Easter Bunny

Here's what the Easter Bunny brought for me this morning:



Being

• Booked For Murder by Val McDermid (from my wishlist)
  
• Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin (not on my wishlist so a lovely surprise)
  
• A sachet of Sanctuary Warming Charcoal face mask (to conceal my ugly mush)
  
• A sachet of Sanctuary Salt Scrub (to renovate my ageing and pustular body)
  
• A bag of Lindt Lindor chocolate eggs (to make my body ageing and pustular again but what the hell!)
  
• A bar of Montezuma Dark Chocolate and Chilli (just plain yummy)
  
• A Lindt Gold Bunny (oh dear what has just happened to his ear!)
  

Thank you Rose (rahar109)

(Would some kind soul like to pass on this information to the appropriate place? Thank you!)

Muriel Spark, RIP

I was sad to hear of the death of Muriel Spark, the most famous alumna of James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh, yesterday, although it seems to me that she was one of those writers of whom one felt surprise that she was still alive (and working)

I'm even sadder that so few people seem to be much interested. Perhaps it's a symptom of my disconnect: Muriel Spark never figured, I think, in the BBC's Big Disgrace in which The Lord of the Rings was found to be the Greatest Work Of Literature In The Known Universe. She was a much better writer than anybody who figured in that Top Ten and any of those Top Ten would, I'm sure, have acknowledged the fact.

It's a shame really. She was a famously concise writer, and as somebody on the radio yesterday said, she wrote like a cat, with sharp claws concealed in soft paws.

I suppose she'll always be best known through Maggie Smith's role in Ronald Neame's 1969 film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It's one of the iconic roles of British cinema and a film well worth seeing, although you should real the book (you can finish it in an afternoon, easily) because the dark, smouldering, Italianate Miss Brodie of the book is very different from Maggie Smith's English Rose gone Morningside.