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Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Extra Dose Of Sermons
Well, on Sunday, I got my wish and heard two sermons, each of which would have been sufficient. This is my usual Sunday practice.
The first sermon arrives via cable TV. I have actually attended this church...once. That experience will suffice for the rest of my life, I think. Too, too exhausting. The service there just really gets going after a couple of hours and the ongoing decibel level is immense. It's all very emotional and regular attendees seem to handle it cheerfully, dynamically, energetically. I, on the other hand, was absolutely wrecked down to zero by just that one time. Took me about a week to recover. So I'm not going back there in person. However, the TV show is great. It's all just the sermon, which runs for an hour and is ALWAYS, without exception, a masterpiece of religious rhetoric. Richly entertaining, funny, witty, brilliantly original, stern, a hard dose of good sense, touching, inspiring...it is too wonderful to be, as it is, free. I do look forward to it from week to week.
The core of this week's message was two stories; the first, of Elijah and Elisha, one being taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire and leaving a double portion of his power to the other, but also exposing him to harrassment by 50 troublemakers from the School Of The Prophets. The thought, illustrated by this story, was that things always get hot for a person who is trying to do better. You no sooner resolve to clean up your act than all hell breaks loose.
The second story was the one of the three Hebrews thrown into the fiery curnace where they walked around unscathed by the fire and God was visible in there with them. The thought being that when things do go south as a person tries to be right, this is merely the prelude to wonderful supernatural support...you have to be willing to do the right things which will lead to your being thrown into the fire, but once there, God meets you.
Need I say, that I was convinced; by the end of the hour I was fully in the correct frame of mind to do right and to get tossed into the flames if necessary. Then I took a bath and got dressed. Lydia picked me up and drove me, herself, and the kids to Christ And St. Luke's Episcopal Cathedral. There she and the kids disappeared. I went into the sanctuary to have an experience at the entirely opposite end of the religious spectrum from the one earlier on TV.
Now, this place is the essence of gothic cathedral. The ceiling is so high that I can't see it to know if bats cling unside down to the stonework way up there. The pews and kneeling stools are so uncomfortable that they have to predate the United States Constitution. Olde and awful. The organ and music are glorious. The congregation have that onsitpated look found on the faces of citizens embarrassed to discover themselves assembled on a religious occasion. The sermon is a throw of the dice. Last Sunday it was unspeakably idiotic drivel about yin and yang from a man who clearly had no dlue what he was talking about. This Sunday the speaker was a young woman headed for seminary. She's planning to become a priest. Her homily was magnificent, so much so that it surprised one and all...particularly, no doubt, those who remembered the ghastly swill from the week before. As she concluded, I heard murmers of, "Wow!" and other whispered recognition of a good job.
Her text was something about looking to the rock from which you had been quarried...and the idea was to stick with what you have always known to be right.
So there, on a day when I needed to get the elbow, I did receive full measure; two sermons, both of them good. As an unlikely candidate for goodness, I do take a lot of inspiring, but if I don't improve this week, it won't be for want of the word in season.
At the conclusion of the sermon at the episcopal cathedral, the children come into the sanctuary to be with their parents through communion. This means that the mausoleum atmosphere disappears completely as babies cry, children drop books on the floor, prayer stools crash up and down, kids talk out loud and annoy their parents while entertaining everyone else. It was a good day for Benny who behaved with amazing propriety. On the way out of church I asked Lydia how things had gone in the children's service. She said that it had been a good story and Benny behaved. When they lined up to return to the adult service, Benny, not fist in line and mad about it, announced loudly that he needed to punch the little girl at the head of the line...but he hadn't actually resorted to hitting...so it was all good.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Whatever
Sometimes I just give up. As in fail to feel any sort of raison d'etre. I lie in bed at the crack of dawn and have less energy than is required to groan. Can't think of anything I would like to get up in order to do. Know all about my advantages and do not care. Exist as a useless lump..to the extent that amounts to existence. Today, for example.
Then I remembered a reason to get up and carry on...I have a dog who needs to go out and go potty. Without adjusting my appearance by so much as an iota, whatever that is when it's home, I grabbed the itty bitty leash and halter, slid my feet into my sandals, and flumped out the door.
Early Sunday A.M. No one whose opinion I need cherish would be out scouting for the next top model...would they? So I'm dragging down the sidewalk with small dog on the end of the leash, self looking like a disaster victim who hadn't completely expired...yet. Small dog realised the purpose of my sacrifice by urinating five times in five separate and distinct locations, vomiting twice in one place, and defacating over a short stretch of turf. So I'm not entirely without merit; I facilitated the cycle of life by a fraction.
Overhead in a pink dawn, the full moon from last night, it was bright silver, details clearly outlined. All around me, the myrtles bloomed prolifically, from deep maroon to pale pink. Steam drifted up from the already hot as a firecracker pavement. Scenic environment in which to experience that out-of-gas feeling.
So I came home to make tea and peanut butter toast, picked up my newspaper, set a new cushion on one of the porch rockers, sipped, munched, and read headlines. Porque woofed mutedly at the neighborhood stray cat who stood in the middle of 38th Street, daring traffic to take one of its nine lives.
Good thing this is Sunday. I need a sermon. A really hellfire and damnation kind of sermon. One of those which make a person ashamed. In a world of people who have almost nothing, I have almost everything and, today, I do not give a rat's little rear.
Saturday, August 20, 2005
My, My
An article in today's paper sent me to the computer. A mother claimed that all children who walk to school should be shown the Virginia State Police website where photos of sex offenders are displayed. So I went to the site she mentioned and typed in my zip code. Now, that would include a very small area. Lydia lives less than a mile away and she's already in another zip code. Let me just say that the listing of sex offenders in my little neighborhood was nine pages of TEXT. When you click on a name, the photo shows. Under the photo is some text with more detail about the crime and the address and appearance of the perpetrator.
It's all very well to have this website, but how effective is it in helping potential victims avoid these characters? I certainly wouldn't remember any of the faces I saw on that site. A couple of things I noticed, 1) only two of them have jobs, and 2) most of them are fairly short in stature. Quite a few were 5'6" - 5'8" tall. I don't suppose I'd remember the faces I looked at, but if I were walking to the ghetto grocery on a work day and if I noticed a short man just sauntering along as though he had nothing to do, given the density of sex offenders in this community...hm....
Recently in the news was the silly situation of a sex offenders' counselling service going into business right next to a preschool/day care center in Virginia Beach. The businesses share a parking lot. This happened because the name of the counselling service was deliberately generic and obscure...in order not to embarrass their clients. It also happened because those sex offenders are generic. They just look like ordinary people. Only someone with a remarkable memory for faces would be able to suddenly say to his/her companion, "Oh, look, Mabel. See that guy over there? He's on the convicted sex offender list. Don't say, 'Hi.' He might follow us home and hurt somebody."
Friday, August 19, 2005
Predatory Poke Weeds, et al
My yard person is truly rare and exotic. He is so thin that it seems there could be no actual muscle tissue to propel his professional equipment. His face is so Jimmy Walker, the tall, skinny TV comedian from the 70's/80's, he looks so much like Jimmy Walker that William could BE Jimmy Walker grown up and gone wrong. William does all the houses on my block except for the military people who dance around their fire pit in the full of the moon. Last fall and this spring, William's reliability and competence were all and more than one could ask. This summer, though, something isn't right.
William lets things go until Mrs. Edna gets after him. Mrs. Jordan, also, gives him 'what for'. She, in particular, takes the gloves off and goes right after the hapless William who has no lauguage with which to rebut charges of laziness and dishonesty and so forth and so on.
My policy with William is to pay him more than anyone else does and to tell him what a great job he did whether that is true or not. The result is that he does my yard first, gets tired, heads to the liquor store, and leaves the yards of others until the homeowners are about ready to knock him upside the head.
First William excused his dereliction from duty by telling horror stories of his other job...he does summer fix and clean work up the street at Old Dominion University. When people got tired of trying to believe those stories, he claimed that all of his equipment is broken beyond his own ability to repair and he had to send it 'out' to somewhere far away and hard to reach where bad people didn't get going on the repair effort yet. After that story got old...(His equipment was, as everyone knew, in my garage.)...he began to whimper vaguely about this and that physical aliment that made him unfit for work. This got him by the critics until one day he claimed to have some of his "medication" in the bag he had in hand. Mrs. Edna sternly demanded to see that medication and, yes, you know what it was...a 45oz. bottle of malt liquor.
By this time, you could have hidden elephants in parts of my back yard. The poke weeds were and are especially luxurious, stems a couple of inches thick with long, fat tendrils reaching out farther each day, grabbing up all the dog-walking space behind my house. Under tremendous pressure from Mrs. Edna, William showed up and mowed my front yard and hers as well. Then he showed up at my door, smiling and bowing and holding out his hand. I paid him and he turned to leave. Those poke weeds are just immense. Not wanting to cause trouble, but voicing a feeble protest, I said, "William, can't you get back soon to do something about all the weeds and whatever in my back yard?" Yes, he could, he promised. He was going to be back before this weekend. My property would be the envy of the Botanical Gardens. Un-huh...Yeah. Right.
Meanwhile I have given up walking the dog in the back of my house. Those poke weeds seem way too alive. If they aren't alive, why are they bigger each time I look out the window? Rank, outrageous jungle growth. Shudder. The needle palms are higher than my house. All across the...formerly... lawn part is a tangle of deep vines which in another setting would be ornamental. I don't know. Maybe WIlliam is just plain scared to get into combat with all that viciously vigorous vegetation.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Dawgs
I have always looked askance at those women who adore their dogs, who hug and kiss them, who carry them around dressed in little dog outfits, who talk about them. Now I'm one of those idiots. Yes, I am ruled by the iron paw of a tiny chihuahua. How did this happen?
My head tells me that this dog is of questionable value; she is EXTREMELY high maintenance, she does terrible things...like leave tiny, rock-hard doggie doo-doos beside the tracks of Benny's train upstairs, like eat inappropriate things and then throw up on upholstered furniture and carpets, like require walks on 107 degree days, like bark and snarl at grandchildren who corner her and grab at her, like refuse to allow me to sit or lie down anywhere by myself, etc., etc., etc.
Somehow, though, Porque Choppe worms herself into the most dog-resistant heart. The other day Lydia told me that Dan inquired anxiously if he could have her when we go to the farm. Imagine someone like Dan secretly succumbing to that Porkee charm. At Dan's house, Porque committed the unforgiveable sin by having bloody diarhea on his beloved new carpet. Instead of hating her, he wants her to come back when we leave town. How I would like to see a picture of tall, stern-faced Dan walking itty bitty Porque on her little pink leash...something he did several times/day while we were at the beach.
My theory about how Porque Choppe exercised her dogge fatale' powers is this; she is just always there and always insanely cute. I never have to wonder where she is, she's either on my lap or beside my feet. She's sad to see me leave and happy to see me return. She's polite about the small things...like if I am eating something, she doesn't look; if I clear my throat, she stops whatever it was she did to annoy me. Besides NOT doing annoying things, Porque does goofy things...for example she makes nests, has to scratch up a pile of afghan and then slither underneath it if she's sitting on a sofa. Since she's so small, she can't really hoist the weight of even a bit of an afghan and her attempts to squish up a pile of fabric are funny to watch, Porque throwing her tiny body at the blanket in mad, furious abandon again and again and then giving up and crawling underneath. Another cute little thing she does is to climb under the covers with me when I go to bed. She sticks her head out and onto a pillow and her little sleeping head with the paws folded over the edge of the blanket just looks too darling as she sleeps trustingly beside me. When I take a bath, Porque waits on the other side of the bathroom door and if I make a noise, she woofs; if I take too long about it all, she woofs in a questioning sort of way as if checking to see that I'm still alive. The little dog is irresistible.
Every day in the USA many tiny chihuahuas are bought by people with more money than good sense, people who don't know that these little mutts require a lot of training and care, need attention 24/7, 365days/year, are extremely delicate and can be fatally injured just by jumping off the bed. People with a new little chihuahua are entertained by their new pooch for a few days and then get fed up and so many of these dogs are abandoned, turned out onto the streets with nowhere to go, left tied up in an empty building, taken to the pound and left to be euthanised. Statistics on the website of the Los Angelos, California, Chihuahua Rescue organization shocked me. Over a thousand chihuahuas/year are abandoned at the pound there. This doesn't included the homeless ones and those left tied up. Poor little, cute little dogs.
I can not too strongly recommend that anyone reading this who would like to have a dog...don't go to the pet store. Go to the petfinders.org website, type in the kind of dog you want and all the dogs like that within driving distance will be available for your inspection...that is, the ones lost, abandoned, or taken to the pound. Each dog is carefully screened and all it's good and bad traits are set forth honestly. People who are willing to give one of these dogs a home must allow themselves to be investigated, but then they will have a very fine pet, one grateful for a good home. Each dog comes with up-to-date health care, each is micro-chipped and spayed or neutered. I found Porque Choppe on that site after checking it again and again for many months. One day last week I rechecked that site and over 200 little chihuahuas are available for adoption right now in this area. They aren't all as nice as Porque...one bites everyone including the woman who feeds her...but these negative factors are all stated up front. If you'd like a little dog, do, please check out the petfinder site. You won't be sorry.
Monday, August 15, 2005
A Faux Toe
Little Benny, the ultimate beach toy fuss budget. If he mnade a sandcastle increment, and turned it over to find that some part was not quite perfect, he had to flatten it and start again. Oh, the concentration....
Boo Hiss, Section 8
How did 38th Street come to be the site of crime and slime central over at the yellow apartments? One long-time resident told me that when she was younger, those apartments were very nice, full of working families, well-maintained. Now one building is boarded up and the other looks like all the work down there this spring never happened. Police still show up regularly. A couple of days ago the landlord, police and police dogs went through both buildings.It's still ugly and awful.
The change from nice rental property to home of criminals and crazy people came when this landlord qualified the building for section 8. For him, the good thing was that he'd get his money regularly and on time. Section 8 tenants have their rent paid directly to the landlord by the state. The bad thing was that to evict a section 8 tenant, a landlord has to almost personally experience some heavy duty felony on the premises. The other negative feature is that the value of the building sinks to the bottom of the realty market the minute a building becomes section 8...and that is also the fate of buildings in the near-area.
Yesterday a neighbor visited me hoping to elicit a promise that I'd attend the meeting of homeowners tonight...they want to chew over the effect of the recent shooting on property values. This visitor said that she was having trouble convincing people not directly across from the yellow buildings that they have a dog in this fight. Those skeptics would do well to consider how easily any property can fall under the evil influence of section 8, particularly in this area of large homes which could be subdivided into apartments. That's what Lydia's house was before Dan saw its potential, just a whole bunch of tiny apartments.
On Saturday a friend who lives farther down Colley in the snooty Ghent section described a neighborhod war on her corner. A restaurant owner is at odds with homeowners because his customers use all the parking spaces. Homes there appraise in the $800,000 and up stratosphere. The restaurant owner has warned home owners that if they win a lawsuit against him, he'll close the restaurant, re-purpose his whole building and turn it into section 8 apartments in order to retaliate. If he does this, those juicy home appraisals will sink into the $100,000+ range immediately. This is exactly what could happen to any area on any street...unless the area is zoned single family dwellings only. Colonial Place was so zoned after protracted toil on the part of a few determined homeowners a few years back. Now anyone living in Colonial Place feels immune from the section 8 menace. They seem to have forgotten that what was created by political pressure can be changed that way, too. Zoning laws are not genetic code. They can be rewritten.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Loud And Strange
This afternoon I met the lady who lives on the corner. Until today I just knew her as the house with a shrieking bird and a dachshund. Porque and the dog bark at one another and that gets the bird going. Unbelievably loud bird. Today the owner of this establishment knocked on my door with a flyer re. a community meeting about the crime situation at the yellow apartments. I guess the recent shooting got the homeowners' association all riled up. Hey, it's Sunday afternoon, hot day, nothing else to do, so we sat down and had a gossip.
Finding herself with a listener, my visitor took off on a rant. There's the crime thing, but she has a list of other least favorite neighbor behaviors...loud voices, throwing trash, loud voices, failure to maintain a neat porch and yard, loud voices, family fights out on the street and sidewalk, loud voices...you see what I mean. She really, really does not like those loud voices...and this from a woman whose bird could set off seismographs in China just by opening it's beak.
Not everyone in this neighborhood is loud, but some are, and by loud, I mean astonishingly loud, impressively loud, explosively loud, ear-splitting. Today's visitor just can't stand people with loud voices and she lost me on that issue. I don't exactly admire loudness, but I believe in one's right to speak loudly should one so desire. 38th Street doesn't sneak up on you; you hear it coming.
Yesterday while I was out weeding my flowers, I heard loud women way down the sidewalk, but headed my direction. They weren't angry or upset about anything, just basically loud. I easily heard every word...unavoidably heard every word. The closer they got, of course, the louder it was. No doubt about it, they constituted a two-woman public disturbance. Past my house, down the street, around the corner and for a long time after that, I heard it all. BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH. Eventually the sound faded away. After a while I heard them again, coming back. Sooner or later, they came around the corner, carrying groceries, and yakketty yakking their heads off. Judging by the logo on their grocery sacks, they had gone all the way to the ghetto grocery where I shop, a half mile away. I would not be surprised to learn that the time when I didn't hear them, they were in the store. How about that? Audible for maybe half a mile in the city with all the ambient noise. That's loud. Was I upset about it? No. Entertained.
Someone who can't stand all that goofy loudness should live somewhere else.
Besides being loud, your 38th Street resident says whatever he or she pleases and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Example; the other day Porque and I were out doing our first walk of the day at 5:30 A.M. We don't usually see anyone out and about at that hour, so I was surprised when a man on the other side of the park bellowed something at me. A bit leary of him, I tried to pretend that he wasn't talking to me. He yelled again. I still ignored him. A third time, he roared out, so that I heard and understood, "Hey! YOU! Y'all have a blessed day, now!" I yelled back, "You, too!" He nodded and walked on.
Then there was the wacky experience I had last Saturday at the grocery store. I was waiting in the checkout line when I heard, "Thank you, lady!" Not assuming the thanks were intended for me, I didn't look around to identify the speaker who said again...and extremely loudly, "Lady! I said 'thank you'!" Then I did look around and saw a woman in another line, four check-outs away smiling at me. I asked, "Me?" She hollered, "I sure do mean you. Your shirt you're wearing, I just love it. It made my day. I was standing here tired and my feet hurt and then I saw that shirt and I felt all better right away." She was talking loudly enough to be heard across town.
That's one of the interesting things about living here; anyone is likely to yell out anything at you anywhere and any time...part of that 38th Street culture. I like it.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Ambivalence
I, along with the rest of my American kind, I bear the burden of trying to paper over the blot we inflicted on life and time by electing this president. I avoid TV news, not wanting to see the president's face, not wanting to hear his latest tautologous utterance. No, I did not vote for him, so, he's not my fault. However, he's so right there on the TV screen if I accidentally get a bit of news on myself.
"Better check tomorrow's weather, what channel, this would do it, OK, AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH." And there he is, enunciating his policy of kill more people to justify the deaths of ones already killed.
I do not like this position I'm in, having to be ashamed of our president. I don't like to be a critic and a cynic. My whole persona is more the happy, joy-joy Care Bears owner, cheerily skipping among the flowers and admiring rainbows. Chronic snarliness feels mean and wrong, so I'm subject to ongoing internal debate...the nice me inveighing against a six-years long downward slide of my dear little self into a cranky, sniping, sarcastic self. Then, in return, the not-too-stupid me riposts that I wouldn't have to turn into a curmudgeon were it not true that the number one wielder of my tax dollars spends each and every day making a bigger donkey out of himself and all of us.
The peculiar thing about this president is that he kind of sounds right until you stand back and see where his ideas drove us. Now we are either fighting or about to fight nearly everyone in the world, terrorism is a growth industry in an up market...much more so than three years ago, the American wealth machine has rust all over it owing to not enough OIL, crime at home is off the charts, all the smart people have herded into corners from which they yip out nothing more helpful than barbs of criticism, all the not-smart people moo loudly that the president is right and we have to support him because he's on God's side.
That right there is the big problem for me. Shouldn't I be on the side of the man who's on God's side? And isn't that where the president stands? Not too sure.
For a long time, the years of my nearly eternal childhood, I seem to remember Christians thinking of politics as a dirty business...something to be avoided. One minister, I remember, put it this way, "When you get busy fixing up the physical, political world, that takes all your time and energy. And all it accomplishes is to make the world a nicer place from which to go to hell. Better you should devote yourself to the struggle for the soul of the world, one friend and neighbor at a time. Be a light in a dark place. Live the gospel. Demonstrate the overwhelming advantage of the Christian ethos in this world of competing ideas. Be what you claim to believe and you will attract fellow believers and in this way make one small part of the world a tiny spot from which it is possible to get to heaven. It is not our place, not our mission to rule this present world, to shape it up, to muscle it into a semblance of Christian good sense. Remember that no matter how many of them there are, no matter how monolithic and ungovernable the human race seems to be, it is one person at a time, living a life and then going on to eternity. The Christian imperative is to change each and every heart in that vast, faceless hoard, one after one after one, by example, by showing the world how to be. We don't tell the world, "Do this or else." We show. We must all live quietly, humbly, minding the business of ourselves and families, not in any way setting ourselves up as rulers, mouthpieces, bosses, overlords. Pick up your cross. Keep your head down." I grew up with that mind set hammered at me through word and example.
The other day I heard a speaker over car radio. He purported to voice the mind of Christians in the USA by saying, "It's time we took back this world. God can't bless the planet as it is and it is our duty to make it blessable place by grabbing government, the media, education, entertainment...we must get all of it under our control and use it to glorify God. Christians! Run for political office. You be the school board. You be the mayors and town councils. You be the police. The world has gone to hell. We must occupy the halls of power. Let's get it back." Behind him I seemed to hear an audience roaring, "HEIL!" Tell you what... his God is too small. His little God needs an armed mob, a bunch of politicians.
What about the president? I don't know about him. Who or whatever he is, our country is on trouble. All the rhetoric of recent years has lead us deeper and deeper into mistake. Today oil is $66.00/barrel. Today Americans arrive home from abroad in a long, unending line of body bags. today the military can not recruit young people; no one wants to go to Iraq and kill more people becauze...uh...because we already killed a lot of people?
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Literary Tastes
On the beach this summer as I toiled up and down pushing the baby in her stroller, I made a point of checking covers of books read by people I passed. Almost all of them were 'beach books', i.e. soupy-gooey romance fiction. Some were texts. A rare few were heavy duty literature. One was a book of the type I like...an adventure. The man showing me this book seemed ashamed of it and blamed its choice on his daughter who had forced the book on him, a gift to take on his vacation. Well, I was at the beach for a long time but I read exactly nothing.
Having unpacked my beach stuff, having grocery shopped, having looked around to assure myself that all is pretty much OK here at home, I am now in mid book binge. Last night I read two and a half. The first, Just One Look, by Harlan Coben, is very good. The 383 PP. flew by in record time. The second was obviously produced after rewrites, sweat, toil...all that showed, but it was OK...The Confession by Sidney Siegel. The third is by Jack Higgins and is per his formula, Blind Justice, but entertaining. There is no particular substance to this book, nothing to linger over, nothing expecially savory, so I'll be done in a short while. I've saved the best for last. Haven't read it yet, but I'm sure it's going to be great...the new John LeCarre book.
In my opinion, the three greats of English literature in the twentieth century were/are...
1)P.G. Wodehouse. Pure entertainment, but just way beyond great. If you start a line from any of his books, I can finish it for you. I reread his stories until I literally wore the books to death.
2) Evelyn Waugh.Immensely entertaining but also full of agenda. Cartoons though they were, I feel that I know each of his characters and would recognize them if I were to see them somewhere. All the faces of the human condition are there.
3)John LeCarre. Not to be dismissed as a spy story writer. This author is as heavy duty a purveyor of morality as was John Milton and infinitely more readable.
I suppose that fashions in writers are as changeable as fashions in clothing design. Right now America sits at the feet of Oprah and what she recommends, sells. She was, for a while, all worked up about that Latin American writer Gabriel Marquez (SP?), particularly the book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. After endless, fanatical encomiums of praise heaped on the book by just about everyone I knew, I eventually read it and wondered if all the recommenders were out of their minds. Silly, silly book that should have ended 200 pages before it did. All that South American drunk priests and humble people on donkeys stuff was done much better by Graham Greene. Oh, yes, and John LeCarre did it better in The Tailor Of Panama, felicitously, brilliantly better.
So...I'm going to hustle through the Jack Higgins Book and then go on to dessert; Absolute Friends, by John LeCarre. Yippee.
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