Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

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Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

A veterinary ordeal, followed by a quiet evening at home

We had trouble last night rounding up the kitties and putting them into their pet carriers. They knew what was in store for them.

Ziva darted under our bed. But we caught her in the end.

She and Jasper were hauled away. The vet gave them their shots and scolded them for being fat (Jasper has been ballooning ever since he figured out that Samuel tosses food scraps onto the floor).

Thankfully, both kitties were confirmed to be flea-free.

The rest of the evening was peaceful. Karin used her computer to play a very strange role-playing game from Japan, and I read from the unfashionable philosophy of William Godwin. The kitties didn’t fight at home (which they often do when one of them has returned from the vet). Samuel played with a toy alphabet that he got for Christmas; then, listening to the music of Bambi, he went to sleep.

Tonight, though, our Young Prince is considerably more grumpy.