I’ve been shivering under blankets and comforters, wonder if I’ll be able to wash my hair tomorrow, can’t even drink tea, which I usually live on, and didn’t make weekend oatmeal muffins.

We  have one of those viruses that go around offices and then go around the family and then go away and then come back.   First stomach flu, then a cold, headaches, you name it.  We call it the plague.

I had intended to do some work today, even if it meant shivering in the living room, but I just didn’t feel well enough.

Nap.  Diet 7-Up.  Nap.  Diet 7-Up.

I watched the last episode of Cousin Bette, the brilliant 1971 miniseries with Margaret Tyzack and Helen Mirren.  It is slower, more detailed, and better-cast than the ’90s movie with beautiful Jessica Lange tarted-down slightly, but still breathtaking as unattractive Bette.  (It was a little like casting Winona Ryder as Jo in Little Women:  the audience laughs when Jo sells her hair and one of her sisters (Amy?)  says Jo’s hair was her one beauty.)

Diet 7-Up.  Suddenly I felt like reading a romantic novel.

It’s not that I was in the mood for romance.  I just wanted to reread Michael Arlen’s romantic middlebrow novel, The Green Hat, a kind of 1920s mood piece where flappers and free love abound and a stylish woman can’t get it right.  The narrator, a writer, relates the tragic  story of Iris Storm, a beautiful, languorous woman who wears a green hat and drives “a long, low, yellow car which shone like a battle-chariot,” who lives unconventionally and takes love lightly, and with whom, of course, everyone is in love.

Then love turns heart-rending.

It’s a sad novel, but I was already crying because I couldn’t drink my tea, so what’s a little more sadness?

But I couldn’t find it.

Finally I settled for Love’s Shadow, the first book in Ada Leverson’s The Little Ottleys, a trilogy so witty Leverson seems like a female Oscar Wilde.

And, in fact, Leverson was Wilde’s friend, and during his trial, he lived at her house in her son’s nursery.  She was also the first one to visit Wilde when he got out of prison.

I haven’t read much of this yet, but it is utterly charming.  The three novels in the trilogy are Love’s Shadow, Tenterhooks, and Love at Second Sight, all of which are available free at manybooks.net.  The paperback version of Love’s Shadow is available from Bloomsbury.

And then…

“It sounds like Delilah in here,” my husband said later.  (N.B.  Delilah is the host of a syndicated call-in and pop music radio show.)

I was listening to Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt and watching their videos on YouTube, and, indeed, they  probably are favorites of Delilah.

Do you know how many versions of “Love Has No Pride” there are on YouTube?  Linda Ronstadt’s and Bonnie Raitt’s are the best.

And the lyrics, by the way, have more depth than I realized.  When I was young, I used to spend hours listening to such music, but I don’t think I caught the fact that the narrator’s friends have walked out on her, too.  For me it was all about love.

But look at this first verse:

“I’ve had bad dreams too many times
To think that they don’t mean much anymore
Fine times have gone and left my sad home
Friends who once cared just walk out my door.”

Really startlingly sad, and the fourth line is a shock.  Because it’s not what we’re expecting:  her lover scorns her, but so do her friends.  And that loss also hurts, when friends give you up because you’ve made a bad choice, or they think you have.  (Has anyone ever refused to go to your wedding?  Probably.)  And”…just walk out my door” is brilliant.  You need the “just.”  It makes it sound pop and colloquial.  (That would be edited out in a writing class.)

Then there’s the repeated:

“And I’d give anything to see you again.”

Like many of us, I have regrets and would “give anything” to go back in time “and see you again,” and take that Aeschylus class…

There have been many emotional scenes in my life, as I’m sure there have been in yours, and this song captured my intense feelings in a way that The Green Hat and Love’s Shadow could not.

So below are two brilliant versions of “Love Has No Pride,” the first by Bonnie Raitt, the second by Linda Ronstadt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_X6BwvAEE

And here’s the Ronstadt: