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Be careful not to mistake plants having their winter rest for weeds or dead. They will soon look very much alive when the sap begins to flow and they wake from their winter sleep. One day in your Latin you may read Virgil's IVth Georgic where he tells about an old man who used to grow a few lilies and verbena and always had the best vegetables and fruit earlier than anyone else.
Nicola stayed away from school on Friday as she felt sick but felt perfectly well all day so I think she must have had a bad attack of school-sickness – you know, longing to get back to school ha! ha! and ever so keen on her hoam werk.
Last night Mummy and I went to see Lawrence of Arabia. With one ten minute interval it lasted from 7.15 to 10.50 so it was quite a piece. The desert photography was magnificent in every way: beautiful colour and superbly done. So I suppose was the story, if it is admitted that it has to be interpreted by photographs of actors acting. But when the drama lies in character, this is not good enough and no one has yet produced, in U.S. or Britain, film that goes below the surface. With Allenby, the greatest man of them all, Feisal, Lawrence, Auda, you need the Rodin technique as opposed to Praxiteles. Still, we both enjoyed it for the sheer magnificence of the desert, and the human beings did not spoil it. But that is not fair – the acting was good. But it is difficult for an actor to act a shy man who acts always as if he were acting a part as an extremely ‘ham’ hero. It's too complicated. And of course Allenby, who really was great, came out as nobody at all – the mess-waiter acting the part of a general in the Officers Mess Christmas rag. It was however very well worth seeing.
We have been watching Dr Who: awful tosh of course, but made so much worse by the characters all being quite uniformly
unsympathetic. Various robots appear but the machines are at least metallic whereas the flesh and blood is wooden.
Julian said the other day, “What a happy place school wou