The Fall of the House of Usher -- and Handbags...

I'm supposed to have locked myself away today to do something about all the boring (but necessary) things I'm always trying to avoid. Accounts/bookkeeping is number one on my all-time Hate List. It's giving me a headache just thinking about it -- life's too short to waste on stuff like this.

Anyway, to make it a little less painful, I usually work for about an hour then skive off for around half-an-hour, then work for another hour etc. In my last break I was doing some surfing -- looking for something to do with a range of handbags we're considering stocking -- when I ended on this page reading Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher. Nooo idea how that happened -- other than the fact that some of the products in our store could be categorised as pretty gothic.

Up to now, all I knew about Poe was his association with the macabre and a few lines of The Raven. I think I might have also watched some old Vincent Price-type film version of The Fall Of the House of Usher on television at some point. Poe's eerie tale was so scarily fascinating that I found myself checking out facts related to the author's troubled life and 'mysterious' death. You can see why he's ended up with a bit of a cult following. So, an afternoon's accounting ended up as a two hour journey into the World of Poe.

Here's a You Tube video from the 1928 version of his short story (silent, with English narrative):