In which horses run free

Last night there was some sort of fence malfunction and the horses got out. (Malory Towers is a fairly fancy school, and among its features is a pasture with horses in it, or, as last night, out of it.) They didn't get far, it was all dealt with very professionally and was not really worrisome, but you haven't heard hysterical shrieking until you've been in a house full of eleven-year-olds witnessing Horses On The Loose. It was as if we were in Jurassic Park and the raptors had broken free.

This morning I went up to the house to wake the children and the horses were back in the pasture, looking sedate. It was a quarter to seven in the morning and sunny, the cool night air slowly warming through, dew-damp cow parsley on all sides. It does get nice here, maugre my complaining.

(I've been using the word "maugre" at a rate of .75 times a week for the past month or so, and I've only now bothered to check that it actually means "notwithstanding; in spite of".)

I should do something research-oriented, like read "Emma". Thing is, I really don't like it very much; it's probably my least favourite Austen, beating "Sense and Sensibility" (which is not nearly enough like the Emma Thompson film) and "Mansfield Park" (which I actually don't mind; I think Fanny Price is unfairly maligned by critics).

Oh, I'm becoming one of those internet people who write quite a lot about Jane Austen. I do promise, though, never to refer to her or any 19th-century female writer by her first name, all chummily. Even if, as in the case of Charlotte Brontë, she can be confused with her sisters and has a last name with a difficult-to-locate symbol in it.

"I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable."

Today was improved by this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFrFhwMQMXg

I was going to do a paragraph on how weird that part in "Persuasion" is where the narrator starts effusing about the landscape of Lyme, and how at first I thought that was because Austen's scope ("that little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I paint with so fine a brush") is so limited that even the slightest divergence from it stands out as odd, but now I think it has to do with the author obtruding her opinions into the narrative. Which I think is similar to what happens earlier on, when the narrator describes the Musgroves' no-good son who dies at sea, and is extremely harsh about him and his grieving mother for no obvious narrative or thematic reason. It's the sort of thing I think I might need biographical details to explain: were no-good young sailors with poor spelling skills a feature in Austen's life? Was she just upset that day? Were all the other books full of this sort of thing before she revised them? (But surely she did revise "Persuasion" before she died.)

But then I thought that might be boring. So you get a meta-paragraph instead.

Wobbly

Among the classic signs that you are due a vacation is suddenly realising that you've been making unhappy little moaning sounds while checking your email, in public. It will be okay, though. I'm glad my job doesn't normally involve a lot of overnight duties, as it does this week. My real issue with it is sort of illogical - it's not the prospect of being woken up, it's that I'm bothered by the idea of being in any sense useful to society or my workplace while I'm sleeping.

But it's just a night or two this week, and then from Saturday it's half term and London shenanigans with Kine and, Avinor strike permitting, Norway. In the meantime, I have vertigo of the body and spirit and should go and lie down.

In which patriotism surfaces

It's the 17th of May and I'm in England, feeling, as I usually do, the urge to make bitter comments to my uncaring surroundings about how I should be waving a flag and watching the russ going increasingly green and not in ENGLAND, WORKING. Which none of them will get because they all work on their own national holiday. It's one of those dull grey English days, too.

Thing is, the last 17th of May I spent in Norway was probably as good as it gets - it was the last year of high school, and I had not been particularly russish so didn't have a hangover, and I had finished all my exams but one and was wearing an amazing fifties dress, and we went about singing with uncritical enthusiasm and wore floral garlands in our hair and struck "look to the future" poses in all photographs.

Today that will be my little brother, though possibly with less flowers and more of a hangover. Which is also nice.

It's been too long since

- the last time I heard someone describe their biceps as "the gun show", as in "would you like to buy a ticket for the gun show". (Actually, it was about two weeks ago, and now that I think about it the person saying it might have been me.)
- the last time I saw Iron Man. I wish more of my nearby acquaintance found this sort of thing delightful. When I saw it before the person I was with fell asleep while Robert Downey, Jr. was supersonically paralysed and getting his nuclear-reactor heart pulled out of his chest.

The internet works, temporarily! This is really cutting down on my Wednesday Night Annoyance.

Victory, ish

I just realised I never heard anything from Warwick, and in a spirit of idle curiosity I called up to see what had happened. And apparently the English department recommended me for a place almost a month ago, and they were unhappy, but not exactly surprised, that the admissions people hadn't let me know yet. "They're having problems down there," they said. "We've definitely lost you, haven't we." "Yeah, sorry," I said.

Now I feel sort of bad for them, not specifically for missing out on me in my dubious glory, but because I imagine this happens to them a lot. Or maybe not; I would've called ages ago if Warwick had been a big priority.

I had a good touristy day in London yesterday - I occasionally have to remind myself that I am in London and it is an exciting metropolis, because otherwise I just sink into the embrace of Borders and the latest Louise Bagshawe novel or something. Instead I had lunch on Southbank, then hung around Foyles for about two hours reading a collection of gothic short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell that I hadn't realised existed, The Idler, the legendarily awesome personals section of the London Review of Books, and "The Ice Palace" by Tarjei Vesaas. Which last is terrifying even in translation and on a warm, sunny day.

Finally I bought a very cheap copy of Wuthering Heights and headed to Trafalgar Square, where I was photographed by tourists who possibly thought I was a genuine London person. ("We're bona fide! We're not from London!") Wandered about the National Gallery for a bit and was delighted by Alison Watt's Phantom paintings, then went to Covent Garden for ice cream (others had had the same idea and there was only one flavour left, so I had chocolate and chocolate).

After which I went to take the tube and through inattention ended up on the Covent Garden Station Staircase to the Underworld. This is a 191-step winding staircase that according to a sign at the bottom is only supposed to be used in emergencies; I didn't realise this until I'd been heading down for a good few minutes and couldn't hear either the street above or the trains below. The Underground is creepy enough as it is, and there's nothing like a winding staircase to make distances seem interminable. I emerged to find myself in a perfectly normal tube station rather than actually in Hades, and took myself to Oxford Circus, where I sank into the embrace of Borders and the latest Louise Bagshawe novel.

Summer!

Large amounts of tapas, whining and sangria last night, almost sleeping through a fire drill, actually getting up and going for a run this morning, supposedly non-drowsy hayfever pills, muggy heat: in the words of one of the Moomintroll books, I am almost dead beat on tired little feet. Also, and probably not coincidentally, I've become one of those young urban professionals whose coffee order in Starbucks (tall skinny extra-shot iced vanilla latte) takes longer to pronounce than to drink. Still, none of this tiredness is actually work-related, so it's all cool.

My current targeted advertisement on gmail says "Do you deserve a Ph.D?". STOP IT GMAIL.

Woo, ligatures

So I was trying to type the word "dæmon", for Philip Pullman-related reasons, and as none of these primitive keyboards have the letter æ I went to the Wikipedia article "Æ" to copy and paste one, where I learned that "Æ can be used in written communication by two people who are in love as a dual number pronoun, replacing "we" and "us"".

It's citation needed, which probably means it's rank nonsense, but still fairly cool in terms of the Future Thesis. I should read up on dual number pronouns. IT'S ALL RELATED.

(The last time I saw Vicky she narrated Joan of Arc's trial transcripts for me, then said that if it wasn't for the fact that she was doing an M.Phil about it, she would just be a crazy person obsessed with medieval witch trials. That seems to be how it works.)