A couple of lists

I just heard Judi Dench’s brother reading Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day on Desert Island Discs, and it made me think of my pet peeves.

Pet peeves

1/ Actors declaiming poems

2/ Actors performing with dodgy foreign accents. e.g. Daphne in Frasier with her suspect Manchester accent. Why doesn’t the studio hire a person from the right country and the right region of that country? 3/ Novels that don’t use speech marks around dialogue

4/ Litter – and especially litter in beautiful countryside

5/ When a writer uses too many words

6/ The fact that so many prize-winning novels are miserable – hooray that Anne Tyler is on the Man Booker shortlist! Fingers crossed

7/ The cat coming in from the rain and climbing onto my newly washed bedcovers

8/ Woolshops that don’t sell wool – only synthetic fibres and cotton

9/ When people don’t do blind copies in circular emails, but expose your email address to every other person on the list

10/ Pillows with synthetic stuffing – not feathers

And here is a tiny unrepresentative and random selection of ten out of the millions of things that I love, that have just popped into my head right now:

1/ Children running happily into Quaker meeting towards the end

2/ Hugs

3/ My granddaughters meeting me at Denver airport

4/ Rosemary Mann’s photographs of Wensleydale

5/ Wensleydale

6/ The moon

7/ Eating my breakfast outside in the sunshine

8/ All of Isaac’s photographs (except the ones where you use Tiltshift, Isaac)

9/ Uniball microfibre pens

10/ Arriving home