it never rains
Thursday, 20 October 2005 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtAmazing how these social wossnames do the not-in-single-spies, but-batallions, thing. Today's thoroughly pleasant scheduled lunch with supervisor for purpose of hacking the revision proposal for this wretched book, turned into a thoroughly pleasant unexpected lunch with two additional gentlemen, one of whom was James-from-way-back, he of the wine-farm-operating parents. Cape Town is, as they say, a teeny weeny incestuous community. Oh, yeah. Good to catch up, at any rate, and additional bonus of a pleasantly argumentative discussion of the precise definition of a cult movie with the other unexpected gentleman, who is of the ilk of mad lunatic fringe sf-reading academics. We are a dying species, she says plaintively. But not dead yet.
Tonight was book club. I have come away from book club (a) sloshed, which is more or less routine, and (b) clutching only two books: an unspecified black volume with a corset on the front, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. The latter, at least, is something I can admit to being tres happy about, and still retain my suave postmodern academic street cred. No comment re the former, although it's apparently a detective novel featuring an academic suspected of Satanic activities, so, given my recent experiences with the police, I felt it had a certain resonance. The restraint in snagging only two books is due to the fact that I shall be adding these to my metre-high pile of Borrowed Books, the ones which I haven't read yet. A quick geological assay reveals that the ones near the bottom of the pile (a) date back almost a year, and (b) are turning into peat. While they settle and compost, I have been reading 19th-century girls' classic fiction with somewhat desperate voracity, given that I have to mark the Honours essay tomorrow: five Anne of Green Gables novels in the last 24 hours. I am pleased to report that they are not as saccharine as either What Katy Did or Pollyanna. Then again, nothing is as saccharine as Pollyanna.
In other news, my niece has a seriously effective pair of lungs, and furry ears, although I believe that's normal for newborns. Meanwhile, the Army of Reconstruction have added sufficient layers of brick to the wall right outside my bedroom that the bricklayer will henceforth be at precisely the right height to look straight into my bathroom. This is going to make tomorrow's ablutions somewhat challenging, given my tendency to sleep in not much, clothing-wise. Darned builders.
Tonight was book club. I have come away from book club (a) sloshed, which is more or less routine, and (b) clutching only two books: an unspecified black volume with a corset on the front, and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. The latter, at least, is something I can admit to being tres happy about, and still retain my suave postmodern academic street cred. No comment re the former, although it's apparently a detective novel featuring an academic suspected of Satanic activities, so, given my recent experiences with the police, I felt it had a certain resonance. The restraint in snagging only two books is due to the fact that I shall be adding these to my metre-high pile of Borrowed Books, the ones which I haven't read yet. A quick geological assay reveals that the ones near the bottom of the pile (a) date back almost a year, and (b) are turning into peat. While they settle and compost, I have been reading 19th-century girls' classic fiction with somewhat desperate voracity, given that I have to mark the Honours essay tomorrow: five Anne of Green Gables novels in the last 24 hours. I am pleased to report that they are not as saccharine as either What Katy Did or Pollyanna. Then again, nothing is as saccharine as Pollyanna.
In other news, my niece has a seriously effective pair of lungs, and furry ears, although I believe that's normal for newborns. Meanwhile, the Army of Reconstruction have added sufficient layers of brick to the wall right outside my bedroom that the bricklayer will henceforth be at precisely the right height to look straight into my bathroom. This is going to make tomorrow's ablutions somewhat challenging, given my tendency to sleep in not much, clothing-wise. Darned builders.
