The New TV Series

Oh dear.  I have a new thing.  I've begun watching a popular TV series, and I've become hooked.

For several months, I've been seeing posts in my Facebook feed about Downton Abbey.  I had thought maybe it might be something I might possibly enjoy, but had taken it no further.  Maybe, if I ever made it back to the video store, I might try to find it...

On Saturday evening, while enjoying some pre-dinner nibbles at Robert and Aidan's, I turned around to find a fabulous DVD collection.  4 shelves!  In alphabetical order!  Drool.  A much better collection than mine, so I said to Aidan that the next time we had a girly DVD night we should go there.  He was thrilled.  The lower shelves were for series, including Downton Abbey.  Some talk of it ensued (mostly due to the fabulosity of Maggie Smith), and I mentioned I hadn't seen it.  Jaws dropped, I asked if I could borrow it, and season 1 ended up in my bag. 

I wasn't much good for anything on Sunday evening, and as my current viewing of the long-running obsession (NCIS, treated like the painting of the Sydney Harbour Bridge) was at the end of a season, I started Downton.  So far, I love it.  And I want to be the Dowager (Maggie Smith) when I grow up.

I enjoy having so many characters with interesting, individual lives and interests and parts to play.  And they have such great lines!  Some are really funny, some very insightful, and some just interesting as an indication of general thought at the time.  Plus the correlation of an entailment plot with Pride and Prejudice, but in a slightly more modern context, is always enticing.  The idea of everyone having a part to play, everyone has a place, can be so reassuring but also so suffocating.  You know what's expected of you, but you don't often have a choice as to what your role is to be.  On top of that, watching it from a vantage point of a hundred years you know what has just happened (the Boer war some years prior, and the sinking of the Titanic right before the first episode), and you know what's about to happen.  I'm still only a few episodes in but that question has been hanging around my brain.

Ooh, and great music.  And it's nicely shot, too.  Devouring under way.

Today's photo:

I had to bake a quiche today, using up the silverbeet.  The gardener said it smelt amazing.  My favourite bit about baking with pastry is the blind baking, for which I bought pastry weights specially.