I guessed it was you :>. You're probably the only person I know outside my family who would associate me with Thurber, Peake and Snark all in one sentence. I detect the fell hand of an ex-student who knows me reasonably well, i.e. you. Or possibly Thakky, but I'm not sure she's into the Thurber thing. Other than giving us the cats subsequently known as Todal and Golux. Oh, and I see your Life and Hard Times, and raise you an almost complete copy of his essays, which I have collected over the last four years while writing a chapter on him. Heh.

Did I ever get around to telling you that I found, in the second-hand bookstore in Obs Main Rd, a couple of Angela Carters which had belonged to you? I don't think I could afford to buy them all at the time, but my copy of Wise Children has your name in the front.

I think both our dreams were probably unduly Hollywood-influenced. Although quite a lot of mine involved becoming extremely irritated with the particularly useless, weak and wandering boyfriend I had in the dream-world, and eventually taking off without him, leaving him to be incarcerated by the police in a fourth-storey flat, out of the window of which I climbed with considerable cat-woman flair. I think his weak and wandering presence had something to do with my past romantic life, if only in negative, because I don't think I have had a relationship with anyone who could be called useless, weak and wandering, by any stretch of the imagination. You could apply a lot of very strong terms to a lot of them, but not weak and wandering.