Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

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I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

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R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Mitfords, pt. 3; body-text fonts, pt. 24: Sabon

Watching Branagh’s Much Ado, in installments. Samuel runs around yelling, “Hey, nonny nonny.”

Reading N. Mitford’s Wigs on the Green, a comic novel about an aristocratic teenage fascist. Somehow I didn’t expect this kind of heroine, although I knew about the Mitford sisters: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur” (Ben Macintyre’s descriptions, although he qualifies them as “caricatures”).

The novel is Springtime for Hitler-esque, but from before WW2 (1935).

I can understand why this family has a cult following. But the more I look into the Mitfords’ background, the less fantastical and more soberly realistic the novels seem.

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Is there a name for the déjà vu-like feeling you get when you encounter the less recent past and relive the more recent past (or the present)? I got it today from some toilet-reading: the chapter on Andrew Jackson in Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals & Malarkey from George W. to George W.

(The footnote says: “All except non-folks like women, blacks, and Indians.”)

The typeface is the Garamond-like Sabon.

(The footnote says: “ ‘Ignorant, passionate and imbicile’ and ‘fierce ungovernable temper’ were some of the kinder descriptions. Jefferson said he couldn’t possibly think of anyone worse to be President.”)

Notice how the italic letters are just as wide as the Roman letters. This feature is unusual for this sort of typeface. A successor, Sabon Next, has narrower italics.