Glimpses

I made a plain cake with tinned pears in it on Friday night to take to dinner with my parents. All the pears sank into the middle of the cake! It tasted fine but I had actually hoped they would perch on top and look pretty like some sort of swish tarte tartin in a French bakery... I tried again on Sunday with tinned peaches and I was quite pleased.

I am reading a lot of Romantic poetry at the moment while researching my novel-in-progress and in doing so I stumbled across the film about John Keats which was made a couple of years ago, Bright Star. I love this scene, with a room full of butterflies. What a lovely notion.



We're having something of an Indian Summer here at the moment. Summer proper really seemed to have died away - I was putting extra blankets on the bed and getting the jumpers out of mothballs - and yet we're now having a spell of temperatures hovering around 30 degrees (celsius).

Things I once knew

Keats

In the early 90s, I did a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major study in English Literature. Reams of essays I wrote on Shakespeare and Marlowe, Keats, Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Arnold. And then I moved onto other things, decided my major study should be history, and that was kind of that. But lately I have been remembering all the beautiful poetry that I read then and I am beginning to rediscover it. The wonderful series, "The Romantics" (hosted by Peter Ackroyd) has helped me to revisit these poems and, actually, to get a bit more out of them than I did twenty years ago! My favourite at the moment is Keats. Do you read poetry? Or is there something you once immersed yourself in and then forgot?