An Enchanting April

Swoon. I took my new Diana camera for a walk in the park on a beautiful April day, and felt arty smushing myself  in amongst the blossom and twisting around at peculiar angles. I'm sure that the pictures will all be disastrous, but I had so much fun playing at being a photographer and waiting in anticipation for the film to be developed is a bit of added excitement. Using real life film makes you feel very professional, even if, like me, you have no clue what you're doing. I found myself doing a lot of muttering about 'the light' much to Paul's entertainment. I also liked that I took one roll of film with me, which meant 12 pictures. Yes, 12 pictures. I usually run off twice that amount trying to get one picture of me with my eyes open. Having to think carefully about what I chose to spend my 12 precious button presses on was like being a child with a limited amount of pocket money in Toys R Us (i.e not easy, and not the sort of decision one makes lightly.) We also took the digital camera so Paul could take pictures of the first Diana experience. Gosh, we're so meta.

Speaking of swoon-worthy things,  a perfect, sunny April day seemed like the ideal time to delve into Elizabeth Von-Arnim's The Enchanted April. What a beautiful, beautiful book this is.It has a sort of spell-binding quality that is difficult to pin down, and which leaves you upon closing the book with that feeling of waking up from a particularly lovely dream. The book tells the story of four very different women who share a desire to escape their every day existences. These four strangers rent an idyllic Italian castle for the month of April and the novel becomes a gentle and lyrical love letter to their surroundings. Beneath all its quiet beauty however, this book has a sense of heartfelt rebellion, of an almost desperate spiritual need that can only be met in one's complete abandonment to the natural world. Von Arnim's descriptions of the landscape are pure poetry, and the drug-like effect it has on the inhabitants of this novel really seems to creep out of the pages and pull you into that world of simple pleasure.It left me feeling like I wanted to walk barefoot in the grass, and curl my toes into the soil. Really, truly lovely stuff.