Life must be filled up

LJ sent me a notification that someone had mentioned me in their journal. As I don’t know the language, I’ve no idea why they did so. Something to do with a comparison between Love for Lydia and Brideshead Revisited?

Here’s the text.
"Сложно искать, где Brideshead Revisited упоминается вместе с Love
for Lydia безотноситально Jeremy Irons (учитывая крайне редкое вообще
упоминание книги как таковой). В дополнение к помянутому в соседнем
комментарии обзору callmemadam нашлись ещё два обзора именно книги, также
упоминающие схожесть её с Брайдсхедом. Frisbee: A Book Journal — H. E.
Bates’s Love for Lydia: "And, of course, H. E. Bates’s Love for Lydia,
which is a kind of inter-class Brideshead Revisited." Miranda's Notebook —
Book Talk: Lofe for Lydia by H.E. Bates: "If you adored Love for Lydia as
much as I did, here are some suggestions for what to read next: <...>
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The young Charles Ryder, starstruck
by the aristocratic Sebastian and Julia Flyte, has similarities to Bates’s
narrator." //"

Well, really!

LJ *still* hasn't sorted out its many problems.

So. Farewell then the 60W light bulb. I am one of its millions of fans.

Here's what cybersofa had to say about low energy light bulbs on Jan 20th 2006. (It took me ages to find this, because now that the journal is in ‘memorial status’, it’s not searchable, nor can I link to the right page. What a brilliant journal it was.)

Let's make some light bulbs. Mine's got a piece of wire in a simple blown glass envelope from which I've extracted the air. You call this technology Victorian, but I call it appropriate. Yours has got two heated filaments, a load of electronics to generate a high voltage, a glass tube bent and twisted to increase surface area, filled with a rare gas, and coated with a radioactive chemical. OK, it uses less energy – er, not counting energy used in manufacture or disposal, obv. It also lasts longer – for that money, so it damn well should. It's still ugly, and it still takes nearly a second to light up after you switch it on.

I see I’ve also mentioned the subject before.

How lucky that I have a few proper bulbs stashed away.

It’s five years today since my first post to Live Journal. I was given membership as a birthday present; my first proper post was about gardening. Now blogging is a really important part of my life. There’s a wonderful community here and I feel lucky to have made such good friends. Thank you all, and thanks too to all the non-LJ readers. I don’t know who most of you are, but thanks for looking.

This comes via Letters from a Hill Farm and others. You take the first line of the first post in each month and reproduce it. Mine is painfully predictable and gives no idea of the domestic upheavals which have taken place here during the year.

January 1st: The door to the sitting room in the cottage swings shut all by itself in a rather spooky manner. I bought a knitted dog doorstop.

February 2nd: The back of the cottage this morning with the house next door and the little snowy heap that was my car cropped out. Photo of snowy cottage. That was the day the builders moved in.

March 1st: A lovely, mild gardening day yesterday and here's the first tree blossom of spring. Photo of cherry blossom.

April 2nd: Getting this in the post today has gee-ed me up to finish the other things I'm making. Some yarn had arrived in the post. What's more, I've used it all!

May 1st: Someone kindly lent me The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley and I fairly galloped through it; could hardly put it down. My list of books read in April.

June 3rd: I was going to post today about Mary Portas and her doomed attempt to turn around a failing charity shop. Instead, I wrote about books to read during a heat wave. See, we did have some good weather.

July 2nd: Yesterday, I took my visitor to see my favourite garden, at Cranborne Manor. It was the hottest day of the year.

August 3rd: Obsession is a popular theme for fiction: one thinks of Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Start of a book review.

September 1st: I always feel sorry for people who say they ‘can’t read’ anything by Jane Austen, Dickens, To Kill a Mockingbird or whatever because the books were ruined for them by exam study. Start of a post linking to a list of world-wide required reading.

October 1st: This month has been heavy on crime and thrillers. Post on books read in September.

November 1st: First, many thanks for all the get well messages, which were much appreciated; sorry if I haven’t always replied. Oh dear! Led to yet another book list.

December 1st: A much shorter list this month; a good thing, due to not being flaked out on the sofa, ill. November's books.