the stars and the sea

I got not one, not two, but three parcels in the post today. I feel really loved. Okay, one of them wasn't actually for me. But still, very much loved. The first one, which was too big for the letterbox and resulted in the postman making a racket and waking me up, a good thing as otherwise I would have slept 'til noon, was from the_acrobat. Who is MARVELLOUS. She sent me a new Anastasia book and lovely postcards from Green Gables (as in Anne of, it is a real place OMG!) and my very own enchanted frog to kiss and boxes and boxes of sweeties. Specifically, Nerds - those boxes of tiny little neon sugar pieces, which I loved when I was little - and I am all squee-ish because I don't they make Nerds here any more. I am rather amused that I still remembered instinctively the best way to prise open the box.

So I will be on a sugar high for a week, which is wonderful, and sadly I have already devoured the Anastasia book but never mind, I can read it again (and again, and again). These books, by Lois Lowry, are children's books all about a girl called Anastasia Krupnik growing up in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England) in the late seventies. I love them so much. I mean, I loved them when I was about ten, but re-reading them as an adult, I was amazed by how charming and sweet and non-dated and incredibly, hysterically funny they are. And one of the scariest things about them is the fact that they are thirty years old but are still the most liberal children's books I've ever come across. Anastasia's parents are an artist and a Harvard poet, who are delightfully eccentric and hilarious, and her brother is called Sam and is two-and-half. It's a blatant narrative device to make him into a proper character, but he's verbally precocious and talks in full sentences about the problems and issues about being two-and-a-half. Talking about the liberalism, we have Anastasia complaining about things being anti-feminist and how her summer job employer is bigoted, and in a truly delightful scene, she falls in love with her (female) gym teacher and her mother has to gently explain to her that that's all right. But anyway, they are delightful and they are out of print. And now I have another one, Anastasia's Chosen Career, and I am squeeful.

The second package was from jacinthsong - I am now the proud owner of Casanova and Blackpool! Thank you very much! I foresee much Tennant lust coming up soon. I haven't seen either of them before, so I'm looking forward to that.

(Um. I'm going to break off here and talk about something completely unrelated. I am writing this and also watching QI, and for the sake of the latter, having to suffer from a lot of adverts because I'm not watching on the BBC. Why do the people who write these things always take viewers for complete idiots? Kellogs are trying to convince us that to get are much fibre as there is in one bowl of branflakes, you'd have to eat nine potatoes. Since when were potatoes a fibre-rich food? It's like saying you'd have to eat stupid amounts of popcorn, or cucumber or something. And don't get me started on the advert for toothpase that claims it's the first to contain "liquid calcium." If I remember rightly, calcium is an alkaline earth metal with a melting point of more than eight hundred degrees. Pretty awesome toothpaste, then.

Of course, that said, some advertising does actually work. The Muller yoghurt people apparently now make banana yoghurts. I now know what will be my major source of calorific intake this academic year.)

The third package, sadly, was from Amazon and sadly was not for me despite being addressed as such. But I still feel much loved by the universe. Of course, the parcels were the most exciting thing to happen all day. It is still too hot. As well as being too hot, there is no water, which is not of the good. Well, there is some water but all the taps are trickling. This is because there is apparently some sort of scrubland fire at Formby Point, which has been burning now for four days and has led to the lovely people from the fire brigade siphoning off all our water. I do understand their need is greater than ours, etc, etc, but it's bad enough not having fans or air conditioning when you can't have a nice cool shower either, and are forced to stand there like an entirely dry lemon as water drips in the manner of egg yolk down your hair.

Anyway, this is all getting a little distracted. I was supposed to be doing actual academic work tonight. Actual feminist theory, as that situation has become sort of dire. I have done nothing. And instead I wrote fic. It's official: writing fic only happens for me when I have other things I ought to be doing. Which probably means I should never take up writing as a career. And the weirdest part of it is that the fic I wrote tonight is not part of the bad-sex-scene fic I am trying to write, nor is it one of the two ficathon entries due next week. It's a strange, standalone fic, 1700 words long and written all in one go, and I swear I don't know where it came from. It's loosely related to late XF-canon, which I barely remember in the first place, and has only one canon character in it, and I don't even know if it's postable, or where I would post it if it were. I'd appreciate it if any of you could take a quick look at it (if I don't scrap it in disgust in the morning!). I know I've already got the usual suspects pinned into a corner for the bad-sex-scene fic, when that gets finished, but I thought I'd ask.

Okay. Now I try and work. I hope I can.