course, The 12 Days of Christmas, being a long list of improbable gifts. Apparently it is not, as some had suggested, some kind of Catholic code during years of repression, and the goo-OOOld riiiings are in fact pheasants. From Monday you can check the cost of this extravagent list on the Christmas Price Index, but if you can't wait (or for an examination of the effects of recession on the cost of turtle doves) you could check last year's .

*Although wikipedia lists 56 artists who have recorded this, so it is yet possible that one of these versions will be at least tolerable. The Fall, for example, may have saved this for me, just.

A Decorative Interlude

Thank you to people who have said nice things and identified themselves as actual listingslightly readers. Some of you are not even relations. I find this heartening.

It is a shame that, having readers, there is not more reading material. Some ideas are simmering. In the meantime, I shall pretend this is a craft blog and demonstrate how to make a festive dove decoration.

Ingredients:
white card
white paper
scissors
glue
scalpel and cutting mat (not essential, but does make it a bit easier)

1. Draw a dove shape on white card and cut it out (this one is about 10cm long).

2. Cut out some strips of white paper (these are 10cm wide) and fold them in a concertina kind of a way about every centimetre.

3. Chop into the concertina-ed paper symmetrically so that when it is unfolded it makes a pattern.

4. Cut a letterbox-shaped hole in the dove card, which is big enough (but only just) to push the folded concertina-paper-wings through.

5. Fan out wings and attach in the middle with glue. Voila!

The first set of these I made was in about 1985 (with added glitter), following instructions from, I think, Blue Peter, so thank you to them, and also to my parents for wielding the scissors....

An Awesome Blog

That there are entire blogs which consist of one ever-expanding list is something that fills me with joy.

1000 Awesome Things is a marvellous list-blog and includes thoughts on the joys of socks, snow days, and cereal, as well as making space to acknowledge the particular pleasures of the smell of an old hardware store or the feeling of getting into a bed with clean sheets after shaving your legs.

Another blog to bookmark and read all of, I would suggest.

Isn't it good

Finally I have read Norwegian Wood. I have read lots of other books by Haruki Murakami, and bought this rather special edition years ago, but was scared to read it. For lots of reasons I think - partly that the edition was a bit too special to actually read, partly that it's good to know that you haven't yet read all the books by an author you love, and partly that I thought it would be very good and make me sad.

I borrowed it from the library. It is very good and it did make me a bit sad, but I'm glad I read it, although now I don't want to read anything else for a while.

Interestingly, it's being made into a film at the moment. I shall keep my fingers crossed.

In the meantime, here is a list from the Times about Haruki Murakami.

You say coin and I say forint (and score 39 points)

I like to play Scrabble. I also like to win games sometimes. These things are not compatible chez-listingslightly.
Exhibit A:

Not the world's most elaborate game - note the four-letter words at the bottom of the board (no, not that kind of four letter word, that is quite a different version of scrabble) - stem, sing, avid etc. So far, so dull. But there, look!

A 7 letter word. On a triple word score. That's 89 points right there for Mr Listingslightly. I'm not entirely sure why I took this photo at all, except it was a newish camera and it was a day when it snowed I think.

Still, things are looking up as today the Guardian published a list of 10 words that were on the finals board at the National Scrabble Championship. If only I can remember how to spell them...