It's Spring! While this does tend to invoke my winter-fondling, Scroogelike, homicidal misanthropy, now with added sneezing, I still can't help rejoicing in the mad sprouting of my container garden (freesias!) and the way that the plane trees down the avenue are all leaping into that pale, misty, hopeful green. It's the first warm day in a while, ( Read more... )

One of the academics with whom I correspond about complicated credit transfer issues insists on addressing me as "Julia", which is not actually my name. For some reason this gives me fits of the giggles. My slightly insane Uncle Bill, back in his bachelor days when I was still in high school, had a particularly tremendous upper-crust English-rose ( Read more... )

I am at home today with 'flu, as I am phlegmy and disgusting and shouldn't breathe on anyone, and moreover have a head full of cement. Also, I need to hold Hobbit's hand a bit, he got beaten up by the neighbourhood tom again this morning, and is wandering around all subdued, with matted fur and covered with leaves. I think the bastard must have ( Read more... )

When I was in my last year of junior school, i.e. aged 11 or 12 or so, I had the lead role in a school play. Well, to be precise, in the small, serious mini-play which served as the opener to the school's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, in which I was a member of the chorus. Possibly the lead member of the chorus, come ( Read more... )

My grandmother (maternal, for the use of) was generally a dreadful cook, firmly in the lesser British tradition of stodge, overcooked vegetables and the general, fixed conviction that being terribly serious about the quality of the food you produce is some sort of decadent European vice and not to be indulged at any cost. (I identify this in sharp ( Read more... )

I have acquired, by some mystic process over the last year or two, a taste for fruit teas. I've always mentally classified them, along with rooibos, as "disgusting pseudo-tea", but then my erstwhile MA student Stacey gave me a bag of something with pomegranate and apple and I was hooked. This is terribly useful: these days if I have a milk drink of ( Read more... )

You know, it's not just the gentle weekly suggestions of my therapist which are starting to make me realise I don't have enough faith in myself. Remember the sad death of Winona, my netbook? She refused to switch on at any price, and eventually by determined trial and error I worked out that her on switch was defunct. I resolved to take her around ( Read more... )