All things considered, last week was a perfectly normal week until Friday came along. Abbi and Paul showed off their newly vegetarian (but still reassuringly delicious) cooking with a mini dinner party on Tuesday: all quite respectable. Went to see Mark Thomas at the Tricycle on Wednesday for my mum’s birthday: OK, maybe a (brilliant and hilarious) stand-up routine about the West Bank isn’t a typical outing for every family, but this is North West London after all. It was only when Friday arrived that things got properly surreal: a cocktail of nerves, sadness, reunion and celebration which took a turn for the even weirder and culminated in Geek Corner turning unexpectedly militant!
But first things first. Friday was Jimmy’s funeral, at which I’d been asked to read out my post in his memory. To be honest, I’d been nervous beforehand that this could all seem like a bit of an imposition… as if the Queens Park community, through sheer mass of numbers, could be taking up something that rightfully belonged to his family. Thankfully, I really don’t think this was a problem – partly because when I listened to everyone else who spoke from all parts of his life it all sounded so right. We were all definitely talking about the same marvellous person.
Funerals like this are odd, though, because the sadness of the occasion is mixed with the joy of being reunited with lots and lots of people you once saw every day. Holly and I got a lift there together, and pretty soon we were having the same arguments we used to have during A Level English, which was sweet and lovely. And the pub afterwards was packed with all sorts of students and teachers from different eras, which means there’s so much to catch up on… especially after a couple of beers, when I got around to admonishing my old PE teacher for denying me the cliché of utterly miserable PE lessons. My ride home was kindly provided by Sue Wales with Alison Hook, Luna Rupchand and Chris Moore sitting in the back: now that’s just plain wacky, like someone’s compressed my entire school life and turned it into a bizarre roadtrip movie.
So, an odd mix of emotions, rounded off with an evening of Geek Corner Plus. (Geek Corner Plus? Geek Corner Extra? Geek Corner with Special Guest Star Amber? You decide.) We watched Hercules in New York, which was obviously terrible, and then I tried to get us all to watch Made In Chelsea as an obviously terrible follow-up. I hadn’t bargained, however, on having to fight Saoirse for the remote: an experience which ended up with said remote smashing into my face followed by kindly and helpful siblings scurrying into the kitchen to fetch tissues and ice for the bleeding 
(I do feel bad about telling this story, because it was obviously an accident and hardly a big one. It was just such an amusing one: the jokes about Saoirse gearing up for violent revolution all write themselves! Rest assured, future employers \ boyfriends \ secret service operatives, that she’s not actually violent.)
But if it was, I would fill it with charmingly silly animated Doctor Who gifs, just like all the other Tumblrs in the world. And sometimes I would post silly animated Doctor Who gifs from 1965, purely because I love the Meddling Monk as a character far too much to be normal:
My Tumblr would have no picture borders
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
Helen on Getting ready for some adventures in China: “Enjoy China! Look forward to hearing all about it. A young woman who worked on our ‘casuals’ staff whilst going…” Apr 4, 12:34
