A Remainder Of Instincts.

The novels of P.G. Wodehouse have been charming the pants off me lately. I haven't even begun to delve into the Jeeves oeuvre and have been absolutely taken. Not that he is an altogether scintillating storyteller. The stories are prosaic and often meandering, sometimes covering little more ground than the confines of an ocean liner.  They are definitely from an age before television and when the 'wireless' was a bit of an extravagance. The dialogue, however, cuts sharply and lends itself to a quick read.

You have to look past a lot of bigotry and old fashioned fuddy-duddiness but hardly nothing more than you get in Trollope or other writers of that era.

His life is fascinating as well. I've been waiting to see the film Wodehouse in Exile which presumably tells his life post World War II exile after he was forced to deliver on-air propaganda while in Nazi captivity. His popularity at least in his native UK plummeted in the aftermath and I'm sure is a powerful insight into the way tastes can be influenced by notions of nationalistic jingoism. I placed it in someone else's Nefflix queue. I won't do the Netflix or support the GDA in any way I can avoid.

I snagged a first edition of The Girl in Blue while on another thrifting voyage and it appears to be about some people and a Gainsborough. See what I'm telling you about the storyline? Not a lot to get on with so if you're used to Palahniuk or Pynchon or DeLillo for that matter you may just want to move along and enjoy your dinner conversation with all the like minded people you've become comfortable surrounding yourself with.

She Read It In The Prologue.

I rarely wear neckties, but when I do I tend to opt for something on the special side.  A simple pattern, sometimes solid, but rarely and even then only Prada and always on the most rarest of occasions.

I never did get on board with the whole overdressing for the sake of overdressing meme, and in all honesty I haven't even started dropping the word 'meme' in casual conversation even though the person heading the blisteringly dull teleconference yesterday managed to do just that and congratulate himself for his verbal dexterity quite almost in the same breath,

That, however, is a digression.

The point is that you can usually find something altogether functional and appropriate in the thrift store and if like me you can count the number of times you wear a necktie per anum on a single hand it isn't something you want to spend the farm on.

I recently scored some respectable neckties. Hermes and Lanvin, and although a perusal of eBay shows the Hermes to be a rather popular pattern it isn't possible to pick it up for 99 cents like I did. The Lanvin, albeit more scarce, was similarly 99 cents.