philosophy supernatural nude

I'm in bed, dear flist. I have spent fourteen of the last twenty-four hours in it, and then there was a headache starting - where is the great literature surrounding headaches, answer, nowhere, they are such a profoundly unromantic affliction - and so here I am again, with my coffee and my freshly-painted nails and my determination to do nothing productive ever again.

Notes and queries:

1. It was a nicely low-key homecoming. The fastest Atlantic crossing I have ever made - five and a half hours on the outside, touching down in Shannon in a deserted rainy 6am, and onwards from there. The ground staff were lovely, getting me through immigration and to my connection with a mixture of efficiency and whatever the noun form of "lackadaiscal" is; I even had a few minutes to spare to have a very unenlightening conversation with a nice lady from the Irish Office of National Statistics. ("So, where was your last place of residence?" / "Er, New York, in the United States." / "So you're on an American passport?" / "Er, no, British." / "And how long have you been staying in Ireland?" / "...about twenty minutes.")

Today I have been food shopping. I bought a box of raspberries, a box of local blackberries, a Lancashire-grown cauliflower, two pints of milk, cereal, coffee, brown bread and Wensleydale cheese with bits of apricot in it. I didn't want to cry once. It was refreshing. That said, I look the wrong way when I cross the street. (I also don't hit light switches hard enough, any more. It's a thing, apparently.)

2. I also didn't notice until this morning that there was a thread for me on littlebutfierce's love meme! Thank you, lovely anons and named people! You're very sweet, and you've cheered me up thoroughly.

3. So, I'm lying in bed again, watching Sapphire & Steel and enjoying it rather a lot. (I'd never seen it; only, I've been rewatching Man From U.N.C.L.E a bit recently, and my dad watches NCIS, cue me exclaiming delightedly, "It's the cute Russian! Only he got old!", and thought I'd make up the set.) So, yes, Sapphire & Steel, and it's so delightfully creepy and kind of ridiculous and I really like it. Where is all the fucked-up telepathic Sapphire/Steel on the internet. Where is it. Also, how so creepy on what is clearly a budget of £12.50 per episode. Wow.

4. The other thing I am doing while lying in bed is writing, or trying to write. As predicted, my urge to write continuously did correlate with having no time at all to do it in; now I have time to finish the current story, I've been flumped horizontal watching Sapphire & Steel instead. I'm also going to catch up with Doctor Who today! Very excited about that episode y'all loved a few weeks back that I never saw. First, pirates, then that.

But speaking of writing, my dear tragic_mathematics is presiding over fic_promptly this week and every one of her themes and example prompts so far may as well have been prefixed with "Iona, this one's for you". Today's theme is "quotidian", which I completely love as an idea (I wrote "In Service" a couple of years back entirely for that theme, but there've been lots that touch on it) and yesterday's was "documentation", and how much I love that has been well.... documented, aha, I am so funny, Iona shut up. But, yes, stories made entirely up of, I don't know, coffee shop receipts, notes, messages stuck to the fridge, whatever, I love those. If my brain were not so completely scraped out from the inside I would be writing the hell out of both sets of prompts. I may yet.

5. ...and finally. A quick housekeeping note. For those of you who had my 607 cellphone number - it is now deceased and no more, alas. I have returned to the UK mobile number ending in -8077 that a lot of you already have. Same number, but different phone - with some kicking and screaming, I have joined the brushed-metal revolution and have an iPhone, and so far I rather love it. What apps do I really, really need? (I don't really do games, but am open to persuasion.) So far I've got iBooks, and am slowly putting what feels like most of the AO3 on it; otherwise, I have a Twitter app and that's about it. Recommendations appreciated.

Mmm. Bed.

1. You know when someone does something so utterly kind for you that you're a little lost for words? I mentioned to the South African Siren that I was having trouble in my flat - my upstairs neighbours keep on making noise until three am, work has collided with excessive sleep disorder so the place is a tip but I don't have the time and energy to tidy and it makes me feel anxious just looking at it, etc., etc. She said, I have a spare room, I'll come and pick you up. She has installed me on a comfy bed, enough room for all my things, peace and quiet, wireless internet, and instructions to just do my thing and sleep as late as I want. I am working on next week's conflicts and feeling. Well, at ease. it's a blessing.

2. Today is a day of birthdays! It's brightlywoven's birthday, and I had a kind of melancholy about not being home for it, which lightened somewhat when I got a Skype-window into the party when I was sitting in the library earlier, reading about conflicts for next week. And, you know what, Skype is time-travel - at any rate I was sitting in the shadowed law school, at the top of the atrium with frantic 1Ls running around below murmuring about civil procedure, and it was all muted, seven o'clock in the evening, and in the window there were drunk people waving pink cocktails and playing the ukelele telling me they loved me, because for them it was midnight and they already knew that today ends well.

So I went back into the law school and felt horribly homesick for a little while (there's a reason, I think, why homesickness is an emotion with its own name that isn't just sadness or whatever - it's that way it's this horrible inconsolable grief that is actually also quite, quite trivial, brought on and off by scents and letters and not being able to tell nickels and quarters apart) and worked on conflicts and mostly wished I were at home. And then I went out into the night and had a very nice dinner for thingswithwings' birthday, and drank white wine and made silly jokes, and now it's past midnight and today ends well.

3. Just one week left, now. I have written first drafts of both of my research papers and in so doing, have realised a fundamental truth about myself: I don't do first drafts. All these years I have been mildly worried about other people talking about first drafts, or even rubbish first drafts, and I'm like... well, I always hand in my first drafts, what's wrong with me. It took until yesterday for me to realise I edit as I go along. I write and re-write paragraphs as I go, I occasionally pause and pull what I've got so far into shape. Two papers down, now the two exams. I have so far resisted making this a post about Why I Love Conflicts of Law. Be grateful.

4. Speaking of writing, I have two ficlets up from yesterday - 12/24 (Sports Night, Natalie and Dana, for gamesiplay) and Grace (Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Mordecai Roberts, for highfantastical), and am intending to get to the others.

One week, one week.

4. And lastly, the query part. Does anyone reading happen to speak Arabic, enough to translate a couple of sentences for me? I'm not sure I trust Google Translate. It's for a fic, as usual. Many thanks.

Hi, I had a lovely dinner and evening out, and sebastienne has great hair, but now I need to WORK.

So this is not a real entry. I note, merely, that spring has sprung. The air has this lovely softness in it, and yesterday I went for a walk around the neighbourhood and saw people in shirt sleeves, people jogging, a woman in a beautifully red niqab taking her small child for an ice-cream. And later, when it rained, it was because the air was thick with humidity and the falling temperature led to condensation, and it all smelled of freshness and good things.

(My first attempt at it was "neighborhood". Perhaps it is a word you mostly see in American contexts.)

God, so sleepy. Links:

-lgbtfest is open for prompt submission for, I think, their third round. This is one of my favourites of the minor ficathons; in their words, it's a fest for fanfic that focuses on the experience of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Notably, this is not relationship based, it's based on lived experience. On the whole I come to it as an ally, rather than as a queer person, but that doesn't mean I can't wave my pointy stick and say you should all go and submit prompts.

-This is why being a lawyer is a noble profession; or, exactly why the people behind the Digital Economy Bill should go and screw themselves. (Via auntysarah.)

Yes, only two links, I am going to make some coffee and contemplate why I AM ALWAYS TAKING EXAMS. Three days before it's over, a week until far-flung travel, deep breaths, etc., etc...

1.yuletide is OFF TO BETA. About 5000 words, quite different from what I expected, and I had last minute oh-god-this-is-awful angst which was ameliorated a bit by an ending that I quite like, but never mind all of that, it is DONE.

(Flist who are wise, how are the treats working this year? Am I right in thinking I'm too early to pick any up? Where are they going to be posted?)

2. Snow! I am safely in Edinburgh and feeling a lot better about life than I did yesterday, by virtue of my first full night's sleep in weeks, layers of snow on the ground and nowhere I have to be and nothing I have to do. Oh, god, sleep is so great, I'd forgotten what the world through the non-sleep-deprived lens even looks like. And the snow is just stupidly, epically beautiful, reflecting back all the slim daylight so everything looks a little crystalline, a little transcendescent - I saw a Border collie earlier, playing in the snow, and its fur looked positively drab and yellow against all that white - and the hills are blurred out like smeared paint. It's lovely.

3. I am enjoying AO3. I am just now trying to upload my very first (non-yuletide) story to the archive, and have picked, somewhat arbitrarily, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, a Remus/Tonks story from a few years ago that I'm still rather fond of, and so far I like the interface, it makes sense. We shall see what I think of it when I've actually uploaded everything I want up there.

(It made me sad that "Raven", as a username, was taken. That is, however, entirely my own fault for writing under Baby's First, Not At All Mary-Sueish Pseud for at least eight years longer than I ought.)

4. I am very definitely on holiday now, at least for the next couple of days, so I hold out some hope for getting them done this time: if you want a quick ficlet, comment with fandom and characters and some sort of prompt. (Drabbles and five-things-that-never-happened a speciality. Reasonable rates.)

5. And finally, one last bit of Christmas music that I uploaded for tau_sigma: Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24). I really like it - and if you've seen "Noel", that episode of The West Wing, it's that bit of music.

And that is all.

Having got me successfully through everything it had to get me through, my body has given up on walking around and now I just want to lie down and flop. Forever. With two bags of sweets within reach, and maybe also the complete works of Lois McMaster Bujold. Some assorted notes and queries:

1. Firstly, and most importantly, Professor Jerry Cohen is dead. My reaction to this has mostly been "but but but he was IMMORTAL but". While I wasn't lucky enough to be taught by him, I have read most of what he's written - and I recommend his writing to everyone, actually, not just students of political philosophy. The title of one of his best-known works is If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, which says it all in just its title, doesn't it? He writes - well, he wrote - about difficult things, about orthodox Marxism, about his particular brand of egalitarianism, and makes a significant critique of Rawls' theory of justice (one which, it is worth noting, is easily used as the base for an explicitly feminist critique), but he does it incredibly well - clearly, engagingly, the sort of way I wish everyone who writes about difficult things would write.

And even though I was never taught by him, I did... er... encounter him on occasion. Wherever he is now, I'm sure he's raising orthodox Marxist hell.

2. In other news entirely, I wish to make a point about Rachel McAdams. jacinthsong showed me the trailer for Sherlock Holmes - which, is, oh god, looks terrible, crash-bang-wallop homoeroticism I cannot wait - but, I could not help noticing, has Rachel McAdams in it playing Irene Adler. She - McAdams, I mean - is also in The Time Traveler's Wife, which, like the other, is a film that people will have heard of. (I have no idea what it will be like, probably bad, but I suspect I will have to see it anyway.)

Anyway. Yes. Rachel McAdams is in films that are released all over the world that people have heard of, and stuff. Isn't she supposed to be a minor character in that Canadian indie thing only my friends and I watch...? Yeah. I just wanted this down for the record.

3. Yes, these points aren't supposed to be related in any way. Flist, speak to me of Diana Gabaldon. I know some of you have read/are reading her - nos4a2no9, thistlerose? - and I'm interested to know what you think. After spending a week in London without a lot to do in the evenings, I have read two and a half of her Lord John books, which are, sort of, historical detective-thriller-adventure things set in the 1750s. Which do, yes, sound like the sort of thing I'd hate (they exist in the same universe as the author's "real" series, a series of historical romances with time-travel and Jacobite rebellions and whatnot, none of which I have been able to get into). But they are witty, engaging, and just likeable, and also the protagonist, Lord John Grey, is that rarest of beasts, a fictional character who is gay, perfectly happy about being gay, and who pursues adventures with gentlemen in and around solving the mystery of the moment. I'm not explaining these very well, but they're good. Very, very good, in this delightfully light and loopy way. The books are: Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, and Lord John and the Hand of Devils (short story collection; don't start with this one). Consider this a rec.

(If they were fanfiction, though, I'd warn for: ( this )

4. Meme! Nabbed from emerald_embers most recently, but from all of you.

Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post. Possibly with pictures. Ask multiple questions. I'll do it.

That's it. shimgray is plotting a Wikipedia article that he has been threatening to write for some time ("Elephants in Scotland"), and I am curled in a chair and attempting not to fall asleep. It's quiet, and it's nice, and it's very good to be together again.

It's really nice to be home. I didn't have the quietest of weekends, really; I was at Amicus training again on Saturday, and that was kind of sort of exhausting. Practical, not theory, so lots of running around with my hands in my pockets trying to make myself as good an investigator as possible, i.e., not very good. The funny thing is, I find, is that the other side of the law - the private sector side, the type of law done by the large impressive firms with the large impressive training contracts - is so... sleek, so glossy, so very talkative. You have to get in the habit of talking and dressing sharply. It's wearing. Whereas, for this sort of thing, you dress, talk and think forgettable. Clean jeans and brushed hair, a notepad any colour but yellow, and you sit and you listen. Your client is on trial for his life, but... well, right now he's not going anywhere. I really enjoyed the change. That said, I don't know if I could really do this work: do it for real with real people and be all things to them, a good lawyer, but a good listener and someone who can get people to tell me, not the right things, but the real things.

That bothers me about law as I see it, here - it's all telling you what you want to hear. I tell interviewers what they want to hear, they tell me what they think I should hear, and none of it bears any resemblance to reality. That might be a problem endemic in the law itself - it's interesting, of course, that the Law, this great amorphous thing I spend every waking hour on these days, isn't a thing about how things are, but it's something that people do. We've written about it so much that we've made it exist. And there's no doubt that electric chairs do exist. That's a real sense you get, actually: that the judicial system induces this twilight state, so people taken away to spend forty years in prison are still thinking, where am I, what's going on, there's been some mistake, this isn't real.

The saddest part was the bit on Atkins v Virginia, a 2002 case where the Supreme Court established that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with "mental retardation", undefined. I find it horrifying that this is actually a point at issue, but there you are. Lots of people have been executed who have had the mental age of nine-year-olds. And it's still perfectly possible to execute someone with the mental age of an eleven-year-old, or a nine-year-old on a good day. It puts investigators in the awful position of going to see the person's community, their their teachers and their elderly mother, and ask things like, was he a bit slow? Was he incapable of washing himself, and will you talk about it on a stand in front of hundreds of strangers?

Yeah. It's not good for your view on humanity, this sort of thing. On Saturday night I went out gloomily and was cheered by a nice dinner in Soho with sebastienne and jacinthsong and deathbyshinies and liminreid, which was cheering but, as I said, I couldn't go dancing afterwards because the Sunday the clocks go forward was the one Sunday in the year I had to be up at seven am. And go to another day of lectures and workshops and try interviewing people myself, which I have to say I did spectacularly not well at all, and then run across the city to get a train up north, which was eerily quiet, and lacking in announcements and indeed people, and didn't stop, and gave me this muted feeling that I might be on the Caldonian Sleeper or the first train into the Twilight Zone.

That said, I did wake up at seven this morning, have a momentary panic as to where I was, realise that a) it was my own bed and b) the alarm clock belonged to someone else, and roll over and go back to sleep. I shall have to be careful. I am NOT ON HOLIDAY. This cannot be emphasised enough. Not on holiday. Yes.

...and here I am, feeling a little like an unspoken sentence. Notes and queries:

-deathbyshinies has started a Secret Histories Project. As she puts it, it is a blog devoted to "little random tidbits of historical fact that make you sit up and go 'BLOODY HELL, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME ABOUT THAT!'" (Examples already mentioned: Alan Turing's homosexuality; the fact there were South Asian people living in Britain before 1700 (I was never told this at school); Helen Keller's socialist and feminist activism.) Definitely worth looking at.

-A brief unrelated rant, also. Why is there a sudden resurgence, recently, of the "it's only natural" argument? I keep seeing this: polamory is natural, wanting to have children is natural. I really thought that the blogosphere had finally got over this one, but apparently not. Okay, internets. Saying something is "natural" is an argumentative faux-pas of the worst order. Because, to begin with, you're implying that polyamory or childbearing or whatever are worthy of respect only because they are some inalienable feature about how people are. You're devaluaing people's choices pertaining to either of those things. Sure, childbearing is natural. So is living in trees, so is killing people who don't agree with you. Natural does not equate to good, and for good reason. People choose to have kids - it's the choice that's worthy of preservation and respect, not the entirely fallacious biological imperative behind the choice.

And as for polyamory being "natural" - maybe it is natural for people to want multiple relationships, I don't know, and maybe monogamy is a stifling yoke upon the natural impetus of society blah blah whatever (I remain to be convinced of that last one, I must say). But it's worthy of respect, surely, whatever its provenance? It's worthy of respect if it's the way people have always lived or if it was invented out of whole cloth by L. Ron Hubbard in 1971. I'm just boggled that people still think this is a smart tack to take. I suppose it's the gay-gene for the twenty-first century. My god it's hard to be a liberal.

Okay, I'm going to stop yelling now. To finish: the clocks went forward and I was very upset. There is now more light in the evenings, and I am less upset. Thus, I leave you with the Spring Arrangements Bill. shimgray can recite it on command. This fills me with joy.

1. The definition of a valuable consideration, from Curie v Misa (1875), is: "either a right, interest, benefit or profit accruing to one party; or a forebearance, detriment, loss or responsibiity given, suffered or undertaken by the other."

No, shut up, I do not care that you thought that was boring, because I have spent the last two days of my life committing it to memory. It and a whole lot of other things, of course, but it remains the most impressive thing that I actually know.

The whole galaxy of things, however, that I do not know, remains a major source of gravity. As I keep telling people at great and aggrieved length, I took Oxford Finals six months ago, there is something deeply unfair in a universe that has me doing exams again six months later. And yes, I know these are not the same, but Finals remain a sterling example of the principle that you can work your body and mind into half-insanity for three months and still fuck it up. Which inclines me to the new and equally general principle that whatever you do, academic life sucks, and in its yet more general formulation, woman is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.

(Seriously, why am I doing postgrad? I'm congenitally lazy (c.f a life-long passion for baths, and writing stories about other people's characters so I never have to do my own worldbuilding) and intellectually sharp as a rubber band. I love law, but I'm continuously wondering, these days, why I persist in the unnatural delusion that "love" and "am any good at" are somehow co-referential.)

Part of this mood of sweetness and light is perhaps brought on by the fact I am right in the middle of 2009's first bout of insomnia. I'm not sure why, either. I just sort of levitate over a pillow and hate the night. I think I ought to use the time to try and sit and remember cases - for example, Pinnel's Case [1602] - in which one may not suggest to one's creditor that one will pay less than owed unless one offers something to support the promise, be it a "horse, a hawk or a robe" - but thinking about cases leads to thinking about writing about cases which leads to thinking about writing cases in exams which leads to difficulty breathing through one's nose.

It isn't even the productive kind of insomnia, either; not the kind where I beaver away cheerfully and wait for the dawn. This is more the stalking-the-Serengeti type, prowling around the house irritably looking for lions, or something, anyway, all wound up with nervous energy until it snaps into unconsciousness at some unearthly hour of the morning. At which point I dream, about death, usually, and wake up in a bright and obnoxious mood in the middle of the afternoon. I also wonder, at this stage, if my whatever-it-is sleep disorder could actually be diagnosed (after twenty-two years, it may be time to convince my mother than no, I'm not going to grow out of it): I mean, it consists of occasional insomnia, occasional hypersomnia, bruxism, very infrequent sleepwalking, violent nightmares and once asleep, being almost impossible to wake. In short, I never quite got the whole sleeping-through-the-night thing that most people have nailed by the age of six months or so. I have no conclusion to draw, really. Maybe I should enlist a loved one with a frying pan.

...there was supposed to be a second point, wasn't there? Here it is.

2. I have decided, therefore, that I now wish to write romance novels for a living. So there.

( the boring brain bit first )

2. If I were in my sane mind, my yuletide request would fill me with glee. As it is, I am pleased, and fully intend to write it well and enjoy it before the deadline. So there.

3. Speaking of stupid things happening at improbably early hours of the morning, a couple of nights ago I was being mildly crazy and sitting in bed watching Mulan when the most abysmal noise started up outside my door. I sat still for a minute, then ran outside on the landing down the stairs yelling, "What the fuck is that?" only to run right into New Housemate running up the stairs yelling, "What the fuck is that?"

A pause, as we both figure out: smoke alarm, and the landing smelled of smoke. "Shit," I said, and we went into New Housemate's room and found nothing and went into my room and found nothing and then went back out, had the exact same horrible thought at the same time and launched ourselves bodily at chiasmata's door yelling, "WAKE UP!"

Unhappily, we did this just as she was opening it from the other side, and there was a moment of argh wake up please don't be dead mixed up with further what the fuck is that? and then, suddenly, we realised it was above us that was the problem. The lightbulb was black. Further investigation revealed that it had set fire to the lampshade, which I could not get off. Cue my fetching a pair of scissors from my room. New Housemate seemed doubtful. "It's house property, guys, I don't endorse this..."

"It's really ugly," I said, feeling very decisive all of a sudden. "It is three o'clock in the morning and we have been woken up by a smoke alarm and it is the ugliest lampshade in the world. Also, dude, it's on fire."

For some reason, all three of us took the opportunity to look at the lampshade anew and notice, all at once, how ugly is is - seriously, it is; it's a globular paper lantern of horror, it looks like an adipose cell blown up a million times actual size - and stood there laughing hysterically while I carefully cut the thing to pieces. It didn't come off. It hung there like some sort of eviscerated piñata, and then the lightbulb melted in my hand. I kind of just stood on a chair and laughed until I cried.

So, on the bright side, we didn't all die by fire. And are unlikely to, considering the smoke alarm works. And also, I feel that if we ever do have a fire or other night-time disaster, someone should be sure to drag sebastienne physically out of bed. She didn't stir at all.

4. Mulan is really great. It actually is. A couple of years ago my flatmates and I tried rewatching some of the Disney films and realised, much to my unsurprise, that The Little Mermaid is really anti-feminist. I mean, Disney princesses in general are not awesome, but I was really shocked by it. But, Mulan is awesome - it's about a woman (whose parents are both still alive, and are not evil!) who gets up one morning, thinks, fuck this, and goes out to fix things. And, and, she does not do it for a man. Rather, the man chases after her. Ineptly. And needs a cup of tea and a sit down when he finally finds her. And the music and the visuals are all really pretty. I like it. Actually, I like it so much I redid my yuletide sign-up with four minutes to spare.

(I am not sure, though, what it's like in terms of race and ethnicity, simply because of my ignorance of Chinese history and culture - I don't know what to watch out for in terms of its being problematic. But the tone of it, I like - it doesn't do the "look at the funny ethnics" thing, which is always a start.)

5. Contract law. Not that I have anything in particular to say about it, just I ought to go and do it. I am so behind with my work, it's not funny. (And this weekend I really ought to do some criminal law coursework, and considering it's supposed to be my favourite one, I really am being spectactularly fail in its general direction.) Yes. Work now.

---

[1] Number one on the list: my yuletide recipient wouldn't get a story.

(Number two: I wouldn't get a chance to try out my new purple glitter eyeliner. Look, I never said I was cool.)

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.

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.