(no subject)
I have been quiet, which means either that I've been leading a boring life with nothing to report, or that I've been too busy to sit down and say anything. Happily in this case it's mostly the latter. Here are some Things What I Done:
1. Stayed in and watched Eurovision, even though I am straight! We voted for Serbia, just because the Montenegrin entry (which was the best) didn't make it to the finals. I was fascinated by the lyrics to the French song, which was in a sort of Franglais and involved a lot of running around by a bald man. You could infer from Woagn's voiceover that he had a fat bottle of Jameson's next to his mic.
2. Read a very strange and melancholy and wonderful book by Sir Thomas Browne called Urne-Burial, which was written in the seventeenth century and is a kind of meditation on death written after the discovery of some Bronze-Age urns in an archaeological dig. I picked it up in the bookshop and saw a note on the inside cover which said "Even in his lifetime Browne's allusions and vocabulary must have offered challenges..." and that sold me on it. Ever since I read Ulysses 10 years ago or so I have kept a list of words I have to look up when I'm reading. It's now very long and I love it, but it gets harder and harder to find authors who still use words I don't know. But this little book was a total gem and had me reaching for my dictionary every other page, to decipher such beautiful terms as exility, testaceous, incrassate, exenteration, incremable, arefaction, exsuccous, archimime, diuturnity and decretory. (I've put them all in Wiktionary now if anyone feels the need to look 'em up).
Some of the sentences are things of beauty. While talking about the fate of one's body after death, he writes:
Some being of the opinion of Thales, that water was the originall of all things, thought it most equall to submit unto the principle of putrefaction, and conclude in a moist relentment.
Which is a phrase I keep repeating to myself in my head; the idea of concluding in a moist relentment sounds so gorgeous that you almost feel it can't be that bad.
3. Went to the British Museum and squeed over all the Anglo-Saxon stuff, including the Franks Casket which I had completely forgotten was there. I could even read the runes! Awesomeness. Unfortunately the same thing happens every time I go to a museum or art gallery, namely:
Room 1: Wow! Look at that! I am going to spend hours in here and by the time I come out, I will know everything.
Room 2: My God I'm exhausted. I hope there's a cafe round here somewhere.
Room 3: Oh Jesus, not another fucking pot.
4. Watched Black Book, which I thought was brilliant. What I particularly loved about it was that it's so much a European film - everyone speaks in their own languages. I have never really listened to so much Dutch before and it's such a beautiful language. It's also very confusing because it sounds so like English, so that everyone appears to be saying things like "Do you audit Welsh fish?" "No, my buttocks are fiery." etc. However I could at least tell when they switched from Dutch to German.
5. Had a meeting yesterday with a load of BBC higher management to explain that news is made in a very boring way and is basically rubbish telly. The 18:30 programme, which I work for, is about the 2nd or 3rd most popular programme in the country, but only 10% of the viewers are under 35 - a shocking statistic. The only reason I watch it is because I work in the business, and I can't in all honesty recommend it to any of my friends, which annoys me intensely because we (some of us anyway) know exactly how this problem should be dealt with. Eventually they'll get it...probably when the audience starts to die off. Then I went out and drank a couple of bottles of rosé with an old friend. We started in telly together, on Watchdog, but while I went into news she went into entertainment and is now producing the Soap Awards. Neither of us is entirely sure we wouldn't rather have the other person's job...