Nothing to worry about Mike, though I appreciate your concerns. There are some things in life that one doesn’t need to subscribe to. For me at the moment, it’s a mobile telephone.

I’m sure you too have your own issues with various techological fads?

m

Wed 6 May
Violin and Piano
Zhanna Tonaganyan
Yulia Vorontsova

Programme to include Mozart, Liszt and Glazunov

Tues 26 May
Harp
Cecilia Sultana De Maria

Programme to include Bach, Grandjany, Tournier and Naderman

Tues 9 June
Esher String Quartet
Ilya Movchan, Erszebet Racz, Sophie Stanley and Naomi Watts

Programme to include Haydn and Beethoven

Tue 30 June
Piano Trio

Programme to include Mendelssohn and Rebecca Clarke

Tues 14 July
Programme tbc

Tues 28 July
Programme tbc

Please note that you will be free to enter or leave your seats during the performance, which commences at 1.05 pm and finishes at 1.50 pm.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/feb/03/travelandtransport

I think this could be completed. You can generalize the idea of romance that’s true, but this shortcut is not faithful to the deeper vision of passion you can find in Madame Bovary.

From the very beginning of the book, Flaubert gives clues about the main roads he is about to follow all along his book. You can feel the uneasiness of living of the main character Emma Bovary. She has too much ambition comparing to what her own life can stand, especially in terms of love, and has a certain paradoxical detachment from reality at the same time.

If you remember the scene just before the quotes you have made, Flaubert makes an ironic description of romantic clichés and illusion of love.

Rodolphe is not seduced, he just is physically attracted to her, ‘blasé’ of the relationships he experienced. And he manipulates her to get what every man expects from a woman. I am not blaming him, Emma is so naive, she dreams her life more than she lives it. She is exalted and works with excess feelings. She is deeply shattered when she meets Rodolphe and lets him acting, because she thinks she is going to be rewarded for her daydreamings about romance.

Flaubert is making fun of Rodolphe, who has a pragmatic, simple and reduced vision of romance, without intuition :

“ He was not seeing, this man full of common sens, the dissimilarity of feelings underneath parity of expressions”.

And Rodolphe is making fun of Emma, as soon as he meets her, he is thinking about how to leave her later on, he calculates everything from the very beginning.

In my opinion, your quotes don’t reflect the spontanity and intuition you can experience in passion. I think romance is a little bit complicated than that and that there is many many ways to describe and feel it. It is not a science, it can be a Sine curve and goes like that for eternity, but why not a gaussian curve, just like life : to be born and to die.

However, I am not juging, just opening the debate. And sorry for the approximative translation I have made from the french book.

EB

Those most vocal about PC tend to be those who find it too difficult to crack a smile and enjoy life as they find it. “So smart, that they is stupid.”

The scary thing is when they are put in positions of power and enact legislation to take away humour from people’s lives and replace it with fear and mock respect. Now that isn’t sustainable living.

mijori

Not being a car owner myself, I prefer to get about by bike when it is viable to do so, by public transport when it isn’t.

Aside from one’s home, a car is the biggest ‘thing’ that weighs you down financially and metaphorically. I prefer to travel light, in both senses. Call it sustainable if you will, I call it being free.

mijori

And I could imagine few things more sexy than a straight razor working it’s way up and down the female leg. Is it just me or are there other’s who empathise thus?

mijori