Such cleverness!

I've just learnt to add some links. It took me all night. I thought you had to make the links as Page Elements, but no, one does them as links! I've got three degrees but my ineptitude never ceases to amaze me. Now at least I can have something more like a normal blog.

Literary Meme

(taken from cestchic.blogspot.com. Thanks!)

1. One book you have read more than once.
Diary of Virginia Woolf

2. One book you would want on a desert island.

War and Peace

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3. One book that made you laugh.
Catch 22

4. One book that made you cry.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

5. One (or more) books I wish I had written.
Sebald, Austerlitz; Naipul, The Enigma of Arrival; Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

6. One (Two) book(s) you wish had never been written.
Protocols Elders of Zion; Hitler, Mein Kampf

7. One book I am currently reading.
Woodrell, Winter’s Bone

8. One book I have meant to read.
Richardson, Clarissa

9. One (Two) book(s) that changed your life.
A. S. Neill, Summerhill; John Seymour, Self Sufficiency

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I feel there should be a tenth item, but can't think of one.

Self-serving Students

I have to qualify my post about bad students (see March). There are also self-serving students, who have no sense that learning in groups is a collaborative venture.

They don't prepare for seminars and say nothing in them and contribute no goodwill to the course or to their fellow students, but then use up a lot of my energy in asking for special help when essay time comes round. Then they turn in their good papers in the end and get a lot of credit -- even first class degrees. I hate them. Self-serving types.

In the old days students got 10% of their degree for their contributions, goodwill, hard work, etc., but now any surly, non-contributing student can get through without those good qualities.

That reminds me of the student who, when a lecturer asked if he would open a window, retorted, "Open it yourself." But that leads me to a larger train of thought about their upbringings. Is it their fault that their parents have given them that horrible attitude to life?

No, but from about the age of 18 I believe that it is incumbent on every adult to get some insight, to shape up, to evolve.

The postscript to this is that I am very aware of the seriously shy students in my seminar groups and would never put them under duress. Poor things. The most gentle of encouragements is needed here, as is working in tiny groups where I can spy on them flourishing, smiling, even using their hands to express themselves.

"The way to . . .

. . . rock oneself into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw."

So wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on Tuesday 22nd August 1922. She walked on the beautiful Sussex Downs and that week she was reading Thackeray and Joyce, and that month was reading Homer, Joyce, Proust, Ibsen and all the rest for The Common Reader. And, as for writing: that day she wrote in her diary "It is only 11.30 and I have left off Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street."

Firle Beacon by Duncan Grant

My fresh air was to go out and find that my broad beans have all germinated in the greenhouse (where they have to germinate, as mice will eat every last one in the garden). Cheered by that, I read Virginia Woolf's diary. And now I am settling down to write on a lovely poem by anon. And this blog is the equivalent of that diary. Here I am saying that oh thank goodness the end of that horrible RAE period is in sight. I see the chequered flag -- not with the success that I was aiming for, but with a far greater thing: the peace of mind that comes from a complete change of attitude to it. I have done my best, and somehow that always does the trick. "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." William Shakespeare.

Selfish Academics

I have been editing up other people's work all week. Some people are totally decent. They present their work in the house-style you've asked for, and put all the publishers, etc. , into their footnotes. Sometimes it is young, thoughtful academics who do this. Sometimes it is the totally professional professors. Others are about as selfish as they come. Sometimes it is the most stellar academics who are these others. So that's how they got to be so stellar is it? Must be amazing to be swanning off to conferences, feted everywhere and leaving other schmucks to clean up after you.

They are like vile, spoilt kids that you have to clean up after. Well, in the old days I could hit my kids and make them clean up after themselves. This is why everyone says to me, "Sapphire, you make the nicest children I know." Today you can't hit your kids, and if you are lucky enough to get a stellar academic contributing to your book you don't even ask them to clean up after themselves, you are so damned grateful. I was weeping today, tied to my desk on the loveliest day of the year, changing his stupid Chicago style to MLA, looking up every book in his 80 footnotes to get the Christian names of the authors, because he'd been so lazy as to just put their initials, and then again looking up each publisher, as he'd been too lazy to see that my house-style demanded it. This took me four hours, and I made a big discovery about my life today: that I have spent it sorting out other people's messes. Time I made a big mess of my own.

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Two hours later, sitting down to write: sometimes a girl just has to look after herself. How about a bath with three candles, Floris Florissa, a glass of champagne that's been languishing since my birthday, Radio 3 play? Some synchronicity (see the bottom of this post). The world is a different place. Sapphire has decided that she will be a bit better to herself from now on. More perfume is in order. Last week at a catatonic-inducing meeting in the Dunciad that is now our university, everyone kept saying, "Lovely perfume, Sapphire. What is it?" It was Madame X by Ava Luxe. Lovely indeed.

Whenever I find myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as I were going out - then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write. This I find the greatest relief.

(John Keats, letter to his brother, George, and sister in law, Georgiana, September, 1819)

The synchronicity was that I had already decided to snap out of it by seeing what Clive Stafford-Smith was up to, and perhaps writing to someone on Death Row. I have done this before. How ridiculous to think that I was in prison, when I was simply tied to my desk, and could get up and leave it any time if I really wanted to. Then I turned on the radio and the play was about prisoners on Death Row. Written by Pearse Elliot, it was called Last Suppers. I don't think you can "listen again" which is a pity as it was so well conceived, written and acted. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, is just fantastic on Texas, the death penalty, George Bush and his executions. Nothing like a bit of synchronicity to make the world a meaningful place again.

Mary Oliver: *Thirst*

Another blip in the vow of silence, but it may be that blogging can be part of the fabric of the heads-down life this summer.

I can't get on with my work until I have savagely processed everything that comes in my door. About the only junk mail not utterly hated by me is the publicity from Bloodaxe Books, as there is usually about one good poem in their flyers that I might keep. I think I love poetry but I don't buy much or read much, so actions speak louder than thoughts.

This time the poem that lifted off the page was by Mary Oliver, much loved American poet. You can read about her and her lover, Molly Malone Cook, if you google about a bit. Sapphie isn't too big on love, having been love's fool all her life, but this poem is cool. I don't think that Bloodaxe will mind me printing it out here as it's on their own publicity material. You can buy the volume, Thirst, from September for £8.95. ISNB 9781852247768.

A Pretty Song

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.

"Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills"

What a gross new title. Universities have, for hundreds of years, been the disseminators of the precious life blood of our civilisation. Now they are places where academics spend more time sweating over grant applications than they do thinking, reflection, writing. They are places that should be called .inc/.org/.plc and the like. They are places where funding to departments is given in direct relation to how many foreign students (read "big payers") are recruited. So business schools get all the money. Classics and Philosophy get nothing.
Can't there just be a Department of Education where Universities are a part of it? -- somewhat at the other end from kindergartens.

And I have no opinion whatsoever of John Denham, another great burly white male in a suit. Everyone please note: he was a great proponent of top-up fees. MY POOR students. Education should be free for everyone, as it was for Blair's and Brown's and Denham's generation.

This Philistine Government . . .

. . . has been enough to get me blogging again.
Please take a minute to read this, written by two sad research students (and see also http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=448 on the state of the British Library):

Dear All in the Academic Community
The following news may not have come to your attention because it has, by strange coincidence, not been sufficiently publicised. The Department of Trade and Industry has reduced the national budget for UK Research Councils by £68m. Please take a moment to read the BBC article below. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6419261.stm. The focus of the article is on science, but we are writing to you not merely in solidarity with our colleagues in the science departments up and down the country, but in protest against the accompanying cuts to the budget of the AHRC -- the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The AHRC is by far the most important source of support for postgraduate study of English Literature and the other humanities. According to their website, the AHRC has a £75m annual budget (see http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/about/). This budget is to be reduced by £5.3m, or 7%. According to the AHRC’s press-release (reproduced in full below), this cut ‘is clearly a blow to research’ and ‘will impact for years on the wide academic domains of the arts and humanities’. This is worrying news indeed for any postgraduate seeking a long-term academic career. An online petition has been set up in reaction to the DTI cuts. The process is straightforward and self-explanatory. http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/reseach/ (Please note that the spelling ‘reseach’ is correct in this context, due to an administrative error at No. 10, no doubt. Their lack of funding for literacy comes back to haunt them). We see, however, this petition as only a starting-point for the necessary, long-term and committed effort to ensure that the UK research community is not seen as a scapegoat for government failures. Research funding is not a honey-pot to be freely pilfered. The AHRC has stressed that the money will not be reimbursed this year. They intimate that further cuts are also likely. Our silence now would thus set a precedent and continue the Government’s startling and unjust victimisation of intelligence, initiated by undergraduate tuition fees and sustained by cuts to the British Library budget. Our silence now would submit to their attitude that higher education is a private privilege, not a public right. We therefore ask for ideas and dialogue on how we may best react to this dismaying situation. Thank you for your time and your solidarity.

16/03/2007 - Arts and Humanities Research Council Statement on funding.
The AHRC Council met on 15 March 2007 to discuss how to manage a £5.3 million cut in their budget. This has been deemed necessary by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in order to contribute to the £68 million reduction in the Science Budget. It is possible the Council will need to make further cuts in due course. The Council wish to express their great disappointment that the DTI have decided to reduce their funds in this way. As the newest and smallest Research Council, the loss of £5.3 million, the expenditure of which had already been planned, will impact for years to come on the wide academic domains of the arts and humanities. Chief Executive of the AHRC, Professor Philip Esler, noted that ‘we will work to minimise impacts on the research community, but the loss of £5.3 million, possibly more, is clearly a blow to research. Our concern is to maintain the health and sustainability of our research community, and cuts inevitably severely limit our ability to do this. Council have had to discuss some difficult scenarios. ‘The arts and humanities research community is 25% of the active researchers in the UK, and their work is a global success story, ranked only second to the US. We can only hope to maintain this level of world class research if investment is sustained. We will inevitably have to defer some of our activities and look at much reduced success rates to manage these cuts.’ The Council discussed a range of options, and concluded the following points:
The £5.3 million cut will necessitate halving the success rate in the Research Leave Scheme, thus removing £2 million from the sum we intended to allocate to this scheme in the current round
The Council agreed the need to defer activities, such as Strategic Resource Enhancement for at least a year, by cutting £1.5 million, and reducing the Strategic Programmes Management Fund by 50% to £570,000
The Council also agreed to defer for a year the Museums and Galleries Research Grants Supporting Postgraduate and early career researchers should be prioritised, so we do not face a ‘lost generation’ of researchers, but Collaborative Training Funds will suffer a cut of £200,000.
Postgraduate research success rates will be greatly reduced if further cuts become necessary following advice from the Treasury
The Council need to await final Treasury decisions on funding, and plans are contingent on this.
As with the other Research Councils, much of AHRC’s expenditure is already committed, because of the long life-cycle of academic research. This has limited options for cuts. As already highlighted some schemes will therefore bear a disproportional ‘brunt’.
The Council will write to University Vice-Chancellors outlining the new financial outlook for arts and humanities research.
The Council is seeking reassurance that the ring-fenced Science Budget is secure for the future.
The Council will continue to look in detail at a range of budget areas, but are unable to give a more detailed analysis than this until the Treasury confirms the Research Council’s final financial position for 2007/2008.

Oh, and here I go again . . .

. . . because I finally bought a sandwich maker. It was £4.99 in Tesco! And I have wanted one for about 20 years! And I just had to put something in this blog about it/ Why? Because I was googling about for toasted sandwich recipes.

I have just had these four toasted sandwiches which were to die for. They were cheese and my home-made coriander chutney with the butter on the outside as they tell you to. And for once I made the best green salad I have ever made. All this is such an improvement on a tin of cold baked beans eaten out of the tin. But now I want someone to tell me of some other great recipes. And what do you do with the crusts? -- apart from give them to the birds. I guess make a gratin tomorrow.

Now what can I put in here for the intellectual content? Nothing but the fact that bad students are the biggest pain in the bum. Do they know that? They come under many categories, but there is an overall category that more or less covers them: lazy little turds.

I said goodbye, but . . .

. . . I just HAVE to put in this link to Jeanette Winterson's site which I sometimes look at. This is something so close to my heart (the values of this shitty government and the damage they are doing to our society) and of course she puts it better than I could:

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=448

Goodbye already

A nightmare this.

I have to say goodbye just as soon as I've got this blog going. You will see the reason if you scroll down the entries to Weekending.

All day and every day my mental energy is going into my blog. I didn't know it would be such heaven being a blogger. Better than writing a commonplace book (a thing I have been doing for decades and decades), but not that different.

However, I get paid to write academical books and articles, the damned stupid things. As if we haven't got enough books and articles. Can't we have a moratorium on new ones till we've read some of the old ones? The average academic article gets read by 5 people only.

Yet, our lumpen, ignorant government (yes, they govern us) awards university funding according to our "research output", and I can't let my colleagues in the department down in the ridiculous, asinine, excremental RAE (Research Assessment Exercise).

Goodbye, darling blog. I have to harden my heart to you until I have got that elusive "fourth item" in print for this moronic government. I have till the end of 2007.

Don't even ask what happens to the refusniks. They get flushed into the scummy sub-gutters of the university system. And even doing my lovely blogging wouldn't be fun from down there.

Next year in cyberspace. xxx

I don't get bullied. I am in a lovely department; but here is a link for those who don't know all this already:

http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/2007/01/high-stress-levels-in-colleges-and.html#links

Papon Dead and Buried

To hell with the fact that he has his precious Legion d’Honneur medal down in the grave with him.

I hope it gives him lots of comfort down there. Perhaps he can take it with him along with his ba soul into the land of the dead and show it about. He could try to impress some of these lively little boys with it:

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http://www.filmakers.com/indivs/Drancy.htm&h=192&w=269&sz=16&hl=en&start=10&tbnid=BsYlR2QOt3vz9M:&tbnh=81&tbnw=113&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddrancy%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DG

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They are waiting at Drancy, just north of Paris, to be deported to Auschwitz. I think perhaps I ought to visit Drancy next time I am in Paris. It's easy enough: on the RER B5. I have passed it enough times on my way to and from Charles de Gaulle Airport. There is a memorial there which incorporates a boxcar from the deportations. It says it is meant to carry 8 horses. But the French collaborationists put 100 people into it, though first stamping a Star of David on it.

I took the following from commentarymagazine.com, who I don't think will mind. Thank you David Pryce-Jones.

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Among the Collaborationists
David Pryce-Jones - 2.22.2007 - 9:50AM
Maurice Papon has just died at the age of ninety-six, but his name will always stand for France’s moral collapse in 1940, and that country’s inability—or reluctance—to redress matters afterwards. In his capacity as a ranking Vichy official, the documentation proves, he signed the deportation orders to Auschwitz for 1,690 Jews, 223 of whom were children, organizing sixteen trains for them, the last in June 1944 when German defeat was certain. It was also his idea to send the bill for the expense of the requisite cattle-trucks to the Jewish representative council, thus obliging the victims to pay for their journey to be murdered. One of his German superiors described him as a sincere collaborator, “co-operating correctly with the Feldkommandatur.”
Collaboration with Nazism was the political choice taken by Marshal Pétain after the fall of France; it was pre-war appeasement in the new context of military defeat. Pétain and his Vichy regime imagined that they were sparing France the sort of horrors inflicted on Poland, but in reality they were facilitating them. In the absence of enough German personnel trained in mass murder, the Nazi authorities had to rely on the French to do their work. The turning point was the accord signed in May 1942 between General Karl Oberg of the SS, and René Bousquet, general secretary of the French police. That accord placed the French gendarmerie at the service of the Nazi machinery of murder. One among many who could now obey orders zealously was Papon, and another was Jean Leguay, Bousquet’s representative.
At the end of the war, Bousquet was condemned to five years of “national indignity,” a somewhat unspecific term, then immediately granted reprieve and decorated for “resistance,” in this case an even less specific term. Bousquet then enjoyed a spectacular career as an industrialist, protected by President Mitterand for no very evident reason except that he too had a compromising Vichy past. Leguay also had a successful business career. Papon fared best of all. General de Gaulle, no less, protected him, appointing him prefect of police in Paris. In that capacity, he supervised a crack-down on Algerians with thousands of arrests, and the massacre of perhaps a hundred of them, their corpses simply thrown into the Seine. Papon showed himself as adept at murdering Muslims as Jews. Under President Giscard d’Estaing, he entered the cabinet as budget minister.
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Researching in the archives, Michel Slitinsky came across his own death warrant with Papon’s signature on it. Slitinsky’s father had been killed in Auschwitz, while he himself only just managed to escape arrest. In 1986, more than twenty years after the event, he brought Papon to justice. At his trial, Papon denounced the proceedings as “fake,” claimed to have helped the resistance, and dismissed the evidence as lies, speaking of “plots,” the usual fascist code for supposed Jewish world domination. Sentenced to ten years in prison for crimes against humanity, he fled defiantly to Switzerland, but was sent back and imprisoned. After he had served three years, the Chirac government had him released. The protection of such people by so many French presidents speaks volumes.
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Like Papon, Leguay was indicted for crimes against humanity (though he died before going to prison). When I was writing my book Paris in the Third Reich, in which I describe his role in deporting Jews, he used to seek me out in order to plead that he had not really done anything wrong, and in any case had no choice, and would I please understand his predicament. Like Papon again, but in his more oily way, he showed no trace of remorse. Nor did Bousquet, who became more and more arrogant with the passing of time even though he too was facing a trial for crimes against humanity. One day, someone named Christian Didier—always labelled as “unbalanced”—turned up at his house and shot him dead.
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The wish to hide complicity in mass murder may be humanly understandable, but it has rotted France’s national conscience and self-respect. Unwillingness to acknowledge complicity in Nazi crime explains the lack of conscience—the sheer bad faith—of the French stance in so many post-war issues.

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********************************************

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As a postscript to Pryce-Jones I would just like to add this from trial records:

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http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-032-03.html;

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and this expression of support for Maurice Papon from Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Front party and presidential candidate:

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"It seems to me that decorations which one earned, that one deserved, I do not see what could prevent you, especially when one died... It would be a gesture really small, really low that -- to prevent the family of Maurice Papon from paying last tribute to him";

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and this from lexpress.mu in Mauritania:

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With the Papon trial, France rediscovered a dark side of its own state apparatus – but also found that three-quarters of its Jews had been able to escape deportation because they were helped by their fellow citizens. Since January 18, a number of these have been reburied in the Pantheon in Paris, where the nation’s most illustrious dead are honored. A memorial plaque there reads: “... despite the weight of hatred and darkness that fell on France during the years of occupation, thousands of lights refused to go out.”

1

Thank Goodness for lexpress.mu, whoever Goodness is.

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And on it goes. .. this crazy world, full of good and bad.

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Aol Estates Management, 248 Uxbridge Road London, W12 7JA

These people are total bastards. Four months after I advertised and let my flat via Loot in London, they are cold calling me (three times so far) on the offchance that I might be wanting to let it again. The first time they did it I was on my way to a funeral. I might just go and blow up their toilet.

This is their damned number that keeps appearing on my mobile:
02087461110
Why do letting agencies always employ Ozzies?
And now can someone do anything clever to jam their phone lines?

Weekending

I did it! I finally got away for a weekend. Perhaps it was to the coldest house in Britain, but beside the most beautiful seascape in Britain, with pale green sea, white waves breaking, black rocks, pink sand and great black-backed gulls. And, as I snuggled to sleep in my nest of duvets, it came to me that I would, I would, I would finish that damned academical book that has been on my conscience for six years. This is what getting away does for the sapphire-stockinged soul.

The Boy in the Newsagent's

Stupid, garrulous, fat, spotty arsehole that he is, holds up the queue all day long garrulating to every customer that comes in (except for me), and says loudly so that the whole shop can hear: "Bring back Maggie Thatcher -- that's what I say".
He is all of 17, perhaps.
Doesn't he know that horrible, dirty, tatty little businesses like the one he works in were closing down at the rate of hundreds a week under Thatcher's regime?
Them and all the filth on their top shelves, too.

On the other hand . . . I think I am turning into a Neo-Con. That is because I am in love with the writings and fine mind of Theodore Dalrymple, who writes in the New Criterion, e.g.:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/dec04/bentley.htm#

The Only Thing . . .

. . . that's made me laugh in 2007:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6377855743675143177&q=label%3A%22numa+numa%22

Book Margins

I am still wading through the list of things I said I'd blog about before I get to what I want to blog about today. So here goes on Cambridge paperbacks with their narrow inside margins:

You would think that the kind of people who produce books would also read them sometimes, or even apply some of their brain cells to their job.

Notice that Cambridge UP paperbacks have an inside margin that is so narrow that it's right into the spine.

How bloody stupid and pathetic is that? It's narrower than the outside margin, and that's not saying much. Do they want us to flatten out their books so that the spine cracks? I can't get into your bloody books to actually read them you stupid CUP. Think about it.

Right, I've said it. Very soon I can have a moan about the boy in my paper shop, and then I'm really going to let rip on my students.

Oh, and also this Guido Fawkes that they're going on about on the radio tonight. I looked at his blog. Stupid old womany gossip. But that insults old women (like me). But can anyone tell me why having raves and stopping people sleeping is "freedom"? I'll go and have a rave under his kid's bedroom window.

Lie flat, books, will you?

I have thousands of books, because that's what blue stockings have. They can put men on the moon but they can't make paperbacks lie flat.

Worst book in the world is a paperback that cracks along the spine and out come the pages. Even Penguins did that in the 80s, but I think they've got a lot better.

Probably the best book in the world is a little hardback, like all my old Teach Yourself books or little navy OUP hardbacks from the last century.

I adore this picture of Virginia Woolf and her little brother playing cricket. Look at her eccentric feet . They are exactly like Maggie Smith's feet when she played The Lady in the Van. Virginia Woolf wrote great things about pens in her childhood diary. She was so fussy about her pens. I have about a hundred pens.

I found this in an old letter that I wrote to my child in 1998 (my child who is just like an eccentric Virginia Woolf and writes sad stories like 'Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond'). I apologise for the fact that I can't credit it. It's probably Hermione Lee, and if so, thank you:

. . . On Sunday, January 1907, just before her fifteenth birthday, Virginia Stephen, an angular, ungainly adolescent, picked up her favourite pen (and she was passionate about pens), the one with the thin sharp nib that bit into the paper as it crossed over it (but without leaving ink trails – a trait that was unforgivable in nibs). And she picked up her diary . .
.
. . . In 1899 we see her taking pleasure in the act of writing in and of itself, which is a necessary prerequisite if one is to become a mature writer. She loved to write for the sheer joy of passing pen across paper, and often described the effect of this nib, or that one, how this ink performed in comparison with another, whether or not her handwriting pleased her. She described the texture of paper and how she bound her pages together. If anything happened to one of her pens, she recorded it, and she speculated about the causes for its new (and bad) habit of leaving ink trails: usually someone (in most cases a servant) had been using it, or had dropped it. On 7 August 1899, for example, she describes how her joy in writing is lost when her pen does not perform as it should, but rather than describing herself as unable to perform the act of writing, she describes her pen as if it is, in fact, unwell. She developed very special relationships with her pens, with the tools of her trade, as so many professional writers do.

Reading material like this gives me such pleasure. My sad life!

From working through my list of things I said I'd blog about, I have now covered paperbacks that won't lie flat, but in truth that leads me on to tonight's real issue: how can I have a library? I fear that if I can ever afford even a very large wooden structure it will get damp, like every other hut, greenhouse, messuage, appurtenage, etc., in my garden. In the meantime most of my books are in storage near the motorway junction.

I do the lottery so that I can have a library built on one day. The lottery brings on a fit of anger so bad that my cells are fusing (only because of the boy in the newsagents), so I'll leave that till tomorrow and mark some essays.

As I write they are discussing, on Radio 4, the fact that universities have too many students and undervalued staff. My sentiments entirely.

Scratchy Labels

I said that this is what I'd blog about, so I'm doing it. I want to get it out of the way so that I can blog about more interesting things like the bad state of our universities, or public hangings in Iran. But I am anally retentive, I think, and so -- grimly -- have to see things through.

When I am on my deathbed is the satisfaction I have had in seeing things through going to be enough compensation for a wasted life?

Scratchy labels are just that: lovely, lovely labels at the back of my neck on my clothes, designer or otherwise (otherwise being Primark, Matalan and TKMax). And they drive me crazy and I live in amazement at all the people who just get on with it and probably don't even notice this.

I can't live with scratchy labels, so I cut them off. Over the years I have cut many a hole into the back of my clothes while cutting off labels in too much of a hurry. Nowadays I do use a stitch ripper and go very very carefully, talking to myself all the while: "Sapphire, you paid a lot of money for this and you know that you could so easily cut a hole in the back of it. Just please curb your rough nature and take this off stitch by stitch very slowly."

Then I have a garment with no label to scratch the back of my neck. This is also a garment that I can hardly sell on Ebay, especially if it is that rare thing, a designer garment. That is my sad decision. Comfort now rather than money later. But I have only sold two things on Ebay and have bought 180. I am a sad failure.

I am also a failure as an intellectual lady, and you will hear about that as you continue to read my blog. The kind of person who is a success as a lady academic is the kind of person who walks though a door, literally slamming it in others' faces. This is what I have observed, and will blog on in future, as well as on the little I know about the opposition in Iran.

http://www.maryam-rajavi.org/

What a wonderful displacement activity.
Thanks bloggers.


4 jobs I've had:
Envelope Filler covered in paper cuts.
Young unhappy waitress in a dress too big.
Dressmaker, as my grandmother was before me.
College Lecturer. Has its moments.

4 movies I'd watch over and over:
Apocalypse Now
E.T.
Wild at Heart
The Leopard

4 places I've lived, apart from where I live now:
Scotland – my heart’s in the highlands.


Ibiza – before there was one single concrete block there. Magic.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=399899&in_page_id=1879






Kent, the garden of England





Paris, France






Love it and hate it. Love the D'Orsay. Love the Ile St Louis.
Hate the tourists. Love the vegetable markets. Like the supermarkets and the rue Moutarde and the Brasserie Balzar.
Not too keen on some of those Parisienne shop owners and their sniffy 'Bonjour Madame'.

4 TV shows I love:
I haven’t got a TV, but I've occasionally seen AbFab – pure genius. When I am very old I'm going to be a TV addict and have the History Channel, etc.
Radio 4: The Archers / Dead Ringers / A Good Read

4 places I've been on holiday:
Greece: especially the theatre at Epidavros
www.math.upatras.gr/PhotoGallery/photo.php?photo=276&u=108%7C54%7C...

Cornwall: everyone’s favourite

Japan: I was so surprised.

South Africa:
www.aboutcapetown.com/

4 websites I visit daily:
ebay.co.uk – Bad addiction. Just like http://after-so-much-thinking.blogspot.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/Naff, I know. Someone tell me a better site.
http://uk.weather.com/weather/local
http://www.aldaily.com/ Art and Letters Daily. About an eighth of it is brill.

4 favourite foods:
This is sooooooooo hard. It would depend on the mood, the weather, whatever. I have to have a little stash of hidden chocolate somewhere, but I don’t have to have it every day. Just every other day. It is a crucial food somehow. What follows doesn’t mean I don’t like vegetables because I do. I just LOVE them, all of them, especially green ones. And need them, always did. Just think of rocket salad, roast parsnips, gazpacho. Oh well, here goes for today:

Oysters
Cold roast potatoes with salt.
Goose like they do it in Hungary.
Syllabub.

4 places I'd rather be right now:
Anywhere in the world with a lot of my family around me.
Sitting in her sitting room with my best friend, but she’s dead.
In a jacuzzi or warm sea.
At the opera with a nice man.

4 books I enjoy re-reading:
Homer, The Iliad. I just love it. I can read it on the beach in Greece. Funny, as I don’t like The Odyssy. I like the way the gods turn their faces to them in The Iliad.

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. Perfection, and my values entirely.

W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Whenever I read him I wonder why I ever read all the trash I do.

Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie. She's probably my favourite living writer.

4 CDs that never leave my rotation:
Scholl, Heroes – all Handel.
Haydn, Nelson Mass / Vivaldi Gloria on same album
Mauricio Pollini playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto
Abba, Greatest hits. Keeps me cheerful.

4 people I'm tagging:
Bella of http://slapoftheday.blogspot.com/
http://www.imaybeknittingaranchhouse.com/
http://www.jennydiski.typepad.com/
I have now lost the ability to tag people. Wish I wasn't so inept!
But there WILL BE MORE. I am just learning to be a blogger in 2007. Oh how I am loving it.

Tight Elastic, getting going

I thought tight elastic was important till I heard about Tony Blair's flying habits and their impact on global warming.

As I type this, in January 2007, just after midnight, a daddy-long-legs comes nosing around my desk; and I don't have the central heating on, and these insects belong to September. This means the planet is getting warmer.

My anger at tight elastic is that, from about the year 1980 onwards, they have sewn the elastic into waistbands instead of threading it in. This means that you can't adjust your elastic, either by taking it in or letting it out. It is not a bad thing to do, this taking in or letting out of elastic, not bad at all if the initial sewing had created a nice oblong of double elastic and you have the right size of safety pin handy and all the rest of it that you might have learnt at your mother's knee, if you had the right kind of mother.

But nowadays, with this extra security, you have to cut your waistband in several places. This leads to a jagged look. Indeed, in the knickers that I was wearing this morning, this led to jags that grew larger by the hour until the garment began to slide down my female hip that has been enlarged by brandy butter, turkey soup and Stilton sandwiches.

But one has to weigh this against the elastic of the earlier part of the last century which could leave you with your knickers coming down suddenly -- generally in the playground. Which would YOU chose? I would chose the old type of elastic but ensure that it was well sewn at all times.

As for flying. I have only just decided that I might as well go to Australia after all -- and then all this footprint stuff comes up. I can't be leaving 5 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. I think I will go to Australia by bike. And I think that Tony Blair and his family could easily go to Tuscany by train. That would be a decent compromise.

Wasn't it foul when he went to Cumbria for a wee holiday to show solidarity with the farmers struck by foot-and- mouth, and then hoofed it off to Tuscany just as soon as it appeared (to him, not to us) decent? He's never been back, even though Cherie must have friends in the North.

My two questions to Tony Blair:

(1) Why don't you and Cherie take the family back to Cumbria?

(2) What do you think of the public hangings conducted (with shouting) by our nation's indispensible ally, Saudi Arabia?

Blogger's Manifesto

My first ever blog. This is what I am going to blog about as the nights get lighter:

Tight elastic

Scratchy labels

Books that won't lie flat

Paperbacks that fall apart

Cambridge paperbacks with their narrow inside

margin

Muzak in the swimming pool