I just stamped out for a walk, fuming about an essay of mine having been butchered in the editing process - perhaps not coincidentally, by someone who taught me when back when I was a Master’s student. (A Stiff Email was sent.) Poking around in the churchyard of Old St Mary’s, I was irrationally cheered to come upon an inscription to the memory of ( Read more... )

We’ve just come home from Burgundy, where friends of ours had rented a gîte in a particularly deserted bit of forest, surrounded by ponds in which swam the largest fish I have ever seen. One morning, when I walked over to the village for bread with the toddler, two men were filleting an enormous pike hung from the branch of a tree, so big I first ( Read more... )

Last weekend I managed the feat of going straight from an NFT showing of Jules et Jim -- wilful, amoral, free spirit caught between two men - to having a long-postponed dinner where I finally got to introduce I. to D., and which I got through by drinking rather too much. It was a cordial, but rather strange, affair, smoothed over by the fact that I ( Read more... )

I decided on the spur of the moment to sublet D.’s flat (my termtime week night bolthole) for the summer, as the rent isn’t negligible and I’m not planning to spend more than a week or so here in the Work Place before my research leave kicks in on September 1st, and I return to being a full-time Londoner. (And have friends here I can stay with when ( Read more... )

I spent a very irritable flight back from the funeral listening to a particularly hearty American in the seat behind me cross-examining his timorous neighbour about Ireland, which he claimed to love, and then answering all the questions himself. By the time he had converted hurling into lacrosse, and taken credit for everything from golf courses to ( Read more... )

I.’s grandmother died unexpectedly at the weekend - well, as unexpectedly as is possible in one’s late eighties, though in robust good health, and married for sixty-seven years to the elderly rogue with whom she had thirteen children - and was waked for four days in her own living room, as was her wish. There were the usual battalions of women ( Read more... )

We just spent four days in Paris, staying with friends we wanted to see before their second child arrives in a matter of weeks. It was a lovely weekend, despite a drip of anxiety from urgent work e-mails which I had to try to respond to on a French keyboard, and the fact that the spring holidays meant that central Paris, blossomy with flowers and ( Read more... )

Last night, I went to the pub with a lively class of my night BA students who had finally come to the end of their degree classes, and eventually it was two o’clock in the morning, there had been dozens of group photographs in which all concerned are mugging and saying ‘Postmodernism!’ at the camera, the pub spaniel was drunk from titbits and ( Read more... )

Yesterday down to the river to the boat race, somewhat by mistake. It was blowing and raining, and biting cold coming off the curve of the river by Chiswick, but I'm leaving in the morning for another three weeks of being mostly away from home, and wanted to see as much as possible of I., who was keen to howl encouraging remarks at the Oxford boat ( Read more... )

I had plans to walk up to Hampstead Heath today, and go and visit the Rembrandt at Kenwood, but it's filthy out, and I am poring instead over a chapter that appears to be getting to an unmanageable length and yet not be quite finished. Trying to ward off mid-afternoon sleepiness with tea and Radio 3, but the fact remains that I came home late last ( Read more... )