D i a r y A r c h i v e : N o v / D e c 0 6

'3s' - Sunday 31st December 2006

First it was the kitchen, then the bathroom... and now my site has had a (sort of) impromptu face-lift. Any comments on the new look will be more than welcome, particularly if they relate to any bits of the site which don't work as they should.

Here's to a year of good health, happiness and success to one and all. Happy 2007 everybody!

'Timing' - Thursday 21st December 2006

Everyone's coming over to ours for Christmas this year. This is why the Divine L and I are feeling slightly perturbed by the fact that the bathroom doesn't have a floor, the bathtub is in the hall and the kitchen (which, we thought, didn't require any more attention) is currently being seen to by two loquacious gents who are repairing the repairs carried out by another (slightly less loquacious) gent a few weeks ago. Maybe we should use this as an opportunity to give Christmas dinner a surreal theme this year. After all, the raincoat hanging on the clothes rack standing in the bathtub (which is, as I said, in the hall) doesn't look entirely unlike a Christmas tree...

'Party' - Friday 15th December 2006

I went to a wonderful Christmas party the other day (thanks again for the invitation, J!) which convinced me that, despite my fears, English eccentricity is alive and well. Take this line from a speech given by one of the evening's hosts:

"And now for the Thank you's. There will be four Thank you's this evening. If you would care to clap after each one, that would be most... gratifying."

The same person then proceeded to deliver an 'annual report' in the form of a song, complete with 'responsorial verses' for the guests.

The highlight came at the very end, though. As J and I left the building, we discovered that she had to walk one way to get to the coach station and I had to walk the other to get to my car.

"D'you want me to walk you to your coach?" I asked.

And suddenly, from behind us, this voice that sounded as though it emanated from a mouth filled with marbles of such high quality that they deserve their own space in the British Museum next to the stuff stolen from the Greeks, uttered, "WOULD YOU LIKE me to walk you to your coach! WOULD YOU LIKE!"

I turned around and for a moment was convinced I'd been sucked into another dimension peopled by characters from Evelyn Waugh novels. "Oh... sorry. What was it that I said?"

She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes. "You said, 'Do you want me to.' You must never ask a lady if she WANTS you to do something for her. You must always ask her if she WOULD LIKE you to do something for her."

"Oh, right... thank you..."

And after all that, J didn't even like me to walk her to the coach!

'Whale' - Monday 11th December 2006

I don't watch a great deal of TV, but I've enjoyed the BBC's recent Planet Earth series, not least because it provides lots of 'food for metaphor'. Trying to find parallels between our own lives and those of other living creatures is an activity as old as... well, as old as the tree gum containing the perfectly preserved body of a pre-historic insect. But, as programmes like this prove, there's still so much left to learn about the world around us and, by extension, about ourselves.

I think my favourite thought-provoker came during the closing moments of last night's episode, which featured a shot of two blue whales. Not only are the creatures the largest living animals on earth, they are also the largest ever to have been alive; apparently they are more than twice the size of the largest known dinosaur. Yet despite their gargantuan size, we know very little about where they spend most of their time and we have no idea where they go to breed. I find the mystery of that nothing short of inspirational.

'Leak' - Thursday 7th December 2006

The kitchen is no longer a work in progress, which means I can't use it as a means of putting off writing any more. Mind you, there ARE five leaks in the ceiling of my study at the moment, and they ARE quite a distraction. The weather people on Radio 4 reckon the downpour's going to carry on until the end of the month. Do I want it to stop raining or don't I?

A few moments ago I received a telling-off from a former pupil via MSN Messenger: "Update your site more often, damn u." I don't know why, but I keep assuming no-one reads these scribbles. Clearly I'm wrong, so a big Sorry to everyone for making you wait so long for a new diary entry.

I've been trying to a write a short story which, at the moment, is called Searching For A Coat In Warsaw. In the name of research, last week I decided to spend a day in the sort of clothes I wouldn't often wear. So I donned a heavy, ex-French Army coat (recently acquired from eBay), brown boots and a pair of anti-paparazzi-esque sunglasses, and proceeded to walk along the streets of Cambridge, where I happened to be at the time. The idea behind this highly scientific experiment was to see if those around me would behave differently from how they normally do in reaction to my appearance. Unsurprisingly, I'm sure I detected several subtle differences; I certainly felt as though I was on the receiving of quite a few aggressive glares... not something to which I am accustomed...

All this made me remember a passage in Shirin Ebadi's excellent Iran Awakening in which she states that, in her view, people shouldn't be judged according to how they behave under torture. She writes that it is unfair to measure someone's behaviour against 'human' standards when they have been reduced to an inhuman state. Tell that to the good people of Cambridge by whom a long coat and dark shades are deemed worthy of condemnation.

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