Dying off

The last of the lovely tulips that Ridgeback brought me when she came round for book group more than 10 days ago. Since I took that photograph on Friday morning (it’s now Saturday morning), most of those petals have fallen off.

At last! A day at home. A quick peloton in the morning, followed by chairing (online) interviews for another School. It was all very interesting (Ancient History!) and it concluded with an offer to someone whose work I certainly would find something in common with. I had a couple more online meetings for the rest of the day, but spent most of it trying to clear stuff off my to do list and out of my inbox whilst compiling a list of what needs doing over the weekend.

The evening was a watchathon of the House of Maxwell on iPlayer. Fascinating stuff about a family, most of whose members are a mess, to put it mildly. While the main focus is on the father and daughter relationship, there is also plenty of other stuff in there. It’s worth noting that there’s almost a century between the birth of Robert Maxwell in 1923 in a poor shtetl in Eastern Europe and Ghislaine Maxwell’s continuing fight to overturn her criminal conviction in New York, on sex trafficking offences, in 2022. I find that reference point more poignant than the ‘fifty years of scandal’ pushed by the makers of the documentaries.