As a lot of you know, I am in a bit of an unusual situation at the moment: I'm not working, and I don't know when I will be returning to work but it won't be for at least another week. It was a bit anxious-making at the start, especially as this would only be my first month on the job, but, you know: it's not my fault, I'm being paid, and I will have a job to go back to - so I've decided to treat it as a strange and wonderful gift and make the most of it accordingly. So! On Wednesday I finished a story; on Thursday I finished a vid; on Friday I spent my entire day in the spring sunshine in the Green Park, picnicking with dear friends; over the weekend I went on walks and spent a lot of time reading in the local hipster café; and then came today, and I've made a decision.
The decision goes like this: I have time. I have free travel into London. (Actually I have exceptionally expensive travel into London, but it's an annual season ticket.) And the sun is shining beautifully and it turns out I don't even mind cycling when it's not sleeting down at the crack of dawn! So I am going to do things I don't normally get the opportunity to do: I am going to have adventures! Today I went for a long and delightful lunch on the South Bank with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
such_heights (we talked a lot about Leslie Knope; it was the BEST) and in the afternoon I went south of the river to the Imperial War Museum.
( about that )
On a kind of related note, I am reading rather a lot of non-fiction at the moment, all around a loose theme. I'm working through most of the books by the British historian Ben Mcintyre - my favourite so far has been A Spy Among Friends, an account of the life of Kim Philby which manages to be informative and academic but also occasionally wrenchingly, I-can't-read-to-the-end-of-this-page-right-now heartbreaking; there's also a bookskygiants told me to read, Operation Mincemeat, which is the true and totally hilarious story of how a team of British eccentrics in the 1940s made up a fake dead guy carrying fake documents explaining a totally fake super-secret battle plan and dropped him on the coast off Gibraltar for the Abwehr to find. The story includes, inter alia: ping pong enthusiasts, cake-baking secret agents, a whole submarine of British soldiers putting on American accents, made-up terrible hotels, made-up angry Welsh relatives, unapologetic cross-dressing, bemused Soviet spies, and the used underwear of the recently deceased Warden of New College. (On the way out of London with the corpse, they accidentally drive straight over a roundabout. It is the most ridiculous book.)
Right now I am reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's account of how the GDR files shredded by the Stasi on the eve of reunification are being pieced together bit by bit. It's a fascinating, sad book, and kind of brings home to me, again, how recent the events depicted in it are. This is the thing about me and history, I suppose - I'm interested in what made the modern world, and my having been a PPEist I suppose is not coincidental, because PPE is really a crash course in how to understand the modern world. (Not a crash course on the world itself, not really: it leaves you with very little concrete knowledge of anything, and a great deal of willingness to believe in complexity. That was my experience of it, anyway, and despite everything I've never ever regretted doing it.) But the thing about the reunification of Germany is that I remember it, maybe. Kind of. I have a friend who divides people into her contemporaries and not-her-contemporaries by whether or not they remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I'm the boundary case - I was born at the start of 1987, and was just short of three by November 1989. Which I suppose means I don't really remember it - what I remember is my dad coming home, from a conference in what he thought was going to be West Berlin, and bringing me a present of a piece of the Wall. I wonder how he explained it to me-at-nearly-three. I should ask. (Maybe: this is history.)
Wow, this got a lot longer and duller than I expected it to, huh. If you have any suggestions for my adventures this week, do tell. Tomorrow I might go the Science Museum! And I will see the Magna Carta exhibition at the British Library, of course. But otherwise time stretches out wonderfully ahead.
The decision goes like this: I have time. I have free travel into London. (Actually I have exceptionally expensive travel into London, but it's an annual season ticket.) And the sun is shining beautifully and it turns out I don't even mind cycling when it's not sleeting down at the crack of dawn! So I am going to do things I don't normally get the opportunity to do: I am going to have adventures! Today I went for a long and delightful lunch on the South Bank with
such_heights (we talked a lot about Leslie Knope; it was the BEST) and in the afternoon I went south of the river to the Imperial War Museum.( about that )
On a kind of related note, I am reading rather a lot of non-fiction at the moment, all around a loose theme. I'm working through most of the books by the British historian Ben Mcintyre - my favourite so far has been A Spy Among Friends, an account of the life of Kim Philby which manages to be informative and academic but also occasionally wrenchingly, I-can't-read-to-the-end-of-this-page-right-now heartbreaking; there's also a book
skygiants told me to read, Operation Mincemeat, which is the true and totally hilarious story of how a team of British eccentrics in the 1940s made up a fake dead guy carrying fake documents explaining a totally fake super-secret battle plan and dropped him on the coast off Gibraltar for the Abwehr to find. The story includes, inter alia: ping pong enthusiasts, cake-baking secret agents, a whole submarine of British soldiers putting on American accents, made-up terrible hotels, made-up angry Welsh relatives, unapologetic cross-dressing, bemused Soviet spies, and the used underwear of the recently deceased Warden of New College. (On the way out of London with the corpse, they accidentally drive straight over a roundabout. It is the most ridiculous book.)Right now I am reading Stasiland, Anna Funder's account of how the GDR files shredded by the Stasi on the eve of reunification are being pieced together bit by bit. It's a fascinating, sad book, and kind of brings home to me, again, how recent the events depicted in it are. This is the thing about me and history, I suppose - I'm interested in what made the modern world, and my having been a PPEist I suppose is not coincidental, because PPE is really a crash course in how to understand the modern world. (Not a crash course on the world itself, not really: it leaves you with very little concrete knowledge of anything, and a great deal of willingness to believe in complexity. That was my experience of it, anyway, and despite everything I've never ever regretted doing it.) But the thing about the reunification of Germany is that I remember it, maybe. Kind of. I have a friend who divides people into her contemporaries and not-her-contemporaries by whether or not they remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I'm the boundary case - I was born at the start of 1987, and was just short of three by November 1989. Which I suppose means I don't really remember it - what I remember is my dad coming home, from a conference in what he thought was going to be West Berlin, and bringing me a present of a piece of the Wall. I wonder how he explained it to me-at-nearly-three. I should ask. (Maybe: this is history.)
Wow, this got a lot longer and duller than I expected it to, huh. If you have any suggestions for my adventures this week, do tell. Tomorrow I might go the Science Museum! And I will see the Magna Carta exhibition at the British Library, of course. But otherwise time stretches out wonderfully ahead.