Return of the linkspam

[oursin]

But, aside from now being able to commit astounding performative feats of memory, can he remember a) where he left his keys and b) birthdays of significant other and relatives? Enquiring minds would like to know, as this seems to me to fall into the same category as 'you can get men to do the ironing providing they can do it halfway up Everest or on a highwire so that it counts as extreeeeeeeeme'.

Sing a very resounding yay for that maligned breed, the social worker. Piece about Margaret Humphreys, as played by Emily Watson in Oranges and Sunshine, who discovered the lost story of the children involuntarily emigrated to Australia. Though, you know, there were well-meaning people involved in the project who thought it was all about transplanting the children to flourish in a better environment. Which was misguided, but the whole thing was not just about reducing social welfare costs in the UK and providing cheap labour for the white colonies (because children were also being sent to Canada). There was an element of the anti-urban romantic primitivism virtue of the wide-open spaces thing going on.

Charlotte Higgins on what a great writer Rosemary Sutcliffe was.

Marks and Sparks on the Champs Elysees - Agnès Poirier rejoices. May previously have recounted tale of how, when my mother was lodging French language students in the long-ago summers, they all stocked up, at Maman's request, before they left, with Birds' Custard Powder, HP Sauce and similar items of the Great Brit Gastro Trad. Also, that when the ferries were still running, whole French families used to come over with large shopping bags and denude the supermarket shelves. Meanwhile, English families were taking the ferry or hovercraft, or latterly travelling via the Tunnel, to shop in the hypermarches of Boulogne. The grass is always greener? Other people's food is more delightfully exotic?

Comments

[sheenaghpugh]

Esca, for a man whose entire family has been wiped out by Marcus's fellow soldiers, seems more than a shade too unquestioning in his loyalty to Marcus

Well, not if you adopt the obvious explanation...:)

[shrewreader]

Now if we can just get M&S to pair up with Target (or brave the waters themselves again) and come over Here....

[mme_hardy]

My daughter is highly thrilled that Topshop is now doing mail order in the U.S.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

As a Parisienne, I would WELCOME Target! (And will always pronounce it "Targett"!)

[mme_hardy]

Hey, we pronounce it "Tar-ZHAY." Or did, back when the adult clothes were cool. I had a Target black velour minidress that I wore everywhere, including to work.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Hah! Fie on this Tarzhay nonsense. (Which I used to say loud and clear when I lived in Washington at the time of Freedom Fries. People found it confusing.)

[mme_hardy]

I was so sure you were going to link to the Guardian story about sniffing out decaying artifacts!

Query: Did acid paper really stop in 1950?

My mom-in-law, who was Foreign Service wife stationed in various bits of Europe, regularly ordered in boxes of food from the PX; among the much-desired unobtainables were peanut butter, Heinz ketchup, and Mexican foods.

[oursin]

Acid paper certainly did not stop in 1950! Most newsprint from much later than that is so acid that it is already deteriorating badly. The worst offenders in terms of bad acidic paper are certainly late nineteenth century books (many of which are so badly deteriorated they couldn't even be microfilmed when the BL was doing that), but a lot of more recent paperbacks are not in wonderful shape. And given that up until we started having to hassle potential donating organisations about the problems of electronic records, we had to incite them to endeavour to use low-acid archive quality paper for records with permanent preservation value and for photocopies of material that might have permanent preservation value, most office stationery was not archive-quality.

[mme_hardy]

Thank you. I certainly have '70s paperbacks that I doubt will last another half-century. (I was wondering why the person in the interview listed 1950 as the end date for seriously acid paper.)

I didn't know that about the late 19th century. Is the problem mostly books that were cheap at the time, or does it extend to all classes?

[oursin]

I think it's mostly cheap editions.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I heard Foer interviewed on the radio here, and he actually sounded fairly modest about the whole thing. And they ended up with some question about whether he still loses his keys (or something to that effect), and he said yes, he does.

M&S: le retour

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I'm happy with the location since it is literally round the corner from me, but it is wrong, wrong, WRONG. Also, much much too small, especially with the food encroachment. (I don't primarily go to M&S for the food; plus most French supermarkets now carry Marmite and HP sauce.) So personal jury still out; because they won't have the space to have all the lines, and probably not the hugely useful but unfashionable staples like knit black trousers and knickers five-packs.

The old space they gave up on ten years ago was utterly brilliant: big, opposite Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, in a nice shopping area as opposed to the Champs, which is like Leicester Square on a Sunday now.

(Agnès Poirier gives me the hives. Cor she is smug and untalented.)