Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

What are you doing Sunday night? Please don't say live-tweeting the Oscars! I know it's what we do in 2015, live tweet everything, share our every thought with the world but I won't be doing that.  I'm not putting it down— I tried last year and it was an epic fail—I just don't have the capacity to watch and tweet. Even though I reserve the right to insist that as a woman, YES! I can do two things at once, I can multi-task— and bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, I am woman, W-O-M-A-N—  but  maybe it's time to leave the live-tweeting to you crazy kids under 30. Not to be a whiner but arthritic hands don't tend to fly across the tiny telephone screen with any kind of accuracy . I'm always missing the best things—the JLaw  stairway fall, Alec Baldwin bungling Idina Menzel's  name—as I'm stuck staring at my phone, furiously trying to correct auto-correct. Read the rest of this post on Chapter1-Take1 .

Downton Abbey has done it to me again. Stirred up a longing, a feeling of homesickness for England so intense it's threatening to turn into a full blown case of Philopatridomania. A word that ends with mania is never a good thing: Philopatridomania is an 'insane' desire to return home, 'excessive' homesickness. Blame it on Downton's outspoken socialist, Miss Bunting! She's leaving the village behind—and Tom Branson with it—heading for a job at a school in Preston, Lancashire. Preston! ' That's where my dad was born ' I squeal to the flat screen. My insanity has not progressed to the point that the screen answers back so I turn to google, looking at houses and flats 'to let' in the north of England, wondering what a maisonette is and what exactly they mean by a one bedroom double? I've been to Preston once, back when I was twenty, when I met my Grandma Good for the first and only time. It's funny, isn't it, how we call the