dom.blog

(It’s not a title that actually relates to this post, but as I was hunting around for music to listen to I was drawn to fond memories of this and thus Liquid News. Ah, Liquid! If you hadn’t gone I wouldn’t have to get my daily ‘stuff people care about’ briefing from Digital Spy…)

As Lucy leaves from visiting (finally made it to the Waffle House!) and I turn to the final week of term there’s a familiar end-of-term weariness, so it’s probably a helpful boost to my work ethic that my final essay is on religion in America. One of the available questions is simply “Why is the United States so religious?” which I read as ending with an implied “!?!” for good measure. But it saddens me that after this essay I will be returning home for a life of coursework rather than recuperation! Ooh, and Book Club too. (I need to get a move on with that actually. Either that or I lie about when I’m back in London and hide for a week…)

Sophie and I have been watching Pride and Privilege: a documentary about life at exclusive (and rather expensive) Glenalmond College in Scotland. It’s the kind of show which I’d occasionally watch at home, if others were around to poke fun at whatever eccentric cast of characters the producers had persuaded to appear, but it’s given a highly entertaining edge by the fact that Sophie is actually one of Glenalmond’s distinguished alumni and thus can provide all the extra inside gossip (“oh my god, they went and found the stupidest girl in the school…”). It did make me think about what would have happened if I’d went to boarding school – I just don’t think I could have endured someone coming in and turning off the light to make me go to bed at night. All of my crazy 2am creations lost! Still, I wish I had a show about Queens Park to provide in return

Last Wednesday night, when I should have been planning an essay on 60s ‘rebellion’, I instead finally managed to get to one of Andrew’s Peterhouse Politics events and saw Christopher Meyer – former British Ambassador to the US – speak on Barack Obama. Luckily, everything he said now has a warm afterglow now that the election is over, but it was still interesting to hear about his friendship with John McCain. It all confirmed what I thought really: nice guy, detested Bush but with a tendency to lose his cool under pressure big time and fly into rages. (And consequently do stupid things and, say, appoint stupid people to be his VP. Thought I might as well get this in before Sanna blogs ) And I’m suddenly struck by amusement at the idea that this is my equivalent of Abbi’s gig reports!

Before I leave you with another instalment of unique wit and wisdom – you know you love them – the idea of having ‘features’ over multiple blogs reminds me somewhat of The Self Twist. The what? The newsletter thingy I made from 2000 to 2002. OK, so it had a circulation roughly equivalent to that of the Daily Express – four – and that consisted purely of everyone else in the house. (Ah, the joys of word processing as entertainment before the days of broadband Internet connections…) But it was also fun, with youthful forays into ‘writing for an audience’, ‘meeting deadlines’ and ‘marketing’. And bits of it can even be unexpectedly reflective now:

from The Self Twist, Issue 41, September 2002

~

The Wit and Wisdom of My Mates And I: Part 3

Part 3: On Peer Pressure
Our hero has gone to London and fallen in with Mark Watson: a ‘crafty, cunning young man’. Under his influence they make life difficult for the good and pious Harry. “…one sultry day in July, when we had taken a long walk, and were tired and hot, Mark proposed, for the first time before Harry, that we should turn into a public-house to refresh ourselves. I gave a sort of wink towards Harry, as much as to say, “What will he think?” Watson understood me.

“Of course we needn’t ask you to come,” he said, as Harry hesitated; “you’re too great a saint for that; far above the vain pleasures of us poor mortals.”

“I’m not a saint,” said Harry bluntly.

“Well,” said Mark, changing his tack, “perhaps I was wrong, but you may have other reasons – your mother won’t let you, eh?”

“I can do as I like,” said Harry again.

“Dear me, then I’m very pleased,” said Watson, with a bow; “walk in then, I’m glad to be favoured with your company, I’m sure.”

[drumroll?]

And Harry did walk in.”

Hot on the heels of being taken out for dinner by my aunt Carolyn on Thursday night, the very next evening I was feeding (quite literally) off Lucy’s generosity in Brighton. (Sentence framed this way to draw attention to the issue of card machine sexism!) Touring the Sussex campus, I was torn between loving the ability to walk around in a virtually car-free environment and never quite being able to escape the thought of The Village, which is common to all campuses. However, it was lovely to visit and see more of ‘real’ university life

My Mates And I

The next day we went back to Brighton and visited a wonderful second-hand bookshop with plenty of old, old books. Naturally, I headed straight for the children’s section and it was there that I made The Discovery: My Mates and I, by a Mrs. O.F. Walton and published by the Religious Tract Society. According to the British Library it was written in 1870 – although published later – and is by all accounts a terrible, terrible book… from the absurd title and woeful characterisations to the paper-thin plot which barely makes any effort to disguise its Jesus-leanings. I just had to buy it. And now, in what I anticipate will become an irregular feature, I would like to inaugurate the first in a new series: The Wit and Wisdom of My Mates and I.

The Wit and Wisdom of My Mates And I: Part 1

Part 1: On The Temptation of a Noisy Game
Having received expert spiritual guidance at the house of old Mrs. Payne, the lads depart and soon find temptation… “just outside we met with a number of our companions, who were talking and laughing at the top of their voices, and who wanted us to join them in a noisy game. However, with Mrs. Payne’s words ringing in our ears, Frank and I refused, and went quietly home; though I am sorry to say our two mates were over-persuaded, and left our company for theirs”.

On Saturday night my irregular wine-drinking partners Andrew, Matt and Caroline – who I struggle to come up with a collective name for other than the dispiriting ‘Themes & Sources crowd’ – braved the apparently highly dangerous route to my house for an evening of, well, wine drinking? Well OK, wine drinking and CUCA bashing – for Caroline is that way inclined – which is always a perfect recipe for a great night. As the night wore on the political discussion intriguingly managed to buck the expected descent into incoherence – well, if you take my word for it – and Caroline pulled off a rather neat trick by being the first conservative to sell a conception of ‘family values’ I didn’t react against with horror. It was clever, actually, and bizarrely smacked a little bit of Old Labour.

Matt, me and Caroline (carefully framed by wine)

(Oh, and Andrew discovered that the Peterhouse May Ball is a white tie event. Oops )

Blurry gig photo!

Joshua arrived on Sunday on a multi-pronged visit to see me and his friend Daniel at Selwyn. That night, a million miles away from the world of wine and white ties, we went to see The King Blues perform at The Portland Arms. And it was awesome. As this was technically my 2nd gig in a not highly illustrious career (sssh, Abbi) I’ll happy nick the phrase ‘protest punk ska reggae frenzy’ to describe it perfectly. We were right up in front of the stage, head-banging and moshing (!) in a wonderful and very friendly atmosphere. Although I don’t believe in their exact protest politics – in many ways it’s like going to an SWP meeting except with a great soundtrack and alcohol – having everyone shout ‘fuck off’ to the BNP in unison is a perfect moment in and of itself. Plus, afterwards a very cool guy was performing an anti-Boris poem (along with others) on the pavement outside. Yay!

The glorious sign

Oh, and I now have their on-stage sign in my room after Joshua took advantage of his height to grab it! (I just love the grammatically correct apostrophe for a Cambridge audience )

The next day Joshua and I went into overdrive at the glorious Waffle House and had two each – an entirely justified excess. In the evening, Abi came over for a famed Peggle tournament – ooh, worlds colliding again – which rounded off a very enjoyable couple of days. I must apologise to Joshua, though, for the rain. Sorry! That’s what happens when everyone suddenly decides to visit at this time of year…

If I’m Obelix, you are my boulder.

Abi and Joshua face off at Peggle Nights

I have a question. You know those mornings when you wake up – bright and early for whatever you have to do – and then you just pause to lower your eyelids for a picosecond and then oops you’re glancing at your watch and it’s Time To Get Up (And Skip Washing And Breakfast)? Those mornings like this morning? Well – why do I always seem to manage to wake up again just at that moment where it’s not too late to make it if I literally jump out of bed, pull on some clothes and rush out the door? On one level it’s quite handy, but at the same time it does create a lot of hassle compared to just sleeping straight through. But seriously… is it actually not just coincidence? Given that we seem to be able to wake up just a few minutes before the alarm was due to go off in the first place, it’s perhaps entirely possible that your body can calculate the exact number of minutes of sleep which can be squeezed out. I don’t know… scientists?

Anyway, it was definitely worth rushing out to lectures in the end (without any breakfast – did I mention this? *grumbles*) for two reasons. Reason One is that my second lecture was on Aristotle and against all my expectations I managed to fall in love with the guy. He’s still barking, naturally, but his critique of Plato makes him so much more sophisticated and amenable to me by hinting that perhaps thoughts of an objective, transcendental ‘good’ are utter nonsense. (He doesn’t quite follow the path to moral relativism, you understand, but he leaves Plato behind in the dust.) Reason Two – and god, Reason One was only supposed to take up a sentence: this blog is going to be severely over-long… – was that Abi phoned as I was speed-walking on an empty stomach (seriously, no breakfast!) with the news that she was going to London this afternoon with some friends to see Russell T Davies, only one of her friends had sadly been forced to pull out, and perhaps I would like… of course I would like! Yes, yes and yes, hurrah! (Timing was still playing crazy games with me though – it just would be the case that I could make it on time but only by rushing back home from supervision.)

Oh, talking of supervision! (You don’t care about supervision, I realise, but then again you care even less about stuff in brackets. Somebody should write a script to just strip them out of blog posts.) I’ve been moving around supervisors this term. Grad students, mostly, and the combination of the two makes most people imagine it would be really annoying, but it’s not. It’s really, really not – as I try and stress to my anxious DoS – partly because grad students are relatively young and seem eager to do a good job, so you get pages and pages of feedback on essays. I love it! And finally someone has taken to commenting on my writing style: sorely needed, because I’m not sure it’s changed from GCSE. (In fact, after this blog post I’m going to e-mail him about tenses. That’s right – what a truly exciting life I lead!)

Anywayyy – Abi and I made it to London and to the National Theatre to see Russell. He was being interviewed by Benjamin Cook to promote their book – The Writer’s Tale – which is a collection of e-mails between the two during the making of Series Four of Doctor Who. But it’s really not just another ‘making of’ book – marvellous as that would no doubt be – but a vivid insight into the writing process as it happens, with all of the pain and raw emotions that go along with it. Sanna would love it, and I mean that entirely genuinely and not just as a sneaky way to foist Doctor Who on her. I love his conception of the Maybe – that living collection of half-formed ideas bubbling in your head as you go about with life – because, even though I’m certainly no writer, I do have a faint echo of it myself. I think everyone does, really. Like with this blog, actually, which came to me in fragments of sentences which I’m desperate to write before they go. Or with the little silly things I make – like that poster which kept me up last night, possibly contributing to the stressy morning – which all begin as small but burning ideas. I may get mocked sometimes for doing such things, but believe me, for every cartoon or political rant there are many more ideas that pop into my head which later morph out of all recognition or are simply discarded. Mostly when I’m walking, actually, and I have to make a note on my phone whilst trying to keep an eye out for bicycles.

Thank you!

I’m writing all of this because I started reading said book on the train back home, of course, which is crazy – I never read on trains as it gives me headaches. (Well, it was dark outside and that helps. But still.) I also queued to get it signed, and have enormous respect for the fact that having spent an hour signing books people like Russell and Benjamin can pull off that trick of generating a five second conversation of more than mere pleasantries. It must be horrible, I suppose, continually generating new conversations with people at such a rapid rate without being disappointing. But hey – they did, and also both signed it for me, Tash and Katie, which was most generous. There you go, Katie, I’ve paid you back for the Peter Davison autograph now! Cleverly I later managed to pour Coke over the book, but luckily not fatally and somehow it makes the book feel even more like my copy. Y’know, the copy with stains.

The coke-spilling occurred during a lovely dinner afterwards on the South Bank with Abi and two of her school friends. I love that part of London, I really really do. That bridge across the Thames is just so utterly magical – the big, bright pulsing life of the city stretched before you, moonlight competing with the urban glow to reflect on the river until a boat cuts through, filled with people. I cannot imagine, as I walk across that bridge, why anyone would want to live behind neat suburban hedgerows and driveways. It’s a lie, of course: almost no-one actually lives in amongst that London, and the people that do are mostly huddling under the bridge for warmth and begging for small change. But it doesn’t matter, not with the imagined community of a city – even a city of millions upon millions of people. (Especially so, in fact.) It doesn’t matter at all.

Abi’s school friends were very interesting, by the way. (Will they read this? No, it’s OK, of course they won’t read this. No matter anyway, I’m only going to be nice!) Smart, confident, alive. Just like most people on Earth, of course. (Even though one of them voted for Boris – but that’s OK, I enjoy talking to such people really. It’s much more fun than the careful dance you have to do when talking to someone you agree with, where you’re constantly nervous you’ll stumble across a tiny split that will wedge you apart. And the morning after Obama’s victory, the conversation I had with two right-wing friends was more insightful, I think, than simply victory cheers.) But yes – it’s always fascinating to meet other people’s old school friends. A little insight into the millions of parallel worlds of friendship groups that exist, and a chance for me to secretly wish I could cast a seductive spell and tempt such people into the comprehensive school system (apologies), where they’d be such stars.

God, I must shut up. Goodnight! It’s alright, it’s alright, to be standing in a line (standing in a line)…