The kids wander around the house, perennially hungry. “When is lunch? Is this lunch? After we finish it, when’s the next meal? Is there more food in the house? Is anybody planning to feed us? What are you holding? Is it food? Are you sure it isn’t food? Where can I find a piece of food?”

The adults are pale and cornered, feverishly trying to decide what else to stuff into the hungry little beaks.

I don’t know why but it was uncommonly difficult for me to write today. I have ideas, I’m working on a very good section where I know exactly what to say, but the language was tripping me up majorly. I had to use the dictionary all the time.

Maybe it’s because I’m reading Elizabeth von Arnim whose style I admire, and it’s making me conscious of the poverty of my own writing compared to hers. I still did my 1,200 words but it took forever and madd my brain boil.

Here’s another delightful quote from Elizabeth von Arnim. A habitually sickly woman is entertaining the 60-year-old fiancé of her very young daughter called Judith. The fiancé is a Master of an Oxford college, which explains why the parents consented to the marriage with this age difference:

The Master had been very exuberant; and his vitality, delightful of course but just a little overwhelming at his age, had reminded her that she needed care. How difficult it had been to get him out into the garden, to somewhere where she wasn’t. She hadn’t got him there till half-past two, by which time he had been vital without stopping since twelve, and even then she had had to invent a pear-tree in full blossom that she wasn’t at all sure about, and tell him she had heard it was a wonderful sight and ought not to be missed. But how difficult it had been. Judith had not seemed to want to show him the pear-tree, and he would not go and look at it unless she went, too. Judith had gone at last, but with an expression on her face as though she thought she was going to have to bear things, and no girl should show a thought like that before marriage

The Pastor’s Wife

I will never forget this “expression as though she thought she was going to have to bear things”. Don’t we all have such an expression sometimes, and isn’t this beautifully said?

Putin said the grain deal is off. The next day he said it was never off. He said that 100% of the funding for the mercenary group Wagner came from the federal government of Russia. A week later he said Wagner never existed. These are only two of the dozens of examples of how he has no idea what’s happening any more.

This doddering, senile loser is who we are all so terrified of. People complain about Biden’s mental acuity but Biden is fresh like a spring daffodil compared to Putin’s bumbling and fumbling.

My 13-year-old niece: So, what should we do? We could listen to the radio.

My 7-year-old nephew: Radio?? What are we, forty?

A corpulent colleague and I get into an elevator, panting from the insane heat outside.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” the colleague says encouragingly, wiping off copious amounts of sweat from his face, “by November it will be cooler for sure.”

Since we are talking about early twentieth-century British fiction, I want to recommend a novel that I mentioned before but a long time passed and people might have forgotten.

It is titled Vivien, published in 1905. It’s deeply Victorian, so beautiful. You get so many details of life in Victorian England, it’s a treasure.

The author, WB Maxwell, was a son of the very talented bestselling author Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Braddon lived with a married man and had a large number of children with him. In the 1860s. You can imagine what that felt like at the time.

WB Maxwell was 8 when Braddon and his dad finally got officially married. He clearly never got over their irregular living situation, which one can see in Vivien. I tried reading other novels by him but they were horrid. But Vivien is amazing. It has this blend of gritty realism and almost farcical snobbishness that one rarely finds anywhere.

Churchill on the US’s attitude towards post-Soviet Russia:

There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Yes, I know he wasn’t around to see it. Doesn’t make it any less true.

More from Churchill on the current situation:

The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians….Nothing can save England j if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.

Here we have seen a change. Thanks to social media, wage earners have allowed the self-hating, defeatist brainy people to occupy their brains and plant the seeds of self-abasement there. Both the left and the right are in the throes of this self-hatred. What was a pastime of bored intellectuals is now a national hobby.

Has anybody on here ever ironed handkerchiefs?

I have ironed inordinate quantities of handkerchiefs. On 4 sides.

We had no Kleenex in the USSR, obviously.

I also ironed mountains of bedding. When I got married at 19, I gave myself a solemn vow that I’d never touch another flat iron for the rest of my life. And I’m still firmly keeping that vow.

I’ve been reading up on Frank Russell, the brother of the great philosopher Bertrand Russell and one of the husbands of Elizabeth von Arnim.

Frank Russell was known for two things: his very progressive feminist beliefs and his outlandish mistreatment and harassment of his many wives. It’s almost comical how he managed to advance the cause of women’s rights in the short breaks he took from bullying and persecuting women.