Lots and lots of snowflakes.
You may enlarge the photographs below of our back yard (British, garden) and see for yourself.
Our blogger friend Yorkshire Pudding in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England reported today that England has had absolutely no snow this year and it is most 'unwinterly' (a meteorological term he invented for the occasion) to say the least. Well, until today, neither has Georgia, which is why I am positively giddy about being able to post about it to all of you in the wider world.
As luck would have it, it also has been snowing in our front yard today. Here's the view earlier this morning from our front door. You are looking at -- mirabile dictu -- our neighbor's house across the street.
Speaking of Beatrice Lillie, Lady Peel, she was a personage of another era. Here is a photograph of her taken, as it happens, on my seventh birthday (March 18, 1948) by the world-famous photographer Yousuf Karsh, a survivor of the Armenian genocide earlier in the twentieth century. According to what I read, over 20 photos by Karsh appeared on the cover of Life magazine, itself another relic of a bygone era.
Beatrice Lillie, friend of Noel Coward and Cole Porter, is indeed an artifact from days gone by. She was, according to something I read a long time ago, "a comic actress and satirist who parodied the flowery performing style of even earlier decades when arias, declamations, recitations, and poetry readings were all the rage". If she looks the slightest bit familiar to you, maybe you remember seeing her in the role of the villainous Mrs. Meers, laundress and white slaver, in the 1967 technicolor movie Thoroughly Modern Millie, the version that starred Julie Andrews.
I think I remember hearing Bea Lillie perform “I brought my harp to the party, but nobody asked me to play; the others were jolly and hearty, but I wasn’t feeling so gay” way back in the dark ages, but I couldn’t find it on Youtube. (I couldn’t find Helen Hayes reciting “The White Magnolia” either, but that has nothing to do with this post.) So if you have been dying to hear Beatrice Lillie perform, here she is doing -- and this will bring this post full circle -- “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden” (2:32) on an old 78-rpm vinyl recording.
I know this post will irritate Yorkshire Pudding for several reasons, but it simply can't be helped.
It is still snowing, four hours later, and here's a picture of our patio table to prove it:
Cheerio, ta-ta for now, and other phrases people like Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Beatrice Lillie were always saying.
