blamebrampton | My brilliant flist, and inner city adventures!

My favourite thing about lj is my brilliant and talented f-list. Allow me to show you some of its cleverness.

The lovely

leochi, whose work reminds me of nothing so much as the illustrations for the nice quality children's novels I would receive for birthdays (Quentin Blake illustrated the naughty ones), has drawn a prompt from me in her 50 Gazes series. I asked for a joyous gaze between Harry and McGonagall, because I love Minerva's fierce affection for all of her Gryffindors. This was the result. It's a perfect young Harry and his mentor after the first of the Goblet of Fire trials. Tartan and happiness – just delightful.

Not satisfied with working on one series at a time, she also produced a set of three tarot cards for hp_tarot. They are brooding, dramatic and technically assured. She is as home with this more adult style of art as with the illustrative book form, wholly lovely stuff.

One of my flisters who particularly evokes the word brilliant is

wemyss, a man who never fails to make me think even when I am coming at the issues under discussion from the opposite direction. He has posted an enormously funny take on my recent rantings about readers who wish to be spoon-fed. You can find it here and, while you may need to be English to fully appreciate it, it contains the most magnificent description of Slough that it has ever been my privilege and pleasure to read.

And, Bubba, aka

eynhashofet, suggests that the answer to yesterday's question may well be Anais Nin. Let's assume it is, research will continue when time allows. Thanks, too, for the walks through musical memory lane!
Tonight we had another spot of the excitement that only comes from living in a thriving and vibrant part of the inner city (read gentrified former slum with expensive delicatessens 50 metres away, but housing estates just up the road).

We returned from our evening constitutional a short time ago to find papers scattered about the bottom of the lane. This is not an uncommon sight in these parts, and the reason our little cottage has an assault course in front of every access point (we make people WORK to burgle us, it's been an effective deterrent so far). We stopped and collected a pile of papers, then looked in nearby shrubs to find keys, laptop charger and headphones, and a jacket and a bigger pile of forms, which were all for a volleyball team.

After sending J back with the torch I sat down and did a spot of internet detecting and found the owner of the papers (head of the volleyball team) lived five minutes' walk away. I had popped everything into a bag and we were about to go for a walk to deliver them, when we opened the door to find a young man wandering about crankily. "You'd be Mr Stuff," I said. "We have some of your less valuable stuff."

He seemed happy to get the bundle we had found back, and has learned a valuable lesson about what can and cannot be left in a car in the inner city. He is also obviously not poor and had his laptop backed up onto his USB key, which was on the keychain, so not a terrible result.