Curious.

I've had a curious day. On the one hand I was feeling very virtuous as I completed my BAS (yucky quarterly tax reporting) and did three loads of washing. This high induced by hard labour was somewhat tempered by spending part of the day dwelling on the fact that the boy's school is next to a rather large electricity substation. This is a big issue for me - our family uses herbal toothpaste and shampoo from the health food shop and I would never dream of feeding my children a biscuit from a packet because of the dangers of trans fats. At after school pickup time I had this conversation with another mum and she showed me a YouTube clip of a group popping corn with their mobile phones. How in control of our lives are we really when we live in this modern world? It's an insurmountable question.

I finished The Paris Wife.  It was compellingly un-put-downable even though I knew it was going to end in tears. And it did - spectacularly - when Ernest left his first wife Hadley for her best friend. Sordid and sad. He then went on to repeat the same adulterous process three more times.

Half way into the book, I was surprised by the idea that Ernest and Hadley Hemingway thought that going to a bull fight while pregnant might have a positive influence on their unborn child. I went to a bullfight in Beziers when I was pregnant and was worried that it may have the opposite effect. Especially as I started uncontrollably sobbing as soon as the first poor, confused bull was shunted into the arena. Kim and I discussed it at length at the time and I considered keeping my eyes closed.

A week before, we had been reading aloud Roald Dahl's Boy while trying to drive around Cornwall in a motorhome. Here's Tobes at the wheel:

Apparently Roald's father took his pregnant wife on a tour of famed beauty spots so that she could gaze and gaze at beauty in the leadup to her confinement. While gestating I may have seen a bullfight yet I also saw Paris in the springtime, the snow capped Pyrenees and the azure blue Amalfi coast. That should have overcompensated...shouldn't it?
R