Scarlet and Black

Some improvement

2007-04-06T14:15:00.000+01:00

My mood has got slightly better, not least because I went to see Notes on a Scandal, which was great and very funny to boot. I very much enjoyed the novel, but wasn't sure how film would capture the first person unreliable narrator on which the whole book hangs. They did a pretty decent job, though it was a good bit more explicit than the novel, as perhaps it had to be. Anyway, the delectable Cate Blanchett could be acting in anything at all, however cliched and flat (anyone remember Veronica Guerin?) and it would still be worth the ticket price to watch her luminous lovelieness. Also, I got some sleep. Bonus.

I have just discovered the blog of a good friend of mine from Oxford who is living in Italy now and have added it to my links. Chris is fiercely clever, funny, kind, gentle and handsome. He is also Scottish, and has chosen to live in Italy, so you can see that he is an almost faultless specimen of humanity. Unfortunately I can't make any sense of his blog at all, since it is mostly about Italian political reform and the media, but perhaps if I begin to read it regularly then I will know what my Milan-dwelling brother and sister-in-law are talking about when they sigh with despair every time the Government is mentioned over dinner.

Idiots

2007-04-05T20:29:00.000+01:00

And to make a bad day worse, anti-choice scumbags have plastered the intersection outside my department with disgusting pictures, past which I have now had to walk four times today. I am not above telling you that I find it extremely upsetting. Earlier on, before the pictures went up, they were giving out fliers but there was nothing to tell you what it was a flier for until you had it in your hand. As soon as I looked at it I ripped it up into little bits and walked over and threw them in the bin and made sure the idiot who handed it to me saw me do it. Despite my fury, I mind the vile misogynist propaganda rather less than I mind the enormous and revolting photographs which made me want to cry. Also, I am 99% per cent certain that one of their billboards was drawing a direct comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, which is in splendid taste, is it not? However, the images were so distressing that I actually couldn't bring myself to look at the thing for long enough to see in any greater detail what invidious association they were attempting to draw. It appeared to hang on the idea of choice and why this was a bad thing (?), and had the phrase "religious choice" above a picture of a pile of Nazi deathcamp victims. I am completely baffled by what on earth this line of reasoning (to grace it with a term it scarcely deserves) can be driving at. I am too annoyed and upset even to work this observation up into a piss-take of their manifest and thorough-going stupidity. Idiots. If I hadn't been in a filthy humour earlier today (and I was) then I certainly would be now. I don't know why the University/police/local authority allows it, but I intend to find out. If they were adverts trying to sell something there is no way it would be tolerated. Since they are only trying to sell dangerous woman-hating bile apparently that's fair enough. More idiots. Great.

Why pretend?

2007-04-05T18:30:00.000+01:00

I am too dismal and badtempered and pissed off and homesick to summon up the enthusiasm for writing blog posts, so why don't I just dispense with any pretence that my blog consist of more than just descripions of films and list the things I've been to see in the last week.

300 (2007): Rubbish. The dialogue is appalling, and the visual spectacle is samey and cliched, and the bizarrely historically truncated plot effaces every nuanced and interesting aspect of the story itself. All the Persians were flamboyantly queer or deformed or both, which was dull and offensive enough, but the Spartans themselves were less attractive by far - revolting identikit pneumatic bodies devoid of any vestige of humanity, erotic appeal, or (absurdly) armour. The whole thing was a two-dimensional and crappily-acted nipplefest. If this is what graphic novels are like then I'll stick to Fielding, thanks. The high point was the credit sequence, which included the magical character description "Transsexual Number 3 (Arabian)". That's something to have on your CV.

The 300 Spartans (1961): quite funny. Leonidas as clean-cut, laconic (you do the jokes) all-American hero; Xerxes as mildly dastardly British army officer in the colonies, and as for Themistocles - well, at least he was in it. Artemisia was a cracking bit of steely-minded totty, and there was a touching and hilarious subplot about a simple Spartan youth who is desperate to fight at Thermopylae in order to win the hand of his sweetheart, with whom he frisks around the olive-shaded landscape. My favoutite bit was Ephialtes, portrayed as a dumbly brutish mountain-dwelling simpleton in a goatskin jerkin. Brilliant. His cackhanded attempt to grope the virginal Spartan maiden was black-hat/white-hat characterisation at its best.

A university production of Euripides' Medea: okay actually. They were using the translation I used to teach to 13 year olds, so that was a nice trip down memory lane. You could see the chorus' underwear through the armpits of their dresses when they moved their arms though.

Rome: a blast. I recommend it to all comers. My only regret is that we were watching it on a school night and therefore had to go home before the commencement of the promised affair between Octavia and Servilia. (To give non-classicists an idea of stupid this is, Servilia was the mother of Brutus, of "et tu Brute?" fame. She was the lover of Julius Caesar. Octavia was Caesar's great-niece. That's some age gap, quite apart from anything else). Best of all was, of course, JC himself, played by Ciaran Hinds. Caesar really is my heart-throb through the ages, which I dare say is highly revealing of some fascinating aspect of my personality blah blah blah. Anyway, I love him. The casting was the icing on the cake for me, since the last time I saw Ciaran Hinds he was in a BBC production of Persuasion playing Frederick Wentworth, the thinking woman's crumpet of the Austen corpus. A friend in the English department told me the other day that in my life here I remind her of Anne Elliot. I hope that means there's a Wentworth at the end of it.

The Queen

2007-03-28T03:08:00.000+01:00

Newsflash on my never-ending cinema visits: last night I saw The Queen. Despite the reviews, I had been sceptical because really, it wasn't very long ago, and I paid plenty of attention first time round (it was hard not to). However, much flimsier commendations would still have been pretext enough for ditching Ovid, and it was, as everyone knows by now, excellent. Much more suprising, I found several parts of it very moving and even shed a tear, which cannot be said of my 16-year-old self watching it unfold at the time. I was entirely dispassionate: my abiding memory of the day she died was that I'd just got a kitten (yay!). My abiding memory of the day of her funeral is that I was up late in the loft apartment of my brother's flat, trying, and managing, to cop off with his best mate (sorry about that). The only emotion I can recall summoning up was a faint sense of distaste for the all the undignified howling over the death of a woman these people had never met, and a vague feeling that the Queen was behaving oddly. Well done to the film makers, then, for the fact that I found the funeral stuff genuinely very sad, and also felt overwhelming sympathy for the Queen. And didn't Blair's government look like twits? I must say that I heartily enjoyed that aspect of it too. My only regret was that Blair himself wasn't made to look even stupider, but luckily he's achieved that amply without the help of filmmakers.
I fear that this all goes to show that I am getting old: the senile lability, the establishment sympathies, the disdain for the anti-royalism of my youth. I can of course see that they did a very deliberate job of making the royals dignified and wise and timeless and the New Labourites petty and irrational and uncharitable, and to that extent the thing was highly manipulative. I admit I bought it though: at least for the duration of the film, and very possibly beyond. Did you?
PS Honourable mention to the stunning Aberdeenshire countryside which stole the show and made me feel even more patriotic than homesick. Go Deeside!

Bad Username Indeed

2007-03-26T01:54:00.000+01:00

I just tried to sign in to blogger but got an error message indicating a bad username, which would have been scottishmelanie had I not missed out the "c" . Avid readers of my blog will probably think the revised epithet not without justification. Anyway, it delighted my childish heart, firstly because this egregious manifestation of my in any case sempiternally cack-handed typing probably owes something to the after-effects of the impressive volume of whisky sour I sucked back last night; and secondly because the shortness and ease of the step from Scottish to Sottish spoke to me at a deep level. My love of whisky sours may be the ultimate expression of my ethnicity: what other confection combines an irrepressable enthusiasm for hard liquor with the thrifty instinct not to waste whisky too rough for drinking neat? They say you are what you eat, so better Scotch than Polish, I suppose.

The History Boys

2007-03-22T20:19:00.000Z

In another fascinating instalment of what I've been doing, I went to the Bloor to see The History Boys last night. I had been dying to see it ever since I spied the poster a couple of weeks ago, resplendent with Tom Quad as it was. Indeed, a handful of wist-inducing shots of Oxford quite made my day. There was also the usual witty Bennett dialogue and a thorough-going air of Britishness which was very comforting and funny. I would have liked more early 80s pop music myself (they tantalized us with the opening bars of Dead or Alive's "Spin Me Round" but never came good on the rest, damn them). More importantly, however, the transition from play to screenplay really hadn't been completed successfully. Lots of the dialogue felt declamatory, and highlighted Hyntner's failure to exploit the opportunities the screen offers for showing the audience something rather than telling them; set-piece dialogues and group scenes were stilted, obviously designed for the formal artifice of the theatre, but grating in the realism of film. And crucially, almost all the shots were far too - well, stagey. The most disastrous manifestation of this was the truly ludicrous way in which the Boys themselves roamed around in a pack - it looked absurd, like a herd of animals (which I appreciate is a not inaccurate way of presenting a congregation of adolescent males of any species, but it was still preposterous).

And why were all eight of them going for Oxford and none for Cambridge? I object solely on the grounds of realism, of course: the foregoing being, on my lips, the essence of the rhetorical question...

Farmyard animals

2007-03-21T03:09:00.000Z

Who didn't have a toy farmyard when they were small? Well, Toronto has a toy farmyard with real live farm animals, and I went to it last Sunday. (Apparently there is also a big zoo somewhere for those whose childhood taste in toys tended in a more Noah's Ark sort of direction, but I am resistant to attractions which necessitate the use of public transport, which is why in seven months here I have never seen the lake.) Riverdale Farm is in a part of the city called Cabbagetown, which my guide, the incomparable Ms Guardiani, tells me is because it was first inhabited by Irish immigrants who didn't like to waste space and dug up their front lawns to plant veg. Now it is very chic, but also has a lot of quite low-rent and social housing behind the trendy main streets: a bit of an Islington, I suppose. (Though frankly this could describe virtually any suburb of London these days, since everywhere is "up and coming". Where on earth are the poor people going to live, that's what I'd like to know).
Here are some lovely baby cows, their spindly legs casting long shadows over the lingering snow in the late afternoon sunshine. They were very friendly. I liked them even more than the pregnant goats.

Baby

2007-03-20T04:13:00.000Z

I am unable to resist the temptation to post this picture of Alessandra, because it made me laugh. And for those of you who find baby photos boring, I can assure you that this much more interesting than anything I have done in the last two days, unless you are desperate to hear about such riveting things as which words I had to look up while reading the eighth book of Virgil's Aeneid, or how I ate some pasta and then got drunk. Honestly, I'm doing you a favour.

Evenings In

2007-03-19T04:03:00.000Z

I have had another fine weekend, this time of Evenings In. I like Evenings In a lot: slopping around someone's flat doesn't make you feel glamorous, it's true, but while the small at-home gathering furnishes little occasion for truly fabulous heels, there is equally little occasion for taxis, having to work out the bill, drinking drink you don't really like because it's all they have, shouting to hear the conversation, etc. Besides, for someone so fond of shoes, I must confess that I am never happier than when barefoot, and one of the failings of bars is that taking off your shoes and curling your feet up under you while you sip your wine just isn't quite the thing. Other advantages of people's homes are that there are no queues for the loo, or queues for the bar, and you can listen to whatever music you like. And you are guaranteed only the company you like: since it's not as though I ever talk to stangers in bars anyway (what are street corners for?), the noisome proximity of other people's inane conversations has limited appeal.
Of course this is all rather predictable from the transient perspective of a rather downcast Sunday evening: ask me again next Friday night. If I am making myself sound geriatric and proving that I am lazy as well as stuck in my ways, this will come as no surprise to anyone, especially considering that by my calculations I have not been clubbing since approximately April 2004. I got bored of it when every night seemed to turn into a rerun of my pretty gay friends telling manky straight chancers please to leave me alone. Sometimes you don't know a good thing, eh?

Tempting Fate

2007-03-13T19:49:00.000Z

On Friday night I had some beers and a bite to eat in a cool little bar along my street, and then to hear a band, chosen according to the time-honoured but highly unreliable rationale that someone's friend was in it. Not only was the band pretty good, but the act which came on afterwards was hilariously, uproariously and unintentionally stupid, which provided a comedic as well as a purely aesthetically satisfying aspect to the evening (the female lead singer kept doing these faux-naive baby-doll stylised dance moves, shaking her hair over her face, and, alarmingly, screaming; the guitarist, dressed in a Where's Wally?-style top and pudding-bowl fringe, would periodically shimmy to the front of the stage and back in a wide circular movement while exaggeratedly lip-syncing to the girl's lyrics with a deadpan face. Fantastic.) Then we went to another bar where I had fizzy lemonade (a drink which with my terrible lack of sophistication I frankly prefer to beer) and a good old blether with the ladies.

Alas, as I walked home I began to fear that I had jinxed Saturday night's dinner party by foolishly contriving to enjoy myself on Friday night, when, as any fule know, you can't have both. So I slept in till 11.30am to give myself minimum time for worrying (highly effective, no one frets while asleep). Then I shambled out into the mild midday to do my last-minute shopping of a) bread and b) wine, a combination which made me feel very wholesome and eucharistic. I will admit I felt less wholesome when I finally went to bed drunk at 6am, and not at all eucharistic when I subsequently missed Mass, but other satisfactory sensations arising from these divine substances were amply forthcoming: I don't complain about an 11-hour dinner party with a bevvy of charming gents, especially one that ends in hours of idle gossip, costly chocolates and bourbon.

Rising at a godless hour on Sunday (is it really breakfast at 1pm, even if it's toast and coffee?) I knew at once that I was bound, after such accumulated delights, to have a dismal time on the third and final day of the weekend (please don't anyone write in about how the weekend is only meant to be two days long - being an impovrsished student has to have its compensations). However, my coffee was interrupted by a phone call inviting me to the petting zoo, where I saw pregnant goats and funny chickens and a lovely cow who reminded me why Ox-Eyed is such a complimentary epithet in Homer, all in the new spring's glorious sunshine which justified (nay, enabled) a long bright walk there and back. To be whisked off to another dinner party afterwards, especially one hosted by a dashing chap with a dab hand in the kitchen who insisted on making us cocktails before, during and after every course, was surely more than anyone has a right to hope for.
I woke up puking at 4am after a bad mussel. Sigh. I suppose it wasn't the weekend any longer.

The Departed

2007-03-09T01:40:00.000Z

I have just come home from seeing this film and it is absolutely superb. I have rather let the Oscars pass me by, so I only discovered this evening that it is the Best Picture winner, and I don't know what else was nominated and almost certainly haven't seen any of them, but a piece of me is still determined that this justly won. I suppose I could spout a lot of my usual pseudy rot about how it was so ingenious and thoughtful and well crafted. But in truth what struck me about The Departed is precisely that it wasn't that "hmm, how though provoking" sort of film: it was in the vein and tradition of the simplest, most formulaic good cop/bad cop/ganster plot-driven efforts of which we've all seen hundreds. It was just immeasurably better. It is a little violent, I'm afraid (though I've seen worse: Scarface, anyone?), but it is also tremendously moving. I actually wanted to cry towards the end, but the friend next to me is the kind who would mock me if I did, so I didn't.

Highlights, surprisingly, included Leonardo diCaprio, the appeal of whom as either thespian or pin-up has always resolutely passed me by, but whose character was so involving that for 150 minutes I became one big ball of heart-wrenched attraction and sympathy and hope. No adult woman should admit this, but there was a point when someone ran her fingers through his hair and I wished it were me. (It reminds me of when I went to see Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet at 16 and found myself hoping it would work out for the pair of them at the end. Durrr...). The Departed also has some excellent tragi-comic and meta-cinematic moments. There's some pseudery for you to counterbalance the hormonefest. What did others think?

Man shall not live, etc.

2007-03-07T23:34:00.000Z

Last night I had a very delicious dinner in a French restaurant, complete with stinky garlicky snails and lovely pink rack of lamb and dense brambly Southern Regional wine. Yummy. I think there may have been two bottles of the vin, actually, but that only occured to me afterwards, since my powers of perception had already had the dampeners put on them by a couple of pre-prandial pints and a good sniff of gin and tonic. Once we had had our snails and lamb and pudding (delectable white chocolate mousse cake, I grieve to confess; the boys were classier and had the meltiest tarte au citron) we decided not to let the pre-dinner pints get lonely, and sent a couple more down after them. It was quite a night.

None of this, you will all be rushing to remind me, is very Lenten. Alas, you would be right. Now I realise that the tale I have just told is not exactly good evidence of this, but it is really not when I am out with the crowd that I find it difficult to stick to my Lenten disciplines. Nor is it when I am really hungry, nor when perusing the supermarket shelves, nor when it's cold outside (25 below yesterday and you could feel it too: thank goodness for the thock of the cork and a glass or two of Nature's Insulation). No, the time when it is hardest is when I have had an uneventful day and work has been a bit dull and I have no plans for the evening and I am missing people in Blighty (comme toujours) and I think "Oh, I'll just stop off and buy a sweetie (bottle of beer/doughnut/bag of crisps), then I'll have something nice to look forward to." Oh no you don't! Home to lentils and an apple, and be grateful, my girl!

Of course the whole reason for making eating a focus for Lenten privation, apart from tradition, is that since I for one am almost permanently either eating or thinking about eating, every time I do either of those things I shall be made to think of God. All very sensible, and indeed, it works. It must be owned, however, that after a long day in the library, contemplating the majesty of the divine Creator of the universe, while highly satisfying on one level, is not quite as immediate a comfort as, say, sitting in your jimjams guzzling a big bar of hazlenut chocolate. Festive occasions such as last night don't get a look in: if I get through an evening like this one without a trip to Dominion for a packet of biscuits I shall consider that a far greater temptation has been far more impressively withstood.

The Book of Alternative Services Rite wrecked my Sunday

2007-03-04T21:50:00.000Z

I had not realised how steeped in High Churchery I had become until I arrived at Mass this morning. "Hmm," I thought, "no incense, how strange." Then I thought " What on earth are they doing with this psalm?". And then "These reponses are all wrong... hang on... NOOOOOOOOOO....! It's the modern rite!" Absolutely horrible, I could barely listen. And what on earth have they done to the Lord's Prayer? I'm afraid that at about the time they announced the peace (complete with ghastly stilted handshaking and forced uncomfortable smiles), I was forced to leave. This put me in a bad mood. At least I got some extra Horace reading done, I suppose. Now I will have to go to Evensong to get my weekly dose of solemn ritual. I should add that there was no warning at all in last week's intimations that the slight change of the Mass time would also involve a very major change of Mass liturgy, and I'm sure I can't be the only person whose Sunday has been ruined by this bit of sneakery on the part of the Rector. I do hope they aren't trying to convert us to these barbaric services: give me incense or give me death, oppressors.

Dydd Dewi Sant

2007-03-01T23:32:00.000Z

That's "St David's Day" to us poor non-Welsh-speakers, and today is the day. I am half Welsh, but you wouldn't know because I don't sound Welsh at all: what I call Stealth Welsh. With a little investigation one discovers an extraordinary number of us Stealth Welsh around the place; so many, in fact, that Rhodri Morgan, the First Minister of Wales, has sweetly sent a Festive Message (hyperlink) to Welsh people living overseas. He says "Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus a llwyddiannus dros ben i chi gyd", which translates roughly as "Isn't this Labour government just perfectly marvellous?"* which I'm sure is exactly what I and others had been longing to hear on this day of national pride in our ancient culture.
Elsewhere I found a website usefully informing me that "the celebration usually entails singing and eating". This knowledge made me feel very proud and loyal as I was able to reflect with satisfaction that I both sing and eat every single day, and not only on St David's Day itself. What patriot could do more?
My favourite fact about St David is that his mother was called Non, a name which to my puerile mind has almost inexhaustible comic possibilities (quite incidentally, the philologically minded may care to know that Welsh doesn't really have a word for "no". Instead you negate the sentence you're replying to, truncate and restate it). I was delighted, however, to discover the motto associated with this 6th Century Abbot: "Gwnewch y pethau bychan", or "Do the little things", which is a fine thought to take away on a Lent day. Do the little things, indeed. Mony a mickle maks a muckle, after all.

*It actually reads 'I wish you a happy St David's Day', though if you read the rest of his touching missive you will see that my cynicism is by no means misplaced.

Speaking too soon

2007-03-01T22:43:00.000Z

Remember that thaw? Hmm, not so much. In fact there is a blizzard blowing so severe that I have just taken the tube home although it is only one stop (and a stupidly short stop at that: none of your end-of-the-Metropolitan-line 20 minute jobs), and although it is only 5pm. The speaker-meeting at the department has been cancelled because the speaker can't get in from the airport. The university has officially closed as of an hour ago. The tube was so packed I had to get the second train, a thing which has never happened to me here (and evidently never to any other Torontonians, either, judging by their bemused and stilted inefficiency at packing into tube carriages: move down, for goodness' sake!). Annoyingly, yesterday was glorious, with dazzling sunshine and a blue and perfectly cloudless sky, whereupon I made the hasty judgement that it was spring. Which it's not. Spring, you see, would involve the kind of weather which makes going out in a mini-skirt and open-backed shoes perfectly reasonable; freak blizzards exist to teach the vain and optimistic that moonboots will be necessary till June.

Anyway, I don't know why I'm posting all this, since if you are in Toronto you probably don't need my blog to alert you to the dense and whirling snowstorm outside, and if you're not in Toronto (and congratulations on that, by the way) then the transport difficulties of a remote colonial settlement are simply so much otiose confirmation of the superiority of life in the Old Country. Apparently we're getting torrents of freezing rain later. Yum.

harumph

2007-03-01T13:26:00.000Z

Apologies for silence - the web interface of this blog failed me for a few days, as did anything at all to report. I had a rubbish weekend, in which I went to bed with Sophocles (not a hot lay) not only on Friday night but also on Saturday, which was like taking a slightly sore spot and whacking it with a mallet. To add a salt and vinegar crisp to the cold sore of this spurning, among the excuses proferred was one which confirms that I am now officially more boring than Ovid. Good grief. This is what happens when, however nice your friends are, you only have twelve of them. At home in Britain I used to lament that I had so many friends I didn't always see them all in a year. I don't think we're in Kansas any more.
Anyway, Saturday was the kind of dismal solitary evening for which, as any single woman knows, the only remedy is a huge bar of chocolate and a bottle of wine. Even recourse to this was barred me, however, as it's Lent, and I have renounced that sort of splurging, so I satisfied myself with some psalms and an early night. It's really not the life I imagined for myself at 26, to be honest. It's not that I resent the Lenten business (I find it very invigorating, in fact, and it's astonishing how easy it is to old back from the pasties when you have A Reason), but I do think I ought to have more of a social life at university than I did when I lived and worked in a small girls' boarding school in rural Oxfordshire.
My very old and very dear friend James rang on Sunday night and we spoke for hours and hours, which made me as happy as I'd been all week. And also twice as sad. Why am I here again?

Ash Wednesday

2007-02-23T02:35:00.000Z

I went to a rather nice Mass yesterday, with the nowadays obligatory but nevertheless rather nice Allegri Miserere and the Byrd 5-part. Unfortunately I managed to miss half the service by the unusual expedient of having done nothing whatsoever all day except sit aorund waiting to go to Mass. Am I the only person who is only ever late when they are early? Being in good time is the utter death knell to punctuality in my life. I get it into my head that I have plenty of time, and then I always think I can fit one more bit of pottering in before it's time to go, and I can't, and I'm late. Whereas if time is pressing on me then I hop about to make sure I'm where I'm meant to be and that I know where I'm going and when and have all my bits and doings. Leisure is my enemy. Roll on the end of Reading Week (a sort of midterm holiday - I love the idea that in the life of a University, "Reading Week" should signify a break from the norm).
Right, I'm about to do it again, but this time with sour apple martinis in the bar down the street. I have been home for two hours, and now I need to be there in 17 minutes and I'm not even dressed. It is actually ridiculous.

A thaw

2007-02-21T14:54:00.000Z

I got up yesterday and got dressed and went outside and it was warm. By which I mean that it was not cold. I walked to brunch (what sort of brunch joint doesn't sell pancakes on Pancake Day? What sort of brunch joint doesn't sell pancakes at all?) through streets running with water, although there neither was nor had been any rain. Very odd. Shopowners were out poking their canvas awnings with sticks to dislodge the melted snow before it dripped on potential custom. Passers-by were dodging the puddles. The drains ran and the mountains of snow piled up along the edges of every road and pavement shrank and thinned, and the sun was shining, and it felt like spring.
It put me in in mind of Horace Ode 4.7, which begins
"Diffugere niues", " The snows have scattered" and which A.E.Housman famously considered "the most beautiful poem in ancient literature". It is rather lovely, but not, I think, as lovely as Odes 1.4. I am conscious of the danger of this blog becoming tediously rebarbative to non-classicists, but on the truly astonishing upliftingness of spring, Horace has it nailed.
Besides which, thinking about this poem is an accurate reflection of What I Have Been Up To, since I have just spent the last five hours making a translation of it. Just for fun. I am not putting it up here, however, since making other people read your poetry is like making them smell your socks. If anyone is interested I'll send it to them.

Soluitur acris hiems grata uice ueris et Fauoni
trahuntque siccas machinae carinas,
ac neque iam stabulis gaudet pecus aut arator igni
nec prata canis albicant pruinis.
Iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente luna
iunctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes
alterno terram quatiunt pede, dum grauis Cyclopum
Volcanus ardens uisit officinas.
Nunc decet aut uiridi nitidum caput impedire myrto
aut flore, terrae quem ferunt solutae;
nunc et in umbrosis Fauno decet immolare lucis,
seu poscat agna siue malit haedo.
Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
regumque turris. O beate Sesti,
uitae summa breuis spem nos uetat inchoare longam.
Iam te premet nox fabulaeque Manes
et domus exilis Plutonia, quo simul mearis,
nec regna uini sortiere talis
nec tenerum Lycidan mirabere, quo calet iuuentus
nunc omnis et mox uirgines tepebunt.

Malpractice

2007-02-20T06:15:00.000Z

Update: the patient with tonsilitis turns out to have glandular fever. So much for Dr Scarlet. I am beating a humbled retreat back into the uninfectious (not to say uncommunicable) realm of classical philology, from which standpoint the most pertinent contribution I have to make is the quite harmless one that "Mono" (as glandular fever is called on these shores) is a pleasingly ironic name for the Kissing Disease.

Niece Again

2007-02-18T22:44:00.000Z

I haven't bored everyone with pictures of Alessandra recently, so here she is. Hopelessly cute, no? When she was born we asked my brother whom she looked like, and he said she looked like me, which I do hope turns out not to be the case. Anyway, it's plainly not true even now, as I was by common assent an unlovely infant. One old amour called a picture of me aged 3 months "grotesque". When mother met Alessandra she said "She looks just like Scarlet when she was born, only MUCH prettier!" It's official: a face not even a mother could love.
Anyway, I have started writing letters to Alessandra, which even I, in my obsessional auntly doting, realise is a bit strange, since like most seven week old babies she can't read. Never mind, she may as well have an early introduction to her Zia's eccentricities, and better letters than stilettoes or vin. My darling.

Tristia Ex Toronto

2007-02-18T21:55:00.000Z

I have just been reminded of Ovid, more's the pity, by Scottish Friend, who is grumbling about what rot it is. I wasn't able to offer him any consolation, since Ovid reminds me of the creep at a party who always thinks he can improve on the punchline of other people's jokes.
[Incidentally, Canadians have a similar problem, to judge by the greetings cards available here. For instance, a few weeks after I got here I was looking for a birthday card and was delighted to see some decorated with Gary Larson "The Far Side" cartoons, which my learned reader will be aware have rather witty one-line captions beneath them. However, these versions had been defaced by terrible lame quips on the inside of the card. Either the original bon mots are so subtle as to evade the grasp of the Canadian greeting-card market, or else there is some dreadful little Ovid working for Hallmark Canada Inc. who hovers, blue pencil in hand, over each tight, cleverly-wrought cartoon, scoffing "Call that a punchline? This is a punchline...". However that may be, it makes buying cards a trying task. There are always plenty of those bland ones of vases of flowers and sleeping cats and what have you, but it frequently happens that a reflective-looking bowl of peonies, a pair lace curtains billowing at a sunlit window etc do not strike the note one is after. Stylish cards, undefiled by inane addenda, are at such a premium that it is no wonder they cost about seven dollars each (a sum which will buy you a pretty decent lunch in this city, before tax).]
Anyway, as I was saying. The observant may have noticed that the subtitle of my blog has changed. The new title is a hilarious malapropism on the title of one of Ovid's very worst poems, the Tristia Ex Ponto (Sorrows From The Sea-Side), a load of repetitive self-indulgent whining about how much the poet likes Rome and how much he hates the freezing, wet, desolate dump he now finds himself in, devoid of culture and beauty and all his books, and how terribly hard done by he is and just wants to go home. The new title was suggested to me by Scottish Friend. I hope he wasn't making a point.

Call that a feast day?

2007-02-15T00:13:00.000Z

Well, that was Valentine's Day. I realise that I'm not meant to care and should by this advanced age have cultivated the appropriate air of thorough-going disdain for the whole business. I haven't, of course, (maturity? moi?) and am gnashing my teeth with ill-temper at having received not one single solitary card, e-card, or even text-message. The only missives I had all day were from my mother, telling me about presents and pestering for news of similar largesse falling in my lap, and from my granny, telling me all about her roses, chocolates and lovely dinner out. Can it be right that my aged forebears revel in luxury and bask in adoration while I, a flourishing maiden in my prime, should trip downstairs to discover my matutinal doormat decked with not so much as a bank statement? That my evening hold nothing more romantic than a bag of crunchy cheetoes? That the sole hint of mystery in my day consist of attempting to decode Aeschylus' Agamemnon? (and quite mysterious enough it was, too).
Worse, not even my trusty exes came through, although there are at least a couple who can normally be relied on to do the good-ex thing and remind you that though it was never meant to be, you remain a goddess to them. Worse and worse, the morning's class was on the incomparable Catullus 64, which, while its brilliance cannot but be uplifting, could have done with being a bit less about weddings for my taste. That said, the real message of the whole work seems to be that if you are a nice girl and have a divinely and legally sanctioned wedding to a handsome and worthy hero, your issue will cause fathomless grief and wholescale bloodshed. If, on the other hand, you are an over-sexed harlot, you will devastate the bonds of family, law and public reputation, and cause wretched heartache to self and/or to the generation's greatest poet. So that's love, then. Perhaps I was better off with the cheetoes after all.

Dr Scarlet

2007-02-12T02:57:00.000Z

Well, apologies for silence, but I haven't attempted to get any vaccinations for tropical diseases, nor have I housemates whose searing madness causes them secretly to decant my half-drunk coffee when I leave the room. And I have nothing to report from the weekend since no one has been sick on me recently. However, since sickness of various kinds is plainly theme du jour, I can report that I seem to have become the Classics Department's answer to House. Evidently the fame of my nursing exploits has led to a swift promotion.
Anyway, I had had the impression that the Woodbury Library was a small repository of philological resources, but this is clearly a trick of the elaborately wrought classical decor: in fact it appears to be the consulting room of some sort of General Practitioner who, I ween, looks not unlike me. Perhaps someone should replace the sign which must have gone missing from the door, and thereby spare the confusion of innocent graduate researchers into ancient languages who amble in for a quick squiz in Der Neue Pauly and instead find a wild-haired Scotswoman inspecting the anatomy of one or another comely youth. It turns out that I can diagnose tonsilitis, conjunctivitis and whatever it is that's making Hubristes' left knee all creaky, but if anyone would like to vary the diet then I can be found in there most days. I like to seem to be reading Hesiod, but in truth I am just waiting for my next case.
I do note, however, that everyone who has so far demanded that I fondle their neck, gaze into their eyes or stroke their knee has been a well-favoured young man; which, since they can have had no reasonable expectation of meeting with any medical expertise whatsoever, is rather intriguing. I wonder if I should abandon the high-minded pretence that anyone really wants me for my subtle manipulation of -mi verbs or cunning appreciation of Virgilian thematics and set up shop as a quack. I'd still get to be Dr Scarlet, but with a prescription pad. Oh, the fun...

And while I'm at it...

2007-02-07T04:56:00.000Z

I frankly consider this to be among the finest things I have ever read. I have my friend Ben, the other half of my soul, to thank for this discovery.
The Vastest Things are Those We May Not Learn by Mervyn Peake
The vastest things are those we may not learn.
We are not taught to die, nor to be born,
Nor how to burn
With love.
How pitiful is our enforced return
To those small things we are the masters of.

More emoting about poetry

2007-02-07T03:37:00.000Z

My friend James has a theory that it is better not to do academic research into the writers whom one really loves. Similarly, my grandfather once said that at eighteen he fell in love with Yeats, but would no more discuss him with another man than he would his wife. I took issue with my beloved bro when he first reported, and supported, this latter dictum, but I think I was wrong.
It is true that I have had worlds upon worlds of beauty and truth and pathos, not to mention artistry and skill and brilliance, uncovered for me by being "taught" the works of certain authors; layers of meaning upon which, I am confident, I would not have happened unaided. For these I am more than grateful. However, there exists (for me, at least) a class of writing which speaks to one too intimately to wish to have it mishapen by the push and pull of academic rigour. Of course, one gains a great deal by the application of intellectual scrutiny. But a very different kind of satisfaction is also to be derived from certain works of literature, something akin to - or rather, something that is - emotion. And this you wish to dissect no more than you would wish to dissect the wordless joy of an embrace.
I do not allege that poetic effects add nothing to my apprecation of the sentiment (that would be positively nonsensical). I merely mean that mounting a laborious and closely-argued case about the historical importance or counter-cultural atrificiality of, say, Catullus XI does not cause me to find it more or less affecting. Of course, I can say many interesting things about the poem and why I think it fine, and that is one real and meaningful level of response, and worthwhile. But my deepest reponse to it is not rational and therefore is not open to rational analysis: I cannot *defend* my love of Catullus XI, or Catullus VIII, or Catullus LXVIII, any more logically than I can defend my love of my mother. I can point to admirable things about both, but as anyone knows who has ever loved anyone or anything, admirable qualities are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the kindling of that emotion.
So I could write criticism of these poems, but it woudl never say the things I would really want to say: that the fourth line of Catullus CI makes hot tears start to my eyes; that Catullus VIII evokes in me a longing to be loved with terrible passion. This all says a very great deal more about me than about Catullus. Which is why it may conceivably interest readers of my blog, but not, I think, readers of the Journal of Roman Studies.
(Catullus, btw, is the reason I am a classicist. Poems VII, XIII and LXXVI, specifically. Ah, to be 15 again.)

At least it was a leather skirt

2007-02-05T03:22:00.000Z

It is 4.30am and you are walking home alone through the stark streets of a concrete city. It is -14 degrees and the wind is bitter and blowing right in your face. In the manner of Saturday nights, you are so shod and clothed as to require a taxi. There are no taxis. Your stilettoes pinch and your favourite leather skirt is covered in someone else's vomit. You are carrying bulging carrier bags full of linen soiled with someone else's vomit. Your hands, clothes, hosiery and hair smell of bleach and of someone else's vomit. You have spent the last four hours dealing with someone else's vomit. You have not slept for twenty-two hours or eaten for thirty, you still have Friday night's hangover, your legs have lost all feeling owing to the cold, and when you get back it takes another two hours to fall asleep. If anyone can beat that for the end of a night out, I would like to hear about it. And I missed Mass.

Why follow the crowd?

2007-02-02T02:26:00.000Z

I had what will surely turn out to be the nicest half hour of my week yesterday, when a fellow graduate student asked me to hold her three-month-old baby while she popped over to the library. I wandered round the ground floor of the department for twenty minutes singing to this delectable infant, and afterwards, as I stood talking to his mother, he fell asleep on me, which I regard as a something of a compliment as well as a pleasure. Luscious. My brother put my niece on the phone to talk to me on Saturday and she made very pleasing gurgles and squeaks, out of which the words "hello auntie" are surely only a few developmental months away. Some friends of mine in Britain have just announced that their first bambino/a is due in the summer; two engagements have been announced since I got back; I have been reading book 6 of the Odyssey; and I am corresponding with an old friend about the dress I will wear at her wedding in July, in which I am cast, perhaps presciently, as The Bridesmaid.
Meanwhile, I continue to eke out my fertile years in a dusty library, pursuing my studies. Studies in a completely obsolete verse genre. In an elaborately artifical literary tradition. In a proverbially long-dead language. Belonging to an ancient and long-extinct culture. And the subject of my investigations? Presentations of thwarted maternity. You couldn't make it up.

Nuptials

2007-01-30T01:01:00.000Z

Doesn't this sound like the coolest wedding ever?
"Oxford registr office for the Civil Partnership, with a few friends and family (less than 30) - then a restaurant lunch for them all. Then - phase two - off to a barn 'n' bar place in deepest rural oxfordshire, with a bit of river, woodland, lawn etc for champagne and nibbles for EVERYONE, followed by a druid wedding in a circle under the trees filled with golden candles and red geraniums, with incense and someone singing hildegarde of bingen and conducted by Justine in something utterly gorgeous. Then back to the barn for stand-up organic fish and chips with wooden forks, a free bar and a bloody great disco."

So, you will glean that I recently had the delightful news that one of my best friends is getting married and that I am sick with excitement about it. He has been with his boyfriend for ages, and they are hopelessly happy together in a really straightforward way. I have always particularly envied is their excellent ability to take one another's foibles with breezy good humour and patience. This may, after all, be what one really needs in life. Sex etc. are all very nice, but someone whose exact brand of calm is the seamless counterpoint to your particular variety of mania, or whatever, is a rare and fine thing indeed, and, crucially someone with whom you can live. Not to mention the burst of love and gratitude you feel when somebody who knows you perfectly identifies your terrible failings to your face and makes you laugh out loud at them. It needn't be an inamorato, of course, but how delicious the thrill of recognition when it is. Congratulations, B and M: be happy and dig the garden.

Snow

2007-01-27T03:56:00.000Z

The long-awaited winter has finally come, and we have snowfall. It's hard to believe that snow is a good sign because it means a rise in the temperature. But so it proves: the -22 degrees in which I walked to work this morning had shot up by all of ten or fifteen degrees by the time I was walking home. The price to pay is that you get damp as well as just freezing, your bag goes soggy, the "sidewalk" is treacherous and the roads are instantaneously full of murky slush with which the ankles of the unwary are deluged by passing cars. I will say, though, that it is otherwise picturesque in the extreme: when the snow began I was in a large-windowed room, and the gentle drop and whirl of the white flakes ouside was quite mesmerising.
Not picturesque, however, is my get-up. Naturally I refuse to make any concession in style. In order, therefore, to avoid hypothermia and death, I am obliged to supplement my little dresses and skirty outfits with: two pairs of tights, a vest, a petticoat, an additional cardigan, trousers over the tights, a big coat, woolly socks, moonboots, a hat, one or two scarves, and gloves. (Actually, strike the gloves: it is too cold for them. If you wear gloves your fingers start to go numb starting with your pinkies, and the only way I could get home without frostbite tonight was to ball my fingers up in the palm bit of the glove as if they were mittens. Easier just to wear mittens, really.) So I spend the first ten minutes of the working day alarming other users of the department by my frantic disrobing. The wearying prospect of having to put it all back on to pop out to the bank and then strip it all off again on my return is (mirabile dictu) actually enough to keep me at my desk working all day; equally remarkable is how dramatically the urgent need for confectionery wanes when you have to change your shoes to go and get it. Just as well I'm not at university in Tahiti.

Homer

2007-01-26T05:54:00.000Z

I have been unusually quiet since I got back to Toronto, which is a good sign, because it means I am too well-occupied to hang about online honing my deathless prose. Last term spending two hours blogging I regularly considered preferable to the alternative, i.e. two hours spent on Polybius; and who will disagree? This term I am being kept off the internet by the fact that it is my delicious duty to read the best poem ever composed by man (at least in any of the four and a half languages I read, which I concede may not be the final word there. However.) I have been in seventh heaven, not a description usually associated with a routine that involves rising at 6am, but this is a positive pleasure for the sake of starting my day with a few more lines of Homer before breakfast. To say that The Iliad is brilliant would be like saying that Miles Davis can play the trumpet. On the other hand, I don't know if I could say anything about quite why The Iliad is so marvellous that wouldn't sound ingenuous and affected. Answers on a postcard.
The dismal thing is that my terrible didactic streak and offensive glee make me desperate to get everyone else to read it and see what I mean. But I don't know if it's any good in English. It probably doesn't come off the worst of any classical work in translation (the Aeneid surely takes that laurel), but I do think that the limpid beauty and deceptive simplicity of the Greek do a lot to make, say, the battle scenes palatable. Not to mention that scenes of any emotion come over crushingly flat once you translate them. I'm told there's a similar problem with Pushkin. Then you have the issue that people won't render certain phrases the way you think they ought, so that the greatest half-line in all of Homer (Iliad 1.47) should, as far as I'm concerned, be "and his coming was like the night" and I get quite cross with translators insufficiently telepathic to anticipate my disgust at their ineptitudes.
Anyway, I doubt I could do better in any sustained way, so I will spare you translations of my personally compiled florilegia (really, what's wrong with me?) and just say that if you can read Greek you must go to the OCT and read the last 200 lines of Iliad VI this very minute; and if you can't read Greek then be grateful that by the end of term I will be back to gnashing my teeth over things I don't understand. And blogging furiously...

Contact Sport

2007-01-18T11:57:00.000Z

I have recently become a wearer of contact lenses, and suddenly I too can see what I actually look like. This is not as vain a comment as it sounds - I have been wearing glasses since I was fifteen, so the thrill of discovering that trees actually have individual leaves and branches and are not just an undifferentiated mass of green is some time in the past. The discovery of of how I appear with correctly focused eyesight and without glasses all over my face is, however, a revelation. It's quite extraordinary: I get up in the morning looking fine, poke myself in the eye a couple of times, and bam! when I look in the mirror again I have big bags under my eyes. I suppose it might have been better to start this contact lense carry on before there were actually any wrinkles or grey hair to see, but never mind - now I can keep a good careful track of them.
When I first got contacts about a fortnight ago I thought I'd never be able to use the blasted things without spending twenty agonizing minutes grimacing goggle-eyed and scrunch-faced into a magnifying shaving mirror every morning and twice as long at night. Now I whack the things in with no difficulty and, I am proud to report, a minimum of clothing fluff adherents. I still didn't like taking the out much, until I discovered the trick at about midnight last night. Now, why opticians give you all this tosh about how contacts aren't suitable for people whose "lifestyle" puts them at a high risk of reeling home guttered after 16 hours and dropping into bed with their poor dehydrated corneas encased in clingfilm I don't know. These are exactly the people for whom they are perfect, because the easy way to trouble-free contact lense removal, I can conclusively state, is to be drunk. No better time to poke yourself in the eye than when your reactions are so slow that someone could offer to pluck them out altogether and you'd be one eye down and one to go before you had the presence of mind to wonder whether it was a good idea.

Niece

2007-01-07T15:01:00.000Z

This is my niece Alessandra, born last Saturday in Milan. She is four days old here, and being held by her daddy (my brother). I don't know what else to say about her, really: either you have had the transfiguring experience of holding a tiny newborn for the first time and falling hopelessly, irrevocably in love, in which case you've no need of my descriptions; or else you haven't, in which case you're probably not interested in hearing me go on about it. She is the coolest and loveliest thing I have ever seen.

Declamatory

2006-12-08T03:38:00.000Z

Someone used this word today to describe my blogging, which I hope was a generic critique rather than a stylistic one. I suppose he may have been alluding to what my friend Bo calls my "Queen of the Night" moments. It is true, I think, that ire and indignation make better copy but I do try not to give the impression that I sit over here cultivating hypertension, so please don't start me on the banks.
In any case, I am devoid of bombast today. Instead I am giving thanks for the genius that is the capsule wardrobe, a fine thing in general but one which never, ever comes in more useful than when packing: it literally saves me days of thought and planning. It also enables me to buy expensive basics in colours other than black or camel; hence Saturday's investment in (steel yourselves) moonboots and a puffer jacket in vibrant red. I know, I can't believe it either. They are not exactly elegant. The very best I can hope for is a kind of cosy cute appeal from my rosy face poking out of the fluffy-edged hood and the childlike shiny welly quality of the patent moonbot toes, and even this hope really is pushing it. So I balked considerably at the purchase, but in the end chic black wool overcoats just don't keep the cold out like a big red duvet, as demonstrated by the fact my legs went numb on the way home today. It was only zero degrees. It goes down to 30 below in February. What can I do? The Scarlet Downie Combo is not a thing of beauty, but looking like an inflated tomato with tree trunk legs is, on balance, probably fractionally more attractive than frostbite. I just keep telling myself: shivering is never a good look.

Rootless Wireless

2006-12-07T03:56:00.000Z

I have just been listening to the Archers' Omnibus. Nothing so strange in that: assiduous Archers' listening is one of many markers of my determined descent into middle age, which by this criterion began when I was eleven (first ever plotline: Lizzie's abortion thanks to Cam the Cad. Gripping stuff). However, you will notice that it is not, as I write this, Sunday morning between 10 and 11.30am, so I have done a terrible thing and deviated from my strict regime of replicating scientifically the conditions of normal life by "tuning in" during the proper hours. Worse, I have realised that if it is possible to listen to the Archers Omnibus on my laptop during, say, a Wednesday evening in Toronto, then it is equally possible to listen to it on my laptop on a Wednesday evening while in the UK. This is a very wrong thing indeed.
The purpose of the Archers Omnibus is manifold. Firstly, it provides reassurance that Sunday morning has come around as expected and that you are still alive (there is sometimes room for serious doubt on this question on Sunday mornings). Secondly, it gives you something to listen to in the bath (Desert Island Discs is no good for this: you have overslept, you idle beast, DID is for making breakfast). Thirdly, it tells me that I have got the bed to myself for ninety minutes (my boyfriends having either despised the Archers and leapt from my embraces at the very sound of the theme tune, or else loved the Archers but made the error of being a church organist and so had to go to work). Fourthly, it allows you to smile wistfully at the parts you have already listened to during the previous week (ah, yes, here's the part where David attacks the treehouse) and reflect with alarm on what you could possibly have been doing which caused you to miss those parts you haven't heard (gosh, this church fete must have happened in Friday's episode when I was busy discussing Frege with that chap who spilt the snuff box over me, etc).
None of these offices of the Archers Omnibus is fulfilled by the sacrilegious practice of listening to it on a Wednesday evening. Doing so can only be viewed as a sign of the decline of all standards of moral and civilised life as we know it, reminiscent of the catastrophic demise of the Roman Republic (favourite line from undergrad marking this month: "It was not only perfumes which corrupted Rome, but also new ideas."). I think it is as well for my soul that I am within hours of my return to the land of reason, order and slavery to the vagaries of BBC scheduling. The laptop stays here.

Uhtceare

2006-12-06T13:45:00.000Z

I wondered if I couldn't sleep last night because I had had a couple of glasses of wine, but that doesn't normally stop me (or, indeed, have any noticeable effect at all - I'm made of sterner stuff than that). More likely it was the fault of being woken at about 2am by the most infernal racket on the street. Since I quickly diganosed that this was a snow plough, I suppose I had better start getting used to being roused in this nefarious manner. Howbeit, I couldn't get back to sleep by any device whatever, which was most frustrating. I had the same problem when I worked at St Marys, when, although I lived in a little village in rural Oxfordshire, the articulated lorries and other traffic zooming down the hill outside my window would jolt me awake at about 5am, and after an hour or so of silent furious cursing and wishing the most immoderate punishments of motorcyclists, I had to accept I was up for the day. I used to have to go to Streatham (a highly populous and insalubrious district of South London) for a decent night's sleep. No joke.
Last night was the same gig - once woken, no hope of return. I did my Achilles routine of shifting around into every possible position in the hope that the direction I was facing would make some miraculous difference, but nothing. Once you've strted that carry-on you really are awake, and that's fatal: because then the uhtceare start. This fine word is an Anglo-Saxon coinage, a hapaxlegomenon from an anonymous poem called The Wife's Lament. Uhtceare is usually translated as something like "worries around dawn," but I tend to think of it as "that 5am feeling." You know the drill: it's 5am, you can't sleep and every single last tiny insignificant and non-existent anxiety, as well as every huge, important and genuinely pressing one, is crowding in on your mind. No sooner do you manage to chase one away than the next pops up, even uglier and more irrational than the last. They are all distorted and magnified massively because the godless time of day provides no hope of any context, reasoned response, or ability to do anything whatsoever about them, which causes usually manageable but nevertheless deep-seated panic. You have no way of breaking the cycle. You have no perspective. You have no further chance of slumber. What you have is uhtceare.
After a trawl through the standard litany of exams, the trip I haven't packed for, money, dead cat; exams, the trip I haven't packed for, money, dead cat, etc, I realised that I wasn't going to get to sleep, put the light on, and read Hard Times for an hour or so. Not Dickens best. And in no way preferable to a decent night's kip. But better than lying awake thinking of exams, the trip I haven't packed for, money, or my dead and much-missed cat.

St Andrew's Day

2006-12-01T01:06:00.000Z

Today being the Feast of St Andrew, patron Saint of the Scots, I expected Scot-loving Canada to be a flurry of saltires. Not a bit of it: no haggis on special offer, no whisky displays in the LCBO window. This is odd because Scots away from Scotland tend to be even more sentimental about Scotland than Scots at home, and that really is saying something. I do find it quite curious how people who have never even visited Scotland can be so jealous in their attachment to the idea that this is their nationality. I am baffled in a different way by the (many) Scots who ship out at the drop of a Higher and are never seen north of the border in their adult lives again except to go home for Christmas and yet their nationalistic zeal and defensiveness rips strips off the people who - my god! - actually live there. I don't suppose it is anything about my own home country in particular: I'm sure if I knew more about Russian diaspora, or Greek (to name but two nations also patronized by Scotland's favourite apostle) then the same would be true, though Scots do seem notorious for this.
I can't put my finger on why I find it irks me so much, since I am greatly in favour both of cultural diversity and of having a healthy affection for one's roots. Yet I still think it is a bit cheap to make your life in Oxford or Plymouth or Sydney or whatever, and then demand everyone do obeisance to your deep-seated patriotism for somewhere else. And it is easy to love a country that only exists in the tea-soaked madeleine, or perhaps deep-fried mars bar, of your imagination. Being one of millions around the world who gets a frisson of nostalgia from the sound of bagpipes is not at all the same as living and breathing all that is good, bad and indifferent about the nation, day in, day out. So I really do not fetishize Scotland, perhaps because I still spend enough time there to be fully conscious of its many failings, but also because I think it irrational as well as sentimental to maintain its intrinsic and mystical superiority over the place where I actually choose to make my life. I am very fond of the old place, but not because it's better. Just because it's home.

Puppy Again

2006-11-29T04:51:00.000Z

This is David's new dog, Eddie. He collected her from the breeder yesterday. There is some concern over how the energetic young pointer pictured here will get along with the in situ pet Daphne the Tortoise, but this potentially difficulty has been deferred by putting Daph into hibernation until February, by which time Eddie may have calmed down. Anyway, if it gets ugly then Daphne can always call on her time-honoured survival strategy of disappearing into the undergrowth. So effective is this tactic that it once occasioned our being extremely late for a cocktail party after spending a whole afternoon desperately angling shaving mirrors and poking broomhandles under the garden shed because David was convinced she must be in there. Several increasingly fraught hours later, after the apparent failure of all attempts to entice her out with portions of brussels sprout, we were just beginning the process of removing all the contents of the shed with a view to dismantling it completely to retrieve the allegedly trapped tortoise, when I found her hiding in a patch of dandelions. Daphne had a mate once, called Niles, but he was eaten by a fox during another ill-starred recreational garden excursion. Let's hope the dog fares better.

Written on the Body

2006-11-28T01:40:00.000Z

Would you ever get a tattoo? (This is the first thought worthy of the name I've had for a week or so, hence my uncharacteristic blog silence.) I considered it for the first time recently when I came across a couple of lines of poetry which I have known for years but suddenly read with new eyes, and wondered how it would be to have them indelibly etched on some hidden bit of me. I also made a new friend who has many tattoos and piercings and who looks rather beautiful for it. Or maybe he's just beautiful.
So, Tom's post about things one would never do was timely. Not long ago tattooing would definitely have been high up my list, along with going to bed with more than one person at a time, drinking milk from the carton and becoming a management consultant. (Incidentally, it is very hard to think of things one would never do. Most are criminal, or obviously grossly immoral, which is surely not the point; otherwise I can only think of things which would only arise out of some kind of psychological distress, and are therefore outside the relevant realm of volition. Just about everything else is something I would conceivably do, and/or have probably done, but am embarrassed about. I don't think this counts. We could all claim never to listen to Radio 1 or that we would never cheat on our partner, but the first case is just snobbery and the second mere optimism. The project seems to be designed to highlight quite specific moral convictions, of which I have none, or to give an opportunity to air high-mindedness, which I am not going to take. Can anyone do better?)
I digress. Tattoos haven't appealed to me in the past. I have never had a rebellious streak, phase or even idea. I am a physical coward. I am ineffably vain and never fancied my lovely skin sullied with grubby blue-green smudges. I have an absurd but residual anxiety that they are essentially downmarket. I am easily bored.
I have also never quite understood the need to impose these marks of ownership on a body which, for better or worse, is plainly mine in any case. True, I don't think of my body as being *me* in any real sense, but it is the only one I have, and satisfyingly and distinctively mine in all kinds of ways. But then, if one is happy for one's body to be a physical testament to the cumulative story of one's life, I wonder how considered and deliberate markers and modifications might be different from or worse than stretch marks and appendix scars and wrinkles, muscles you did or didn't tone, weight you gained or lost. Why not a message, or an image, which is both as ephemeral and as permanent as a healed scar?
But amid all these good reasons not to bother, here, if anyone is interested, is the poem which makes me want to do it anyway. We can't be wholly sure about all the words: the first line is fairly secure, but the second is a mess of textual conjecture. As one critic has it, "While the statues at Olympia are beautiful in their broken state, with only empty air to suggest what has been lost, it is difficult to leave the lovely first line of this couplet sitting atop a pile of ruins. We can only hope for Sappho's indulgence."Evening Star, you bring back everything the shining Dawn scattered,
You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.

The Science of Sleep

2006-11-23T04:08:00.000Z

Shame on the Bloor: I have just wasted five dollars on going to see this film, which is a right old pile of poo. It was billed a comedy, but it isn't funny, unless a couple of men dropping a piano down some stairs actually is hilarious, as all the fifteen year olds in the cinema seemed to believe. It also thinks it's very avant garde and quirky, which it's not. It has dream sequences in it, which are almost invariably utterly boring unless you're clever enough to be David Lynch. One online review said it "demands to be seen more than once", but I left after 45 minutes.
I can't remember when I last walked out of a film. I felt like walking out of some Chinese effort I went to see in Aberdeen about silent married people, but somehow forbore. I don't think I even left "Dick Tracy", for anyone who remembers that dogturd of a film. I should have left "Moonwalk". I would have left "Speed", but by the time I'd given up hoping it would get better it had ended. I remember wishing I could leave "Spring Summer Autumn Winter and Spring" a couple of years ago: it was about a floating monastery with one inhabitant and was every bit as fascinating as it sounds. It memorably included a sequence fully ten minutes in length of nothing but a small man dragging a big rock up a hill.
At the moment I feel rather like a small man dragging a big rock up a hill in an endlessly protracted cinematic sequence, possibly one which has been surreptitiously switched on to a loop (a la "Speed"...), so that I could be doing it for eternity and no one would notice. They would just be obliviously snoring into their popcorn. Or they'd have left.

Dead Feminists

2006-11-20T05:52:00.000Z

I have just been back to find out what other feminist I might have been if I hadn't been Mary Wollstonecraft, but it wouldn't tell me unless I completed the quiz again. So I went through ticking boxes completely at random, and I still came out as Mary Wollstonecraft. I don't know if there's a message in that.
I get the sense one of the Pankhursts is lurking in there, and wonder which. I hope it's Christabel. I used to be a Latin mistress in a girls' boarding school where one of my joyful duties was to be head of Pankhurst house, but sadly it was (for all anyone seemed to know) named for Emmeline and not her good pinko daughter. Despite my admiration for the suffrage movement and love of my personalized house hoody with "Mrs Pankhurst" on the back, I really wanted to be head of Fry (Elizabeth, 1780-1845). This is not because my stint in the girls' boarding school gave me a special affinity for lunatic asylum and prison reform, but because our hoodies were regulation blue and theirs were, irresistably, scarlet and black.

I am Mary Wollstonecraft

2006-11-20T05:23:00.000Z

Directed by Jenny and Tom, I took this short quiz and discovered that I am Mary Wollstonecraft, which is nice. The questions were a bit perplexing. At first I couldn't understand why I was being enjoined to decide whether I was either creative OR intellectual OR passionate but not allowed to be all three. Likewise why I couldn't use both humour and brains to win a debate, or even enjoy both coffee in cafes and also conversations with my friends. I began to wonder if everyone else had known for ages that you were meant to decide on just one of these and stick to it, and no one had told me. Then I started to worry that the reason for all my problems was that I had foolishly been trying to hold simultaneously the manifestly logically incompatible beliefs that women should be respected culturally and intellectually, and also have an equal share in government, and also not be physically brutalized. When it came to questions about the number and sex of my offspring I twigged that perhaps they were not signing me up for an ideology after all but just trying to find out how many basic details I knew about some historic feminists. By which time it was too late to tailor my answers to make sure I was Simone De Beauvoir. Damn.
Anyway, it turns that to be an inspiring woman I would need to be dead. Which is not very inspiring.

Rhyme

2006-11-18T01:46:00.000Z

A conversation about words with no rhymes arose in the library yesterday, fuelled by the kind of whimsy that overcomes those steeped in boredom with 1st century AD rhetorical theoreticians. Examples touted included "orange," "silver," "month," "purple" and "traffic". Of these "orange" seems to stand, as does "silver". "Month" I dimly recall rhymes with "krunth", which as far as I remember is something in Sanskrit (vel sim) and also has some botanical meaning. I don't know if that counts or not, I'm prepared to let it go. Purple is a scandal, though: "hirple" is a perfect rhyme and a fine Scots word to boot. I checked and it is in the OED, so there. (It means to walk with a limp or awkward gait, as any fule know.) However, I will let people off for not knowing about the word "hirple." But I must insist that there is no excuse for anyone, especially a classicist, claiming there is no rhyme for "traffic". As well as being an indispensable piece of metrical terminology and the adjective for one of the greatest artsists in the literary history of Europe, we must also consider how impoverished would be our vocabulary of euphemisms for sexual deviants without the glorious term "Sapphic." More elegant than "Lesbian," less graphic than "tribade," less prosaic than "gay," it is the choice of queens. It even rhymes with Seraphic (QED x 2). However, may I suggest that you do not, in your innocent determination to find rhymes for "Sapphic," type this word into google and press search. It took me half an hour to clear my desktop.

2006-11-17T03:20:00.000Z

My friend Mark and his son Oscar, whom I was admiring in this post.

Zowie!

2006-11-16T00:47:00.000Z

I have just been to see what is possibly my favourite ever film, the hilarious Some Like It Hot (Wilder, 1959). I was in a filthy temper this afternoon and it cheered me right up. I wanted to share the joy, but my assiduous google image search didn't throw up any decent stills of MM in that incredible backless (and virtually frontless) spangled frock, teetering around in stilettoes and juggling a huge and fabulous white fur stole, which frankly is the main cheering aspect of the film. That and the shot where she is wiggling down the hotel corridor away from the camera in a tight white dress. And the train berth sequence, where she is barely kept inside her black maribou-trimmed peignoir, all milky skin and smooth flesh. Gorgeous.
I also went to see a truly terrible film on Sunday, and gladly warn anyone who fancies the look of The Illusionist not to waste their money. The script is awful: it is really badly paced and the dialogue is rubbish and the whole thing is lame instead of romantic and implausible instead of fanstastical. And the heroine isn't remotely attractive. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Desert

2006-11-15T02:44:00.000Z

I thought this was seriously cool.

I am rather into deserty things at the moment because today I started learning Persian. I am very excited and therefore verbally incontinent, while knowing this is a stupid thing to post, because when I fail dismally or give up in despair I will have this public announcement hanging over me.
The chances of me getting anywhere with this endeavour are practically nil. Contrary to cursory appearances, I am not at all an instinctive linguist, and the phase of life in which such things come easily fled by in a mist of pointless crushes, amateurish eyebrow-shaping, and the rote learning of the few French verb endings I have managed to retain. In adulthood I have tried Italian, with modest success, and German, with none. Learning German had the same effect on me as learning to drive, viz that I was no use at it despite my genuine (if ephemeral) enthusiasm. This was actually incredibly useful at the time: nothing improved my teaching more than being on the other side of the didactic divide. I earnestly believe that all teachers should try to learn something new every year, just to remember what it feels like to be hopeless.
I have been reliving this experience today, embarking on lesson 1: The Alphabet. Unfortunately Persian uses the alphabet of the more brutal and visceral Arabic, which consists of a series of dozens of virtually undifferentiated loops and strokes, combined with a handful really annoyingly intricate figures, all of which alter beyond all recognition when placed in the middle of a word. The result is that the merest slip means you have written "petrol-tin" instead of "corner", or "brackish" instead of "kind," and I toiled cackhandedly over inept and doubtless highly comical scribbles. The friend who is teaching me was very encouraging, but I did feel like a particularly stupid five-year-old.
However, I am determined to persist. Some years ago I fell in love to the strains of the Persian tongue and have never quite managed to fall out of love again. It is incomparably beautiful and I think I will never again hear anything so enchanting as the sound of Persian lyric love poetry on the lips of my lost amour. It really is a language to be wooed with. As for Arabic - well, it has other uses.

No Name

2006-11-12T23:09:00.000Z

My friend Tom's blog mentions that I am blogging anonymously. I never wanted to be anonymous, as anyone who knows me will easily believe. I find it artificial and faintly absurd and also somehow grandiose and self-important. I can't see what difference it makes if people who know who I am know who I am, and it's not as though it would be hard to work it out anyway.
However, I have friends much more circumspect and generally cautious, one of whom told me a creepy story of being stalked, and insisted I take my real name off. So I have. There is also that old chestnut that I'll be unemployable when interviewers discover that I once had one too many gins or made a catty remark at the expense of Aristotle's prose style or something, though (quite apart from the unlikelihood of this scenario) it is no drawback for a person who experiences massive attraction to anything which might relieve me of the necessity of ever having a proper job. (Actually, that may be the sort of thing which is better said anonymously.)
I feel like Odysseus, playing the No Man trick, and thinking thereby to evade all reponsibility for his actions: vanity will out, of course. Endlessly circling the jobmarket must be the modern equivalent of being cursed by a man-eating giant to meander the Aegean for a decade. What strikes me, and this may be revealing, is that it's all even worse when he does finally get there. It's better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

More Pride and Delight

2006-11-12T18:51:00.000Z

I suppose Oxford has a reputation for being hard to get into. Indeed, the admissions policy of the university is an indelible obsession of the British media, and a process about which almost mythical speculation hangs like a pall and generates a hysteria which would lead the casual reader of your average article on this subject to suppose that the commodity to which the poor slighted teenager du jour was being denied access was life-saving surgery or freedom of speech or clean water. Rather than, say, admission to one of many good establishments of higher education in the British Isles, all the rest of which remain open to them and at any of which they could obtain a perfectly good degree and the three or four years of drunken irresponsibility which are the birthright of those fortunate enough to be born clever, or at least middle class.
Well, admission to Oxford (undergraduate admission at any rate) is indeed competitive. Since this knowledge is so hard for the press to cope with, it is doubtless good if they don't look too hard at the tiers of competition which exist within the university itself. Having already loaded words such as "privilege" and "elitism" with such insupportable (though essentially meaningless) weight, I can't imagine what terminology they would have left for the institution of All Souls College. This is the Oxford-within-Oxford, a fellows-only college which generates among Oxonians the same class of myth that the University generates in the wider world. Perhaps among Fellows of All Souls there is a particular committee or something which evokes the same kind of legends and mystique. Members of that committee would I imagine spend their nights dreaming of the elusive and exclusive position of Chair. The Chair probably knows of a committee of Exclusive Academic Committee Chairs and wonders what cruel prejudice keeps him off it.
Anyway, at the inappropriately named All Souls, two fortunate souls per year are given a set of rooms and a stipend tenable for seven years, during which time they are obliged to do nothing but exactly as they please. The Prize Fellowship is awarded by exam, the focal point of much of the mythologizing, not least for the question which consists of a single word. This year it was "Water," for anyone who cares. The range of privileges which accompanies success in this competition is, I need hardly add, extensive, as is the associated cachet. It is also very pretty, though the website is a bit coy about photos so this is the best I could do.
My interest in all this is that earlier in the week one of my oldest friends was awarded one of these incredibly prestigious fellowships, to my enormous pride and delight. I have known him since school, when he was quite a little boy and I a worldly-wise 6th former, and subsequently adopted the approach of a terribly neglectful but very fond big sister who offers the well-meant but sporadic and probably useless voice of experience in such matters as debating competitions, Oxford admissions, finals, etc. Indeed, we have numerous endeavours in commmon, in which I as the elder am ostensibly better-versed but in fact a bit hopeless, and in every single case have been immediately, gracefully and very convincingly upstaged by my vastly more talented young friend as he graduates to each rite de passage in turn. Since in addition to his formidable intellect he is the nicest and most gracious and modest man in the entire world, it is not only right and proper that he should be the recipient of the richest academic honours, it is also a matter of genuine pleasure. How often can you say that?

No Use

2006-11-09T05:00:00.000Z

I am still broken-hearted about the cat. At the end of a second evening spent mostly weeping, I am starting to feel a bit foolish, but whenever I think about her I feel so racked with loss and a terrible sense of responsibility that I don't know what to do with myself. I can't bear to think about her suffering but it's just desolate to imagine home without her pootling around in it. I didn't even get to say goodbye.
Using her name seems to grieve me particularly. Twenty-four hours ago it was the name of my pet cat and now it's a word that refers to a memory of a cat I once had. I can't bring myself to write it, so I will just call her my cat.

Trying to be positive

2006-11-09T03:35:00.000Z

Here are some (more) of the lovely things which have happened to me recently.

To begin with, this is a picture of Marc and Jess's new baby. She is called Frida and I am hugely excited about meeting her when I come home for Christmas. I met their first daughter Leonora the day she was was born, and was bewitched. Jess says Frida looks just like Leo did. They sent me a lovely letter telling me all about her which was a very nice thing to come home to after a long day of work and rehearsals.

My friend Cie is not only a phonetician but also a champion knitter - she sent me a beautiful alpaca-wool snood which she had designed and made in my colours. It appeared through the post one morning and pleased me so much I wouldn't take it off all day, even inside.

Today I spoke to gorgeous Peter, with whom I used to share an impractically laid-out flat and all my secrets and whom I have managed not to talk to since I arrived here. He is a hotshot lawyer and the most sensible man I know, not least because his fondness for babies almost equals mine. We caught up on all our secrets and it felt just as though we still lived next door to the gay pub and never did the dishes.

The nice Parsee man who owns my favourite cafe decided to take me under his wing and introduce me to a Zoroastrian speciality of his wife's making in place of my boring lunch order. It was a scrumptious and eminently replicable confection of spiced veal mince. He says they eat them for breakfast which I perhaps won't try.

I got a letter from my grandmother telling me all the family news. There is nothing like familiar handwriting.

Monday was the most beautiful day since I arrived here. It was autumnally coloured but there was dazzling sunshine and a bright blue sky and it was balmily warm. I spent the whole day perched on the steps on my department listening to Beethoven and Brahms and doing my reading and smiling at people who came past. A handsome man bought me coffee. I drank it with a bar of hazlenut chocolate (my favourite) while sitting in the sunshine lost in thought.

A senior colleague with many far better things to do spent an unnecessary amount of time listening to my trivial work problems and making me feel much better. He also revealed that another even more senior colleague over the pond had been asking after me, to my great suprise, since I wasn't sure he had ever really twigged to my existence. I was rather touched.

Yesterday I was asked out shopping and spent a merry couple of hours trying on beautiful shoes with an old friend. One pair were red suede and as soft as butter and formed the subject of vivid, if short-lived, fantasies of glamour and beauty. For the last two days I have worn patent leather shoes which shine wonderfully in the rain and make puddle splashes a thing of joy. Today I wore my favourite skirt and woke up to a text message from the incomparable Ben, who would have approved the skirt in terms more aptly phrased than any other person alive could manage.

Cat

2006-11-08T05:27:00.000Z

My cat had to be put down today. I promised myself I would try my hardest not to get too upset. It doesn't seem to be working just yet, though.

Martial Law

2006-11-07T06:04:00.000Z

Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere 'Vivam':
Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie.

"I'm going to live" is not, believe me, what the wise men say:
Too late's the life tomorrow brings us: live today.

Thoroughly Modern Milly

2006-11-07T04:25:00.000Z

Well, I have just made a mobile phone bill payment over the internet and I feel very clever. Online banking is so sensible! Why didn't I start doing it years ago? Oh, yes, because I'm utterly lazy and an addict of the short-term gain. However, a very small investment of time (like two minutes) has now paved the way for a lifetime of laziness and not having to do tiresome things like get washed, dressed and out of the house two or three minutes earlier to get to the bank before class. More time to spend in front of the mirror. Hurrah!

I have also just received the first credit card of my life. Neither I nor the man in the bank believed they could possibly approve my application, since I am not from this country and have no credit history here and almost none at any of the fifteen addresses I have lived at in the last five years, and my parents moved house the same day I did. In short, I am a credit papertrail cul-de-sac, but they have still given me a mastercard with which to make mischief. I am not at all sure this is a good idea. My ability to live within my means has been repeatedly tested and I have repeatedly failed. Not even when I was living rent- and bill-free in a village with no friends and no shops did I manage to keep my profligacy within the bounds of my (more than reasonable) salary. I wouldn't wish this reflection to be read as regret: I defend every penny ploughed into maintaining my reputation as an unparalleled vision of immaculately coordinated elegance, and expense is a risible rank outsider in the annals of whatever sorrows Burgundy consumption and its consequences may have occasioned over the years. I could not have squandered my money better. Nevertheless, the prospect of commercial debt alarms me, because my problem isn't cash flow, it's poverty: I have no more prospect of being able to pay for things at the end of the month, or even of the decade, than I have today. The card will not be coming out to play.

As for how I continue to spend the money I do have, I am simply unwilling resist to lure of delicious ephemera. Meals get eaten, drinks evaporate in a cloud of hangover, earrings get lost down the seat in the great drunken taxi-ride of life. One day I will have a mortgage and offspring and responsibilities and I will be jolly glad I made the glorious most of life's brief window of booze, shoes and opera twice a month. How wonderful a thing it is to be young and carefree and vain, and tipsy and well-fed and sunk in culture and beauty; and how sad it would be to realise this only when it's too late to indulge it to the fullest, when you have babies and will never, ever again be the most important person in your own life.

So, yes, I am a notorious spendthrift: the kind of person, in the words of my friend James, who would be a grand overdrawn at the bank and still think, "Ooh, pheasant...". Quisquam vivere cum sciat, moratur?

Touchy

2006-11-06T05:34:00.000Z

The cast of my play contains one of the world's nicest man. Like most of the world's nicest men, he is happily partnered; his wife is also lovely. Most enchanting by far, however, is their 18 week old son, whom I have been longing to meet and finally did today after the afternoon run. I know it is asking a lot to encourage all my friends to come and sit through a 200 minute-long incomprehensible play in which I do little more than walk on and walk off again. It was beyond the call of duty for them not only to do so, but to patiently wait in the foyer afterwards while I spent twenty minutes scraping panstick out of the ravaged remains of my facial skin. It was therefore indefensible that when at last I emerged I all but dived past them in my eagerness to meet Oscar, who had not bought a ticket, not sat through the play and not hung around to offer me kind, ill-deserved and dearly welcome congratulations on my nugatory performance.
But oh, this baby. He is delightful. You may refer to my previous post about my chum's puppy if you doubt my capacity for infant-induced hysteria, which is considerable. However, the paticular effect of meeting Oscar and stroking his downy baby face was to make me reflect on the compelling thing that is the human need for touching. I have always had a very tactile life: half my family is Welsh, and there is no stopping them from hugging one another constantly. I have for many years lived close to numerous dear friends with whom sharing physical affection is as regular as breathing, and I am not normally short of a chap or two. I suppose moving to a foreign country has various dislocating effects, but none of them has affected me with anything like the power exerted by the sudden radical diminution of physical contact. It's simply not natural to go untouched. On Friday I was shattered and needed a nap, and realised after an hour's procrastination that my reluctance to go home to bed was anticipation of the desolate feeling induced by having no one - not parent, spouse, sibling, friend, lover or child - to cuddle up to. Quite apart from the noted panacaea that is the Babycuddle, what is the point in general of a warm bed without a warm body in it?
Luckily I am blessed over here with the kind of first-rate friends who not only sympathise with this tragedy and compensate me with great big full-body hugs, but also sit through my boring play, listen with patience to my endless nonsense, keep my secrets, calm my worries, and ring to check I'm okay when I sleep though classes. I do not deserve them, and charming as Oscar is, I was secretly far, far more touched and pleased to see them in the foyer after the play than I could ever have been by even the sweetest and peachiest of baby boys.

It's time to play the music

2006-11-03T06:14:00.000Z

Tonight the show opened. Woo hoo! There was even an audience, and the cast got very excited, but then the director revealed that he had given out thirty seven complimentary tickets, which slightly took the edge off. Naturally it was a triumph, though sadly it's not clear whether the audience thought so. It is a rather difficult work. Sweetly, one chap reported that his sister said I was the best thing in it. As most of my appearances consist of walking on with a box, the message to take from that would seem to be that the play's most successful moments are when there are no speeches or dialogue of any kind, which is not an optimistic evaluation.
My chief contribution to the whole production, other than to clutter up the stage for the most possible time with the least possible reason, has been the provision of a rather obscure prop. At the audition it transpired that one of the servant roles involves swinging a censer. Now, there are not many occasions in life upon which the claim to have been dining with a handsome young collector of thuribles only the previous night can be made with truth, and still fewer upon which one would freely admit it. For just this claim to be hailed with an admiration bordering on awe, and with the immediate welcome into an obscure renaissance drama of someone with exactly no qualifications in any relevant field, is surely unique. But it is a point of fact: I have had a wonderful month of happy rehearsals and nice new friends and impromptu dinner party invitations and backstage gossip, and all thanks to a random boozy evening with a man who spends his free time and money on the acquisition of ecclesiastical bric-a-brac. You couldn't make it up.

Nymph and Satyr

2006-11-02T05:58:00.000Z

Inspired by last night's rant, here is one of my favourite bits of ancient art: a mosaic of a Nymph and Satyr in (some variety of) flagrante, from the Casa del Fauno in Pomepii. This is the same house in which they discovered the glorious mosaic of Alexander the Great doing battle with Darius III, which I daresay tells us the original owner was bloodthirsty as well as a misogynist. Oh well.

Isn't it lovely? I now head straight for this when I am in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, one of my very favourite places in the world. (The Museum, that is, and not Naples, a city where the mafia are responsible for collecting the rubbish and mostly don't.) I'm sorry to have to admit that I was especially drawn to the rather plump-bottomed, black-haired and white-skinned nymph because I fancifully imagined that's what I might look like if I were rendered by a sympathetic mosaist. You can view snaps of just about all the Museo's exhibits from here. It is quite a resource for fans of the Museo, though tragically the website doesn't serve you lemon granita in a marble colonnade under the bright blue sky and blazing sunshine of an Italian summer's day. Nor, on the other hand, does it smell of garbage.

Have I Been In This Job Too Long?

2006-11-01T05:20:00.000Z

It is not surprising that someone would direct me to a webpage that unites feminism, antiquity, sex and blogging. I was surprised, however, to find myself quite so perplexed by it. If you have a moment, please do have a look here: I'd be really interested to know what people make of it. This is a long post but I am very interested in this.
I confess that while I could see the cause of the consternation, I didn't share it. I hope this is not because I am unsympathtic to the plight of kidnapped, enslaved and raped women. However, I simply cannot see that the renovation of a well-preserved ancient ruin and the promotion of visits to such a site is in any way identical with collusion in slave-rape. To begin with, these women (and boys) and the men who abused them (if this is what was, in fact, happening - I don't know that for certain, and I doubt the blogger does either) are long dead. Their experience was the product of a society, culture and politics which are also long dead: whatever parallels people may wish to draw between it and our own do not obviate the fact that, for instance, we have laws against this kind of thing. I think it's of limited practical value to get up in arms about the fate of these specific women.
Of course, I quite accept that there's such a thing as socialisation and fully appreciate that encouraging people to view slave-rape as entertainment has the potential to normalise it and contribute to a modern-day culture of (at best) indifferent or (at worst) titillated reponses to such stimuli. But it's not at all clear, at least from what this blogger writes, that the site is being marketed in deliberately callous or titillating terms. And quite apart from that, people do know this is the product of an another time and other circumstances. If that weren't the fundamental point of the site, why go? Sickos can, I'm told, look at clearer, faster, better and more anatomically convincing and wildly specialised porn from the comfort of their laptops and not bother traipsing round a dimly lit cavern in a manky town in Southern Italy.
Secondly, you can't restrict access to a cultural artefact of undoubted historical significance just because not everyone will have an "appropriate" reaction to it. It is a pity that not everyone who goes to Pompeii spares a thought for the possibility that some nasty stuff happened to real people in these places. It is unpleasant to think that anyone would actually enjoy the idea of said nasty stuff. But this is not something than can or should be policed; and the alternative is that no one has the opportunity to look at it. It is, of course, arguable that it is more important to protect the dignity of individuals who have been dead for two thousands years than it is to examine, document, collate, discuss and educate people about the exiguous and miraculously preserved remains of an ancient civilisation whose culture and history still fascinates and engages us, but you won't hear me saying so. Maybe I have been in this job too long.
Thirdly, it is not as though ancient historians don't notice or care that bad things happened in Greece and Rome; it's just that deciding in advance that a historical source is in its very essence wicked and corrupting defeats the entire point of scholarship. It is not enlightening to say "slavery and rape shouldn't happen." We know. It is enlightening, however, to explore what new things these sources can tell us about the society that produced them. I for one am much in favour of this apparently controversial process of discovery and enlightenment, unless anyone can point me to some active harm it may be causing, which they haven't so far.
The cleasrest attempt to demonstrate harm is this reference to the papyri which are so unjustly neglected. I need hardly add that I am very sorry to hear this. I have always yearned for more Livy and am devastated to hear that tranches of it are being kept from me. Seriously though, I don't presume to lay down criteria for which cultural artefact is more important. I am a convinced literary bug, but even I don't see that it is irrefutably the case that more Aristotle should necessarily and obviously be prioritised over extensive frescoes. Besides which, it's the limited funds which are the disgrace here. I don't complain that they pick the pix over the papyri, I complain that they have to pick at all. Surely the blogger isn't saying that the brothel (or "brothel", if you must - I'd have said the force of the punctuation is inherent in the term, myself) should rot altogether? Or is she?
From the point of view of the visitors, I would a) rather people visited ancient sites than didn't; b) rather they had something to look at there which engages them with the idea that the Romans were real people with real vices and virtues. You may think it a shame that sex sells, but it's no less a fact about Pompeii than all those boring ditches and far more interesting to most people. What exactly is the objection? That tourists are insufficiently discerning and highminded in their tastes and education, so as to prefer the (gasp) coarse-but-interesting bits to the dull-but-worthy ones? How dare they. That not everyone who visits knows the whole terrible history of Roman imperial domination and the details of its social effects? Shame on them. Whatever happens, we mustn't market these sites using points of universal human interest that might engage and involve people with no previous interest in antiquity and make them consider the humanity, with its joys and sorrows and everything in between, that we all share through the ages.
I note that nowhere in this thread is any allusion made to, say, the display of real human skeletons (NB: not drawings) preserved in their huddled poses of terror and futile self-protection as they were buried alive in burning ash. I note too that a similar objection is not made to tourism in the Colosseum, where countless people were tortured to death by public fiat amid the avid cries of hundreds of citizens. Or does human suffering only matter when it is caused by patriarchally sanctioned male-on-female violence? Perhaps it is not after all the Pompeii Tourist Board in whom a sense of perspective about sex, porn and prostitution is somewhat lacking.

Gratuituous Puppy Shot

2006-11-01T04:28:00.000Z

This is a friend's new Brittany bitch, Eddie. She is so new that she isn't even weaned yet. I have never seen her, but I am uploading this partly for decoration and partly because I am all but driven to squeals by the mere thought of lovely little warm wriggling helpless things. I would like to make it clear at this point that I am a fully emancipated and equality-driven woman of the twenty-first century and in no way subscribe to or condone any shallow patriarchal gender stereotypes. But look how cute!

Liturgical Slut

2006-10-30T03:36:00.000Z

I did the thing I said I wouldn't do and cheated on Mags with Smoky Tom's. I promised it was just one Evensong, that it meant nothing to me, that it would never happen again, but somehow there I was at mass this morning. I could try to defend myself and say that it was the Palestrina that did it, but we all know you don't do anything under the influence of Palestrina that you don't secretly want to do otherwise. The liturgy is no better, the acoustic is far worse, it's nothing like as pretty, but for some reason I let myself be drawn back.
The reason may be the lure of twenty more minutes in bed, since St T's is virtually round the corner from my house. To use this excuse on the very day when the clocks go back providing an entire hour longer in bed is, I know, especially pathetic. I can also say that the homily was excellent. Apart from the great advantage of being English and therefore sounding like Home, this morning's preacher suggested, reasonably, that if in 1st Century Judaea Zealots (Simon) and Imperial functionaries (Matthew) could unite under the love of Jesus, then surely the Evos (I don't think he used that term, I'm paraphrasing) and liberals of the present age should be able to manage it. This does rather suppose that the love of Jesus and dogmatic theology are not, after all, one and the same thing, a view so controversial that it is sure to cause consternation wherever it is voiced. Luckily I am so ill-qualified to judge these matters that you are not going to have to listen to my views on the subject. I'm only there for the music, remember.

Gig

2006-10-30T01:54:00.000Z

Last night I went to a gig. This is a word my church music friends use to refer to any professional engagement (I think more to seem drily reductive and offhand about the whole business than in any real attempt to make conducting Vaughan Williams appear hip) so I should clarify that this was not chamber music but a friend's rock band. Initially I was unperturbed by his claim that it was a bit of a distance, but this was foolishly forgetting that I am in Toronto, where two blocks can mean fifteen miles, and "a bit of a distance" means "book a flight." Well, it was sweet of him to ask me, but I'm not awfully good at bestirring myself to this kind of thing, being extremely idle and almost always inappropriately shod, so I settled on a Saturday night at home reading the paper and painting my nails. However, I ended up at an engagement even further out of town (does this city never end? It must have suburbs on the moon), and since by 11pm I was actually in a cab passing the junction where the gig was, I felt it the action of a wilful churl to head straight for the subway.
Unfortunately, since fate had all but delivered me there, I hadn't really considered that I had to get home as well. When I looked at my watch and realised that I had missed the subway, I was of the mind that it was not the end of the world. When I spent 40 minutes ringing three cab companies 600 times each and got no reply, I was somewhat troubled. When I couldn't actually see any cabs, or indeed buses, streetcars or signs of inhabitation in any surrounding buildings, I started to panic, and a sick realisation spread through me that the black leather skirt which had seemed so amusingly off-whack for a suburban dinner party was wont in my current much-altered circumstances to lead to potentially unpleasant misunderstandings about my purposes in walking up and down a badly-lit street at 2 o'clock on a Sunday morning, and that "I'm trying to hail a taxi" was unlikely to sound convincing coming from a heavily made-up and precipitously-heeled lone female hanging about an intersection. Having dropped in to the bloody event for no reason but chumminess with the guitarist, I knew not one single other person there, even supposing they hadn't all left already, which they had. And I wasn't wholly sober.
By the time it was clear that I couldn't get back any other way, the band had packed up and despite having said they couldn't one of them kindly drove me home, no doubt far out of his way, so I felt like a total nuisance and an utter imposition as well as the worst kind of helpless and demanding female, and I don't even know to get hold of him to say thank you. Today I am hungover and tired and grumpy.

The set was quite good though.

You lose concentration for one second...

2006-10-27T16:12:00.000+01:00

Isn't it funny how even quite fundamental things about yourself can creep up on you unnoticed until some cataclysm brings them into relief? Take Latin. When I was 14 I had to read bits of Petronius' Satyricon at school, and it was murder. I should have been warned by the kindly inscription from the friend who had given me the book: "To Mel, Love Ewan. PS It's very boring and hard to translate". And so it proved, an agony of incomprehensible clauses and senseless word-order. I couldn't see how I'd ever be able to read it, still less why I would want to.
Well, then Catullus happened to me the next year and I was instantly smitten and the rest is history. But when I was clearing out books to take University I came across the Satyricon and decided to torture myself with a glance at the impossible Latin. I was astonished to find I could read it as easily as the newspaper. You could have knocked me down with - well, I'm no sylph, but certainly with a copy of Petronius. How had that happened? You'd think clues like passing higher exams and being admitted to Oxford to read classics would have given me some notion, but no: until that moment it had never occured to me that whether or not Petronius was fiendishly hard had more to do with me than with Petronius.
So yesterday I found out that the man with whom I fell hopelessly in love at seventeen is getting married. I frankly admit that I had expected to greet this news with howling and for the day of the nuptials themselves, whensoever, to be spent round at my friend James' house in my dressing gown drinking scotch out of the bottle for breakfast and with grubby streaks of last night's mascara tipping down my face. Not a bit of it. I am jolly chipper and even happy for the chap in question, since he is eminently husbandable material and will no doubt make great success of it all. I don't know where this cheer and equilibrium about the whole affair has come from, because I thought getting over him was about as likely as ever being able to read Tacitus, or see the point of Wagner. But as I sit here with my well-worn copy of the Annales at my side listening to a much-cherished recording of Siegfried, I suddenly see that such things can happen when you're busy doing something else.
Of course this process does also work in reverse. It's very easy to learn to do something and then to go round for years with the firmly rooted belief that you are a person who can, say, read the Greek language, only to discover that you aren't. At least in that case Greek is something with which it is possible, not to say pleasurable, to fall in love all over again. Ah, Aeschylus. It's like being seventeen again...

Lenten Entertainment

2006-10-27T05:12:00.000+01:00

Rehearsals continue and my part in the play is getting bigger; or, to be more accurate, the number of small pointless roles I have is expanding. I am now playing no fewer than six people, with lines ranging from "Where will you have 'em burn sir?", a long-debated crux of thespian interpretation, to "Here's a letter come from your son, sir," the possibilities of which demand a thought and consideration which tax the amateur. I am also half of a brief dialogue scene in which I facilitate a husband role-playing the seduction of his own wife in the guise of a travelling hunter, and of another dialogue, my half of which consists purely of shouting 'Oh God, sir!" in increasingly hysterical tones. I am sorry to say that in both cases this is a good deal less sordid than it sounds. However, the former scene does involve acting a person who is acting, a remarkably difficult thing to do convincingly, and the latter involves acting someone with no personality, which is no doddle either. There is no denying that finding new and engaging ways to say "It pleases you to say so, sir" would confound the ingenuity of the most experienced and dedicated professionals.
In any case I had forgotten how much I like acting, and not just because of being around all the nice thespy types who tell me how much they like my shoes and say kind things about my accent. I spent a lot of time board-treading as a gel, but have scarcely been in a play since school, when the opening night of my star turn (ahem) as Lady Bracknell was marred by a less-than-word-perfect Jack Worthing. He fluffed my cue line, and thereby created the only performance in the history of The Importance of Being Earnest in which the line "A handbag?" was never in fact delivered. Oh, and there was the time I was roped into a One-Act play festival. Despite staging the worst-rehearsed show in the history of theatre, something about my portrayal of a bumptious uniformed Girl Guide-cum-secret Lesbian frotteuse seemed to appeal to the (old, male) adjudicator. Inexplicable.
Actually, my last foray was not at school but when I featured, rather successfully, in an intercollegiate drama competition in my first term at Oxford. It was definitely one to go out on: it was only a small role, and in a play so forgettable and so briefly and plainly named that I can't even find it on google; but it does make me one of few people who can honestly say they have been awarded a prize for their performance in Bed.

Growing Old is Inevitable, Growing up is Optional

2006-10-25T04:31:00.000+01:00

I was most glad to have this legend awaiting me on a card when I got home from the library last night, which was at 3.30am. Staying at work till 3am is quite grown up, I suppose. It is certainly ageing. Sitting up half the night talking to someone is not work, however, and is quite the opposite of a grown-up thing to do when you have an exam the next day. But it was highly enjoyable. Coincidentally, a goodish portion of this conversation had been about when and whether one ever becomes a Grown-up. Had I ever indulged the fond fancy that I might be one, it would have been dispelled upon speaking to my brother, who spent the weekend shopping for a cot, pram, changing table and nappies, which he then (and this was the killer blow) took home in the car.
Compared with getting married and having a baby, holding a driving license is not, I know, that huge a marker of Grown-upness, and quite a different matter from the creation and sustenance of human life. But it is yet another eminently achieveable adult goal which I have entirely failed to tick off the list. Inertia is no small part of this. I have been quite happy as a non-driver, for several irresponsible reasons: that I am lazy; that I like to drink; that on train journeys I can sit and read my book; that I have always, extravagantly, insisted on living within easy walking distance of everything; and that I truly love, and get an almost erotic thrill out of, being driven. Naturally there are many valid and conscientious reasons for not having a driving license, but these are surely not they.
In fact, I did try to learn to drive once. I took to it with great enthusiasm, squandering quite a lot of money on lessons and entertaining seductive images of myself in the guise of my terribly glamorous best friend, who used to take me out whizzing round stunning mountain passes in Switzerland in her sexy black two-seater with the roof off and the CD player on loud. Instead the whole enterprise ended in tears somewhere outside Maidenhead last July when I panicked, forgot to steer and wrote off someone else's car by driving it into a hedge. This was clearly a salutary warning that adulthod is best left to adults, who must be miraculously equipped to cope with experiences so stressful, frightening, humiliating and expensive. The best that can be said of the whole sorry episode is that, as ill-omened forays into the world of Grown-upness go, it was at least a motorvehicle that had to be written off and not a baby.

Ongoing Moggy

2006-10-24T15:35:00.000+01:00

Octavia diced with death yesterday when she had to have surgery, which is not very good for you, especially when you are a 19-and-a-half year old cat. I had nightmare visions of mother ringing me up to tell me the vet had had to do the decent thing and see her off with half a brick (or more medically advanced equivalent). Fortunately she recovered immediately and skipped to her foodbowl very much in the manner of an animal that had not just had half its teeth removed under general anaesthetic.
One does start to wonder if she persists in living, against all probability, only to spite my stepfather, who is not only painfully allergic to her (and to our other two cats) but is also now footing the bill for her treatment. It does seem a bit hard to swallow that one not only has to live with three animals whose every presence makes one physically ill, but also to fork out egregious sums of one's hard-earned to eke out their lives for one's own indefinitely protracted torment. My stepfather says that her operation cost the same as my ticket home and did consider whether I should be offered the choice of Christmas en famille or the cat's life, perhaps not unreasonably. However, I am most grateful for his dedication to making me and my mother happy, though after 45 years of cat-owning my mother also devloped a major allergy to them recently, so I do wonder whether Octavia might now find her herself in the same position as her namesake's brother, under constant threat of being done in from within her own household, able to trust noone nor eat anything but figs straight from the tree. I don't know if cats with no teeth can eat figs from the tree.

How I Learned to Stop Fidgeting and Love the 'Song

2006-10-23T03:43:00.000+01:00

For reasons to do with the organisation of my job (I did have one once) and personal life (ditto), over the last few years I have been to a lot of Evensong services. I think your average lay clerk and most clergy have probably not sat through as many Mags and Nuncs as I have done since 2003, or perhaps it just feels that way. I was never much of an enthusiast for these particular offices, to be honest, and could quite often be found sitting in the car outside the church listening to the Archer's Omnibus and reading the Observer Magazine. This is particularly strange given that the music is, for me, What It's All About.
I have just discovered that this aversion is the fault of English churches. It really is no wonder that I was itching to get out of Evensong when they'd have fully three hymns (why?) in addition to the psalm and then ply us with a homily on top of that. And my word, the prayers went on forever, including having the Lord's prayer twice in ten minutes for reasons I could never understand. (Perhaps the weirdo blog commentator who left the message saying "All Masses are the same as each other" - which they aren't - will make himself useful and write and explain.) Stanford in C is all very well but at that level of dilution I used to start reading the hymnbook for something to do. Good stuff in there. Full marks to As Pants The Hart for getting the word "pants" into a church service, and to Gladly My Cross I'd Bear for most vivid and confusing homophone.
Anyway, I went to a cracking Evensong tonight at St Thomas', or "Smoky Tom's" as I heard it called at a dinner party last night. All sung (Murrill in E, Holman "The Strain Upraise", for anyone to whom that might mean anything), prayer book, no mucking about, no preaching, one hymn, devotions and then home, all in sixty minutes and never a dull moment. I noticed with some wist that I'd missed Howells Coll. Reg. at Mass, but I mustn't let the virile Edwardian appeal of St T's repertoire start me cheating on beautiful Mary Mags, which is prettier and their choir is better and sings older and even nicer music. Quite why there should be two screamingly High Anglican churches within a couple of blocks of each other I don't know, but if Oxford doesn't have to justify a concentration that practically provides a chapel each per parishioner then nor does Toronto, I suppose.
Inside the church was toasty and bright and full of incense, and outside it was crisp and dark and there were damp multi-coloured leaves underfoot: very autumnal, very lovely, and it put me in the mood for cello music, which Mr Haydn is now providing. It could only be a Sunday night.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2006-10-21T15:22:00.000+01:00

I am not all that interested in the environment (sorry) or in conspiracy theories, but I saw this film last night, and it's much more entertaining than it sounds. Provides a bit more fuel for any Bush-haters out there (as if it were needed), and it's narrated by Martin Sheen in a clever allusive move.
It was especially appropriate to be watching it at The Bloor, my local independent cinema: no big buisness here. There is one screen, it costs 5 dollars (2.50 GBP) at peak times (less during the day), and they have proper popcorn and late-night screenings and show cool old films and independent films and any sort of films you don't get in the big expensive cinema in the shopping centre. I just don't see how this place could be any cooler, and was remarking same to the handsome Jewish guy serving the popcorn (Q.E.D...), when I walked into the auditorium and heard they were playing my favourite Chet Baker collection. Just. Too. Cool.

Requiem

2006-10-21T02:05:00.000+01:00

I am listening to the Mozart Requiem, or Sussmeyer Requiem as I prefer to think of it. I am particularly fond of this version because I was at the concert where it was recorded and it features numerous friends of mine. The venue was a big church in Chelsea and to protect the acoustic the audience had to wait through some technical reruns of certain sections at the end of the performance. Far from destroying the ambience of the piece, this afforded a wonderful opportunity. For as the conductor ran through a section the mics hadn't caught properly, he suddenly lowered his baton mid-bar; the resonance of the chorus round the magnificent austere building faded into nothing; there followed a single moment of perfect suspended silence; and the conductor turned to the audience and said, "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the point at which Mozart died."

Humour

2006-10-19T05:11:00.000+01:00

I am in a play, namely Ben Johnson's Every Man Out of His Humour. It is one of the gems of the renaissance, which is why it has been performed roughly twice in the last four hundred years. You chaps in Blightly will be grieved, I'm sure, to miss my star turn in this searing comedy of manners and mordant social satire, so I have put up a link to the text, where you can peruse at leisure the many over-wrought jokes and long gargling speeches. The humour of the work relies to a great extent on the mere existence of the Latin language, which Johnson seems to find intrinsically hilarious. I suppose his was a more classically literate age, but the etymological gags don't exactly run out to meet the modern ear, so that one is left with a slightly impressionistic sense of a work better suited to page than stage. The range of accents among the cast does nothing to ameliorate this, since each has his or her own well-founded and jealously-guarded beliefs about how Classical Greek, Latin, French, Italian and the English of England in the nascent 17th Century ought to be pronounced, which at least means that audience may be lucky enough to miss some of the lamer gags.
At one point there is a minor character called Cinaedo (I notice the editor of the online version has quaintly uploaded Cindedo, whether out of deliberate prudery or a mere tyopgraphical error one can only guess). That, for all you non-classicists out there, means (with apologies for crudity) arsebandit. Oddly, the character in question is a servant boy, so either Johnson was not completely on top of his material here or else social conventions of activity and passivity were radically different down his way. In the former case I can recommend Jim Adams' excellent book The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. This appeared on my first ever reading list in Oxford, along with my dear tutor's wonderfully dry rider "He manages to make it much less interesting than it sounds". Johnson would empathise.

Almost Two against Thebes. So Far.

2006-10-18T06:46:00.000+01:00

It is the dead of night and I really ought to be soundly asleep, but I am restless because this evening I have made two exciting discoveries. One is that if you listen to Radio 3 in the middle of the night they play interesting music with minimal inane drivelling of the kind that pollutes the broadcasts in the daytime. Since British nighttime is evening here then it saves me trawling my iPod for something suitable, or, worse, taking pot luck with Composer of the Week vel sim. Earlier I downloaded what looked like a perfectly reasonable R3 programme, only to hear the presenter making quite unwarranted threats of Bizet in his introduction, which I consider unconscionable in a pre-watershed slot.
The other discovery is Aeschylus. Now I do not wish to rabbit ingenuously on in the manner of those ghastly thirty-something women who are all over the media at the moment with their wide-eyed stories about producing the world's first baby ("I had a baby and, my word, it was jolly sore!"; "I had a baby, and do you know, I didn't get a minute to myself!" etc.) I am fully aware that opining that Aeschylus is marvellous is not newsworthy, and that never having read any Aeschylus till now is a mark of my own ignorance and neglect. Also, there is nothing more embarrassingly personal than other people's tales of conversion, as anyone who has ever been stuck at a party with a gregarious evangelical will know. I will just say that I am smitten.
This effusion of enthusiasm is based purely on the first three hundred lines of the Septem, however, so I do hope that it doesn't turn out to be one of those works like Crime and Punishment that seem ever so convincing and dramatic at first and then taper off hopelessly and get found down the side of the bed six months later with a big crack in the spine about a third of the way in and the rest intact. On the other hand, a great many tales of laying seige to provincial cities by means of garrisons stationed at the ramparts and of navies defeated by structural adaptations made to the prows of enemy triremes stand between me and my new love, compared with which I will doubtless still adore even the roughest work Aeschylus might pull on me. And tragedies are short.

Unattractive Afterthought

2006-10-16T05:22:00.000+01:00

This is not going to make me any friends, but as those reading this are already my friends, and I know you are mostly as bad (or perhaps as good) as I am, it may not lose me any either. For starters, are we agreed that a few people one doesn't like much are a fact of life? I do hope so. For twice yesterday I was in a position to notice how exciting it is to discover enemies in common. Positively devilishly fun. Watch me parse this delicious sensation to show that it's an improving reflection and not just further evidence of my oneway ticket to the Inferno. Or possibly the reverse.
Enmity is of course far more personally revealing and risky than amity: the special few to whom this feeling applies push much more intimate buttons than the many nice people to whom it doesn't, so that outing yourself as an X-hater gives a momentary thrill of recognition and then of inner badness exposed. Then there's the exhilirating danger factor: potential blabbers will render you friendless or jobless in two shakes of a lamb's tail. In addition it's a huge relief to realise someone will both gladly unburden you of your long-nurtured bile and allow you an opportunity to showcase any hilarious but vicious rhetoric you may have been storing up (there's no appeal like vanity). Thirdly, it has a scrumptious rarity value, since for all that it is achingly enjoyable not even I, a person with markedly limited reserves of temperantia, find many politic opportunities to indulge in it. Still, one mostly belives one has a good reason for disliking people, and it is most satisfactory to have the impression, as it were, ratified. This process, irrationally but delightfully, makes one believe that the overwhelming disdain or detestation is a verifiable and justifiable observation of fact.
Oh, and of course people's shortcomings are so much more hugely entertaining than their virtues; in which connection I can at least say in my defence that I am far more forthcoming with stories against myself than against anyone else.
Yes, I'm horrible. But not about any of you.

My Cat

2006-10-16T02:29:00.000+01:00

I saw a lovely little silver tabby, only six months or so old, on my way home from Mary Mags this morning (Bruckner Locus Iste, Mass by same obscure Torontonian as last time). This reminded me that I have been meaning to post a picture of my cat. I was giving thanks for her miraculous continued existence on Thanksgiving, and it must be said that aged 19-and-a-half she is not as pretty as once she was. She is squinting into the light here, and doesn't look very welcoming. On the other hand, it winningly disguises her left cornea, horribly scarred from a fight she got into after the first of the six house-moves she has survived.

I named her Octavia because I was seven and I didn't know what pretension was or that it needed to be avoided. In fact, it may be possible to date my interest in the ancient world, and therefore the whole chain of events that has led to my utter refusal to get a proper job and support myself, to an infant school project on The Romans. Aged six, I had finished my maths puzzle faster than anyone else (sic transit etc) and got first choice of a Roman Name. I actually chose Livia, but decided by the time the cat appeared that Octavia was much cooler - a choice made purely on the basis of euphony, I should add, since at that time I knew even less than I do now about the differences and similarities between one and another ruthlessly exploited and prematurely-aged broodmare of the early Roman imperial class.
Anyway, here she is, a bit tatty and dandruffy these days and with a strange propensity to start wailing in a manner that exactly resembles a crying baby, usually at about 5am. In October of 1987 she followed me home from a walk and her owners said we could keep her, so I have the great distinction of having been deliberately selected by my cat and not vice versa. At that time she was the size of this morning's silver tabby. And now that she is old and frail, she is about that size again.

Shot

2006-10-15T04:25:00.000+01:00

I have had a sheltered life, according to the Amercans in the bar last night, and could not be suffered to go another hour without trying something called a "shot". Now, I am not interested in any drink that isn't at least meant to be savoured, and I don't really drink spirits much either. However, not to seem rude, and allowing the maxim that one should try everything once, I drank a shot. If anyone is interested, it was a shot of something called Liquid Cocaine, which consisted of a mixture of Goldschlaf (spelling?) and Jaegermeister and it was thoroughly delicious. All warm and toasty and spicy, like sweets.
So on first meeting the Shot and I appeared to be getting along famously. Warmed by this success, I decided to extend the acquaintance, and had another. Another three, in fact. Rather in the manner of proposing marriage on a first date, I fear that this unguarded zeal has done for any chance of a beautiful friendship, since I knew not whereof I meddled, and found that my new friend had a rather complex and dangerous personality lurking under the seductive and harmless exterior. The descent into drunkenness was as precipitous and shocking as a cliff edge. Never again.
In general, I find social drinking here quite difficult because I don't like beer very much, and it's pretty much all you can get. The spirits are ruinously expensive. Decent wine, even decent local wine, can be got, but the wine in pubs tends to be the worst kind of home-grown gutrot that makes one wonder why Onatrio produces wine at all, unless it is to increase their sales of beer. Thus abandoned by my faithful friends, is it any wonder I get into trouble through casual entanglements with glamorous strangers? Though glamorous wouldn't be the word for how I felt when I woke up this morning. Nor for how I looked by the end of last night.

Nothing to Declare Except Other People's Genius

2006-10-13T02:11:00.000+01:00

My only piece of post yesterday was an offprint of an article from a scholarly journal. Although it is without doubt the leading journal in the field, it can't be often that that could be said to occasion true excitement, even in someone who receives as little post as I do. However, yesterday it was the cause of much jubilant jumping round the kitchen and firing off of exuberant emails of congratulation. For it was written by one of my Very Best Friends, and I am absolutely unspeakably proud.

She and I have been bosom chums since our days as first year undergrads, when I was having chaotic affairs and drinking cocktails and hanging round the Union, and she was hoovering up every single university prize, while having chaotic affairs, drinking cocktails and hanging round the Union. Her genius having long been recognised, it was especially thrilling to see the hard evidence of it arrive in a slightly rumpled A4 envelope quite unexpectedly. I am now going to make anyone with an incipient academic career out there sick, by pointing out, as an additional swank factor, that this highly impressive material was written in the first year of her doctorate. Now wouldn't you be jumping round the kitchen with pride?

As if this weren't glamorous enough, yet another insanely gifted friend has just had a book published by OUP. If you have a look here you can read all about it, and I dare say purchase your very own copy, too. It tells you how to say words, which no one will deny is a very useful thing to know. The perfect Christmas present, no? And the source of deep delight in my bosom. Hurrah!

Curses

2006-10-11T04:27:00.000+01:00

Something called the World Series has pushed House off the TV schedule. I am so cross that I will not even deign to google "world series" in order to find out what this barabraic business may involve, but I am fairly sure that it will be some game or other, and that is unlikely to feature a middle-aged Hugh Laurie being cantankerous and objectionable yet strangely attractive.
I should add that I had never seen or even heard of this programe until a couple of months ago, owing to having a life and no telly. Now that this situation has been reversed, I have become something of a fan. The whole set-up is absurd and contrived (brilliant but unapproachable doctor solves intricate medical "mysteries", saving lives and winning hearts passim, etc) and rather hammily acted and painfully implausible, but hey, the nights are long out here. Anyway, I thought I was a fan, because I would watch it if it were on and I were in, and might have half a mind to set it to record if I saw an episode coming up.
It turns out that this is not what being a fan means, however, as you will see if you click on the link above and scroll down a bit. Being a fan would appear to consist of uploading masses of semi-literate material about the similarities between a telly doctor and Cyrano de Bergerac. Even better is a link to the site of a real doctor who has put up pages and pages of explanations of all the medical terms in the show, carefully referenced by individual episode, and also some fascinating analyses of which episodes he finds most and least plausible, including (joy!) marks on an American style GPA for quality of mystery, solution etc. Would you want this person treating you? Okay, maybe if he looked like Hugh Laurie.
Becoming suddenly aware that web-drivellers in glass houses shouldn't throw stones , I think I will go to bed.

Thanksgiving

2006-10-09T13:41:00.000+01:00

Canadian Thanksgiving falls at a different time from American, though there's a "quot homines tot sententiae" issue with why (sorry, just wanted an excuse to use the word quot, one of my favourites). The most persuasive is that it has something to do with Harvest Festival, so we'll go with that. It is a very important festival indeed here and people travel a very long way to be with their families. It is much nicer than Christmas, however, not only because the weather isn't punishing but also because it is almost completely uncommercial. There is nothing in the shops to tell you that it is Thanksgiving (except closed signs). This is perhaps related to the refreshing fact that at Thanksgiving one doesn't give presents, one just gives Thanks.

Today is the day, in any case, and here's (some of ) what I'm giving thanks for, in no particular order - please feel free to add your gratitudes as a comment, I'd love to see them.

-- The excellent dinner I had last night in Wish Bar, a joint much cooler than anywhere I could have tracked down -- the incredibly kind colleague who took me out for said dinner so I wouldn't be all alone on the wrong side of the pond during the country's biggest family festival -- my sole Eurotrash chum here, who is a find, a love and a star: dig those Celts -- The Harbord Bakery, the best Jewish bakery ever: chollah anyone? -- the continued health of my supremely gravid and beloved sister-in-law -- red maple leaves (truly beautiful: if I had a flag I would put this on it) -- brilliant sunshine in October -- the Choir of St Mary Mags -- a smashing little coat I found for cheap in Zara which gives me the appearance of a waist -- my generous and patient housemates -- Skype (get it, all of you) -- the perception and wisdom of Random House Publishing -- true love (you know who you are, you lucky things) -- Marc and Jess's new baby (mazal tov) -- emailable photos -- the single Veronensis MS that preserved the poems of Catullus --the very existence of the city of Oxford and the university I love -- the friendliness of Torontonians -- my enormous and delightful family, scattered as we are -- the fact that my cat Octavia is still alive though I've had her since I was seven -- the pinot noir grape -- my iPod -- the lovely Classics Faculty and students -- the seemingly bottomless kindness of my stepfather -- (more to follow...)

Back in the Saddle

2006-10-08T20:29:00.000+01:00

Not one to be beaten by the vagaries of a missal, I hied myself back to Mary Mags this morning. On the downside, I did manage to be late, after turning down the wrong street in my haste and finding myself at the Portugese Seventh Day Adventists a block and half away. On the upside, I was pleased to discover that I could remember the chants, so I wasn't doing my juggling routine. The church was fuller than last week, perhaps because it is Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend (of which more anon), and I noticed that a good third of them knelt for the Sanctus so I felt somewhat vindicated in last week's error (even while I corrected it). No idea what the Mass setting was, but the motet was Tallis If Ye Love Me, which was very heaven.

I tripped home, inspired, to listen to Spem in Alium and do some work. Instead I found that I hadn't put Spem on my iPod and that the dishwasher was broken. Jettisoning my church togs along with any hope of passing the day in intellectual pursuits, I have just spent a goodly proportion of the sabbath on my hands and knees with a monkey wrench trying (and failing) to identify the source of a leak in a copper pipe and striking improbable poses in my attempt to wedge myself into the under-sink cupboard for a better view. Having rather predictably got exactly nowhere with the amateur plumbing, I have put my frock on again and am lying with my ankles crossed enjoying sunshine, Tacitus and Handel (best I could do) until it is time for my dinner date. Sublime, ridiculous, whatever...

You Say Spadina

2006-10-08T04:57:00.000+01:00

Look at this: it is October and the sky today was so blue that I didn't see a single cloud all day long. Nor is this because I was sequestered in a library during daylight hours or hunched over my laptop with the blinds down - on the contrary, I took my work outside and lay on a sunlounger in the back garden listening to the trickling of the fish pond. Incidentally, the road you can see here is called Spadina, a word which so obviously ought be pronounced Spadeena that it has taken me weeks to accept and begin to use Spa-dye-na. This must be an irritant for the Torontonians I speak to. More irritating by far, however, is spending an entire month with Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off by George and Ira Gershwin runnning endlessly round one's mind, only with potatoes and tomatoes cast out and lyrics that instead run "You say Spadeena, I say Spa-dye-na...". This is aggravated by the fact that almost nothing rhymes with Spa-dye-na, so I can't get further than the first line without recourse to anatomical references that don't make for family listening.
But for some reason nothing I listen to is ever catchy enough to displace it. Handel operas are all very well (yes, they are) but I admit that for the most part they lack that foot-tapping je ne sais quoi. I had a bash at trying to knock the Gershwin out with some Marvin Gaye but catchy tunes aren't really the bag there. The best I have managed so far is Think About You from Guns n Roses' Appetite for Destruction. This is an album I treasured as a ten year old despite its highly unsuitable lyric content and general inappropriateness, and with which I was reunited some months ago by a similarly unlikely fan, to my lasting delight. Luckily the track in question is quite respectable, and the crippling shame of being caught singing GnR songs is abated by the fact that half my collegaues here are closeted, or not so closeted, fans; indeed, one of them burnt the album for me (possibly only to stop me singing Gershwin). Anyway, it could be a lot worse. It could be Gilbert and Sullivan.

Nae as Gid as Embra Castle, Like

2006-10-07T09:24:00.000+01:00

Or so says the (Scottish) friend who took this picture of the Colosseum. There is no denying that Edinburgh is very pretty, something I had managed to forget over the years, just because of the tendency of very familiar things to evoke no wonderment whatsoever no matter how richly deserved. Edinburgh is a town that smells of hops and sounds of bagpipes and my auntie lives there: the end. But when I went back over the summer I was very struck with how beautiful it was, and I think not just in a wistful patriotic way (though I was with the Scottish friend, who was a bad benchmark for this, admittedly). Why they call it the Athens of the North I couldn't say, not least because I have never seen Athens. I'd have though Edinburgh's hill-bound location would more obviously earn it the title "The Caledonian Rome" vel sim; but perhaps Rome is indeed really too measly to sustain the comparison...

I Have Not Been Here

2006-10-07T09:15:00.000+01:00

While I am dimly aware of the weirdness of posting someone else's holiday snaps, I justify it on the basis that enjoying these is an accurate reflection of What I Have Been Up To (for those who care), and that, not having any shots of my own, it would be nice to decorate the blog with something other than my deathless prose.
This view from a tower in a Tuscan town pleased me especially because a long time ago in a distant land I had a postcard of this very tower on my bedroom wall. It had been sent me by the quasi-inamorato of the moment who was off in Italy living it up, while I stayed in rainy Oxford perusing more portable gems of Mediterranean civilisation. As I recall, it was pinned up next to a rather nice poster of Prague castle lovingly carted home from a trip round Europe the previous summer, a poster I have since lost. This is particularly sad because all our own photos from that month-long tour were mislaid by the developers. This being in the bad old days of non-digital technology (I show my age here), there was nothing for it but teeth-gnashing and resignation to their loss. Though a sorrow at the time, one might say that it had the silver lining of disposing of the evidence of me aged eighteen in combat trousers and walking sandals (this trip pre-dated the rouge et noir revolution and it was Not A Good Look). Meanwhile, the landmarks we photographed are, to the best of my knowledge, still there for anyone who wants to look at them. Win win, I reckon.

Electric

2006-10-04T15:54:00.000+01:00

I was woken up in the early hours by the most spectacular electric storm. The sky was wildly flashing several different colours and lighting up my room in the manner of the Coven on a Friday night (though less sweaty). I was impelled from bed to gaze out of the window, and did try to take snaps, but lightning is not very easy to photograph so you will have to take my word for how beautiful it was. There was no point trying to sleep anyway, as the thunder sounded like someone driving a four-horse team around in a large tin drum. I do love the sound of battering rain on the windowpanes.
There was a storm of a similar nature yesterday at about the same time, which at first evoked a strange sense of deja vu, and then made me wonder whether this is a message from on high that I should be getting out of bed at 5am and not 8. If so, I am more than equal to it: the interruption meant I overslept by hours, and made the journey to lessons at a cracking sprint while deftly pinning my hair up. Today I am a far less captiviating sight than the storm.

Polyphonic Joy

2006-10-02T05:28:00.000+01:00

I thought Christ Church Cathedral, Pusey House and Magdalen Coll., not to mention the chapel of St Mary's Wantage, had given me a fair old training in High Anglican rite, and that those years in Hampstead had drummed the responses in pretty effectively. So I popped along to Mary Mags (Cambridge spelling, I'm afraid) in the full expectation of slotting right in. Oh no. Witness if you will the unique embarrassment that is pratting your way through a (n otherwise beautiful) mass.

To begin with, I couldn't find the hymn, owing to the multiplicity of volumes I'd been given; a short and fairly discreet hunt turned it up in none of these but in a hymnal residing in the pew. The service was now underway, but I was frantically flipping through various sections of the ringbound folder to track down the liturgy (also different from home). I had just caught up when it became clear that the entire service was sung and I didn't know the chant. By this time blushing with shame and with whole tranches of the mass passing me by, I delved back into my various tomes, but was so bent on finding something that looked like notation in the book that I couldn't follow the words and therefore had no idea what I was looking for anyway. I had by now given up my attempts to improvise the chant and was dumbly scanning page after incomprehensible page. Sensing my rising despair, a kindly parishoner intervened in a true advertisment for Christian charity. The chant turned out to be in a section of the service booklet without page numbers, cross-referenced from a separate service sheet covered in cryptic markings. This was one of three additional sheets, the remaining two of which I now regarded with fear and dread, as it was clear that at some point I was going to have to incorporate them into papier mache mountain on the pew beside me. One was just readings, and mercifully straightforward, but all was tainted by the lingering awareness that when the sermon stopped I would be at the mercy of the paper Everest again. I was also flummoxed by innovations such as which way to turn for the gospel (read from the front), or for the collects (said from the aisle), or when to stand, sit or kneel (I no longer know what on earth I am meant to be doing during the Sanctus). I felt an utter twit, especially for sitting in an empty pew so that I couldn't even follow the person next to me.

So much for a morning of soothingly familiar liturgy. But there was lots of fabby incense and friendly congregation and nice clergy who gave me a little tour through their service book. Even if they had driven me from the door with staves, it would have been more than worth going for the music: upliftingly lovely Palestrina and Lassus, and well performed. Plus, unlike almost every college chapel, the acoustic was super-clear, so you really got the transcendental effect of the counterpoint. Gorgeous. Highlight of my week. Now I just have to master the missal and I might get to listen to it properly.

Paraclausithyron

2006-10-01T04:27:00.000+01:00

Bit of a disaster this morning. Not feeling my stunning best, I emerged from my lair something later than my wont, my garland a little askew. On staggering to the bathroom, the bedroom door slammed shut behind me, which at first seemed nothing worse than jarringly noisy. However, the the doorhandle on the hall side was working loose and despite my most determined grappling and intemperate turns of phrase (tempora noctis eunt; excute poste seram!) it gained no purchase on the catch whatsoever. There was clearly no way of engaging the catch (and therefore of opening the door) without taking the whole doorhandle off from inside the room (a prerequisite of which was, of course, opening the door). Bit of a bind, and one not easily wrestled down by a slightly delicate-feeling young woman arrayed in nothing but an indecently short slip and the remains of the previous night's eyemakeup. Nor, having yet to bathe, was I fit to be among human beings, and I think no swine or beasts of burden would have welcomed me wholeheartedly either, so I wasn't relishing the prospect of calling on the household for help. Luckily my (fully dressed) landlady came to the rescue with a ladder and a multi-headed screwdriver, gaining entry via a fortuitously opened window, a rich irony, since a breeze from same had been the cause of the calamity in the first place. I, of no possible use in the break-and-enter, listened to proceedings from my bath and hoped that the cries of consternation were prompted by the gradient of the ladder and not by any shaming detritus of my fitful night.
At present moment, my normal means of ensuring personal privacy represent a danger of permanent incarceration. My room therefore stands open night and day until someone at Canadian Tyre can find a way to restore doorhandle and dignity. Against the obvious symbolism, this in fact perfectly guarantees my solitude and chastity. I can't even dress toute seule. omnes clamant: ianua, culpa tua est!

The Holy and Undivided

2006-09-25T07:10:00.000+01:00

This is Trinity College, though I made a bit of a bish and missed the prettiest bit of the facade. As far as I can gather, the University used to have a collegiate system like Oxford and Cambridge; I'm not entirely sure what function is performed by the remnants of this arrangement, other than decoration.

2006-09-25T07:01:00.000+01:00

Hart House is what the Union would be if it had a gym, fitness classes, numerous sports teams, a theatre, a jazz choir, a chorus, several bands, a bridge club, a chess club, a proper cafe, and about five thousand other facilities. I think they won World's Debating last year. Oh, and it's free.

Underneath the Arches

2006-09-25T04:45:00.000+01:00

This made me think of the ceiling above the staircase into Hall in Christ Church, though it's far smaller. It's the underside of an arch between Hart House and some other big quad. I had to get quite squinty to take the shot, and I have to admit that the angle of the lamp is a bit disconcerting, like something out of Dracula. You get the idea though: pretty, no?

Hart House

2006-09-25T04:18:00.000+01:00

Hart House was modelled on Magdalen College Oxford, or so people keep telling me. I did feel a twinge of familiarity when first confronted with this vista.

Not Just The CNN Tower

2006-09-25T03:43:00.000+01:00

Out for a walk in the last of the autumn sunshine, I saw this lovely building (which is some part of the university though I can't say what exactly) and snapped it. Though the sky above Toronto may be thoroughly scraped, there is still plenty of Olde Worlde prettiness at ground level, and this shot inspired a glut, some of which I shall upload above for those who may wish to picture my environs.

New to Sin

2006-09-21T05:14:00.000+01:00

Where I am from Sin refers to dangerous, irresponsible and highly pleasurable behaviour which dissolute bon-viveurs find irrestistably attractive. Canadians have seen the perils of this racy and unsettling term for their law-abiding people and reclaimed it as the name for the National Insurance card, ensuring that no one need be menaced by those three little letters that lead straight to hell. Over here they lead to state-run pensions and an accurate and efficient income tax system instead.

Yesterday m'chum and I went and queued up for our SINs (ho ho) and experienced yet again the wonders of a functional beaurocracy. We were in and out in 60 minutes (including optional 30 for same day - same day! - service). The form was the world's shortest and simplest. The staff were kind and helpful and smiled. The people queuing all chatted and fetched each other forms from the carousel. The furniture wasn't bolted down. It could have been a 1950s village post office on the Isle of Wight.

But here was the telltale sign of the colonies: despite involving the world's shortest form I nevertheless managed to run into trouble owing to having been born in a small, unremarkable and not at all famous town in Scotland whose chief distinction is having at some point in the distant past given its name to a large and glamorous town in Canada which has since become very famous indeed. Had I been born in Banff, Alberta then I expect I would be much better at skiing and landscape photography. As it is, Banff, Banffshire has given me a curious accent and an indelible addiction to chips. However, there is no quarrelling with fate, and it is Banff, Banffshire takes the laurel for producing me, a fact of which the official was readily convinced when I adduced the necessary vowels and evidence of calorific consumption. I did wonder whether the two Banffs have anything at all in common, besides a name and persistent subzero temperatures. About as much as I have in common with an Olympic swimmer, I expect, or my ex-boyfriend has with an internationally renowned global economist. They'd certainly differ in their attitudes towards SIN.

TIFF TTFN

2006-09-20T02:22:00.000+01:00

This weekend saw the end of the Toronto International Film Festival (http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2006/home/default.asp - sorry, I can't do hyperlinks yet) which I was lucky enough to be in on, owing to the largesse of a friend in the industry. It me feel like a true Torontonian since it's a huge annual event for the city and (I believe) the world's second biggest film fest after Cannes. For a week in September the place is overrun with limos and closed-off streets and long queues of fans hoping for last minute seats - or so it appeared as I swept past them with my industry freebies...
The insider access did mean that I wasn't choosing the films myself, and when it emerged that the first film was about heroin abuse, I began to wonder if perhaps I wouldn't be better off in the library after all. This sensation was compounded by discoveries about subsequent subjects, which included teenage suicide, apartheid torture, and exploitative globalisation. (In fact, the last one turned out to be a heart-warming clash-of-cultures romantic comedy, with the plot merely framed and fuelled by a US firm's irresponsible and unethical labour practices in the developing world, so that was okay.) Now I hardly need further goading into emotional lability at the best of times, and especially not when so far from home, but even I found these films nothing but uplifting, since they were beautifully made and very thoughtful.
In several cases the directors gave Q&As after the screening, but the audience really went through the roof one night when a staggeringly inarticulate, tattooed and scruffy youth with an offputting stoop appeared, gargled a few words of earnest but pointless greeting and shambled off again. This was someone called Heath Ledger. However, since he was not responsible for the script, I can wholeheartedly encourage you to see Candy (Neil Armfield, Australia 2006) which is superb beyond anything that a portrait of despair and depravity deserves to be and has made me into the High Priestess of the cult of Geoffrey Rush. Some will be more attracted by Heath Ledger, of course. Takes all sorts.

More Grub

2006-09-19T04:32:00.000+01:00

Today's dastardly confection was a Key Lime Pie, inflicted on my unresisting corse by my other housemate. She is a tremendous baker and kindly gave me a big squelchy slice of tangy loveliness after dinner. Delicious, and a particularly fitting conclusion to my aerobics class: since K was responsible for introducing me to the Athletics Centre it seems only right that she help me unravel any good it might be doing.
I am starting to think it is about time I shared with the household my own gift for cholesterol-filled creations, the making and eating of which have often brought solace in strife. Unfortunately, I can't afford butter, which is twice the price it is in Britain but essential to all my favourite recipes. Meat is also madly expensive, as are most dairy products, including, bizarrely, milk. How can milk be expensive? They have made it genuinely cheaper to drink Coke. So until Canada gets its own version of CAP (or whatever makes milk affordable in Britain), anyone with any vegan recipe ideas is welcome to make them known...

2006-09-18T02:15:00.000+01:00

Today I had a paratha, a severely good and terrifyingly calorific confection which I had somehow missed out on in my years of curry-eating in the UK. It was prepared by my lovely friend and housemate Shama, who is a magnificent cook and unerringly generous in sharing the latest scrumptious concoction with whoever is hanging around the kitchen. She fills the kitchen with lovely smells and my life with good cheer. Afterwards I made myself rather sloppy instant noodles and disintegrated tofu, which was nothing like as good (though considerably healthier).
Here is Shama, even more beautiful than her parathas.

The World Needs More Canada

2006-09-17T04:19:00.000+01:00

Or so announced the big sign in the bookshop. Given that, in terms of land-mass, Canada is the second largest country on the planet, I found the claim unpersuasive. However, on inspection they seemed to have personalities more than acrage in mind, as the backdrop was made up of the names of hundreds of famous Canadians. At least, I assume they are all Canadians. Otherwise it is was just a rather puzzling list of famous people.
Of course everyone knows about Glenn Gould and Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies. But David Cronenberg? Saul Bellow? Oscar Peterson? My own prejudices will be obvious, as the list doubtless also contained the names of renowned geologists, software designers, Nobel-winning Economists and the like, none of which I would have recognised or remembered. But it was a long and impressive list for a "new" country (and I didn't notice mant Inuit-looking names up there) of only thirty million people. Incidentally, of these 30m, 10m live in the Greater Toronto Area. This means fully a third of the nation is using the same two off-licences.
One thing I found strange was that the names were printed in fonts of varying sizes, whether to reflect the (supposed) magnitude of their fame and achievements, or as a purely aesthetic exercise, I couldn't say. In any case, I was quite put out to see the wonderful Alice Munro in only the second-biggest font (anyone unfamiliar with her work should acquaint themselves with it as a matter of urgency) and thought of engaging the bookseller in an Atwood v. Munro face-off. On balance I decided he would be more likely to respond to critical remarks from people actually buying something, which I wasn't: books are expensive here, ironically for a nation of loggers. And of writers, indeed.

Distant Nuptials

2006-09-16T18:06:00.000+01:00

Today is a very exciting day: two very old and dear friends are getting married (to each other), in the most long-awaited marriage ceremony since Scott and Charlene. In fact, by the time this goes up they will, barring forces majeurs, already be wed, which is hugely exciting and cause of much celebration, espcially for those of us who have been following their romance with avid interest for years and years. I need hardly mention the depth of my disappointment at missing it all: raising a solitary glass at a remove of thousands of miles isn't much consolation. But enough grumbling: it is a marvellous day, so let joy be unconfined and the echo of popping champagne corks echo across the pond. No photos for this post, alas...

Grapevine To The Right...

2006-09-15T04:18:00.000+01:00

Today I went to the Athletics Centre. Despite having lived in and around Oxford for eight years, I don't know if Oxford even has an athletics centre, and I lived next door to the (noisy) college sports ground for months without even knowing it was there, with the odd jog along a picturesque towpath as my spasmodic concession to the need for cardio-vascular health. The sports centre here is enormous and unlovely (as you can see) and situated right in the middle of the campus, so there is no escape from a choice between exercise and guilt at not exercising. They also make it unreasonably easy by running a massive variety of classes, at all times of the day, which are free to University members, and for men and women of all ages, so one isn't intimdated into atrophy by oceans of improbably flexible PE majors. Above all there is the primal draw of highly rhythmic music, by which I am readily hypnotised into forgetting that I am sweating and in pain. As a consequence of all this, I have a made a find. They are called abs. I suppose I had been notionally aware of something separating my intestines from the layer of superadipose fat, but I wouldn't have gone so far as to call them abs. Now I have willed control of them. Extraordinary. These illustrious seats of learning really do exist to fuel the thrill of discovery. Next I would like to discover a means by which I can replace my precipitous heels after aerobics without hobbling agony. A litter, perhaps?

2006-09-13T07:33:00.000+01:00

Somewhat in the manner of the old British television test cards, here are the current inhabitants of my bed. I am off to join them.

Scarlet and Black

2006-09-13T04:21:00.000+01:00

Scarlet and BlackToday I worked out how to move pictures from my camera to my computer. I realise this isn't very advanced but we all have to start somewhere. If I am lucky I might be able to work out how to put them on here, too. Wouldn't that be clever?