Sharpe

I've been reading Sharpe again! I borrowed (took) the books from mum last time I visited, and when Susan helped me reorganised my books I brought them out to light, and now I picked one off my shelf. I want to read them in publication order, to see how they change.

Sharpe' Eagle and Sharpe's Gold are the first, and you can feel it, they're very good, straightforward, exemplify all the Sharpe qualities. However, I think one of the Sharpiest things about them is they're much about Sharpe's commanding a company.

And funnily enough, another two I like a lot are Sharpe's Being a Major and Sharpe's Besieged Sea Fort, which I think are added later, but also have Sharpe commanding loyalty and beating the French, which is what he does best :) (Come to think of it, I do like books about well executed plans -- it's something I like about the Vorkosigan books for instance.)

Sharpe's Rifles was a funny one. It was good, but when I read it I assumed it was the first written as it didn't quite fit, but it was published later. It's the only one where Sharpe has more than one companion with him lost behind the lines, and the only one where he's struggling with the other soldiers, rather than having most respect him and a few hate and fear him :)

PS. Having written this to you, I realised there's no reason not to copy it to lj for anyone else who's curious :)

Cloak!

And, of course, the veizla gave me another time to wear my cloak! It is blue and silver-lined and shiny and feels nice and swirls, and goes well with a period shirt. Thanks, Rosy *hugs* :)

Wearing a suit

A friend's girlfriend saw me in the street wearing a suit, and their comment was "It says something about you that our best guess was that you were doing office-themed LARP, rather than going to a job interview or something."

In fact, I was going to BA dinner with college daughter and college niece.

FWIW, most people I know do very much tend to jeans and black T-shirts sort of clothes. I hypothesise that we generally value time above appearance, and also have a streak of non-conformance. And I hypothesise that that makes dressing up for social events and special occasions more attractive.

In fact, due to equally proportioned blame confusion, we were going to BA dinner the *next* night, and so I joined them and Is-and-her-James (all their boyfriends are called James, it's just one of those things) for Pizza Express.

But it's quite nice wearing a suit out. It looks good and is comfortable. I would more often, except for the aforementioned lack of desire to get smart clothes cleaned and ironed regularly, and the fact that ironing shirts better might pass unnoticed (and be definitely a good thing), wearing a suit casually would produce nothing but remarks :)

I still find excuses to wear suits on dates sometimes :)