Timorous Beastie

Tosser

2012-01-13T16:17:00.001Z

My neighbour is not only a noisy twat who looks like Rick Astley; he's also a tosser. When he eats a piece of fruit (which is often if the state of the undergrowth is anything to go by), rather than putting the peel in the bin like any normal human being, he likes to catapult it from his third floor window into the garden.

I complained about him doing this, but he was undeterred and only resolved to improve his aim. He now throws a bit further and usually gets his missiles over the fence to the land belonging to Network Rail and, thus, out of sight. But the occasional tangerine peel or banana skin ends up dangling in the branches, giving the game away.

Today, as I stood at the window watching a tiny wren, a banana skin sailed in a graceful arc above me, slapped into a tree trunk and fell to the ground. In the communal garden.

Because he is a noisy twat who looks like Rick Astley, I then heard him opening and shutting his front door and running down the stairs. Thump thump thump. A moment later, he strolled casually into the garden and tossed the offending banana skin over the fence before ascending once more to his flat in the manner of a large elephant.

Why would anyone prefer to throw fruit from the window, then have to run up and down three flights of stairs to move it rather than just putting it in the bin in his flat in the first place? Tosser.

Aliens ate my landlord

2012-01-08T12:09:00.003Z

On New Year's Eve, while watching fireworks from the living room window, Timorous Beast spotted alien spacecraft. There was just the one at first, drifting slowly across the sky. It was disc-shaped and glowed reddish orange.

"It's the perfect night for them to come - everyone's looking at the fireworks."

"Well, that also means everyone's staring at the sky, doesn't it?"

Beast ignores me. "There's another one. Two of them!"

And so there were, moving silently, steadily past the whizzing and banging, as though watching. We gazed in awe as they rose and disappeared into the darkness.

I squinted at the horizon. "You know what I think they are?"

"They're bloody aliens. Don't spoil it."

"You know those Chinese lantern things? People could be setting them off up at the park, and then they're floating this way on the wind"

"Mmmm, the park is up there, isn't it?"

A few days later, I'm talking to my landlord. "Good Christmas?" she asks.

"Yeah, quiet. At New Year we just stayed in and watched the fireworks from the window. We saw what we thought were aliens, but they turned out to be those Chi-"

"Chinese lanterns? Yeah, we set some of them off, from just up there." She points towards the park.

Beast restless

2012-01-05T17:38:00.001Z

Guess which side of the bed Timorous Beast slept on?

Incantation

2012-01-01T13:24:00.001Z

One of the first things I learned to say in Czech was "Stop getting on and off; The doors are about to close." I could recite it perfectly before I knew what it meant because I heard it every day on the Prague metro. The rhotic accent was sexy and the words all the more beautiful for their meaninglessness to me.

These days, the old soviet-built carriages have been replaced by shiny, whining German ones, the announcer is as often as not a man, and, in a nod to market forces, they have added the word "Please". You can listen here, but the quality is rather poor.

Nowadays, my incantation of choice is the shipping forecast, which incites me to dream of the grey seas undulating in the darkness: Rockall, Malin, Dogger, Finisterre.

Radio four was an unknown quantity when I was a child. Being working class and Scottish, I got my hypnosis from the football results: Cowdenbeath three, Heart of Midlothian two; Raith Rovers one, Queen of the South one.

Merry bloody christmas

2011-12-25T12:50:00.005Z

Social conditioning

2011-12-23T12:49:00.003Z

I'm off to Scotland to conduct some empirical research into social conditioning. My hypotheses are as follows:

1. Conditioned by a lifetime of measuring her self worth in terms of how well she cooks and cleans for her family, my mother will, given any opportunity, offer to prepare the entire contents of her fridge for me. Such offers will be repeated approximately every 10 minutes regardless of how often I say, "No thanks, mum, I'm really not hungry."

2. Conditioned by years of me living in cheese-free zones, my mother will, given any opportunity, thrust blue cheese upon me despite the fact that I now live in England, home to many fine varieties of blue cheese.

3. Conditioned by 15 years of living alone and having no friends, my mother will tell me the same stories she has told me every single time I've seen her, with minor embellishments added each time for dramatic effect. She shall not be deterred by feedback along the lines of, "Yes, mum, you told me."

4. Conditioned by a single comment 28 years ago, my mother will, given any opportunity, buy Thornton's special toffee for me in the unshakeable belief that I consider it a rare treat.

5. Conditioned by 25 years of not living with my mother, I will be clenching my fists in exasperation within 48 hours of entering her company. I will then feel guilty for being such a selfish, snobbish brat and will eat large quantities of blue cheese, toffee and other disgusting items from my mother's fridge before sinking into a quiescence of self-loathing.

For Rog

2011-12-18T21:18:00.001Z

When I lived in Glasgow, I used to see Gregor Fisher in the posh fishmongers on the corner. He was usually wearing soft leather moccasins and a nice chunky Aran jumper (and trousers too, I hasten to add). Rab C. Nesbit was never the same after that.

I blame multiculturalism

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000Z

In an attempt to get festive, I went to Hovisville University's annual Christmas carol service.

As well as the usual suspects sung in the usual fashion, we were treated to the spectacle of six Chinese girls dressed in identical red costumes lining up behind each other on stage, waving their arms above their heads and wailing along to what can only be described as the Mandarin version of Richard Clayderman. And when I say girls, I mean postgraduate students.

There were readings in Portugese, songs in Czech and, best of all, an African gospel choir accompanied by a drummer and guitarist who drifted off into an extended prog-rock odyssey during verse two.

At the end, lebkuchen were served.

Humbug

2011-12-11T17:07:00.001Z

I'd like to write something concise and witty here to compensate for my rubbish recent blogging, but I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.

I suspect it was sucked into the vortex of academia. It's been ten weeks since I finished my annual bout of full-time work, and in that time I've singularly failed to get a stitch of PhD work done. Instead, I've done assignment marking for professors in the department, planned and taught seminars, done gazillions of data coding for one of the lecturers, and half-written an article for publication. Some of these things bring in the bacon and some of them are good for my career, but none of them contribute directly to the 90,000 words of wisdom I'm supposed to be writing. Despite always being busy, I don't seem to have made any actual progress. It's all rather disheartening.

On top of this, Timorous Beast's father has died.

How to get into the Christmas spirit and out of this pestilent congregation of vapours?

For Ken, who went fairly gently

2011-12-04T20:30:00.000Z

How to cheer the fuck up

2011-11-18T19:21:00.001Z

It hadn't been the happiest of days and I needed cheering up. I'd spent the morning in the seventh circle of hell with the stony metal bollock and the afternoon in the torturous process of writing the literature review for an article I'm working on.

Writing a literature review is torturous for me because I usually re-shape my thinking on major concepts at least five times while I'm doing it. Each epiphany necessitates changing the order of paragraphs and re-writing sections to shift the emphasis. Often it involves going back to the source materials I'm using, re-reading and realising I'd completely misrepresented the author's findings. I then re-write large sections of my draft and spend hours agonising over it only to discover by the end that I've said much the same thing I had said in the first place only in a less articulate way.

Just as I finished, an email pinged into my inbox. It was Che with a long but chirpy message updating me on her comings and goings and Internet dating criteria. The news included the following:

New band's first performance - went great. Me singing Bjork - went great. Met potential drummer - great. Very drunk but didn't chunder on tram home - great.

I love Che.

The stony metal bollock

2011-11-16T15:42:00.000Z

My laptop has reached the end of its tether, so I ordered a new desktop. It arrived, large and shiny. Despite Timorous Beast's reassurances that transferring the data from the ailing laptop to the shiny desktop would be easy, it wasn't. Data transfer failed and so a new cable had to be ordered. In the 5 days that took to arrive, the desktop sat taking up space on my desk and doing nothing. "It's as useful as a big shiny stone" I told Timorous Beast.

The new cable duly arrived, but didn't solve the problem, and so an appointment was secured with a service bod over the phone. The appointment was not for a further two days, and so in the meantime the desktop, with all its shiny stony qualities, got in the way and pissed me off.

On the day of the appointment, Timorous Beast sent me an email, "Good luck with the stoney metal bollock."

After a hour spent scuttling between the phone, the laptop and the desktop, trying to understand the instructions of an IT guy in Belfast who had all the charm and communication skills of ... well, an IT guy, the thing still doesn't work. They're sending me a new installation disk. That should take another 4 or 5 days to arrive and I won't know what to do with it when it does, so I'll have to make another appointment with another IT guy and go through the whole performance again. I'm in the seventh circle of hell and it cost me nearly 800 quid to get here.

Fucking stony metal bollock.

Remember remember

2011-11-05T11:10:00.001Z

What could be finer than a 400 year old celebration of sectarianism in which the general public is invited to play with high-powered explosives and burn effigies of Catholics?

In this spirit, I'm going to drink mulled wine and watch the fireworks from my lovely colleague's window. At least one Catholic will be in attendance, but she's Polish, so we might spare her.

Word of the week

2011-10-28T20:29:00.040+01:00

I came across the same lovely new word three times in as many days. What are the odds? Will Self used it in an article about social mobility and then I spotted it in Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes and then I saw it again on YouTube (but this version by Grangemouth's finest is much better).

Word of the week is empyrean.

I don't know how I managed to get to this age and level of education without encountering this word, but now I plan to make up for lost time by weaving it into conversations and possibly even blog posts.

Timorous Beast has a bad day

2011-10-25T22:58:00.000+01:00

First, he visited Wells Cathedral. Having driven some distance to see it, he was less than impressed. "This is nothing special at all - a bit disappointing," he decided.

It wasn't until he was leaving, head bowed in dismay, that he spotted the real Wells Cathedral just across the road from the parish church he'd been in.

Later that day, he spotted this and, being a hopeless sucker for toilet humour, sent me a photo of it. The only problem was that he pressed the wrong button and sent it the woman from whom he wants a job at York University instead.

My poor nephew

2011-10-23T22:57:00.000+01:00

My nephew has had his face rearranged. Not via a facelift, nor a punch in the chops from this father, but via orthognathic surgery. This means that he had his upper jaw broken into three pieces and detached from his skull, then re-shaped and re-attached with the aid of titanium plates and a bone graft from his hip. The operation took 6 hours.

His jaws are now held immobile by a set of elastic bands and wire hooks and he is subsisting on a diet of custard and soup (not at the same time), half of which escapes down his chin since he has no sensation in the lower half of his face.

I can only speculate as to how I would have coped had I been handed such a fate at the age of 19. Even without such indignities, I had a chip on my shoulder, but my nephew's made of stronger stuff. Beneath his pasty, skinny exterior lurks a brave lad.

Pete

2011-10-15T19:50:00.003+01:00

The sun shone on Hovisville for the first time in around six weeks, so I headed for the park to get some some long overdue vitamin D.

I had just settled on a bench and opened my book when a bloke with a bottle in one hand and a roll-up in the other sat down beside me. I dislike being disturbed when I'm studying. Upon seeing someone, head bowed, with an open book in their lap, I would assume they were busy rather than, say, looking for conversation with a stranger, but perhaps that's just me.

I frowned at his opening gambit of (yes, you knew it would be) "What are you reading?" not least because I was reading "Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading", which is tricky to think of a rejoinder for.

Despite the unpromising start, Pete turned out to be an interesting guy. He was living in the park and slowly but surely drinking his way through Hovisville's supply of Frosty Jack. He was the same age as me and was a violinist cum chef from Belfast whose life had taken a turn for the worse. "I live in the park, but I've got a brain, you know what I mean?" he apologised. We talked about books, the troubles in Northern Ireland, nationalism, Stephen Fry, languages, religion and the problems of being homeless.

"All you need's a door to close behind you, you know?" he said, his eyes anxiously searching over my shoulder to where he'd left his stuff. "If I don't have to keep an eye on my stuff all the time, it helps me to free my mind a bit."

He told me about a trip he took to a small village in rural Lancashire with a born-again Christian who promised him fish, chips and salvation: "I thought there might be some nice people there and I really needed something to lift me up." After some praying and chanting, people spoke in tongues and fell writhing to the floor. "I'm not complaining or nothing" said Pete, "but it felt a bit hocus pocus."

Pete was forgiving of the people who'd tried to take advantage of him, full of sorrow but not full of self-pity. He was intelligent and self-deprecating. By the time I left him there, the shadows were long and the bottle of Frosty Jack's empty. He shook my hand, his expression bereft, and said "You've made my day, you have."

I walked home slowly, wishing I'd told him how much I respected him.

Stevens

2011-10-12T21:11:00.000+01:00

I went to visit Timorous Beast, who is lording it up teaching on a residential course set in a 16th Century country house with flowery carpets. He gets as much free wine as he wants with dinner, and port is passed to the left.

This is not the house in question, but it's similar. This one is Dyrham Park and now that he's a mincing great toff, Timorous Beast made me pay £10.50 to visit it.

It was rather nice and had the added virtue of being home to Mr Stevens the butler in film adaptation of The Remains of the Day.

Failure

2011-10-10T20:40:00.000+01:00

First, it was scones. They smelled good and looked right, but were rock hard.

Next, it was gingerbread buns using Aunt Anne's recipe. Aunt Anne's gingerbread is moist, dark and spicy with a sticky, glossy top. It's a simple recipe and I followed it exactly, yet my gingerbread was pale brown, dense and heavy. I threw away the first batch and started again. The second lot were the same.

What am I doing wrong? Why do all things soft and floury turn leaden in my hands?

Why do it to vinyl but not to carpet?

2011-09-28T18:29:00.000+01:00

Forfar four, Fife five

2011-09-25T18:27:00.000+01:00

In an attempt to curb my insomnia, I decided to buy a radio for the bedroom so the mellifluous sounds of Radio Middle Class could ease me gently off to sleep. I bought this little beauty on ebay. Unfortunately, I can't pick up Radio Middle Class on it. The clearest signals I get are from BBC Radio Wales or the Scottish football results.

So many cakes, so little time

2011-09-18T11:51:00.000+01:00

The trouble with not blogging for ages is that one feels the pressure to write something interesting and witty upon one's return, as if to justify the absence. But the truth is that I've only been working and have been too tired and boring to blog.

The weather up here in Hovisville has been terrible, so I bit the bullet and accompanied 200 of our students on a trip to York, where at least the sun shone for a few hours. I met up with Timorous Beast, who's just finished some work at York University, and we wandered the cobbly dobbly streets lusting after cakes. York has more than its fair share of tasty cake shops.

Now I'm back in Hovisville, with nothing but Greggs to satisfy me.

Never trust a sociologist

2011-09-03T18:33:00.000+01:00

Oops. I'm shocked to discover that so long has passed since I posted anything. Sorry about that - I must be very busy and important.

During the summer, I'm based in an office that is not in our usual building. The nearest kitchen is upstairs in the sociology department. I went up there to wash my coffee cup. Signs on the cupboard doors warned people not to use too many paper towels or leave items on the counter. I was fastidious: washed my cup swiftly and left. The next day I returned. They'd put a sticker on the washing up liquid saying "For sociology use only".

Monthly period

2011-08-18T20:00:00.000+01:00

Our boss gathered us round in the office today and asked if we wouldn't mind receiving our bursaries quarterly instead of monthly because it would be easier for the finance department to process.

I'm the first to admit that my ignorance of what goes on in finance departments is pretty much complete, but it came as something of a surprise to me that paying people on a monthly basis could be so strange and tricky, particularly given that the other 3000 employees of the university (and, I suspect, the vast majority of employees everywhere in the developed world) are paid monthly.

Tooty frooty

2011-08-16T23:43:00.002+01:00

Do three fig rolls count as one portion of fruit?

Another one bites the dust

2011-08-10T20:24:00.000+01:00

My neighbour broke her hoover trying to hoover up water. Believe it or not, she's a PhD student, which just goes to show that intelligence may not be linked to academic achievement after all.

I lent her mine, but it must have seen her coming, for it refused to work and now appears to have bitten the dust. I did buy it second-hand for a fiver.

Before ordering a new one, I was warned off VAX machines and although I secretly want a Dyson, my budget didn't stretch that far, so I've ordered a Russell Hobbs. Now you may be thinking that this simply provides further evidence that PhD students are thickwits, but it was reduced from a hundred and sixty quid to seventy two quid. An offer I couldn't refuse.

Watch this space for sorrowful tales of pushing dirt around the carpets.

Paws for thought

2011-08-06T20:19:00.001+01:00

The British ambassador to Norway, Jane Owen, clearly has a way with words. Following an incident in which some teenagers woke up to find a polar bear chewing on their friend's head, she visited the survivors in hospital and announced to the press that they were (and I quote) "all bearing up well".

Hame-ish

2011-08-01T20:03:00.002+01:00

I'm a wee bit crabbit because I'm awa' up tae ma mingin' hame toon, which is full of eejits that talk like this. Whit's mair, it'll probably be dreich and I might even get drookit.

Foxed

2011-07-31T11:31:00.000+01:00

I exited the flat the other day and saw a bunny, nibbling furiously on the grassy knoll opposite. While rabbits are hardly rare beasties, I do still get excited at the sight of pretty much any wild animal in its natural environment. To be honest, even the sight of a dog heading my way on the footpath gets me going. I'm easily pleased.

I've spotted quite a few small furries since moving to Hovisville - Che and I saw a stoat recently. But what I've really been wanting is to see fox or, say, a badger. I thought I had a chance with the fox since I often cycle through fields and woods early in the morning, but so far nothing.

Timorous Beast is down in Kent. He looked out of his bedroom window this morning to see fox cubs frolicking on the lawn. Lucky bastard.

A day in the life

2011-07-25T20:34:00.001+01:00

Inspired by Caroline, No, I bring you the story of a typical Timorous Beastie day, complete with full colour photos. In the interests of honesty, and at her suggestion, I leave no banal stone unturned.

Get ready. This is where it gets gripping. The day began with my usual breakfast of champions.

After which I went here,

and spent absolutely ages going up and down the aisles comparing the country of origin, ingredients and price per 100 grammes of every product in the shop. After several hours, I managed to buy a modest selection of food items and pootled off home again on the dream machine, being careful to ensure that my broad beans did not escape on the way.

Once home, I got down to work. In this case, reading journal articles, taking notes and reorganising my methodology chapter.

But a girl can only take so much of that, so as evening fell, I moved all of this from its usual position on the sofa to the alternative storage solution that is the living room floor.

With that done, I reclined my lazy body here:

Oh and by the way, I was wearing these. Nothing as trendy as green jeans and red sandals for me.

I hasten to add that my uggs are my slippers. I don't go out in them, and I don't wear my shoes indoors. After years of living in the Czech Republic and then Japan, the wearing of shoes indoors seems barbaric to me. I wear the slippers year round, along with an average of three pairs of socks. Again, something to do with years of living in warmer countries. From this warm and happy perch on the sofa, I got one of my five-a-day by eating these:

The yellowy stuff that looks like cat sick is actually honey with ginger, purchased for me at Hovisville farmer's market by the incomparable Che. It's a winning combination. There's Greek yogurt lurking under there too. Of course, I didn't eat it in that state - I mushed it all into a horrible pink mess first.

And that, dear reader, is pretty much that. Exciting, huh?

Children and dogs

2011-07-21T22:05:00.000+01:00

Apropos of nothing, here's a charming old photo of me, my sister and our neighbours circa 1973.

And here's another charming old photo that reminds me of Timorous Beast. I'm missing him because he's dan saf working. He used to pull my dogs' ears like this when we lived in Prague. And my dogs would make this expression.

(Photos courtesy of Jane and the Kennel Club Art Gallery.)

Put shit in, get shit out

2011-07-18T22:37:00.002+01:00

A cider bottle has been found in the garden. Condoms have been found down the back of the sofa. Eldest Nephew denies everything even though he was the only one home that weekend.

"He's never here and he treats the place like a hotel" my sister complains. She seems unaware that she's repeating what parents have been saying for generations. Our parents said the same about us. I suggest that while it might not be right, it's probably common.

"I don't think we were like that." she retorts.

I can't resist it. I reply, "Well firstly, we were girls and secondly, we didn't have Paul for a father."

Paul is my sister's husband: the greatest arsehole known to man. Paul drinks heavily, threatens the nephews, pushes my sister around, shouts and swears at them, tells Eldest Nephew he's ugly, he's stupid, and he's gay. Less than a month ago, Eldest Nephew had to jump out of a first floor window and spend the night at his friend's to escape from Paul.

God's own country

2011-07-10T22:53:00.002+01:00

We spent Saturday reading and pottering in the dappled sunshine of Beastly Mum's garden in York. I love Beastly Mum's garden because, where my mum's garden is a scrubby patch of grass and some spindly rose bushes, Beastly Mum's is filled with trees, shrubs and many-hued flowers that attract a veritable eco-system of bees, birds and butterflies. All afternoon, the sound of music and cheering drifted across the city from the racecourse and then, as dusk and its attendant silence fell, bats flitted back and forth, enchanting me with their magical dancing.

On Sunday, the house was filled with wriggling jack russells who would scrape our legs with their long little claws, roll and snarl in hairy joy, and breathe their hot, fishy breath into our faces.

I caught the slow train home. It was an old bone-shaker of a thing that eschewed all urban areas, instead rattling gently through golden fields, past churchyards, hedgerows and finally the glittering sea. I alighted at Hovisville, smiling sentimentally to myself and leaving a small festival of dog hairs on the seat.

When is everyone not everyone?

2011-07-07T17:30:00.000+01:00

Again, a car is waiting on the cycle stop box at the lights. I lean over to the driver to remind him, "This stop box is for bicycles."

"The road's for everyone." he replies.

"Yes, I know that. What I'm saying is that this particular part of it, the pink box with the bicycle painted on it, is for bikes. Cars should stop at that line back there."

His response? "I pay road tax and you don't."

I wonder if, in his world, the payment of road tax allows one to ignore all road markings?

Fox rocks

2011-06-30T15:55:00.001+01:00

Timorous Beast and I went to see the Fleet Foxes. The Fleet Foxes sing a lot about fruit, and play a range of interesting instruments. On this particular occasion these included what appeared, at least from our perspective at the back of the theatre, to be a box of puppies and a large vole.

Crossing the Rubicon (and then sinking your boat)

2011-06-25T14:57:00.000+01:00

I usually go out of my way to be nice to people in admin positions because their help can be invaluable and their wrath can ruin your day, if not your career. But after last year's debacle, Colleague X knows I'm angry with her.

We're now gearing up for this year's course and Colleague X is keen to get me back on her side. She's tried joking and smiling and asking if I need anything. Now she's resorting to the "create a common enemy" tactic. While I too am unimpressed with our boss's leadership, Colleague X's maneuvering only serves to undermine her own chances of finding redemption.

Antler man

2011-06-20T19:33:00.000+01:00

Shortly before he left Japan, Timorous Beast visited Nara and was tickled enough by this bizarre item to buy it for me. It came in a plastic egg rather like a Kinder Surprise.

You may be wondering why. Not so much why he bought it, but just why. The answer may lie in the fact that Nara is famous for its temples and its sika deer, which wander the grounds of the temples munching their way through every shrub they can get their chops round.

What the designer of this mascot presumably did not know and what, come to think of it, Timorous Beast must have forgotten in the 7 years since he left the Czech Republic is that, in Czech, "paroháč" describes a man forced to wear antlers as a symbol of his wife's infidelity.

Love at first sight

2011-06-17T20:25:00.015+01:00

Whenever Timorous Beast visits his sister, Poppy, one of the retinue of jack russells, likes to stand on his lap/chest/shoulder and stare into his eyes at point blank range.

What the Bohemians really get up to

2011-06-14T21:10:00.001+01:00

The first time I met him, he was wearing snakeskin cowboy boots, which for a Czech in 1995, marked him out right away as unusual.

One freezing November day, he took me down to South Bohemia in the Trabant. The visit was ostensibly to see his father, but was more about picking up some grass. I imagined his stash secreted within a small corner of his childhood wardrobe.

The house was an ancient village house with an earthen floor and thick walls. The garden was wild and overgrown.

"Come upstairs" he called from a rickety wooden ladder. The attic was around a hundred square meters, large enough to stand up in, and thickly beamed. Every beam was strung with huge clumps of cannabis plants hanging up to dry. It was like looking at an upside down forest.

The pox

2011-06-12T20:24:00.001+01:00

"Did you have chickenpox as a child?"

"I don't know. It's a long time since I've been a child."

Apparently when children recover from chickenpox, the virus doesn't go away but lurks in their spinal column waiting for their immune system to weaken. Then it travels to the nerve endings and causes a nasty rash.

I was surprised to discover that I'd been harbouring something unspeakable within my spine all these years, and I don't like the sound of it either. Shingles: sounds like something brown and dangly.

Critical reading

2011-06-06T17:05:00.001+01:00

"I highly recommend this book" announces the lecturer, holding up her copy before the class. "It's one of the best books of its type. Generative and very well written."

I look down at my photocopy of the first chapter, which I dutifully read in preparation for the class. I've underlined several sections and, in the margin, written the words "Bullshit", "Indulgent, middle-class crap" and "WTF?"

It's going to be a long day.

Through the keyhole

2011-05-30T20:16:00.001+01:00

If you're anything like me, you'll love a good nosy at other people's living rooms, so I hereby provide the two people who read this blog and have not actually been inside my living room with a peek through the keyhole.

I love my flat. It's always warm and cosy, there's beautiful greenery right outside the window, and although it faces north, at a certain point on summer days, the early evening sun creeps in and illuminates both it and me with a golden, happy glow.

The golden, happy glow is nothing to do with the glass of wine on the desk. Honest.

Why I'm not a Christian

2011-05-28T22:29:00.000+01:00

"She looked ghastly" my mother said, "and it's not as if she hasn't had enough bad luck in her life."

My mother recounted the troubles of her neighbour, Pat. Pat was a lovely woman, who always used to smile and chat to us kids. Her daughter was in my class at school.

Her eldest son was in my sister's class, but only for a short time, for at the age of five he was killed by a car at the top of our street.

Some years later, Pat's husband developed multiple sclerosis. He gradually lost mobility, could not work and became confined to a wheelchair. He's still alive but needs help feeding and bathing himself.

Then Pat was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her hair fell out, her weight plummeted and she felt sick for months, but she pulled through and enjoyed four years of good health, during which she cared for her house-bound, terminally ill husband. At her final check up, the doctors told Pat she had bone cancer.

As my mother related this to me, I pondered the terrible time Pat had had and the fact that it was even worse than my mother imagined.

Many years ago, when I still lived in Scotland, I did voluntary work, counselling women who'd been raped or sexually abused. One night, a woman called and told me about the prolonged sexual abuse she and her sisters had suffered at the hands of their father. It had happened a long time ago, but had all just come out in the wash because the father had just died. I recognised her voice. It was Pat.

Now, nobody said life was going to be fair, but that just doesn't seem right, does it?

Heaven is a place called Cartmel

2011-05-23T21:37:00.000+01:00

Thus it was on a Wednesday afternoon that we took the Jag, or rather the Jag took us, to Cartmel, a delightful little village in the south of the Lake District.

It's a quiet place, with a Norman priory, a twelfth century gatehouse and a shop selling every variety of sticky toffee pudding you could ever hope to taste. That would have been enough to attract me, but it's also home to Ray Winston's sputum, a second-hand book shop and Unsworth's Yard.

The latter is a little courtyard containing a mouthwatering cheese shop, a bakery that serves up a dizzying array of freshly-baked bread and pastries each day, and a wine shop with a knowledgeable, friendly owner and not an Echo Falls in sight.

Armed with a bottle of Kiwi pinot noir, a wrinkly orange cheese and loaf hot from the oven, we set off for a picnic by some bronze age ceremonial rocks.

There is nothing more an unexpected trip to the countryside could offer.

The car

2011-05-21T14:56:00.002+01:00

Timorous Beast bought a car. I know nothing of cars, but I am cognizant of Timorous Beast's attitude towards opening his wallet, so was rather surprised when he turned up not in a Skoda or a Ka, but in a racing green Jaguar.

The process of purchasing the car was not entirely trouble-free, involving, as it did, getting locked in the back of an Audi in Keighley, breaking down twice in two days, and then leaving his trousers in Windermere.

But all's well that ends well. Now he can legitimately say, "Let's get the jag fixed up. Spend the weekend in the country," which is more or less what he did, except the jag did not need fixing and since we are both feckless layabouts without a job between us, we went on a Wednesday.

How to make a lasting impact

2011-05-14T10:55:00.000+01:00

Seventeen years ago, I went for a job interview with a certain HR manager. I was having a bad hair day, so wore a beret. I didn't think this was a particularly outrageous decision. It was the nineties after all, and I was dressed very conservatively by my standards at the time.

HR manager was a pleasant chap. I got the job and ended up working for the company for seven years.

Last week, Timorous Beast had an interview with the same HR manager. My name came up. HR manager said, "Ah, Timorous Beastie! How is she? She wore a hat to her interview, you know."

Dr Fruitloop

2011-05-11T10:26:00.000+01:00

We were joined for the pub quiz by Dr Fruitloop, a research associate in our department.

Question: What were the top answers given by the British public when asked to name something people no longer believe in?

Our answer: God, Santa, fairies, etc.

Dr Fruitloop's answer: Nick Clegg, tranformational-generative grammar.

Never take sweets from strangers

2011-05-06T21:13:00.000+01:00

I was sitting in the park, studying in the sunshine when an older couple sat on the bench next to mine and asked about one of the buildings. We got chatting. They were in town for the day while their daughter had an interview at the university. I directed them to the park's cafe and settled back down to my book.

A little later, before heading off to pick up their daughter, they returned and presented me with a packet of wine gums.

I guess they thought I was an abandoned child rather than a skinny forty-one year old.

May the 4th be with you

2011-05-04T01:46:00.002+01:00

On arses

2011-05-01T17:36:00.000+01:00

Timorous Beast has flown half way around the world, leaving a trail of blocked toilets in his wake. He blocked the one in Tokyo before he left, and then repeated the experience in Hong Kong. His mother's toilet overflowed within days of his arrival, and now mine is in need of a good plunger. It's the jet lag, apparently.

His poos may be like breeze blocks, but his heart is soft. He's been talking about how nice the royal wedding was. I suspect what he really means is how nice Pippa Middleton's arse was in that dress.

The sweet potato man

2011-04-17T18:28:00.000+01:00

The first time I heard it I didn't know what it was. I was tidying up my classroom in central Tokyo at the end of the day. Darkness was falling, and the the lights were on in the high-rise offices surrounding the university. I opened the window to air the room and, along with the clank and hum of the city, in drifted the eerie, plaintive song. It seemed to come from far away - from an unseen alley or from another age. It didn't fit with the skyscrapers and neon. I stood, alone in the darkness, listening in wonder.

A quick rendition the next morning in the office revealed that it was not the child catcher but the sweet potato man. In the time I lived in Tokyo, I caught a glimpse of him now and again, driving slowly around back streets in his tiny van, a brazier full of hot sweet potatoes glowing in the back. The potatoes smelled of cinders. But more often, I would only hear him, faintly, always at dusk.

I recorded this one from our balcony in Tokyo. Extra haunting beauty courtesy of the birds.

Cold and alone

2011-04-14T18:14:00.000+01:00

Timorous Beast is finally leaving the Land of the Rising Becquerel Count and returning to Blighty's shores. This entails much selling and giving away of stuff, since it would cost an arm and a leg to ship it.

With a couple of days to go, he is devoid of home comforts. The sofa, the bed, the curtains, the washing machine, the microwave and the toaster have all gone. Even the heater has gone.

"Aren't you cold at night?" I asked.

And poor Beast replied, "I had the iron on for a while earlier. That warmed the place up a bit".

A chance to reveal the depths of my ignorance

2011-04-12T11:04:00.000+01:00

This PhD malarky is getting scary. I thought I was just pootling along fulfilling my role as ignorant novice, but this week I've had the creeping feeling that people expect me to know something. First, an established academic asked me to recommend studies carried out in a particular area. Then a publisher offered me a hundred quid to answer some questions. Gah!

Even more unobservant

2011-04-08T18:23:00.001+01:00

I had intended to tell you about my pissy leg, but then seismic forces in the pacific got in the way, so here it is at last.

I'd gone to the pub quiz and sat with three others at a table. It was a Tuesday night. The pub was quiet. No one had to brush past our table. No drinks were spilled. No one in our party was drunk. No animals were loose in the pub. I went to the toilet once during the evening and peed in the normal fashion. Nothing untoward happened in there.

As I walked home, it was raining lightly, "spitting" as my mother would say. I walked briskly, without taking any detours through undergrowth or swamps. By the time I got home, the rain had stopped and my jacket was only a little damp. I didn't need to dry my hair or change my clothes.

Around an hour later, upon pulling at the ankles of my jeans as I got undressed, I noticed that one ankle was pretty wet. "That's odd. I didn't think it was that wet outside", I mused, but thought no more of it and tumbled happily into bed.

In the morning, I picked up my jeans from the bedroom floor (yes, I am that kind of slovenly trollop) and noticed that the ankle was still very wet. I was reminded of last night's mystery. I felt the other ankle - completely dry.

In the way that one does when one finds mysterious wetness, I sniffed it. And you know what's coming, dear reader. Piss. The ankle of my jeans smelled of piss.

Something or someone had pissed on me without me noticing.

Unobservant

2011-04-06T18:22:00.000+01:00

I've been living in my flat for a year and a half. I've just noticed that there's a heater in the bathroom.

Dirty linen

2011-03-30T18:19:00.000+01:00

While idling the afternoon away lusting after loft apartments in Manhattan, I came across a blog post about bed linen. "How often do you change your sheets?" was the question.

With horror, I read some thirty six comments by readers who all confessed to washing their bed linen once a week or more. I guess the readership of Apartment Therapy is made up mainly of Americans, whom I've long suspected of an unhealthy interest in hygiene, but that seems excessive. Or maybe I'm just a filthy grub. I change my sheets about once a month. It's not hot, so I'm not sweating in there and given that Timorous Beast is currently living 6,000 miles away, there's not a lot going on to make my sheets er... dirty.

A few weeks later and Timorous Beast and I are talking about packing, sending and selling stuff in preparation for his move to the UK. He plans to send the duvet cover to me. I told him about my grubby ways and his response was, "I haven't washed mine for about a year." Then he laughed and added "No, I'm joking. Rob visited in October, so I changed it then."

May the source be with you

2011-03-26T18:05:00.000Z

From joyous elation back to the drawing board in approximately 90 seconds. While working on PhD stuff, I hit upon a brilliant means of incorporating a reference to Star Wars into the title of my thesis. It was so clever and so perfectly fitting, people would have been congratulating me on it for decades to come. Alas, a Google search revealed that some bastard already used it in 1999. Harrumph.

On the edge

2011-03-20T21:01:00.000Z

Timorous Beast, seldom one to miss an opportunity for a holiday, has decamped to Kobe for a few days. Released from the spell that had compelled me to check the news every two minutes for updates on how soon he could expect to be glowing in the dark, I followed his lead and went to the seaside.

For reasons I'm unsure about, people with mental health issues and fiscal misfortune seem to gravitate to the English coast. Perhaps they are cast there by society to cling to the country's very edges. I had been there not two minutes when a man shouted at me, waving angry arms and cursing. Youths in tracksuits charged furiously along the prom.

I sat on a bench and stared out at the sea.

Written in the stars

2011-03-16T12:29:00.000Z

I once went to a temple in Tokyo and paid 100 yen for my “fortune” on a slip of paper. It read, “You will lose all your servants”.

I wonder how many Japanese people’s fortunes read, “Your friends will be crushed, burned and drowned. Your house and all your worldly possessions will be swept away, pulverised, mixed with garbage, broken cars and ships, covered in stinking mud and then dumped back on the place where your house stood. You will spend the foreseeable future sleeping in a school gym hall with no running water, toilet, heating, lighting or food. It will snow. You will be continually threatened with radiation poisoning.”

Call it what you will; fate, karma providence, something tells me there is no divinity here.

The big one

2011-03-11T18:07:00.003Z

I was going to tell you about my pissy leg, but that’ll have to wait.

I couldn’t sleep, so was in bed with my laptop, emailing Timorous Beast in Tokyo. His first email concerned a story we’d both seen on the news about a blind guide dog. The next one was sent from under the kitchen table: “Earthquake!” He may have been scared, but he still grabbed his iMac.

I checked the news, but it had just happened. There was only one line in the breaking news, with no details as to magnitude. We experienced earthquakes all the time in Tokyo, sometimes big enough to shake buildings. I was not alarmed. I laughed and sent Timorous Beast an amusing photo of a puppy. He replied: “Back under the table – it’s a big one” (the earthquake, I presumed, not the table).

As the minutes and hours passed, it became clear that Beast had been lucky. Tokyo has been waiting for The Big One since 1923, and I was hoping it wouldn’t arrive until after Timorous Beast leaves the country in April. But now it’s come. Watching the footage, I’m awed by the destruction and guiltily grateful that the epicentre wasn’t a couple of hundred kilometres further south.

Beast has indeed, had a brush with something monstrous. I hope he's now safe, but the news can only get worse for a great many others. If they don't manage to cool down the Fukushima reactor pretty soon, the horrors could last for a very long time.

Happy International Women's Day

2011-03-08T10:32:00.001Z

I'm a little bit in love with Daniel Craig, and probably even more so when he's wearing make up and a dress.

What I miss about Japan

2011-03-04T16:47:00.001Z

One of my favourite places to eat when I lived in Tokyo was Doma Doma, an insalubrious chain of izakaya. People would laugh when I told them this - thousands of superb high-end eating establishments, and I liked Doma Doma.

But it was ace. There were dark little booths where one could snuggle up and hide away from the raucous crowds, yet never be more than the press of a bell away from a waiter delivering more tiny dishes of deliciousness and chilled sake to share.

Even though it was cheap, the food was fab, "things on sticks" being among the most exciting for someone raised in a working class household in 1970s Scotland, where the pinnacle of celebratory dining was the party porcupine.

Back then, our things on sticks consisted of spam and pickled onions. Doma Doma did it better, with pork and perilla rolls, asparagus wrapped in bacon, and chicken and leek with miso sauce. But one had to choose carefully: the unwary could be surprised with "beak of chicken" or even worse, "gizzards".

Scottish weather

2011-02-24T19:18:00.000Z

You know you're in Scotland when....

Gazing out at water-logged fields and flooded roads, you ask the taxi driver, "Have you had a lot of rain recently?" "No" he replies, "Nothing out of the ordinary".

The first words you hear upon switching on the TV are "... and a high risk of hypothermia."

The horizontal drizzle becomes horizontal sleet and then horizontal snow.

The power of grammar

2011-02-16T21:37:00.000Z

According to one of my undergraduates:

"Passive voice can distance an audience from the writer and create a more professional apparel".

Dirty

2011-02-14T06:44:00.000Z

Something dirty for all you lovers on Valentine's Day.

Available for weddings, bar mitzvahs

2011-02-09T16:09:00.000Z

It's official - somebody likes my accent.

Are you Japanese? For a nominal hourly fee I'll happily come to your home or place of work and whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

It's rubbish

2011-02-07T23:11:00.001Z

Words nobody wants to hear from their supervisor when the deadline is four days away:

"Nearly everything is there: it just needs tying together, re-organising and in one or two places 'sharpening up' a bit further."

Birthday wishes

2011-02-05T22:58:00.002Z

Timorous Beast's birthday is coming up. I search for his wish list on Amazon and am astonished to discover that the first two items on it are exactly the same items that I have on my wish list! We are obviously more alike than I imagined. Then I realise that I'm looking at my own wish list.

I try again and this time I find it. There are only two items on his wish list: a twelve inch of The Prodigy's Omen, and a book entitled One hundred and one summers of Australian surf lifesaving. Either this is not the Timorous Beast I'm looking for or I've just discovered a whole new side to him.

Skippy disappoints

2011-02-02T19:43:00.000Z

I've just finished reading Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. I'd heard good things about it and usually like fiction that focuses on childhood/adolescence (since I've got an adolescent personality trapped in a middle-aged body, no doubt), but I just didn't get it. I didn't care about the characters, couldn't see the point of the story and took issue with some of the writing. I mean really; "interiorly"? That's taking the piss.

Who can recommend something good for February?

A typical Scottish sentiment

2011-01-25T20:48:00.000Z

Oh, go on then since it's Burns' Night:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
For promis'd joy!

or, as my mother would say, "It'll all end in tears".

Being a teenager

2011-01-24T01:08:00.001Z

Eldest nephew is in trouble. He crashed his car. Both his mother and my mother have berated him for "being up that back road at that time of night in the first place", speeding, showing off in front of his friends and not having enough money to get the car towed. He stands defensively in the doorway of his bedroom while my mother finishes haranguing him.

"Now go and tidy your room before your mother sees it".

"It's tidy" he replies, looking at the floor.

But my mother is having none of it. "Go and tidy it!" She cries, fixing her beady eyes upon him.

"And while you're at it, have a bloody shower!"

Keas

2011-01-14T19:10:00.000Z

Timorous Beast had gone to ask the weathered-looking bloke in the Department of Conservation visitors' centre where the campsite was. He came back shaking his head in disbelief. "It's just round there" he pointed, "but we're getting a cabin."

"Huh?"

"Apparently, a marauding pack of savage parrots will rip our tent to shreds if we camp."

We saw one of them later that day. It was attacking the camera I'd left on the table.

Blowing up the tyres

2011-01-10T12:57:00.000Z

I got my bike out for the first time in almost a month. The front tyre was completely flat, so I changed my clothes and caught the bus instead.

The next day, I put on a skirt to highlight my helplessness and wheeled the bike to the bicycle shop in town. A nice young man took control of the situation, loosening the valve and pumping furiously. He had a spot of trouble getting it to inflate, but he persevered and then BANG!! The inner tube exploded.

When the ringing in our ears had stopped, he looked at me balefully and said, "I have a degree in economics, but not an NVQ in cycle maintenance."

Celeb spotting in Wellington

2011-01-07T08:38:00.001Z

It had been a good day. It had started with an earthquake and some rumpy pumpy. We ventured out into the city, where the sun shone, the sea glittered and a tui serenaded us as we ascended to Mount Victoria.

Inexplicably, there was no van selling cold drinks and ice creams at the top (New Zealand simply does not have enough spare people to dispatch to the top of hills to make a killing from thirsty tourists). So we decided to take the shortest route down and, as if by magic, a bus driven by a friendly bloke appeared on the horizon and took us directly to the nearest beverages.

Evening fell and we dined in a cosy Italian restaurant, where we sat next to none other than Baldrick.

Where is everyone?

2011-01-06T00:12:00.001Z

New Zealand is a wonderful country, not least because there's nobody there. In fact, the four people you see in the photo below were the only people Timorous Beast and I clapped eyes on the entire time we were there.

Here's an abbreviated list of what this enchanted land has to offer:

Geographical features:

Valleys low, mountains high, giant sand dunes, huge empty beaches and misty rainforests.

Fauna:

Savage parrots, somersaulting dusky dolphins, sperm whales, fur seals, donkeys and bouncing 7-week old puppies.

Comestibles:

Flat whites, possum pie, chocolate cake proffered by hitchhikers, the finest wines known to humanity and Perky Nanas.

And all without the irritation that is other people.

Earthquakes

2011-01-05T02:45:00.000Z

I have no desire to be buried under tons of ferro-concrete (although being subsequently located by a panting German Shepherd would be some consolation), but I have been missing the regular tremblings of Tokyo since I left. I like the sway of the room, the creak of the walls, and the tension of not knowing whether it will reach a crescendo to bring down the ceiling or simply fade away leaving nothing but the thrill behind it. I was hoping to encounter a small earthquake on my travels.

In San Francisco I was disappointed. Not the slightest rumbling disturbed me. In New Zealand, despite the fact that we were in Christchurch on three different occasions, we managed to miss the rather large earthquake that occurred there, but were woken at 5.00 am in Wellington by a satisfying shoogling of the building. The gods evidently heard my prayers, however. The day after I returned to the north of England, the ground beneath Ripon shifted and sighed. Alas, England's earthquakes are puny efforts and Hovisville was unmoved.

Happy New Year

2011-01-04T00:10:00.000Z

It's strange to be back, not least because I have become nocturnal. Since leaving New Zealand at 5.30 pm, spending 15 hours on a plane and arriving in Canada at 2.00 pm the same day, I've been a bit befuddled.

I rang in the New Year somewhere over the Pacific and then again somewhere over the Atlantic. My body now believes that 3.00 pm is bedtime. I'm bright-eyed and bushy tailed by 11.00 pm.

Middle Earth

2010-12-13T22:45:00.000Z

My last undergraduate class of the year has been taught, the flat has been cleaned and my case has been packed. I'm going to San Francisco for a couple of days to commune with the spirit of Charles Bukowski.

If I the San Andreas fault does not suck me into the earth's core, I shall be flying the long way round and meeting Timorous Beast in New Zealand. I intend get into the spirit of things by speaking Elvish. I look more like Smeagol than Galadriel, but Timorous Beast would make a fine troll if I chopped the bottom half of his legs off.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

Perv

2010-12-09T22:41:00.004Z

I enjoy cycling in winter, but there are only so many layers one can wear on one's hands before gripping the handlebars becomes impossible. So my fingers get freezing, and then sore, and then numb, at which point gripping the handlebars or braking becomes impossible anyway. I can usually get about half way home from the university before I have to stop and let my fingers thaw out.

I have poor circulation, so the only way to get the blood flowing again is to press my fingers against something warm. And the warmest, most accessible thing around when I'm half way home from the university on a winter's evening is my beaver. So far, no passers-by have spotted me lurking in the trees at the edge of the park with my hands thrust down the front of my trousers.

A choir of falling angels

2010-12-06T23:20:00.005Z

I indulged my festive mood by going to see the Halle Youth Choir. They sang beautifully, but Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus was interrupted not once but twice by the thud of choirboys falling face-first to the polished wood of the stage floor. Whether it was the emotion of the occasion or a lack of dinner that led to this fainting fit is unclear. I felt quite emotional myself by the end, guilt being the dominant sentiment because the old guy sitting next to me was breathing so noisily that I wanted to suffocate him.

The curse of the high-viz vest

2010-12-03T19:55:00.002Z

Having cut my cycling teeth in the gentile lanes of Holland and Japan, I'm used to pootering along helmetless and wearing a suit (Japan) or stoned out of my face and carrying a coffee table (Holland), safe in the knowledge that only an unseen canal can harm me.

I'm not into luminous yellow clothing, and I don't like dressing up in sports utility wear just because I'm going out on my bike, but cycling in the UK is treated more like an extreme sport than a means of getting from A to B. I hate doing it, but I have submitted to the curse of the high-viz vest. Pah.

Massive savings

2010-11-29T19:21:00.001Z

The UK's greatest bargain spotted today in Holland and Barrett: a sachet of face pack, reduced from £1.09 to ... £1.05.

Ooh, I could crush a grape

2010-11-26T19:54:00.000Z

Somehow on a Monday night in November, I ended up at a meeting of the Hovisville and Grimthorpe Wine Appreciation Society, where a roomful of 70 year old men coerced me into drinking somewhere in the region of 8 glasses of wine. My memory gets hazy after the third red, but I do recall the leader of the session announcing that it was a fine beverage since "only the best grapes go in t'crusher."

War hero

2010-11-18T08:31:00.000Z

All this talk of remembrance got me remembering my grandfather. He worked in bomb disposal during the Second World War, till one of his projects blew up in his face, killing his friend and blinding him.

He had a white stick, but he could still see well enough to punch my grandmother in the face when he'd had a couple of whiskies. He drank a lot of whisky. A week's wages worth every Friday, including Fair Fortnight, when my grandmother and my father sat on the edge of the bed, packed suitcases by their feet, waiting for his return and the promised holiday to Saltcoats.

Eventually they ran away and hid at an aunt's house. He'd call round in the middle of the night to shout obscenities and throw rocks at the windows. The aunt sent them back.

The last time I saw him, he was lying shrunken in a hospital bed with a hole in his throat and a dark scar running from his right ear to his left thigh. He still bristled with menace.

11.11

2010-11-11T11:11:00.003Z

I'll potter around at home, slowly but surely writing a thesis. I'll cook something. If I can persuade my boiler to yield enough hot water, I may lie in the bath, enjoying a minute or two of silence. And in that silence, I'll consider how dulce and decorum life is, and wonder about the thousands upon thousands of men who were sent, in wave after wave, to lose theirs.

The things I do for love

2010-11-07T20:00:00.001Z

I don't normally buy a newspaper, because I'm tight and can read free online or because I'm really environmentally friendly and prefer to read online than create loads of paper waste, depending who's asking. And if did buy a newspaper, it certainly wouldn't be the Torygraph. But Timorous Beast wants a set of free DVDs, so I have to creep surreptitiously around campus every day this week with a right-wing newspaper under my arm.

The cheek of it!

2010-11-04T20:46:00.000Z

I had to take my laptop to the IT department. The technician - let's call him Pete - was surprisingly nice, but my problem took ages to resolve so I spent a chunk of time frowning at the screen while Pete multi-tasked, helping several other people. A girl sat down at one of the desks and, like everyone else who had passed through, got out her laptop and waited. While Pete's back was turned, this girl reached over and picked up the bottle of coke that was sitting on his desk. I watched in amazement as she brazenly took a swig and set it down again, exactly where she found it.

When Pete returned his attention to me, I leaned conspiratorially towards him and whispered, "Is that your coke?"

He looked at me suspiciously. "Yes".

I gestured behind us, "That girl just took a drink of it."

He looked over his shoulder and smirked, "That's my sister."

Is it because I is old?

2010-10-28T19:27:00.008+01:00

One of my pet hates when I lived in Japan was people gazing fixedly at their phone, frantically pressing its buttons while walking along the street. Getting on trains, getting off trains, going up stairs, going down stairs, crossing busy intersections; wherever they were, they seemed unable to tear themselves away from their phones lest they be out of touch with their "friends" for more than two minutes, or lest their company manage perfectly well without them.

My boss does it in meetings. Someone will be talking to him and he'll start fiddling about with his iphone, staring rapt at it rather than looking at the people right in front of him, who are left wondering whether he’s still listening. No doubt he's using it as a diary, but nonetheless the effect is quite rude.

I accept that I’m a bit of a Luddite in this respect, and that perhaps it is OK to use an iphone in a meeting, but there are certain situations in which one should switch the gadgets off and pay attention.

Yesterday I was giving a presentation to a fairly small group of lecturers and PhD students. My boss was one them. He got out his iphone in the middle of my talk and began using it. I wish I’d had the courage to tell him to put it away.

My parallel universe

2010-10-18T08:24:00.000+01:00

Mega-tampon heads for Philippines

I had woken up at 4.00 am. Sleep deprivation affects one's ability to concentrate and I have noticed that I often misread text when I'm tired, but it does make the morning newspaper that much more intriguing.

Comfort and joy

2010-10-16T16:49:00.000+01:00

Predictably, as soon as I stopped work for the summer and turned my attention to my own research, I came down with a case of something unspeakable. I don't know what it was, but I thought my head was going to explode. I've slept like Rip Van Beastie for the last few days and now I'm on the mend. Plans for this weekend include snuggling up on the sofa with homemade baba ganoush and and a nice glass of horke jablko with cinnamon and cloves.

Punishment

2010-10-08T15:50:00.003+01:00

She sat me down and asked, "How's your hair been since last time you were here?"

Assuming I'd misheard, I replied, "About two months, I think".

"And how's it been for you?"

Putting aside the patronising flourish "for you" accompanied by a tilt of the head, how does one answer such a question anyway? "It's been a bit naughty, actually"? I've never expected much of my hair other than gradual growth. But "It's been great, thanks" hardly seemed the right response either, since if I wasn't in some way dissatisfied with my hair I probably wouldn't have made an appointment with the hairdresser.

I tilted my head and replied, "Well, Louise, it was fine right after I got it cut, but now it's getting untidy, so that's why I'm here."

I tentatively hoped she'd proceed in silence, but she talked for the next half an hour about her boyfriend's car. Perhaps she was punishing me.

Mr and Mrs Potatohead

2010-10-05T20:28:00.001+01:00

In my opinion, anyone who can't tell the difference between a bag of spuds and a laptop deserves to lose their money.

The summer of discontent

2010-10-03T22:05:00.000+01:00

Courses completed: 2

Questions about bank accounts answered: 180

Faults with computers reported to the IT guys: 5,392

Lectures forgotten about by Course Director: 1

Lectures delivered by me: 1

Tasks not fucked up by the secretary: 0

Tutors alienated: 15

Students reduced to tears: 3

Hours of unpaid overtime worked: 30

Withering criticisms of Course Director's decisions: 27

Hours of sleep lost: 800

If you're dead, answer me

2010-09-22T21:17:00.000+01:00

I've just done a first aid course and discovered that the right thing to ask someone who appears to be choking is, "Are you choking?" yet for some reason one's fellow trainees laugh when you ask someone slumped, inert in the corner, "Are you breathing?"

Tim Minchin - Pope Song

2010-09-18T19:35:00.000+01:00

The elephant shrew

2010-09-18T17:11:00.000+01:00

We sat in Abdul's carpet shop, chatting. He had already described seven different types of carpet, and we had already told him we were not going to buy one. We'd drunk tea. He'd offered Che thirty camels and a carpet in exchange for me, but negotiations had reached a stalemate, so the conversation turned to other matters.

Che and I were on the hunt for the elephant shrew, native to Morocco, but didn't know the French name for it. "It's a small animal with fur and a long nose."

"A mouse?" offered Abdul

"No, like a mouse, but with a long nose." Che waggled her hands together in front of her face in demonstration of an elephant shrew's snout.

"A desert fox?"

"No, smaller than a fennec. It's small and very cute and it runs fast."

Abdul frowned and rubbed his chin. He tapped his leather slipper off his stool thoughtfully. Then his eyes lit up and he sat upright. "I know!" he announced, "A locust!"

How to laugh in the face of adversity

2010-09-11T12:35:00.002+01:00

The running of our course this year has been up and down. Up in that one person in the team has screwed everything up, and down in that she's let everyone down. After an attack of waterworks, she went home in disgrace, leaving me, our trusty assistant, Bob, and my two fellow coordinators to sort out the mess.

Bob is the strong silent type. He doesn't say much and he never complains. He just gets on with whatever we women ask him to do. The coordinators, on the other hand, are angry and vocal. We were in the office complaining, when I turned to Bob and said,

"Sorry - you must be fed up listening to us moaning on top of everything else."

"That's OK" he shrugged, "I have three sisters."

This year's intake

2010-09-08T06:34:00.000+01:00

One hundred and seventy students fill the lecture hall. They are asked to fill in their registration forms, pass them to the end of the rows and file out. One girl fails to notice that the other 169 people have all handed in their bright yellow forms and asks me if she should keep hers. Another tells me that she doesn't know how to spell her own name and looks at me hopefully as though I might know. Another confesses that does not know her permanent home address. A young man approaches me and asks my name. He looks surprised when I point to the name badge I am wearing.

Looks like it's going to be another great year for scholarship.

The alchemy of animals

2010-09-04T17:34:00.001+01:00

I seem to have lost half my cycle helmet. How I lost half of it without noticing is a mystery, although I suspect it was stolen by crafty wildlife.

First it was slugs. They'd lie on the path, glistening wetly. I almost killed myself several times trying to avoid cycling over them. Then it was squirrels. One ran, ninja-style, along the wall beside me as I cycled, racing me for a good hundred yards or so. I feared it would leap from the wall into my path. The second lay in the middle of the cycle path like a dog napping in the sun. I swerved to avoid it and executed a sharp u-turn to go back and inspect the furry pile. It did not appear to be injured. Its tiny paws were pink and tipped with sharp, silvery claws. It was motionless, but unsquashed and unbloodied. How mysterious.

It was later that day that I noticed half my helmet was missing.

A serious man

2010-08-26T21:29:00.000+01:00

My colleagues and I are teaching a Turkish student at the moment. He's doing an MA in Cultural and Media Studies and likes to punctuate his essays - even the ones about changes in the cost of living in Turkey over the past 20 years - with references to Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare and Heraclitus.

He sulked for hours and claimed that his heart was broken because we told him off for being late. In the class one day, I gave him a task and a time limit in which to complete it. He reluctantly took the paper and cried, "When you give me a task, you speak to me as if you don't even know me!"