I’m not dead. Not nearly. But having now committed myself to the insane asylum (in disguise as the British Library), I’m started to ignore even my e-mails, so blogging is right off. (Not because I don’t love ya all, but because I have reached Point Crisis where social interaction is basically A Bad Thing, so I’m doing the cowardly thing and hoping that I can get to June without really looking people in the eye. “Oh, did I go quiet for a while? Whoops. All done now.”)
Nevertheless! Here is a cheerful day-by-day guide to FUN THINGS DONE:
Tuesday – Royal Courts of Justice with Sanna.
Pros? Her idea, and a genius one. Going to court for entertainment is a bit like going shopping with friends, but instead of being expensive it’s free, instead of leaving you feel a bit shallow you can pretend to be all civil-minded and serious, and – best of all – you get to hear all the little jokes made by judges about Latin.
Cons? Occasionally you have to pinch yourself to remember that you’re not in a Cambridge supervision and won’t have to answer any questions yourself.
Wednesday – Science Museum Lates with Saoirse and (gasp!) Dominic F!
Pros? Being allowed to go back into the Launchpad again – and with all of those pesky kids kicked out for good measure – do I really need to say anything more?!
Cons? Alienated one random woman on the Tube by arguing too loudly about communism.
Thursday – Camden with Saoirse, Robert, Abbi and (ooh!) the shiny new Paul.
Pros? Sangria, tapas and the fact that Paul doesn’t even bat an eyelid when pressed to describe the merits of individual Doctor Who episodes from the 1970s.
Cons? I have lost all faith that Adidas are going to take seriously my proposal for a new shoe made entirely of discarded VHS tapes.
Friday – Promise dines again with The Selfs
Pros? Mum goes all-out on a cooking extravaganza, and we all end up sitting around drinking wine and sipping tea until about 11, an over-run from our normal dining length of “about seven minutes” of several hours.
Cons? There were home-made chocolate brownies. I’m not sure there are any cons.
Saturday – Doctor Who returns!
Pros? High-definition time-lord loveliness, and even Oliver texts in his approval afterwards.
Cons? Once again The Doctor completely ignored my application to travel in the TARDIS with him. I’m starting to suspect I don’t quite look the part.
Sunday – It’s Easter, but it feels more like Christmas with a big extended family meal served up.
Pros? Lovely to see everyone! We even had a representative from the American outpost family, Sophia, who fills me with renewed hope that one day soon I will make it to California again.
Cons? I haven’t yet made it to California again.
Monday – As quite regularly happens, we all become unduly fascinated by dad’s pictorial encyclopaedia from 1957.
Pros? We now have transistors, appreciate the existence of continental plates and don’t engage in quite so dodgy racial theorising.
Cons? We haven’t achieved a state of perpetual ‘peace with our fellow man’, either. You win some, you lose some.
Today’s post title comes courtesy of All Caps, via Katie. No, Harry Potter isn’t dead either.
For those of you enjoying the on-going saga of Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad (Secular) Wolf?, I appear to be in the process of accidentally posting a link to a certain video which you may or may not enjoy downloading watching. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ve got to get back to sipping my port…*
Clear, no?
Sophie’s house
Helpfully sharing my audio guide
Only wimps duck out of an open-top bus tour! Even in Scotland.
Misssssttttt.
So, these were some little bits from our great time in Edinburgh. We also: tried to keep a straight face while a woman thought she felt a ghost in the underground city (“there’s cold on my face…”), wandered breezily into the Scottish Parliament viewing gallery, discovered the totally awesome Museum of Childhood, poked around in the medicine cabinet of a Georgian house and – and I really wouldn’t joke about such obvious mental instability – ended up having conversations like this:
“Pronoun verb pronoun!”
“Pronoun verb pronoun, qualifier!”
Worrying.
Now, one thing you should know about going on holiday with Lucy is that she’s an absolute Adam Smith fiend. It’s forever Theory of Moral Sentiments this, Wealth of Nations that… obviously I did eventually drag her off to an art gallery occasionally, but it was a tough fight. To keep her pacificed I will therefore also include the following photo, although for reasons of political impartiality it will naturally be appropriately balanced:
Dead white men FIGHT!
Bet Hume had a coat with buttons on
(And now I’m struck with an irrational fear that someone will take the above seriously… look, to prove I was joking, here’s me with the Batman to Adam Smith’s Robin to show that it was all me really. Ah, Hume. Now there’s a man who wouldn’t have felt cold on his face.)
I’m still home off to Edinburgh! Well, via Birmingham, and shortly. First I have to decide whether to take worthy-but-hardly-thrilling reading material or just abandon of doing any work on this holiday at all and plump for a proper book. (OK, I think we all know how this is going to pan out…)
I also have to enthuse about our new TV. Unapologetically, because I actually went to the trouble to go on Omegle and ask random strangers whether it was OK to be excited about the pinnacle of clichéd of shallow consumerist acquisitions. And they gave me the all-clear. So, what’s to love? Well, what’s most to love is actually what’s coming in a week or so – courtesy of a wireless accessory – and that is YouTube direct to the TV. Now this really is worthy of excitement. Just picture your life at the moment, and then picture your life plus a sofa, a remote and Auto-Tune the News streaming in front of you. Things are better now, aren’t they? Exactly. Better. But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s a graph:
Impact of YouTube on Happiness
A roughly similar correlation also exists for Omegle, by the way. And BSG. And Jenga. And having lunch with Sanna and Saoirse!
I’m home! Technically I snuck back to London tomorrow morning, but I wasn’t back in spirit until the moment this afternoon when I finally e-mailed off my final supervision essay of the term (and… hey… forever!) which I’d spent all day sitting at the dining room table writing. (Naturally, however, I had already found the time to resume Battlestar Galactica duties with Katie. Priorities, priorities.) Of course, now I’ve finally finished ‘term’ I must now turn my attention to the giant pile of ‘holiday’ work… and indeed tomorrow I’m back in Cambridge for a final supervision and library pillaging! So basically, this is my excuse for why the troublesome unpacking process might take a while this time, OK? 
Lots of end of term things. Up on Blu-ray – pretty pixels! – followed by Lego Rock Band at Bill’s. I was too wimpy to take to the mike, I must admit, but I really do think this for the best. Formal at Catz with Promise which ended up with plenty of Queens Park talk, as we always always do when we’re together. It’s a bond 
Alice in Wonderland in 3D for Sharon’s birthday, which was the first time in my entire life when I wished that something has been just a little more surreal. (C’mon, the Mad Hatter is supposed to be actually mad, not lovable-quirky.)
Nana
And also, my nana died on Thursday. (It feels appropriate to use the same photo as before.) She had dementia, although wasn’t suffering from it for too long, and I do feel that we’d all count ourselves lucky if we had a similarly rapid decline.
I think I owe nana my love of rich tea biscuits 
She was lovely, although by the time I knew her had settled down somewhat in her ways. I can rewind my other grandparents back and pretty well imagine them as young adults, but not so with nana – partly because I know she kept what we would now consider the most exciting elements of her past strictly to herself!
(The last time I saw her she told me that Cambridge’s church bells were suppressed during the war.)
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
