philosophy supernatural nude

It's been a hell of a week, all things considered. Let's not even get into the part where I got my passport stolen on a Paris Metro station.

(I should add that after about an hour of that particular flavour of anxiety you only get when you have no passport and are four hours away from an international flight you are already checked in for, I had it returned to me by a mysterious stranger, who handed it over with no explanation and disappeared into a subway tunnel. My life, a Cold War spy novel, apparently. I never stop being surprised by how kind people are.)

Otherwise - things are in flux. I was in Oxford and London over the weekend, missed Pride for the nth time (next year! definitely), but managed a quick lunch with gavagai, at least, and, well. Well, I have a sixteen-year-old cousin from Indiana. She's visiting Europe with her girl scout troop. She has never been anywhere other than the States or India. Her mother is very worried about her getting lost/kidnapped. Accordingly, when I was still in Ithaca I promised to take her and her two friends out for dinner in London, not realising at the time that her well-meaning girl-scout-leader-whatever guardians would be interested in, er, vetting me before I disappeared into one of the world's major metropolises with their little darlings in tow.

So Shim and I dressed as respectably as possible, and made soothing noises about how we are totally grown-up and can totally be trusted with teenagers (and, as gavagai insisted on pointing out, not at all the sort of people who stay up the night before reading fanfic till 3am and posting "DEATH TO THE OPPOSITION" to their friends' Facebook walls). The three middle-aged and very serious ladies asked us what we do. "I am a lawyer, and my partner is a librarian," I said, very seriously, and tried not to look like my grown-up shoes were killing me and that I wasn't holding a carrier bag of Star Trek books.

Anyway, success! I took them out, and fed them a nice dinner, and let them have a glass of wine each which endeared me to them forever, and delivered them back to their youth hostel back to their clueless guardians, having been somewhat enraged by the revelation that their troop leader had calculated their food budget by converting it from dollars. I took them to a Tesco Metro, bought them sweets and fruit and crackers and whaever else they wanted, and ruined their entire learning experience no doubt but I refuse to feel bad about it. Shim and I got home to Oxford at 2am with sort-of feelings of a job well done and sort-of mental whiplash.

Speaking of home, and Oxford. Shim and I move to Cambridge in less than a week. Remember how when I left Ithaca, I was having FEELINGS, only one at a time because I am not an emotionally complex person? That.

Anyway! I digress. glitzfrau asked me some interview questions.

( America; Diana Wynne Jones, authors like her; advice to fresher-me; my dream legal career; dragging up )

Bedtime.

So, I am in the Midwest, where it is a good ten degrees warmer than it was in New York, and I am feeling a little at sea; it's interesting that I've lost a lot of my anxieties - I mean, for the first time in weeks I have slept ten hours two nights running - and gained a lot of new old ones, because my relations here are kind and loving and acres more conservative than my own parents. The net result is for me to miss home desperately - not the UK in general, not my boy and my books, but the house I grew up, my parents, our way of doing things, food, religion and culture, which is of course better in every respect. Every.

( this is under a cut because it is the silliest, pettiest complaint I have made in a while )

But I make things sound dreadful. They are not. I made it here on Sunday after a long journey but with no delays and no issues about my carry-on baggage, and that was after my lovely weekend stayed entirely lovely; on Saturday night I watched Star Trek and ate popcorn with thingswithwings, livrelibre and eruthros and had lots of fannish fun, which has been sadly lacking in my life recently.

And now I am trying to catch up on a little of my work, and have some rest, and tonight is the fifth night of Navratri. Here they go in for organised religion a great deal, and as the mandir for the area serves a lot of people and traditions, they celebrate every festival with the enthusiasm of the group of Hindus who celebrate it with the most enthusiasm, which is... startling. Garba, a tradition that reminds me irreverently of dancing at the Taruithorn Banquet, is a Gujurati thing - no Gujurati blood in me, but we all set to dancing with a will. I had a lot more fun than I let anyone know, for fear of being made to dance at a later date. Still. Lots of colours, and dancing around in circles, and dandia, a tradition where each person carries two thick sticks, and if you do it right you should bang neatly on your partner's sticks in rhythm, and not, for example, your partner's head, or their very shiny dupatta, or the space of air where the small child was just swiftly removed from.

Also, Diwali is soon and I am vaguely torn. Flying here for it is an option - it's a Friday, so I wouldn't miss class and there is a six am flight out of Ithaca, but for all I'd be able to celebrate it with some of my family I'm sure I would merely miss home horribly. At the same time, if I stayed in Ithaca I might just mope even more, and my parents would be in India, where the ten-hour time difference would probably mean I wouldn't even speak to them on Diwali itself.

(Not to mention the airfare. Er. Um, it might be a justifiable expense for a weekend if the alternative is sitting at home feeling like I am the only Hindu in the world - really, this isn't true - but. Okay, to think about later.)

In ten days Shim will be here! This is exciting. In the meantime I potter on and try and get things done.

Oh, and! I am reading the first of the novels that I got from the booksale. The Left Hand of Darkness is surprising me; while I love Le Guin, mostly Earthsea, Western Shore and the short stories. I'd read "Coming of Age in Karhide", the short story about Gethen, before I read this. And while I keep thinking it's boring - very ground in politics rather than the SF setting, and while the prose has the occasional flash of Le Guin's limpidity of vision, it can be quite (by artifice, I'm sure) workmanlike - and yet I keep picking it up again, and wondering what's going to happen in it in odd moments.

Onwards, as ever.

Had dinner tonight with a couple of very old friends indeed. It was sort of supposed to be an evening of new things - they're brothers, whom I'll call V and P (which aren't actually their initials, because I'm crafty like that), and their mum has just moved to a pretty new apartment by the water. So off we went this evening, with a box of chocolates and a poinsettia, and oohed and aahed at the new place, which has, among other things, a coffee grinder, a kitchen floor with actual, honest-to-god sparkles (it made me want to dance; my kitchen floor doesn't make me want to dance!), a large tank of tropical fish and a wee tortoiseshell kitty, who is very shy and lives in a cupboard.

But my point was, we got to reminiscing about long ago and far away, which reminded me of all sorts of things I'd forgotten about living in hospitals. I mostly did until I was twelve-going-on-thirteen, and V and P and I used to spent quite a bit of our time - basically, all of our time - running around getting in trouble. See, this was the late nineties when most of the small infirmaries became big district generals, and ours was no exception - it moved out of town to an enormous greenfield site complete with duckpond, and left behind eyes, gynae and geriatric psychiatry, to the amusement of all. And in the mess of the move no one really paid attention to the kids running around the place, and no one was exactly supervising - the logic was, doctors' children in hospitals are sort of supervised by osmosis, and besides if they break a leg, accident and emergency is right there - but even so, until V reminded me tonight, I'd forgotten we built a go-kart out of scrap wood and raced it around the hospital car park.

Seriously. Out of a three-legged table, some wheels taken off a trolley the porters had thrown out, some string and some enthusiastic pushers, including my dog, a fairly excitable Alsatian. Funny how you can forget brushes with certain death. We also built a treehouse at one point, and tried to spend the night in it; I think we lit a fire in a dustbin before giving up because it was cold. And went trick-or-treating through the hospital wards at Hallowe'en, and got songs played on the radio station, and walked out to the beach and tried to push toboggans down the dunes. It was all a bit Swallows and Amazons, only with less water and more sharps bins.

It makes me a little sad that now the infirmary really is closed, the buildings are going to be turned into flats, and the whole place is going to be different. The funny thing was, there were a lot of kids running around at the time, and I've forgotten most of them - but many years later I was at a party in Oxford when a girl came up to me and said, "The old infirmary...?" - and it sort of came flooding back.

Anyway, a lovely evening, surprisingly. In other news entirely, the week's lunatunes theme is "top five at the moment":

1. Florence and the Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) (with thanks to musesfool; she said she'd had it on repeat for a few days, and I nabbed it off her and now I've had it on repeat for days, too - it's so great, so full of energy);

2. Sarah Brightman - Nessun Dorma (so lovely, this, and usually thematically appropriate);

3. Amy Ray - Laramie (for Matthew Shephard, and I like it a lot, especially the first couple of lines: we hit snow on the road to Laramie / we all heard about that mess)

4. Regina Spektor - Eet (jacinthsong pointed me at this, and I don't understand it at all but it's really gorgeous)

5. Melissa Etheridge - Bring Me Some Water (I am not at all a fan of hers, but I really do like this song).


...tell me if you like 'em. Alas and alack, I return to writing my statement of purpose for Cornell.

I am in Edinburgh! It is not very cold; yesterday I woke up at six am and listened to the birds sing for a while; shimgray claims that the whole Ethnic Festival aspect is his dastardly revenge for my taking him to my family reunion in October, but somehow this doesn't quite work; people being unfailingly sweet to you and then feeding you to excess does not, in my mind, constitute revenge.

It has been an intersting couple of days, certainly. I almost missed my train north, and would have done had I not been stopped by a little old lady with a car full of greenery, who said she was going to decorate the local church and if I would help load hundreds of pots of green things, she'd give me a lift to the station; then, once I had arrived, and been met, and gone off to catch a bus, I nearly had my suitcase stolen. I would have done, had Shim not both a) been paying attention and b) had the wherewithal to jump up and hare down the street after the guy, who was more confused than criminal and seemed under the impression he was carrying two large plastic crates of vegetables and crisps rather than a small suitcase filled with women's clothes. (That said, there was a little old lady also on the warpath. While I peered out to see what was going on, she told me to stay on the bus, because that was a bad man. "Not your man!" she amended. "The other man.")

I have also been fed more food than I've pretty much been fed ever, been batted in the head by a remote-controlled helicopter and replaced a fully-bedecked Christmas tree with another, taller, not-so-fully bedecked Christmas tree at five o'clock in the morning. It has been very nice indeed.

(My father reports that two of the Christmas babies he's delivered have been named after me. Oh god. Also, my mother is not talking to me, again. After nearly throwing an entirely arbitrary fit that I was giving my boyfriend a girls' scarf for Christmas, and then having the sheer temerity to not call her until nine o'clock in the evening on a day on which I had been travelling for six hours, clearly things could only get worse. Bitter, me, etc. She's driving me mad.)

And now, Doctor Who. Until then, yuletide! It is great, and there are recs to follow. In the meantime, usual rules apply! If anyone guesses one of my stories correctly, a ficlet or drabble shall be forthcoming! (And as a tip: there are six stories of mine in the archive, five full length and one drabblet.)

Hope everyone's having a nice day.

I remember, when LJ was still running out of a back room in San Francisco and I had a free account and it would go down for hours just as I'd done my homework for the night and I'd sit and fume that I couldn't pour my fourteen-year-old angst into it.

...I tell this story as evidence of how much things change, really. I have spent the evening not doing my homework; I failed to do contract; then I failed to examine the insanity defence for murder; then my mother phoned and talked at me solidly for an hour; then I failed at offences against the person. I shall shortly give up and go to bed, I think.

Anyway! I am Doing Things for my Mental Health. This gets long, and somewhat self-obsessive, so it shall be duly cut. ( depression! echolocation! menstruation! Gratutious Capitalisation! etc )

And, lastly - pick a topic for my baby-dissertation! (It's not a dissertation, they say; it's just... a long research project. Uh-huh. Yeah. Not at all the same thing.) I was telling my father about it this evening, and he said, thoughtfully, "Well, it was to be expected. Baby's first step, baby's first word, baby's first thesis."

...yeah. And now to bed.

I'm still alive. People may be surprised to know this. But I am. I survived. By Saturday morning, I was hitting a sort of awful plateau - where my brain was splitting at the seams, my family had gone out, I considered staying in bed and didn't, considered living in the bath and didn't, and after a great deal of mental kicking-of-self, went out. I went to News From Nowhere, and then I went up the hill in the rain and then I went to the university Catholic chaplaincy to help - well, not so much help as sit around and wail - forthwritten make a Lancashire hotpot the size of Merseyside. It contained more potatoes than I have ever seen in one place, and was a suitably surreal interlude in my day; they were, she said, in aid of a Lancashire cultural evening, and when I departed, she came with me in search of Fisherman's Friends, which are apparently emblematic of Lancashire culture.

(No, I don't know, either. I have lived on the Lancashire border for a decade. I really don't know.)

So, I wailed at forthwritten. I wailed about how I chose to have a minor nervous breakdown the same week as my family amass, I wailed about how the family reunin was going to be awful, I wailed about having a broken brain, she was very soothing and made me coffee and walked me back into the city. At which point I fetched shimgray and took him home with me and began my own moral degeneration.

...I exaggerate. Actually, the whole thing went enormously better than expected, and my brain didn't break, for three separate reasons. First of all, the relatives were behaving themselves, for given values, and two of my cousins, plus Mani (whom I have written about before as my oldest friend, who kills goldfish and makes me watch America's Next Top Model), were calmly, aggressively sane, and mixed drinks, made me laugh, and were nice to (and approving of) shimgray. Whose presence was, of course, reason number three I didn't have any freak-outs. He, too, appears to have been treated well by my army of relatives: my grandmother cheerfully addressed him in Hindi (and asked why I didn't give him milk in his coffee, had I been a bad girl and forgotten; he smiled and nodded quizzically), and everyone else was either askance and thus polite or cheerfully accepting. At about eleven one of Mani's friends came by to pick her up, came in for cake and other food (god, so much food; a story for another time, the sheer quantity of food) and we were introduced. It amused me that this was the only occasion in the entire evening when he wasn't introduced as "Iona's... friend."

(My favourite incident was one of my cousins happily asking, "Who's the white person in the living room?" Pause, while she catches sight of Shim. "I meant... the other white person. I mean, I didn't - oh, god, that was racist about white people, wasn't it? I didn't mean to be racist about white people!")

(And one of the small children present, upon being asked if she'd travelled anywhere in the world, answered, "Boring places with no toilet paper.")

At three in the morning, it was over, we did it. I did not do the terribly scandalous thing of falling asleep fully clothed on my own bed on top of the covers with my similarly sleepy, on-top-of-covers fully-clothed boyfriend; I got up after an hour, like a good Indian girl, and went and shared with one of the cousins. I guess... that's compromise? Anyway. In the morning there was beautiful sunshine, and my family were sweet and gave us breakfast. (Also, apparently, my mother informed Shim, "You should learn Hindi."

...I just. I mean. Yes. Oh dear.)

In short: 'tis done, and 'twere well it was done quickly.

As for my brain... no, going home was not the best idea I've ever had. It was a good idea for other reasons; it was nice to see people, and it was nice to be in the north. I am still quite seriously depressed, and I don't think the trip home has really alleviated that, although this whole thing being over is a good thing. I need a serious sort of sit-down and think about this, but not right now. One step at a time, as always.

As a number of people have asked: I'm all right, really. The night before last it wasn't so much that I couldn't sleep as I couldn't sit still; I wandered around the house feeling really rather insane, and then, at five o'clock in the morning, thought clearly, hell with this, and when it got light, started making arrangements to make the journey north.

As dramatic gestures go, it wasn't bad - I got out of Oxford all right, and somewhere near Leamington Spa, rang my father to tell him that, er, possibly, maybe, I might have adjusted my tickets and might, possibly, be home in a few hours. He was concerned. And then because he is secretly five, carefully didn't tell anyone about it. So at half past four, when I stepped softly through the front door, my mother shrieked, "My baby!" and jumped on me. Which was worth it, really. Within about five minutes she'd made me some coffee whilst simultaneously telling me I drink too much of it, and when did I last eat, do I ever, why didn't I tell anyone I was coming, etc. It was good to be back.

I am actually not entirely sure this was the best idea in the world - there are so many relatives visiting that I'm having to really fight for peace and quiet, and of all the assembled masses, only my father knows why I'm really here, in the sense that he knows I'm quite depressed, not that I've been diagnosed as such. My mother merely thinks that I meant to do this all along as a surprise, and I think telling anyone the truth would lead to a major family meltdown, so. So this isn't actually relaxing as such; I'm having to hide my pills and such. I tell everyone I have a lot of work to do, which is certainly no lie, so can hide behind textbooks when needed.

But there are compensations. The weather in this part of the world is doing something it often does at this time of year, and getting hectically, fiercely beautiful. I went out briefly earlier - before remembering that in small country villages, post offices close on Wednesday lunchtimes - and watched the seagulls wheeling up against powder blue. It's lovely. The family situation is one thing, but what isn't claustrophobic is of course the landscape, which never changes. It's worth this, at least, being here.

Also, it is worth being here for some of my relatives. My cousin Sunny, who is an easy-going Australian medic, is here for four weeks to do his elective and is making my life calmer by his mere presence. He is cool, calm, collected, and predictable in what makes him happy. "Today," he announced this morning, "I am going on pilgrimage."

"Anfield?" I asked, ever-so-slightly amused.

"Yes," he said dreamily, and I wrote down the bus routes for him, because, seriously, who am I to stand in the way of other people's religious experiences. Off he went, happily, at about lunchtime, leaving me to the soft afternoon and the study of the criminal law.

So, yeah. I'm... not okay, but I'm still here. Some things - the small, everyday happy things, like my mother buying me a cupcake, or jacinthsong ringing me up to be appalling, or being in the vicinity when a life-long Liverpool FC supporter is asked by a well-meaning relative if it's Goodison Park he's going to today, and has to be led to a chair and given a glass of water - are making me smile, and feel good, or at least okay, and then it reverts, and I'd rather go and hide and shiver in a bath. But, well. There is a bath, at least, to hide in.

Tomorrow, if I feel up to it, I am going in to Liverpool to find the post office, get my Macbook fixed and possibly have lunch with forthwritten; at the weekend, shimgray is coming up, which will be very good for my mental health and catastrophically bad for his. And on Sunday, I return. I will go and get my head looked at by the medical profession on Monday.

So... yes. Still here.

Earlier, a perfect moment: skimming down Donnington Bridge after nightfall, with dark sky above and dark water below, humming abstractly to the Indigo Girls' Galileo, which doesn't stop being wonderful with the passage of time. I was given the album as a gift on my eighteenth birthday, which was also the day George W. Bush took office for the second time. I mention this merely because I spent intervals throughout the day having impassioned conversations with my father about Sarah Palin and her moose-eating credentials. (It's nice, sometimes, that nothing changes; that my life has rolled onwards and around, but I like dark nights and politics and Amy Ray, and my father is still a quietly ageing former hippie, a little more aged.)

Anyway. I am not eighteen. I am not twelve, four-and-a-half, or any other age that involves your relatives patting you on your head and remarking on how much you've grown and does she still not eat aloo gobi for breakfast like a good Indian girl, and we always knew she was going to turn out strange, etc., etc., and all the other things I have been subjected to today by my well-meaning relatives, here for the first time from India and making my life somewhat more difficult than it usually is. I say this with some, limited, affection; they try to be nice, they really do, and sometimes they really are, it's just, yes. Difficult. They have views. Indian families have Views. In a couple of weeks, they will be having a family reunion, in which a vast corpus of various relatives will appear, and my mother has been not-so-subtly persuading me to come home for it for quite a while now. This, of course, I have no objection to. It might be nice to be home for a couple of days, Mum will need lots of help I'm sure, and there are lots of my relatives (and two in particular) whom I'm very fond of and do want to see.

The problem is, well, my mother said, in a burst of enthusiasm, "Why don't you bring [shimgray]?"

To which my immediate response was, did my mother just acknowledge I'm an adult human being who might want to introduce her partner to her family? Quite apart from whether I could in good conscience subject a fellow human being to my family, this is, I think, the sort of liberal modern Western thinking that ought to be encouraged. My parents, in other words, are not the problem. But when you add conservative aunts and uncles into the mixture, it gets difficult. I'm a good Indian girl, I've got to be good and chaste and pure. And the double standard is just horrific; one of my cousins is getting married this summer (they've "found him a girl", I was informed, simperingly), and another has just acquired a girlfriend (something I found out, in a truly horrific turn of events, from Facebook), but I.... well, I am a category error. I don't do That Sort of Thing. It's like an enormous blind spot they have about me; I'm not enough of a person. It makes me rather angry. Because I'm female, I don't have agency, is the continual subtext beneath all of this. "Time to get you married," they tell me, but note syntax; I can't do anything for myself.

And the worst part of it is, the day I do get married, if I do, I will become a person! Not my life experience, not my degree, not my life plans, not my being an adult and philosopher and lawyer and human being, but the fact of being married will transform me into an autonomous being in the eyes of my extended family. That really makes me angry; more than anything else, I think. It's eternally symptomatic of the wider problem, in that in the culture I belong to, I'm not worth particularly much; I'm a liability and a problem to be solved, rather than the wee princes who strut about being my male cousins, and the fact that I'm the only daughter of my side of the family makes it all that little bit worse. I'm nicely insulated from it by virtue of distance (both cultural and geographical; it's the fact of their being rather liberal people that made my parents emigrate in the first place, to some extent), but it comes out at times like this. Part of me wonders if it's something to do with the fact I've finished my degree - the last thing I ought to do before getting married.

My mother, I suspect, has a Machiavellian plan going on behind the scenes - I think she wants me to bring home my underdone pale white boyfriend (shock! horror! etc.!) in an attempt at a beautifully visual fuck-you in the direction of the worse of my relatives. (Who will cluck and tsk and say they always knew it would come to this, they always knew that girl was doomed to bring dishonour, and so on.) My mother on my side is a dangerous thing. And if there are people on my side, and besides in a few weeks all the relatives will have returned to whence they came and this whole period of angst will have come to a blissful end, I might suggest that it's not all that important, not in the longer scheme of things where I continue living here and baby-lawyering and, well, being me, but it does matter. It matters a whole lot, when you don't matter.

And as such, I shall spend the rest of the week steadfastly not answering my phone, I think. And I will go home for the family reunion and be sweetness and light, but it will continue to rankle that I spent this morning clearing my room of condoms and antidepressants, because. So there. I have no point to make here beyond the standard, classic, it's not fair, it's NOT FAIR, it wasn't fair when I was small and brown and lost, and it's not fair now.

I have a banging monster of a tension headache that has so far not been alleviated by painkillers, enormous glasses of water and therapeutic shouting. I have to be up to get my laundry out. I may sit in the bath until then, having spent the last five or six hours being hugely, grossly productive. (Seriously. I got up. I went to work. I came back from work. I got rained on. I proof-read and got five training contract applications ready to submit. Packed a suitcase. Found tickets, insurance, passport and American dollars. Started work on application to the GLS. Did not cry. Put laundry in. Am now eating ice-cream and waiting for laundry to re-emerge.)

(Pause, as mum wanders in, demands of world in general where all her saris are, she knows she owns them, lots of them, in fact, have I seen them, no I haven't, do I still have that bottle of silver glitter, please can she borrow it, goes off to find it without waiting for answer, cue my father, he didn't know there was ice-cream, where is said ice-cream ("In the freezer, possibly?"), I didn't offer him any ice-cream, do I have any concern at all for my fellow man, clearly not, I will grow up to be the sort of person who reads the Daily Mail. Honestly, I do adore my parents.)

Anyway! Things that are of note, numbered as usual:

1. We can has cat! The landlord said yes. Therefore, chiasmata, sebastienne and I are free to become crazy cat ladies as and when we would like. I am quite, quite ridiculously excited about this.

2. Also, we can has... well. I feel that it needs recording that yesterday, due to a sequence of highly improbable circumstances, shimgray became the vaguely surprised owner of a thirteen-foot kayak. (With no paddles. We are literally up a creek... yeah.) Consequently, I shall be spending part of my Saturday tying it up with blankets and perambulating it home.

...anyway.

3. I met Anne Fine today! I was a big fan of hers when I was small - I have clear memories of reading Flour Babies and Goggle Eyes as they first came out - and she's apparently written about fifty books for children since. Anyway, she was a delight. I did a couple of hours' work in the shop in the afternoon - well, I say work; there were no customers whatsoever - and then toddled along two doors down to set up for the signing, met Book-Monkey-in-Chief carrying two boxes of books, took them off him and went to see what chaos I could bring order to, whilst the poor actual author followed us all down with some bemusement.

But, eventually she sat down, the kids queued up, it was all great. First of all, she can't talk to children. Well, she can't talk to children the way teachers and parents talk to children - she kept on getting halfway through words she possibly ought not to say, and then stopping, and then finally giving up altogether and talking about the bloody publishers at will. And it was more than stopping not to swear - she said to one small child, who had been standing there in front of my box of books for about half an hour, "You are pathologically indecisive." The small child clearly didn't understand but enjoyed the word "pathologically".

And in the breaks between signings, she talked to me, and apparently Book-Monkey-in-Chief had been telling tales, because she asked me about how Oxford had changed in the last twenty years - since her son was a Balliol PPEist. I told her a bit about how I'd found it, especially philosophy, and she fixed me with a gimlet stare and said, "Never forget. You have had an incomparable education."

I said I wouldn't. "No," she went on, thoughtfully, "They teach you how to think, don't they?"

That's the idea, I said. My degree results come out this week, I said.

She laughed and said, "What would you like me to write, darling?" to the front of the queue, and wrote with love to the most indecisive child in the world.

The signing actually went rather well. A lot of young children who had just read The Diary of the Killer Cat, and slightly older ones who had just read Goggle Eyes, and a surprising amount who wanted to read one called The Road of Bones. Now, I remember Goggle Eyes very well; I re-read it as an adult not long ago and realised anew how very, very good it is. (It is the story of Kitty, who does not like her mother's new boyfriend; this very simple plot is interspersed with clever allusions, acerbic wit and, my favourite, a marvellous set-piece involving the late-eighties CND.) This other one was new to me, having been written much more recently, and it was being gripped tightly by a solemn-faced boy named Joseph. "Sweetheart," she said, "you're ten, you don't want to read about Stalinist Russia" - but she ended up signing it To Joseph, who stood his ground.

As we were packing up, I asked her to sign something for me. A poster for The Tulip Touch (which is a horrifying - and horrifyingly good - young adult book based in part on the murder of James Bulger, so quite evocative for me, reading it) that claims it's Whitbread book of the year - which means it's been at the back of one of triptogenetica's cupboards for twelve years. She was very startled to see it, but signed it happily to James.

In fact, she was very good company. It's weird, but I've been here two weeks and not really seen any of my friends and done nothing but go to work in the morning and come back in the evening, and I've missed good company, which for me is usually defined as people who light up the room with how bright they are. One of the local newspapers was interviewing her, asked how much input she had into the film version of Mrs. Doubtfire (the book was called Madame Doubtfire, if I remember rightly), and if she had any regrets - and she said, not seeing the Beatles in Northampton in 1961.

And that was that. We finished packing, I picked up my wages from the shop, and she disappeared, but not before wishing me good luck for my results and telling me, "Give my very best regards to James, and congratulate him on his fine taste and discretion."

Not bad, I think, for an afternoon's work.

Anyway, I need to go to bed and kill this headache somehow. Tomorrow, I depart from Up North and return to Oxford. At least, for a while. I will be around and about until Wednesday night, at which point I depart for San Francisco. But in the meantime. Argh, my head. Bedtime.

Urrgh. I have lurgy and am thoroughly incapable of doing anything beyond lurking and making "urrrgh" noises. I watched Bob the Builder dubbed into Hindi. It was not edifying. It is frightening, exactly how much I resemble this icon at the moment.

I posted a meme a couple of days ago in which you all told me things I should blog about, which I don't.

apotropaios asked: Actually, I don't think I know much about your opinions on art. Who's your favourite artist? Do you have a favourite painting?

( Hopper and subway signs )

slasheuse asked: I want to know about your only-child-ness! Do you mind? Was it deliberate on your parents' parts? As an only child myself I like to know what others think.

( tragically I was an only twin )

clubhopper15 wrote: Something mundane and less intellectual..like your list of hottest celebrities :P

She says, as though I post interestingly and intellectually all the rest of the time. I will merely smile enigmatically and point you at the wonder that is Paul Gross and the very different wonder that is Katee Sackhoff.

And gamesiplay asked: I'd actually like to hear MORE about your love of philosphy, because hearing people talk about the abstract intellectual things they love makes me happy. Like, who's your favorite philosopher? Who was the first one you ever read, and was it immediately clear to you that you wanted to Do Philosophy when you got the chance? Do you ever get those annoying questions from practical people about what you're going to "do with" philosophy, or what "use" it is? How do you respond? That kind of thing.

( and she probably now wishes she hadn't asked )

Okay, enough! Another attempt at work now, I think.