SYCORAX PINE "I have no more ambition for this book
than that some day someone will be lying in bed
and read out a single line
- and that their companion will turn away from them in silence..."
- Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows" ~
I send you this link in an envelope with a stamp in the upper right corner placed reverse diagonally, face down. I await your response with some trepidation.
While I greatly appreciate your efforts to broaden my knowledge, I have no idea which stamp language you're using, so I don't know what you mean by the odd positioning of your stamp. And to my horror I now learn that, according to the first guide, when we sent out our Christmas cards we told everyone that we loved them. I hope they will take that it a suitably festive sense or we may have lost our reputation entirely!
Should I send them flowers to rectify the situation? And if so, what kind? Flowers have a language too, don't they?
Dear Laura, Oh the pain, the embarrassment. And yet, like many a romance heroine, I can't help but say this: if you knew me like you ought to know me, you'd know *instinctively* which language I was using.
It seems evident that you have lost all sense of stamp propriety, casting your favors far and wide through the dubious vehicle of the Christmas card. Having consulted the guide to the language of flowers I keep in the downstairs loo, I'd endorse a bouquet of fly orchid (error), abatina (fickleness), butterfly weed (Let me go), mistletoe (I surmount difficulties), blue scilla (forgive and forget), auricula (importune me not!), xerathemum (cheerfulness under adversity), and, if you're willing to push the bounds of melodrama, asphodel (My regrets follow you to the grave).
Dear Sycorax,
While I greatly appreciate your efforts to broaden my knowledge, I have no idea which stamp language you're using, so I don't know what you mean by the odd positioning of your stamp. And to my horror I now learn that, according to the first guide, when we sent out our Christmas cards we told everyone that we loved them. I hope they will take that it a suitably festive sense or we may have lost our reputation entirely!
Should I send them flowers to rectify the situation? And if so, what kind? Flowers have a language too, don't they?
Yours in great anxiety,
Laura
Dear Laura,
Oh the pain, the embarrassment. And yet, like many a romance heroine, I can't help but say this: if you knew me like you ought to know me, you'd know *instinctively* which language I was using.
It seems evident that you have lost all sense of stamp propriety, casting your favors far and wide through the dubious vehicle of the Christmas card. Having consulted the guide to the language of flowers I keep in the downstairs loo, I'd endorse a bouquet of fly orchid (error), abatina (fickleness), butterfly weed (Let me go), mistletoe (I surmount difficulties), blue scilla (forgive and forget), auricula (importune me not!), xerathemum (cheerfulness under adversity), and, if you're willing to push the bounds of melodrama, asphodel (My regrets follow you to the grave).
Yours in errant symbology,
Sycorax