"Disqualified for a layer of buttercream? Outrageous!"

[usuallyhats]

Photos! From Ystalyfera, from Swanage (though sadly lacking frolicking on the beach in the dark and the pigs in Bath since they're on the beginning of the next film), plus bonus photos of the Garden of Surprise at Burghley House, from when I went to visit Hetty in June. One of the joys of a film camera: I'd forgotten I'd taken those. Unfortunately due to Jessops's rather eccentric file naming system, they're all in the wrong order and I can't work out how to change it round.

I have remembered the other thing I meant to say yesterday - I'm reading Daniel Deronda and it's reminding me how much I love George Eliot's writing: the way her strong sense of morality is tempered by her sympathetic understanding that real people are incapable of being completely moral all the time. Her writing is so beautifully balanced. And now I want to reread Middlemarch. I love the very last sentence of Middlemarch most of all, I came across it unexpectedly the other day and it almost had me in tears. In fact I'm going to quote it now, spoiler-cutting just in case, though it's not really spoilery and my English teacher made us all read it before we read the rest of the book, so we'd understand what it was all about:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.