i was doing pretty well today, having submitted a lease change form to real estate services, and run some errands, and lunched with rikita, and ate some delicious tequila-grapefruit sorbet from toscanini's, and packed most of my winter things into large boxes and taped them up.

then the ups guy arrived and gave me my caddy ever after.

i'm sorry to say that despite moments (many moments - i shall type some of them up) that made me laugh aloud, and of course my affection towards the cassons, and the pleasure of "now read ons" - i can't really feel as warmly towards this book as i did the first three. this makes me especially unhappy, because from the first i've always loved caddy best, but there's always been least about her (what with living away from home, or being london-based, as bill puts it) and i have waited a long time for a book that is about her - insofar as all the other books, while being about everyone else too, is largely about one person's development - but when it arrives it is still more about everyone else, which is rather unfair, i thought, not only because they've all had their own book already, but that things work out for them: rose is assured of tom and has adapted to school, indigo has really blossomed with confidence and i won't tell you who he took to the valentine disco, and saffy, through nearly losing sarah, and meeting someone at last who is equal to her and unsettles her, softens a great deal in this book. (on the subject of saffy's new boyfriend, i cannot help but approve of a man who is able to loom up suddenly and kiss one with more accuracy than in one's experience. nobody ever looms up and kisses me. it's generally is one or the other.)

but poor caddy comes on towards the end of the book (and gets very little room in it) and agrees to marry the wrong person for the wrong reasons. (it is not to darling michael, but you knew that already.) i wouldn't mind so much if it hadn't been named for her, i suppose, but a book called caddy ever after which doesn't allow caddy to develop leaves me nonplussed.

also i do not like the caddy wedding bits one bit, because all of the other casson stories had the virtue of creating perfect believablity out of wild improbability, whereas the bits about caddy's wedding managed to be both unbelievable and cliched.

to be continued because i'm very hungry and very late.