Disappointingly, there was no Rapture last Saturday, which not only robbed us all of an exciting period of secular frolicking (or something along those lines: the various diagrams are rather confusing) but also meant my carefully planned Friday can’t be described as ‘going out on a high note’. Still, it was fun nonetheless. During the day Grace and I joined Oliver, Abi and Sarah for a picnic and some badminton in their back garden – now doesn’t that sentence sound absurdly genteel? And then in the evening I went to a charming pub out in Harrow with Henry, who I’ve known vaguely through whatever social networking was in vogue at the time but never actually met. Some things you should know about Henry: he’s the country’s third youngest Catholic school chaplain, he’s got numerous Facebook fan clubs, he’s endearingly passionate about drinking real ale and he – hallelujah! – is great conversation too.
See, this is my thing. Like most people, “I enjoy spending time with people with different views than my own”. Nothing remarkable there – we all like to pretend we’re charmingly tolerant and well-mixed like that, because then when your friends cheer on your drunken rants with “yes!” and “exactly!” and “I know!” you can flatter yourself that it really was the full persuasive force of your elegant slurring which stirred their hearts and won their minds, rather than admitting that your friends were unlikely to have been quiet supporters of the Hitler Youth \ Toby Young \ Comic Sans in the first place. However, some people seem to work by the maxim that you should delicately steer every conversation around any conceivable disagreement so that you can arrive at the hallowed destination of ‘common ground’ without doing any of the spadework first. I have a theory that this is why we like talking about terrible crimes so much. If you think that cannabis should be given to nursery children instead of milk and your neighbour wants to reintroduce capital punishment for smelling of it, then why not open each chat together with a gloomy anecdote about the latest gruesome murder and reassure each other than you’re not monsters after all?
Except this is silly. This is like setting a film in ancient Rome and not featuring gladiators. When I have a rare opportunity to drink real ale with the country’s third youngest Catholic school chaplain, you can be sure that I want to talk about gay rights, condoms and faith schools rather than – oh, I don’t know – petrol prices. So we did! It was brilliant. BBC Four should have filmed it and used it to fill up their pesky ‘Religion and Ethics’ quota. And, as usually happens, I’m liable to get on with people much better after such conversations rather than suspecting someone to be hiding behind a front the whole time. So here’s to Henry. Because no one should have to talk about petrol prices all night. *raises glass*
(Apparently he wouldn’t have been Raptured anyway: not sure American evangelicals are too fond of Catholics. Now, who wouldn’t want to go to the pub with one of them…)
P.S. I have other things I want to blog about, and am behind schedule, but this turned out wordier than I expected. Apologies.
P.P.S. It’s still a lifetime ambition to go to the pub with Father Alexander, although I am unsure as to how this could ever be contrived. I’ll just put it out there, again.
I feel slightly disorganised at the minute, like I’m being tugged in multiple directions. There are even longer to-do lists taunting me than usual (and multiplying at a frightening rate) whilst I also feel like I haven’t seen Everyone In Ages. Yet this is nonsense. I’ve actually been rather productive, completing chunks of work for Melissa’s Schools Wars as well as for The Lexi & The Nomad. At the same time there have been plenty of fun things with lovely people, too. Cocktails last Wednesday with Caroline, Laura and my soul mate Matt (sorry, Laura) at a swankyish bar where Matt and I matched each other’s choices five times in a row and everyone else wondered if we needed some alone time. A recording of QI on Friday thanks to Jamie’s ticket generosity, which proved that Chris Addison is clearly auditioning to be the next Stephen Fry.
And, oh, Eurovision glory! Grace and I made it over to Joshua’s flat on Saturday evening for some delicious cooking (*tips hat to his mum*) and the kind of entertainment that only Moldova can bring. (They really should have won. We did vote for them. Three times.) Here’s a top tip for Eurovision: always try and watch it with an American who’s never seen it before, and there will be an extra layer of enjoyment simply in beholding the bewilderment. It also allows you to look really clever when it comes to the voting stages, confidentially predicting that yes, detailed calculations indicate that Cyprus will probably award twelve points to Greece this year. Tada. What insight.
This is all on top of numerous happy lunches, dinners, drinks, books, Doctor Who episodes and elections. OK, maybe not happy elections, but this was the first time that I’ve voted in the same polling station as my parents before, so it was a rite of passage. (Again. Think I’m squeezing about seven ‘rites of passages’ out of this voting business. It’s like being Klingon but without the pain sticks.*) And I’ve even found time to write the most-detailed-yet plan to revamp this site! Sure, it’s now about four years overdue, but at current projections Duke Mayhem Forever will still have taken longer.**
So there you go: I’ve talked myself into believing that all is fine. I will still feel happier once I have something vaguely full-time to demand my attention, though. Which is odd, because you’d have thought that would make me less happy with even less time to do all of the things I mean to do, but for some reason it doesn’t work like that.
In the meantime – if I’m being abominably slow in doing something that I’m supposed to be doing for you, I’m sorry. I’ll be freer when I’m less free.
* DaHjaj SuvwI’e’ jiH. tIgwIj Sa’angNIS. Iw bIQtIq jIjaH. Nerdiest reference this week.
** Before that one.
What happened was this: drumroll, flames, hush, uplifted cake knife but, before it could descend, came a tremendous knocking at the front door. TREMENDOUS. Such a knocking that the birthday candles dipped and swayed and dropped wax on the chocolate tiles; the bough of lilac tossed, scattering nodes of bloom; the very parquet underneath us started to tremble, about to rise up.
A thrill ran through the room. Something unscripted is about to happen.
I first remember meeting Jimmy Buchanan after a couple of weeks of A Level English. We’d all been set Angela Carter’s Wise Children to read and were hopelessly lost and confused, so he was parachuted in to set us on the right track. He would take passages that we’d puzzled over, tried and failed to dissect, and just read them to us – but read them with such booming enthusiasm, his perfect stream of consciousness delivery, that for the first time we’d sit up and take note of the big bloody obvious thing we’d been missing: it was hilariously funny.
He was that kind of teacher – the utter maverick, so completely impossible to imitate – never safe and dull. Through his teaching he passed on joy for the literature he loved. Long after I’ve forgotten so many lessons from school, I can still hear Mr. Buchanan utterly glorying in Othello, pausing whenever Roderigo appeared on the page to remind us all, once again, just was an idiot the man is. He would shout this, by the way, like he would shout many things: swearing liberally, because the rules that applied to other teachers just didn’t apply to him. (I’m pretty sure that teachers aren’t supposed to grab you just before you sit down for an exam, loudly wish you luck and kiss you on the forehead, either. He did.)
It was so appropriate that he made a point of insisting I read magical realism, because at times he felt like a magical character himself. He seemed intimate with any cultural reference that came up, like he had been there himself, and threw out hints to a colourful and vaguely mysterious past. On the New York trip, as we walked around one night, his voice dropped into sombre tones as he recounted the people in the neighbourhood who had died from AIDS in the 1980s. In class, he once scoffed at me for praising Transport for London (corporate, professional, controlled) because it was nothing like the good old days of London Transport (friendly, ramshackle, slapdash). Angela Carter’s death seemed like a personal loss to him.
I was always particularly jealous of his class, because while the rest of us had to sludge through the dreary evangelism of William Blake, he had demanded (successfully, of course) that his class study Byron’s Don Juan instead. Why have plodding sentimentalism when you can have an epic adventure, satire and swashbuckling tales instead? That was him all over. And he was fiercely opposed to euphemism. No one passes away at the end of Hamlet: “they all get deaded”. Cue wicked grin and a broad laugh.
I totally loved him. Everybody did. There must be so many students with their own stories and memories of him – people who got to know him much better than I did. But he was always pleased to see me again, after I left, as I’m sure he made an effort to remember so many faces he’d taught over the years. It was a real privilege to be one of them.
Jimmy Buchanan, in New York
Great news! New photos smuggled out from the Self family compound show that Katie has finally been upgraded to a suitably sized room of her own:
Roomy
So I figured what the Internet could do really do with was a picture of a kitten!
Abbi and Munchkin
These things, yes, and yet more things too. There was a highly enjoyable and curiously rowdy Geek Corner which went on until about 4am. I got in a pub outing with Emma before she leaves for New York. Grace and I discovered The Big Book of Racism ‘The World in Colour’: my dad’s 1966 worldwide survey spectacular. (Sample insight: “The French, perhaps one of the most civilised and artistic of all races, are descended from unruly, primitive Gauls…”) We all commenerated Elisabeth Sladen’s shockingly premature death by watching School Reunion together and then laughing heartily at K9 and Company. And let’s not forget that I managed to give blood without doing an embarrassing semi-fainting routine!
I also packed in two of my absolute favourite local(ish) nights: the type of places which give me a very happy Londoner glow. First, a long-awaited return to the Tricycle with mum to see Brontë: a play about the three famous sisters and their wayward brother Branwell. It featured scenes from both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, so it turned out to have been good timing to have at least just read the latter. (Emily was depicted as being just about as, um, intense as her characters. She’s definitely not invited to my dead celebrity dinner party.) Second, on Thursday night I went for a fourth time to NewsRevue, this time with Grace, Oliver and Abi, where (*reaches for the cliché shelf*) a good time was had by all.
But, really, all of this ‘life’ stuff is just surface froth. Friends, family, love, laughter, even cute kittens? Mere diversions: baubles and trinkets to idle the time away until tonight. At the end of the day, only one thing really matters; only one thing really counts for anything at all. Doctor Who is back, guys 
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
