Overheard

The delightfully witty Ms Musings tagged me ages ago for a meme in which I had to list seven personality traits. I thought about this for a while but never could seem to come up with seven, and I wasn’t all that sure about the authenticity of the ones I did identify. So finally I decided on a variation on a theme. Below you’ll find seven representative snippets from my life, and you can judge my character for yourselves.

1.  From a job interview, which was nearly over before it began:

Him: How do you do, I’m the master, and here on my right is the tutor for modern languages. We’re both astrophysicists.
Me: Oh how lovely. You’re practically in the arts.

2. From an email from my academic publisher:

‘It is quite extraordinary how much your emails are representative of you (the you that you represent when you meet others, or … this could be protracted).’

3. From reviews of an academic book:

‘An empathetic teacher, she frequently introduces a ‘difficult’ movement or work by adopting what she imagines to be the perspective of her audience, injecting a dose of humour that may amuse some readers (while irritating others).’

‘Written in a witty, incisive style which punctuates first-rate research with amusing asides, this book is far too enjoyable (I read it on holiday around Italy) to seem like serious academic reading.’

4. From an aborted attempt at cognitive behavioural therapy, which I loathed, but which remained archived on cassette tapes (I threw them out when I moved college room):

Him: This fear you say you have. Well you don’t have it. If you found yourself broken down in the middle of a traffic jam, you’d be fine.’
Me: No I wouldn’t.
Him: Yes you would. You’d go and sit on the side of the road until the AA came.
Me: I might do what I needed to, but I wouldn’t feel fine exactly. I’d be overwhelmed with anxiety.
Him: No you wouldn’t.
Me: Yes I would.

5. From a conversation with my son:

Me: Would you say we were a critical family?
Him: Ha! You? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you criticize me, not even when I deserve it.
Me: Oh, but. Well, I suppose I don’t think you ever do things that deserve criticism. Apart maybe from French, I think you try at whatever you do.
Him: Well you’re right about the French.

6. From a conversation with my husband at 10.45pm one evening as my son and his two friends walk out the door:

Me: So they’re going to spend the night at Stefan’s?
Him: I know, I thought they were going to Fergus’s.
Me: And what did Stefan say as they left?
Him: I asked him if it was okay with his parents and he said he was sure it would be fine. This is when I’m glad we didn’t have a girl.
Me: Oh no. Unless there are boys involved, girls make sensible decisions. I can imagine this lot being turned away by Stefan’s parents and then thinking that the park looks good.
Him: [Brightening] They’ve got their sleeping bags. They’d be okay.
Me:  One of my old school friends used to tell me about the evenings he spent down on the railway lines with his mates. They discovered a hollow under one of the tracks, dug it out deeper, and then lay in it while trains thundered by overhead. I told him, “If you ever tell that story to my son in a way that makes it look attractive, I will kill you.”

7. From a friend’s email:

‘I have to say you have a very catching way of giving tantalizing snapshots of your life in your blog. It’s not full-on revelation – it’s like the occasional emergence of real life, which meshes intriguingly with the insight into who you are via your book reviews. It reminds me of that Colette quote about playing cache-cache with the reader.’

Update: I don’t know where my head is at the moment; let’s be charitable and put it down to late summer madness. The charming John Ray at Bookflap interviewed me last week and if there is anything at all that you don’t know about me after this meme, I’m pretty sure it’s answered here.  Meant to add a link to this the first time around….sorry!

Promised Pictures

Ages ago I promised pictures from my new room. Well, yesterday I was in college and did my best. It was a beautiful day, which was lovely if you were there, but problematic for cack-handed photographers like me with the sun coming from all the wrong directions. Anyhow, I’m in a crescent-shaped court on the far side of college, that you reach by going through a rather elegant archway. If you go through and look backwards, this is what you see.

Entry Arch

The courtyard you are looking into is one of the main thoroughfares of college. To the left (out of shot) is the forecourt porter’s lodge, where the fellows collect their post, and alongside it, the chapel. Opposite, on the right (out of shot), is the college library. I did try to take photos of these parts of the building as they are all rather gorgeous, but they are also huge and refused to accommodate themselves to my viewfinder. The windows of my room look into this courtyard, and I can see it’s going to be difficult to get anything done with so much people watching on offer.

Anyway, here’s the entrance to my new staircase.

This part of college has recently been refurbished, and you can see that the gardens are unfinished. Well, there’s just two big expanses of earth at present, but hopefully the gardeners will get to work in the autumn.

So, you head up the stairs and for once, I’m not at the top of the building but only on the first floor. Now, I’m really sorry about this shot, but my room is dark-paneled, as I’ve mentioned, and the sun was streaming in, and it was difficult to get the camera to handle the contrast (that’s my excuse).

My New College Room

There’s another armchair to the right, with a coffee table between it and the sofa. And behind me is the fireplace with the two cylindrical lights above and either side. This was impossible to get a decent shot of, so you’ll have to imagine it. My friend who lived in the room a while back said it was like living in a cigar box, but I rather like my wood-paneled womb. And if I can get hold of a maintenance man to put my pictures up, then those walls are going to look a lot better.

I’m very grateful for all the suggestions from the previous post for room cleansing, and I will certainly enact a little ritual, particularly if I can find a way to disable the smoke alarms….  My son goes back to school next week, and I’ll be returning to work. If any of you out there are having difficulties with your essay-writing skills, or fancy a little chat about French literature, drop me an email and we’ll fix a time to meet – only kidding! Shame you can’t come over for tea, though.