Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"

As a literary illiterate, I expected Jane Eyre to be the same kind of story as Jane Austen's. After all, it are all romantic novels from about the same period, no? It might be obvious for some of you, but they are not interchangeable at all. Where Austen realistically writes about society and people, Jane Eyre seems more to be some kind of a fairytale (but granted, a dark one).

To start with, Jane Eyre has everything against her. She's poor, she's an orphan child, her aunt and cousins treat her badly, she has to go to a terrible school, where the children are kept cold and hungry, there is an epidemic illness and her best friend dies,… How much more can you come up with? My feeling is that Charlotte Brontë is overdoing it a bit, which makes me lose touch with her heroine. The story seems a kind of a fairytale, where in the beginning everything is dark and bad, Jane Eyre has no chances on happiness at all in life, but in the end, all turns out (more or less) well. I've had to get used to this darkness.

What I precisely like so much in Jane Austen is her capacity to write fascinating stories about ordinary bright social life. Her heroines don't have all the luck in the world either: Catherine is rather poor, Anne is an ignored child,… but there is not one who has all the mischances of Jane Eyre. They are rather well off at the start of the story and better off in the end. The books focus much more on all the aspects of society.

But I suppose I just shouldn't read Charlotte Brontë with Jane Austen in the back of my head. After some while I got used to the style, and then it is a really good and well-written book. Compared to the books of Jane Austen (see, there I am doing it again ;-), it only seemed rather "girlish".

You can find the book here.

Sweet Thursday

There are so much pretty moments and small jewels in the world, which we so often don't pay attention to, immersed in our day-to-day activities. That's why I want to enumerate some of them each Thursday. Today we have:

• the smell of long dry grass on a warm day
• the sentences on the Yogi Tea bags. Today I had "You must step out of your house for learning."
• the colours of a butterfly
• a room lit by the soft light of burning candles
• banana milkshake

The lucerne experiment

Indian cress with lucerne mix?

As for the little lucerne experiment I did with the indian cress, I still cannot conclude if the lucerne mix makes plants grow better. In case you don't remember, I sowed indian cress in different pots, and added a lucerne mix, which is said to make plants grow better, to some and not to others, to see if it really make a difference.

As you can see on the pictures, the cress in the pots with red clothes-pin are definitely growing better than the ones without. So I wanted to conclude here that the lucerne mix really helps, when I saw that I noted done last week that in the three pots with red clothes-pin I left out the lucerne mix. And now I am wondering if I noted this done wrong, or the lucerne mix doesn't help at all... The only option seems to try it again another time!

Indian cress without lucerne mix?

The first plants

Small lettuce and a tiny radishes

In the past days, the small seeds I sowed have enjoyed the nice sunny weather as much as me and have been starting to grow tiny green plants out of the earth.

The lettuce is already forming a circle, and some radishes are starting to come out in the middle too. It's not my intention to let the lettuce grow out to crops, I am planning to cut it when about 10 centimeters, but I am only wondering if the radishes will have enough place to grow.

The sunflowers are also growing nicely. However small they still might be, you can already sense that in some time they will be strong enough to carry large flowers.

Future sunflowers

Herbs and edible flowers

My second balcony project are edible flowers and herbs, which I put on the sunny side of my balcony. The small pots contain seeds of thyme and lemon balm, two herbs with a delicious odor. I have no idea if they will be large enough once the plants have grown, but I can always repot them. In the largest pots I put classical sunflowers, because their warm yellow look makes me happy. The strange brown pots hold indian cress, for their beautiful (and edible!) flowers.

All are sowed in a mix of potting soil (around 60%), compost (around 35%) and a lucerne mix (around 5%), except for the ones with the red clothes-pins. In those three pots I left out the lucerne, to see if this really makes a difference.

The brown pots I put the indian cress in are biodegradable. I like the way they look, but unfortunately, they don't smell that well. Maybe the lemon balm will be able to make up for that. We'll see how it evolves!

Janes Austen's "Emma"

- Spoiler alert: don't read if you haven't read the book first -

My view while reading 'Emma'

The first time I read Emma was two summers ago.  I was traveling in Spain, but got stuck in Bilbao because of a hurt ankle. As I had to wait for two days to have cheap transport home, and couldn't visit much of the town lumping about, I entered the nearest bookshop to be able to spend the coming two days reading. Spain is not known for its culture of foreign languages, and as my spanish is not much more extended than Ola!¿Qué tal? - Muy bien! (hoping I'm not making too much spelling mistakes), the large bookstore with hundred of books only gave me the choice between Emma and some book of Charles Dickens. I'm glad I chose Emma.

In fact, I hadn't read any of Jane Austen's novels before. Of course I had seen the movies of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, so I was expecting some mushy lovey-dovey story, but I was pleasantly surprised. Jane Austen's books are not about mawkish love stories, but about people, about characters, about social interaction and the important place this has in ordinary life. This is especially visible in Emma. The book has a small community of strong and well-developed characters, and is all about the interaction between them - the way they influence each other, the way their projects change because of the impact others have on them. Just think about how different Harriet's year would have been if she never had met Emma, how the mere fact that Jane Fairfax exists influences Emma, setting her a standard, how Highbury life would be different if Frank Churchill wouldn't have arrived, and so on. 

But when it comes to Emma's own love story, Jane Austen hastily finishes the novel: when Mr. Knightley makes her a marriage proposal, she writes about Emma's answer "What did she say? - Just what she ought, of course." The last chapters, where all love stories come out, are just there because the story has to be completed, but they are not the culminating point of the book at all. The culminating points are all the social interactions in between.

In a classical mawkish love story Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill would have been the leading characters: a beautiful, sweet but poor girl, an engaging, handsome and rich boy, a nasty aunt and a secret engagement - what more do you need? It sounds almost like a Disney movie. But Austen changes the focus: Emma is the focal point, a precocious girl, thinking very highly about herself. The imperfectness of the main characters makes this a perfect book.

Emma convinced me that a good book is not made by a good story. To have a good book, you need strong, interesting characters and that's about it. When you have the characters, you just let them meet each other, let them interact and write it down. That's where you'll have the perfect book.

You can find the book here.

My first balcony vegetables

In previous years, I loved doing some gardening at my parents' house. I cared for the plants, giving them food and light and room and watching them grow. Now that I have moved to an apartment in town, it has become a bit more difficult. But I decided to grow plants on my balcony, and share my experiences with everyone who has the same fascination.

The fantastic squeezed coco

My first "experiment" are lettuce and radishes. I sowed them in a planting bag, weighing nothing and being easy to move around. As potting soil I used some kind of squeezed cocos thing. It's really an incredible invention, it just weighs some 600g, and then you have to add some water to it and suddenly you have 10l of potting soil! If I had thought of this before, I wouldn't have had to drag a 20kg potting soil bag around half of the town. I mixed this cocos soil with some compost and lucerne (also known as "alfalfa") mix to make my vegetables grow better.

Lettuce and radishes to be

The lettuce is sowed in a circle on the outside, the radishes in the middle. It's still looking a bit grey, but it will be much better when little green plants begin to grow... Looking forward to it!