Saturday, April 14, 2012

Madame Arcati's cosmetic surgery: None of Francis Wheen's dreadful fire!

I do hope you like my new look. The red stage curtains backdrop alludes to what I can only trust is the theatrical experience of visiting this site. I had thought to introduce you to the joys of 'dynamic views' where you decide from a range of options how this blog should look. But Google-Blogger in its bearded wisdom forgot to add a button to its 'dynamic' templates that permits me access to my own dashboard - so, welcome to the curtains. Had I succumbed to the invitation to go dynamic, I'd now be permanently locked out of my site.

And people wonder why they get murdered.

I had planned to add a flame theme backdrop so that you could imagine Madame as the centrepiece of a mediaeval auto-da- - but only this morning I learnt that Private Eye deputy editor Francis Wheen's shed has just been lost to fire along with countless priceless things - archives, letters, part of a book, etc - I believe on a day not unadjacent to Friday the 13th. Thankfully no one was hurt. I do send him my condolences. Naturally this awful news rendered my fiery temptation inappropriate. People would have accused me of callous satire; and we can't have any of that.

My curtains - as you'll see in the excerpt below - enjoyed a past life as Madame Arcati's dress.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How wise Duncan was to put his stuff in a bank vault

David Hockney's cleaner said...

Remember Patrick Proktor? He died of a broken heart soon after all his studio archive went up in flames

Anonymous said...

Utterly gorgeous! Can't think why it took you so long. But still on Blogger. Dear oh dear.

Madame Arcati said...

I think Francis will not be dying of a broken heart. He appears to be stoic at the very least - judging by his Facebook comments. To lose part of a book is particularly cruel - a writer's worst nightmare.