…over and above the usual, that is.
As I understand it:
So:
A further thought:
Eddie isn’t a sculptor—the various b’zugda-hiara are cast in moulds, surely? Why not simply replace the broken one, if it’s suddenly become such an issue?
Oh joe, you have no soul. It wouldn’t be the same cast concrete dog-like artefact, now would it?
As to your specific questions, above - is there an emoticon for “weary shrug”?
She doesn’t. She is merely miserable because of what they have done.
Which is now, frankly, sod-all business of hers. Presumably we were supposed to draw some sort of parallel with Susan’s attempts to look round Willow Cottage.
If she really feels that strongly about the way the place should be maintained, why did she sell up? She could have let Kate go hang and sold the land near Spiritual Con, as was originally planned. Even better, they could have sold the actual site of the alleged “business”; it wasn’t being used for anything that we know of, what with the owner decamping to South Africa sine die. In any case, yurts are by definition portable, so Kate could simply remove herself to another location.
(Last three words optional)
When did you last sell a house, joe, and was it suddenly, under compulsion, one you had been living in for forty years? Of course she finds it melancholy and it makes her unhappy. I feel the same about the house I left after thirty-five years there, marriage, three children and a huge hunk of my life; I moved to another town and don’t see it, but if I lived as Jennifer does less than eight hundred yards from my old house I would have found the complete alteration of both interior and garden hard to observe. (Luckily it was in a side-road so my ex, who stayed in the same town after the divorce, didn’t have to see it too often.)
Would you prefer Jennifer to spend her time saying “I shouldn’t have insisted that we sell” – in a futile way, since she did do so and cannot now alter it?
The sensible course of action was the one I outlined above - sod Kate and her play “business”. Nothing about this SL has made any sense from the outset.
And since you ask, a few years ago—courtesy of a very ill-advisedly drafted will*—I had to say goodbye to a house that had been in the family since my grandfather bought it in the mid-C19. Unlike JD, I literally had no choice (unless I gambled on challenging the will, but the costs and improbability of success made that a non-starter). So yes, I do know a little bit about being forced out of a family home.
*From the point of view of everyone other than the sole beneficiary (now deceased) and her husband.
You have my sympathy.
Yes, Jennifer should have told Kate to sue if she could afford it; but she didn’t and it is now too late to repine. Which she is not doing. She dislikes the mess being made (evidently) of something she had taken good care of, and like any normal human being disliked something being smashed and thrown out when she would have taken it with her if she had remembered.
The 2nd wife of Mr C’s uncle thought that she had left us her house in New Romney
She hadn’t , & the estate was divided into 7
All a long time ago, but it could have been life-changing
Carinthia.xx
You reckon? She hated the thing with a passion; IIRC Lilian helped Ruairí buy it primarily to wind JD up.
True; but why should she like things being broken for the sake of it? I don’t, even if they are things I don’t happen to care about.
She might not want it broken, but I doubt it was particularly high on her list of things to bring (unlike the multiple tagines…)
That is the point. She might not have wanted it, but she doesn’t like it having been deliberately broken, and in what seems to her (decapitation?) a nasty way.
Of course, this all presupposes that the decapitation was deliberate. This was a Grundy product, after all.
Oh come on, who hasn’t from time to time wanted to knock the head off a piece of statuary that offends their eye? If it’s in one’s own garden, it’s a rare chance to indulge a natural human instinct.
Calling the decapitation a ‘desecration’ seemed a bit over the top language for Jennifer’s given her dislike of the sculpture. If I were writing her script, I might have said something more along the lines of ‘wanton destruction’. Desecration implies the object was sacred to her which of course it wasn’t. She’s indignant because it was theirs and the Gills destroyed it for no apparent reason.
I like Mary Cutler’s writing, usually, but a couple of things have sounded wrong in tone this past week. For instance Ruairi may be keen on girls, but would he really say he was looking forward to having the Cathedral School girls at his ‘beck and call’? I sincerely hope he would know the expectation of such would likely result in them telling him to get lost or worse. It sounded a bit too much like the sort of thing Brian might have said many decades ago.
And the previous week, Stimpson putting the words ‘nasty, over the hill skank’ sounded unlike Will who may dislike Tracey but I really wouldn’t have thought he would turn on her quite like that no matter how angry.
Getting the right tone is important, isn’t it? If it’s wrong, a bell instantly clangs.
Um, it wasn’t Mary Cutler yesterday, JJ; it was Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. Desecration is a word she’s had used about her work before now…
Oh, right, I forgot the Incident of the Dog was only yesterday. Dunno why, but it seems like longer!
So I’ll put ‘beck and call’ down to Mary Cutler - honestly, that sounded really weird to me, then ‘desecration’ down to Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and ‘nasty, over the hill skank’ down to Tim Stimpson.
They all have tin ears?