We drinkies from now until Tuesday for me. I am assured I will not be required at the museum till then, the painting is finished even if I now have a mound of things just lying about like Syrian migrants looking for a home, and I have nothing imposed upon me till Tuesday.
And tonight and tomorrow and Saturday there is football to be perused, proper football featuring Scots teams, none of that foreign rubbish (except for our foreign players that is).
How lovely!
When on my way to a BA (failed) via the Open University some years back we began with Victorians society (meaning of course English Victorians Bah!) and pre-raphaelite painting was among the items noted. One of the paintings that thrust upon me was this one of 'Mariana' by Millais who sounded like one of those immigrants Brexit was supposed to stop. This was based on a Shakespeare play, 'Measure for Measure' and a Tennyson Poem. In the play she was awaiting marriage but as her dowry sank in the sea he hopped it and found someone else. The poem follows:-
"Mariana in the Moated Grange"
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure)
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "The day is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!"
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"
The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, "I am very dreary,
He will not come," she said;
She wept, "I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!
It must be said that by the time you get to the third stanza you wish she was dead also!
So we now have an idea of what May has for us. Out go the majority of the 'Posh Boys' and in come her mates and several women all sharing her vision and all looking for half a chance to take her place when she falls. There is no doubt the planting of Boris Johnson in the Foreign Office and one of the top four jobs in government was a shock. A shock best summed up by the US spokesman who managed to stifle his laugh and merely smile when asked about the appointment. Other leaders were less generous and made mocking comments while the personnel of the UK just placed their hands over their heads and wondered what Putin would make of it.
Dearie me, this is either a way to let him hang by his own rope or a mistake of gargantuan proportions. I await his meeting with Mrs Clinton who he likened to a 'sadistic nurse in a mental hospital' or Obama who he described as 'part Kenyan who harboured an ancestral dislike of Britain' or the Turkish president who, he stated in a poem, 'has sex with a goat.'
I should point out this man was born in New York and it is therefore possible he could become President of the United States!
So we now know the right wing leaning cabinet, Hunt remains the Health secretary as no-one else wills to take it, and we await the new 'caring' Tory party with delight.
Hmmm...
