hail europa

Today was v. relaxing. I awoke late, with the intention of showering and perhaps accomplishing something--but I got sucked into a TV airing of 'The Money Pit', a minor comedy from ~1987 starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. That was back before Tom Hanks started taking more serious roles, and relied more on slapstick, so it was quite amusing; he and Shelley Long played a couple who thought they got a fantastic deal on a house, only to discover that they had been conned and that the place was completely falling apart. It was perhaps not as good as 'Joe vs. the Volcano', 'Big', or other Tom Hanks movies from that era, but it did manage to trap me into watching virtually the entire movie (I must have missed approximately ten minutes at the beginning). Since the movie didn't end until 2:20ish, and I had intended to go to Evensong at St. Patrick's Cathedral at 3:15, I didn't have time for a shower, but I did manage to put on a skirt and tame my hair before catching a taxi to the church.

I arrived early, because I had anticipated some traffic problems due to the Easter Rising commemorative parade that went through the city center earlier in the day, but the traffic was largely back to normal, so the taxi ride was quick and easy. St. Patrick's Cathedral is only a couple of blocks from its rival, Christ Church, the cathedral where I had attended the Handel/Baroque recital on Wednesday. Both churches are now Protestant (Church of Ireland), thanks to the British, and both rely heavily on tourist admission fees because their congregations are now so small. I was quite surprised that Evensong only attracted ~150 people, and two-thirds of those appeared to be tourists. Granted, they don't offer communion during Evensong, so I suppose a lot of the more devout parishoners went in the morning, but the attendance was sparse to say the least; they could have fit four times that number without any problem whatsoever. Still, the service was nice, albeit heavy on singing, but that's to be expected of anything called 'evensong'. Better yet, they have a real choir and an organ, so you don't have to do all the singing yourself like I'm used to when I go to the Christmas Eve service at my grandmother's Methodist church. Choir boys are a definite step up from out-of-tune farmers.

All in all, I felt that this was a better way to experience a cathedral than by paying to go in and have a look around; Notre Dame in Paris was highly moving, but it would have been more moving if there weren't tons of Japanese tourists jostling to get pictures of each other in front of anything that looked remotely interesting. When I left, there was almost as large of a crowd outside waiting to look around as there had been during the actual service, which I thought was a little ironic.

After that, I did very little the rest of the day. I had fish 'n' chips at the pub nearby, I talked to my parents, and I spent most of the evening reading 'Georgette Heyer's Regency World'. I'm approximately 70% finished with it, and I'm sad that I've gone 0-for-2 so far with books I've purchased here. This isn't infuriating me like 'Jaywalking with the Irish' did, but I'm just a bit bored with it. I think that the problem is that Georgette Heyer was so attentive to facts and to accuracy that most of the information in the book could easily be learned by reading a dozen of Heyer's romances--which are far more entertaining than an academic description of the Regency period. The worst part, though, is that every fact that is given is backed up by references to Heyer's books, not to other historical accounts. The author was apparently working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Georgette Heyer, and so her account of the Regency explains everything with illustrative references to Heyer's characters. For instance, the section of women's conduct might have a sentence like, 'As Miss Sophia Stanton-Lacy discovered in 'The Grand Sophy', women were barred from driving down the exclusively male St. James' Street'. The first few sections were fine, but the constant references to fictional characters (especially from the same five or ten books that I've already read) is getting a little tedious.

Despite that, I'm beginning to get enthused again about writing my romance novel, if I can actually work up the nerve to begin again. This will have to be balanced with work, a desire to get fit, my plans to thoroughly explore Dublin, and my hopes for getting out of the city at least twice a month. Will I accomplish everything I want? Probably not, but so far it's v. fun trying!