Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

Well, sitting on a sofa, anyway.  Or a sopha, if you prefer. I simply had to share this portrait by the wonderful Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) of the Divine Farinelli and I as BFFs.  (It even says so on our mugs.  I hope we're drinking mocha!)  Kirsty had the inspired idea to raise money for relief aid in Nepal by offering a portrait of yourself with your favourite historical character.  I think my selection was a no-brainer!   This is just a scan.  The real thing is on its way to me, in the post.  I can't wait! Thank you, Kirsty, for such a great idea, and for helping to raise funds and awareness at this difficult time for Nepal

            Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the film of 1992: BFI Player I recently listened to a fascinating online lecture by Cheryl Morgan about gender fluidity in science fiction and fantasy.  Regular readers will know that issues of gender and (a)sexual identity feature a lot in my blog.  So I was interested to read some of the books featured in the lecture.  Here's what I managed to find in my local library:  Orlando by Virginia Woolf This famous literary novel is quite strange, and I doubt anyone truly knows what Virginia Woolf meant by everything in it.  The title character, Orlando, begins as a 16th-century nobleman and favourite of Elizabeth I.  By the end of the book, she is a woman (still called Orlando) and living in Virginia Woolf's own day, the 1920s.  The part where Orlando becomes a woman is spectacularly unspectacular.  He goes to sleep a man and wakes up a woman.  (I...