The Blue Castle Book Club: Chapters 11 & 12
As I mentioned earlier, I have hardly any relatives alive, and there weren't many of them to begin with... but I've participated in just enough family dinners that I can relate to the "true to Stirling form" family dinner experience. Guests always making the same "hardy perennial jokes" and speculating on the next person to pass away used to be staples during the dinners my mom used to host, too.
Apparently, Valancy is not expected to really talk during these affairs, seeing how Uncle James is already convinced "that the conversation had been uplifted" and Valancy's mother "had been breathing easier" once she states her idea of the greatest happiness. I can relate to this too: during the aforementioned family dinners, I wasn't really expected to talk, either, and though I'm not an especially shy or anxious person, I had a very hard time butting into the ever-recurring discussions even when I felt like I had something to contribute. I think that's because my relatives had mentally slotted me into the role of the child and just let me remain there even as I grew up, since there were no younger people than me in the family and since I didn't show any interest in producing any myself, either. The Stirlings seem to have slotted Valancy into a very similar role during their family dinners.
Anyway, all aforementioned annoyances are certainly a magnitude easier to deal with when you don't actively fear and/or dislike the people sitting around that dinner table with you. Get their asses, Valancy.
"He looked enormously pleased over managing to work that quotation in at last. He had been waiting all his life for the chance."
I'm afraid I relate to Uncle James here. The only thing that stops me from being incredibly annoying like this all the time is that most of the fiction I'd like to quote is in English or in Swedish, while most of the conversations I have irl are in Finnish. Maybe that's for the better.
“People who don’t like cats,” said Valancy, attacking her dessert with a relish, “always seem to think that there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.”
Tumblr posts that Valancy would 100% reblog, part 1:
"Old maids are apt to fly off at a tangent like that. If she had been married when she should have been she wouldn’t have got like this."
This post is just becoming a collection of personal anecdotes, I'm afraid I've spent my daily allotment of brain power elsewhere and don't have anything more substantial to contribute here... but, inspired by the above quote, I really have to tell you this:
Eight years ago, when I was 25 years old, I went to see a doctor because I was feeling really tired all the time. He told me I should look into finding a spouse, then having children, and then having grandchildren, because – according to a book he had recently read, no less! – that's the natural course of a person's life, and those who don't stay on that course become depressed and therefore tired. The doctor didn't even order blood tests before sharing this pearl of wisdom with me and ushering me out.
Reader, it was undiagnosed ADHD and sleeping disorder, and clearly that doctor was Uncle Benjamin.
"Uncle Herbert was thinking that things were rather dull now that Doss had gone."
More Blorbo Parallels between Valancy and Daniel Daréus: very mysteriously thinking about a person they've only met twice while feeling very lonely and in pain. Wonder why that might be..?
