philosophy supernatural nude

Notes on a week in Delhi and Mumbai:

-So this time I flew into Mumbai from London, to visit friends for a couple of days, and it's lovely. Unlike Delhi, it has reasonable weather all year round rather than two months out of twelve, and although it has its problems, it doesn't have Delhi's perennial issues with water. (Lately, in Delhi, you just want to cry watching water go down the drain; it's like throwing away gold dust.) Anyway, so I went to the beach and ate street pav bhaji and saw the Gateway of India (which you can't go in, any more; there was the beautiful open lit empty space inside, occupied only by a police dog having a snooze) and had tea at the Taj and generally was quite, quite useless. It was great. My mental health hasn't been the best, lately, but I think a dose of warmth and sun is never bad. Delhi, once I got there, is in the smoothing-off period, the pre-Diwali time where the shops and businesses are beginning to turn off the air conditioning. It lingered around a pleasant, dry thirty degrees, which was nice.

-Since I was last in India about eighteen months ago, my parents have sold their old house in Delhi, which was by New Delhi Railway Station, and given that it was my father's ancestral house and he did to a greater and lesser extent grow up in it, and also, it was where I spent the little time I did with my paternal grandfather, a deeply formidable gentleman who was kinder and gentler to me than he had ever been to anyone, given all of those things, god, I hated that house. When my father was young it was a nice house in a residential district, running on the rhythms of the railway station (one of the things I did like about it was the brief moment, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, every morning at five am: this is the night mail / crossing the border, in this case, the Kalka Mail), but now it's surrounded by developments, hotels and construction work, and to make things just that little bit worse, the water pressure in the area has long since fallen to basically nothing. We spent four months there the summer I was four, and it was forty-eight degrees in Delhi with no air conditioning or running water, and those days, you had to ring up Emirates to confirm your flights the day before travelling. (Did you know that? I've never met anyone who knew that. We were bumped to standby. I missed my first two months of school. I was put off my ancient and magnificent homeland for not-quite life.)

-(A related note, also: I occasionally see non-South-Asians refer to us as "desi", which is just, beyond not on, from my perspective. "Desh" means, homeland; "desi" means someone from that homeland. To presume to give that word, because it is a gift, is rank imperialism.)

-The new place, oddly enough, is very close to my mother's family. It's in CR Park, the Bengali colony which my maternal grandfather, my Dadu, was instrumental in creating in the seventies, and it's beautiful – it's a second-floor flat with two actual bedrooms (which, in south Delhi, is positively palatial) and trees in leaf brushing up against the windows. I adore it – partly for itself, because it's quiet and clean and comfortable, and as part of my family's continual quest towards non-Western modernity, it's outfitted with Indian-style bathrooms and kitchen, all cool, smooth granite and rattan and ridiculous drapes from Fabindia, and Ikea's finest in the kitchen drawers – and partly because, well. Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was maybe three or four in the morning and I got up, went to the kitchen and got myself an apple and rasmalai from the fridge, and cut the apple and put the rasmalai in the bowl, and sat for half an hour with my laptop, and ate them, then washed up the bowl, spoon and knife and put them in the rack to dry. I think maybe you have to be me to understand the significance of that. But I have my keys to the place. It's my home, too.

CR Park, too, is a good place to live. It was created as a gated community before the phrase acquired the connotations it has now – that is to say, the emphasis is on the second word. It's large and getting larger all the time – we are a short walk from the CR Park police station, CR Park Market No. 4 and the CR Park Kali Mandir Society – but all with that dusty-tree, homely feeling. Annoyingly, it's equidistant between two metro stations, Nehru Place and Kailash Colony, and thus not really walking distance from either, but just as I was complaining about that someone reminded me about the Phase III Metro work, which will build a third radial station closer than either of the others, so really, I'm very happy. I kind of want to take Shim there for a week one winter without telling any of my relatives I'm in town, and just hang out and explore.

-Speaking of which. I can't put my finger on it, and it's kind of frightening, but this kind of middle-class Delhi life has become a lot easier for me to navigate, just recently. I've been married five weeks and those five weeks have done more for my social capital than my previous decade of adult life. And it doesn't matter that Shim wasn't with me, or even that Shim isn't desi; somehow, something has changed. It's deeply insulting, of course, but that's maybe epiphenomenal? I picked up a book in the airport called Lady, you're not a man, which I liked mostly because it's basically a slim Indian feminist tract masquerading as a self-help book, and rule one is, never apologise for being a woman. This is the sort of self-help advice I can get behind. Anyway, so it is insulting, and maybe it is psychologically destructive to be a woman in a society that demands such apology (I applied to get the natural gas pipeline connected; the gas company wanted to know my husband's name before I could apply), but I don't know, I think the best way out is to carry on living the life I do. After all, India is an idea – a grand, ancient idea, for sure, but a thousand dialects and cultures, old states, new states, rural and urban and mixed, 1.1 billion people, one in six of all the people that there are, all pushed together like they fit, like it's possible for them to be one noisy nation, under no god. If there's no room for me in India, then what the hell's the point of it. (One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, ever, was said by my second-year institutional politics tutor, herself a desi: "She is the argumentative Indian.")

(Rule number whatever in the book is addressed to single women, living in a society that believes they need to be married before they're complete: remember all the other women who support you, cheer you, admire you, are you.. It keeps telling you there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need help, it's the worst self-help book ever.)

( wedding stuff )

Anyway. It can't be helped. I am back now for seven weeks (wouldn't it be nice if I got a job in those seven weeks, gosh), peeling off the jet-lag, and listening to Jiya Re on repeat this morning, if anyone needs something cheerful to help them out of bed, and going on.

I've been meaning to make this post for a while! Deep Space Nine, lovelies. People who really don't understand the silly Star Trek thing, look away now. (Except you don't get to make fun of me for it, I love science fiction and I love Star Trek and I am so done being ashamed of that.)

Deep Space Nine is the third Star Trek series. It's the only one to be set in one place, it's the only one to have a large cast of recurring characters, it's the first one not to feature a ship called Enterprise. As for what it's about: oh, god, I have no idea. It's about a space station called Deep Space Nine. It's sort of about war, and a little bit about religion, and a lot about family, and mostly about people.

I watched the pilot, "Emissary", in June 2009, and I just finished "What You Leave Behind", the final episode of the seventh season, and I have been watching this show for ten eleven months and I feel like I should say something about it that isn't just flail. I've been enormously lucky in that not one but two of my best friends were watching it for the first time at the same time as me - jacinthsong and hathy_col, thank you for a) putting up with me and b) lending me so many DVDs - and I've had a chance to properly squee. Squeee!

But first of all ( here are some things I don't like about it )

But what do I like about it, that is the question. Oh, so much. I love the tissue of the whole world it creates. The show begins in literal darkness. The space station is still called Terok Nor, a grim tentacular horror of a space station that is being busily trashed by the withdrawing occupying forces. The Cardassians kick stuff about, they leave. In come the Bajorans, who are throwing off the yoke of the oppressor not with a happy shout but with a sort of resigned efficiency, and the Federation, who are merely helping out. They aren't doing it all that well: Sisko's grieving for his wife and doesn't really give a shit about the assignment, Dax hasn't even been a new person all that long, O'Brien can't make the Federation and Cardassian computers work together. Bashir's all enthused that he gets to be a noble doctor working here in this third-world savage backwater, and Kira, as one of the noble savages herself, is getting ready to kick his head in.

Then, right next to the space station in the back of beyond, a stable wormhole is discovered to the Gamma Quadrant. And suddenly these people are at the centre of the world, and suddenly they have to be the best people they can be. And... oh, I love it, I do. Other Trek shows are pretty rubbish at people, interpersonal relationships, love stories, the rest of it – they're plot driven, spatial-anomaly driven, moral-dilemma driven. And Deep Space Nine is about… it's about Sisko and Jake, working out that father-and-son thing here in this very strange environment. It's about how they build ships together, go on trips together, about how Jake sets his father up on dates and Sisko yells at Jake for not doing his homework. It's about how Kira, who has been a terrorist her entire life, has been fighting the Cardassians her entire life, and has to learn now how to have friends, how to have fun, how not to fight, how to live.

(And let's pause for a moment on that: Kira, a woman with strong religious faith, who describes herself as a terrorist, who never regrets her actions, is nevertheless depicted as consistently principled and awesome.)

And then there's Julian Bashir, who incidentally is both non-white and British, who develops from annoying wunderkind to much more rounded character, and he and Miles O'Brien go on to get drunk together, play darts together, fight at the Alamo together and periodically declare their love for each other, together. And Nog, the Ferengi kid whom Jake teaches to read in the first season, who by the seventh season is a lieutenant in Starfleet, and so well-written and effective has his character development been, you absolutely believe it.

And then there's Odo, Quark and Garak, the three alien characters who are not backdrops to the humans – whose concerns and motivations are both entirely real and entirely at odds, on occasion, with those of the Federation.

And there's the whole world this takes place in: the politics of Bajor and Cardassia, the war against the Dominion, the smaller details like the Bajoran shrine on the station, the baseball in Sisko's office, the fomenting unionists in Quark's bar. The darker cast it puts on the Federation: Section 31, and the infamous root beer analogy. The brilliant, and brilliantly random recurring themes of yammok sauce (this is apparently a Cardassian condiment – why it gets so much discussion is never explained) and self-sealing stembolts (which are never explained at all). It's all so well-realised and internally consistent that these things make sense, and they're deployed with such a light and confident touch that you don't even have these sudden, self-conscious this-is-science-fiction moments, but only, these are people in a brave new world, but they're people.

Obviously I want to finish this by posting a clip from the show. I was going to post Miles and Julian getting drunk and singing Jerusalem, and then I was going to post Kira and Dax wearing the most amazing hats ever seen on television, and then I was going to post Garak, being Garak.

But now I'm going to post this: for the simple reason that it's during this little clip that my mild liking for this show made the leap into full-on love. All you need to know is that Kira has, for various reasons, just lost her job as first officer and liaison between the Federation and the Bajorans, and is preparing to leave the station.

( how can you talk about skin lotion at a time like this )

I am reading a case called Royal Bank of Scotland v Etridge (2001). It's quite a well-known case, and a fairly interesting one. It goes like this. Say you are married, or civil-partnered, and you live with your partner in a house that you both own. Say you then decide to start a business, and need a loan for the purpose. The bank wants security for the loan, so you offer up the only thing you have - your house. The bank agrees, Land Registry enters the restriction on your title to your property, you get the money.

Then the inevitable happens. The business fails and you default on the loan. In order to get back the money, the bank exercises its power of sale. And you're thrown out of your home - but so is your partner, through no fault of theirs, and they may not even have known that all this was going on, considering all that was required from them was one signature, possibly years before.

The House of Lords was keen to stop this happening, and in this case it set out guidelines for what a lender must do when making a loan of this type. Nothing dramatic - it must satisfy itself that practical implications of the transaction have been set out in a "meaningful way" to the other partner before it proceeds with the loan.

So far, so hoopy. In some ways this is just the sort of common law that appeals to me; there's a problem, the court takes a simple logical action, it fixes it. Very neat, very sensible.

But here's the issue. The wording of the judgement is as follows:

"It is important that a wife (or anyone in a like position) should not charge her interest in the matrimonial home to secure the borrowing of her husband (or anyone in a like position) without fully understanding the nature and effect of the proposed transaction and that the decision is hers, to agree or not to agree."

And later:

"It is important that lenders should feel able to advance money... on the security of the wife's interest in the matrimonial home..."

The textbook, published in 2009, I should add, writes:

"The lender is entitled to proceed on the basis that the solicitor advising the wife has done so properly."

And:

"[If going ahead with the transaction] the solicitor should explain to the wife the purpose for which he (the solicitor) has become involved..."

There's layers and layers of issues below this - at one level it's about undue influence, which suggests it's a tool to stop women being taken advantage of, and at another level it's about introducing transparency.

But the judgement is on the most obvious level, about husbands and wives. It's about how a husband takes out a loan, and doesn't tell his wife; it's about how a wife must have it explained. There's a clear, clear assumption that it will be a man who takes out a business loan, not a woman, and that it will be the wife who needs the situation explaining. The judgement was made in 2001, note: it wasn't Lord Denning in the 1970s getting paternalistic on us, it was made less than ten years ago. It's not a profound point that I'm leading up to here, but nevertheless I want to make it: the sheer and obvious sexism in it is what gets me down. It's not that you have to analyse it carefully to see that it's there, it's just there, waving a little patriarchy flag and wearing a shiny hat.

It was made before the Civil Partnership Act, of course - but that is retroactively implied into it, so there's one blessing, but hmph. Hmph.

So, my day was going pretty badly, and then there were death threats!

Remember the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women? The Pink Chaddi Campaign was a wonderful, wry, smart and pointed form of protest - because, let's face it, Hindutva activists are usually quite stupid, and witty humiliation as an argumentative technique is the best way to deal with them other than hitting them with iron bars and setting them on fire.

The Facebook group of the Consortium - I'm not linking to it, for reasons that will be clear in a moment - has been hacked and renamed "the only good bong is a dead one".

I hate everybody. And the Indian men of the world can go fuck themselves, with ginger.

edited to add: the Hindu discusses it.

I do wish Feministing wouldn't talk the way it does about, well, stuff. Skin-whitening products are Bad and Wrong, I quite agree, yes indeed. But... you know. There's a reason for them. Colourism, I've seen it called, but it's a kind of internalised racism or just plain old self-hatred that makes people like me think our skin ought to be whiter, and, you know what? It's my business, mine and my people's business, what we do about that, and I can't help but think it's terribly presumptuous for someone who's never been a part of a culture where this is an endemic feature to jump in and start spouting about the Bad and Wrong.

(And, just for the record? If there was some magic cream that would let me pass for white? I'd take it in an instant, and I'd pay more than $70 for it, too.)

In other news, lgbtfest is open for prompt-claiming, and I am having to resist very hard and not claiming... well, lots. I especially love the Harry Potter ones, becuse they twist off two identifiable nexuses (not a word I have used in the plural before): the thought that the magical world is much more socially conservative than ours, and the equally convincing thought that, well, they have magic. Rather than come out as trans, you might go to a back street for a potion as soon as you were sure it's what you wanted. I want someone to write that, actually. I'd also love someone to write about Voldemort's persecution of queer people and how that intersected with issues of birth, and oh, queer issues in the Potterverse generally.

In other other news, a brief vid rec (unlike me, I know): How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, a really gorgeous, savage indictment of the invisible Asians in Firefly. I don't entirely agree with the thesis, but the vid is stunning and very smart.

In other other other news, Small Cat just woke up and looked at me in a disapproving fashion. Back to equity and trusts. One day I will understand the law. Today is not that day.

That Cat, having just run riot around the living room, settled herself down to take a big bite out of my golden-syrupped waffles. I picked her up by the middle - the kitten I could once scoop up in one hand now works quite well as a draught excluder - and put her in the kitchen, and closed the door.

Poor kitty. Cue much wailing. "You don't looooooove me! You hate me! I bet I'm adopted!"

I ate my waffles, put the plate down and let her back in. Cue much purring, finger licking, and finally settling herself down to lick the golden syrup off the plate. Fine, I thought. Okay, she's rotting her little teeth, but she's due to lose them in the few weeks or so.

Then she shoved her little nose into the mug on the table, pushed it off and bounced down onto the floor. I sat up and found her cheerfully lapping up half a mug of black coffee. This is, I would argue, all the proof one needs that she is not adopted. She would have none of that. I put her back in the kitchen and all was peace.

And then small, stripy, kitty paws appeared under the kitchen door. They flailed. They flailed some more. Then a tiny kitty nose. Then a tiny kitty miaow. "S'okay, if you don't love me. I'll just. I'll just starve. It's okay."

In conclusion: I give up. I have a cat enthusiastically investigating the back of my jeans. With her claws. If anyone asks, I've just got into kink. Is less embarrassing than Defeat By Four-Month-Old Kitten.

In other news, I'm still here. Went to all my classes and lectures this week, save one. I still love the law. As for my brain... well. Still here. Having been offered it, I have so far resisted switching my meds to amitryptyline, because it's a tricyclic and the side-effects will probably be too awful for me to function. I went to my first session of talk-therapy on Wednesday. My counsellor is middle-aged, balding and has ears that stick out to here. I like him a lot. He said, tell me about your family. I told him about my family. I told him my father is a cheerful aging hippie, my mother is both awesome and occasionally crazy. He said, tell me about your friends. I told him about them. He asked, how do you cope with life and depression.

I did not say: I make convoluted puns on the internet. I eat waffles. I pick up my cat and sing, "Kitty in the sky with diamonds!" My dearest friend comes in from Norfolk and sexually propositions me.

I said: humour.

He laughed, and told me that he didn't like to make sweeping predictions so early on in the therapy-process, and he hadn't known me too long, but, well, "I think you'll probably be fine."

In other other news:

Truly idiotic post from Feministing today - apparently we should not be in long-distance relationships because they're not environmentally-friendly. As well as being idiotic in itself, this post exemplifies one of the things that annoy me about the big feminist blogs (Feministing, Feministe, Pandagon): they're so very definite about what a feminist, or in this case, a social progessive, is like. Occasionally that approach backfires spectacularly - see Amanda Marcotte's incredibly racist book covers, for example - but not often enough for my liking. Possibly this is just the week white privilege is pissing me off, but hell, white privilege pisses me off.

(Random bit of rage for the day: people keep talking about Christmas. Christmas is in December, for heaven's sake. I belong to a religious tradition that is also subscribed to by a billion people. The major winter religious festival of this religious tradition is, er, on Monday. Have I heard a single thing from the media, or the world at large, about this? Have I fuck.)

(Note: I am aware that this is not white privilege per se. I have never found a good term to describe it. I once described it as "orthopraxic cultural privilege", but I don't think it'll catch on.)

(Further note: jacinthsong gave me a Diwali card. This is awesome.)

I stop babbling now, yesyes. I am going to re-read Whipping Girl now.

The first thing I remembered when waking up this morning: we're out of coffee. In retrospect, I should've known it might not shape up to be a good day.

...sigh. Anyway. That sort of day, so this sort of post. Things that are indeed good about life:

1. The fact that the Wednesday market stall that sells the industrial quantities of sugar is back, and the drawer next to my bed is actually, literally overflowing with sugar. Mmm, liquorice. Mmm, dark chocolate. Mmm, biscuts. Mmm, regression to primary school. You get the picture.

2. Nobody has actually ever had "Final Honours School" written in the appropriate box on a death certificate. (Also, I have never accidentally certified my own death. This is not the case for her, my mum reports.)

3. Philosophy is, indeed, an entirely useless degree. However, in my case it is masked by the wonderful, wonderful degree title of "Philosophy, Politics and Economics", despite my having done twelve weeks of economics in my first year and thrown a textbook down the attic stairs.

4. Very few graduates actually starve.

(However, am going to echo slasheuse in saying hi, my name is Raven, and the only way I could know less about my degree subject is if I were actually dead.)

5. Oxford is a stunningly beautiful city, and springtime cloaks it in blossoms and fluffy clouds and sunshine. Also enormous gaggles of American tourists and random bagpipers on Cornmarket, but you can't have everything in life.

6. For reasons I am not sure I can satisfactorily explain, everything in our freezer tastes of cider. I don't think this is a good or bad thing, exactly, but it certainly adds an interesting note to a stir-fry.

7. The now well-commented-on and well-documented Open-Source Boob Project, otherwise known as skeeviness-onna-stick. It's not a good thing, of course, but the comments and discussion have kept me amused for a couple of days, and I had a very nice chat with emily_shore today, in which I got all my ranting out of my system.

(I hadn't written about it here because, well, my life is becoming this xkcd at the moment. Seriously. It actually happened word-for-word a couple of days ago. I leave it as an exercise to the gentle reader to guess which side of the exchange I was on.)

(Yes more parenthesis what of it. Um. Why has there been such an outbreak of stupidity on the internet lately, anyway? Seems everywhere I go, someone is saying something grossly offensive about women, about queer people, or about us filthy ethnics. After many, many years - literally - I may, after Finals, finally bring myself to make a post about my experience, yes, me, me-as-person, not me-as-PPEist, of White Privilege and How I Don't Have It. This is entirely far too long a digression, but what the hell. I always resist this sort of post, because I'm a strong disbeliever in anecdotal evidence - citation needed, oh my god, and "it happened to me once" is not a reliable third-party source - but it seems the level of stupidity on the issue is reaching critical mass, at least for me. For fuck's sake, world. Stop being racist. It's Not Good.)

8. If all goes well, it's actually only about a month until I see the_acrobat again. I have had to sort of push back how excited I am about this to the back of my head, but, er. Much, much excitement.

9. I have awesome feminist friends.

10. I have lots of work to do.

No, that isn't a good thing. I am going to do it now watch me go yes.

I've had a peculiar sort of day. Mostly, it's been gloriously sunny and warm outside, and I've been stuck in the Indian Institute Library since ten o'clock this morning, up five flights of stairs so significantly closer to the blue sky and dreaming spires, but still, not in the sunshine. I popped out in the morning to see steerpikelet emerge from Exam Schools, having finished Finals, and joined the cloud tipping glitter, balloons and congratulations on her head, but didn't stay for the party - I tramped fairly miserable back across to the Indian Institute and moped there for the entire afternoon. It was livened up briefly by jacinthsong, who is still great, smuggling sweeties into the Bodleian and reading out funny bits from How To Lie With Statistics.

Still, by about eleven, I was feeling thoroughly despairing. I'm writing an essay on the importance of gender politics in India, as mentioned before, and it's so awful I wish I'd done economic liberalisation instead. Not that the essay itself is bad, but the material. In India, women are mostly illiterate. They're overworked, underfed, and more than ninety percent of aborted foetuses are female. Since I've started writing this essay, six Indian women have been raped and two have been burned alive for dowry payments. They are abused and tortured, oppressed and villified, they are downtrodden, ignored, derided and unfranchised, bought and sold. It makes miserable reading and even more miserable writing, which probably explains why it's taking me so long to write this thing; I just keep stopping because I can't take another reason to despair.

So when Ben came up with a bag of KFC chicken, I was delighted to see him. He suggested I get some food and join him outside on the terrace. Yes, we do, indeed, have a terrace. It's a flat surface of flagstones that is alternately too cold and too hot to sit on comfortably - the flagstones radiate heat - but out in the silent, warm night air, it was perfect. I think there are some people that are just good to be around, and he's one of them - in any case, it was very soothing to be sat out there, talking about nothing much. (Er - the sheer sweetness of the night, the play Sky was in tonight, the word I couldn't think of to describe Ben's chicken (it turned out to be "bilobal") and, after a bit, I explained the Gettier Problem and Ben tried to explain to me why maths isn't a very specialised type of philosophy.)

The ironic thing, of course, is just when I was considering renouncing my citizenship, part of the reason I was enjoying it out there so much is that it's a lot like India in early summer. I'm wearing my favourite skirt, today - short, ruffly denim, it flares out when I walk, I love it - with footless tights and bare feet, which is very like the traditional clothes for an Indian summer, and the night had that mix of cool and the radiating heat of the day, and the quiet, and the scent of elderflower and roses from the tubs of flowers beneath. We'd been sitting there, quietly talking, for a while, when Maria opened her window and she and Liya appeared to demand some of our midnight feast. Sky blew in, like a tornado, talked helter-skelter about the play - it went well - waved at me, kissed Ben, asked to borrow some money and disappeared off to the King's Arms.

Sometimes this is what you need, I think; quiet, and semi-darkness, and people who love you within reach in the dark. It did me some good.

After a while, the porter appeared from behind us, carrying a torch. I had this sudden weird thought - we're not allowed out here? we're not allowed to eat out here? - but he merely asked, "How long have you two been sitting out here?"

"About twenty minutes," I said.

"Have you seen anyone moving across the field?"

Apparently there's been a prowler who tried to break into some of the graduate accommodation across the field, whom we would have seen if we'd been paying attention. Or maybe not; the field's very dark at night, and you can barely see the ground from where we were sitting. With a stern instruction to Maria to close her window, he went off again.

"It's all very Gaudy Night," I said. (Er: in the novel, which also features night-time prowling about, Dorothy Sayers situates Shrewsbury College on Balliol's hallowed sports ground. Which is the field, naturally, that Ben and I were sitting above and looking across.)

We watched, and after a bit we saw a torch beam flickering on and off on the grass. I rang Balliol, and was informed me it was just the porters themselves and not to worry we'd get murdered in our beds, or anything. We went back to Gettier for a while, until I realised I really, really have to work.

And I do. This essay is not fun. At all.

Still, the only patriarchal oppression I have experienced this evening is, er, a man tracking mud all over my floor. And I'm sure if I went after him and yelled, he'd come back and clean it up. (He's having kittens over a computing project, so I won't.) And I had a soft, quiet interlude in a life that that's better than hundreds of thousands of others'.

Back to work.