2004-10-20..5:18 p.m.

I don�t think I�ve written ages. I�ve had no time to pander to my little self-indulgences, and yet like seeing Jude Law in the flesh while simultaneously trying to herd two severely underage (though very persistent) bulbous Essex girls in tube tops and those ghastly highheeleed flipflop things* back over the threshold of the Marquee, so many wonderful and peculiar things have sauntered dryly past not making much of an effort to make me take notice, yet due to their wonderfulness and peculiarity, I�ve scarcely been able help it.

*if you've not got them where you are, be thankful. Very thankful. Incidentally, does anyone know how those came to be? I can understand the progression from comfy flipflops to Graceful Stilettos, don�t get me wrong, but dude. Rather like the *natural* progression from primitive attempts to formulate an understanding of the universe and our meagre place in it to fundamentalist refusals to acknowledge other belief systems, this hybrid flipflop-heel thing baffles me.

Mostly my lack of time (both in terms of temporal increments and spatial proximity) is due to all my headspace being taken up with booklearning and not being near the internet. Or being inundated with other things when I am near the internet, thus poses physical obstacles on my path to cyber documenting. Or the fact it�s taken two weeks to sort through the enormous amount of crap I managed to haul out of my overpriced room, and lo I�ve discovered rather painfully I may indeed have even more than that. I think I�ve left a teeny denim jacket (poss slung over the banister on the landing), a potato peeler (shiny and grey, purpose built for Giant North American Root Vegetables), a cork-screw (yellow with chrome) and most importantly a slightly battered copy of John Galsworthy�s The Forthsyte Sage. I�ll be that general way on Saturday, so am angling to pop in and excavate with one of the exes.

Actually I�ve another reason for needing to remind them of my presence: I need the number of my old estate agents. I don�t think I�ve had my deposit reinstated. This was supposed to be left in the hands of Rachel to get an inventory sheet in (as suggested by the estate agent themselves.)(I know, I know. It�s just that I was in such a hurry to get the fuck away from them. I didn�t think). Still, I�ve not heard I�m not getting it back for ripping out the fireplace and replacing it with papier mache squirrels yet either, so there�s hope.

Staying at M's is actually going fairly well. I'm not saying I'd like it to be a permanent thing right now, but it's not as earthshakingly dangerous as I feared. We're both very independently minded, which means that if need be I can get up and leave, or he'll go out with his mates without me, and neither of us are offended. My space has not been invaded, nor (I've been told) has his. Though it is STILL WAY TOO SOON TO DO THIS PERMANENTLY, it�s proving to affirm my sneaking suspicions that we may well do this one day. And without intervening flatmates too. In any case, I�ll be starting to look for a flat of my own again this weekend. I decided to give myself a week or two to recoup before throwing myself back in the flat market, of which he�s very supportive knowing as he does that if I were to manage to get a couple of week's reading done ahead of time, allowing me to relax a bit on the uni front, I�ll be much able to get what I want and not settle for some (story-riddled no doubt, but likely also roach-infested crack-whored) hole.

Speaking of which, uni I mean, O my! Yesterday's class was excellent. The seminar more than the lecture. I tend to find them a little unchallenging, a bit elementary in the approach and frustrating too because we have no opportunity to raise our hands and tell them, This isn't New. Give us More! However, as we've just finished studying The Sound and the Fury, and are turning to Andre Gide�s The Immoralist this week, I can't complain. (Sound and the Fury, by-the-by a beautiful and complex text, narratively evocative and deeply aware of itself. If you've never read it, I implore you.) Sorry, I was saying about yesterday. It FINALLY felt like we were getting stretched a bit. Not wildly so, but that interesting questions were being raised, and there was more participation instead of just me sighing when everyone else looks shyly at their notes and ending up exchanging dissertations with the professor myself. I feel like I�m coming off as being big-headed, all Look At Meepie, Registered Smartypants, but I had such high expectations for this. I convinced myself all along that I�d be snubbed off as Token Moron, and instead I�ve discovered that that�s what everyone else feared. I assumed that philosophy and literary criticism, in at least a foundational sense, would have been at the core both the course and the backgrounds of my fellows. I wasn�t being na�ve about this, I simply assumed that if you�re taking a course on the contextual side of literature, you�d have had a drafting in it that made you want to pursue it further. Instead, I�ve felt for the past three weeks that in each lecture, in each seminar, I�ve sat there waiting while the most rudimentary and uninteresting points are being laboured over with protracting slowness. Like teaching someone to count on their fingers when they�ve been studying algebra for four years.

In any case, yesterday was a Pure Mathematics day. A Whatever the Fuck it is You Study Once You�re Over Algebra day. It was great. And then afterwards we all went to the pub and got to see what each other looks like when we�re not being scholarly. It was most illuminating.

And I just had lunchums with G and D (mum�s dad and his wife) at the GastroPub nextdoor (incidentally, why is it that whenever I talked to anyone on that side of the family they warn me about the dangers of getting pregnant at the crucial time and urge me to take care of myself? Am I that obviously incapable?), lovely mad salad with chips. I�m not sure how they cook them, but those chips are worthy of prose and poetry. They�re worthy of TS-esque ode in their honour.

they
are
wo rthy
of

a

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a
i
n

ing
n
e

d c
a



by


e.

e.


c
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m
m

ings

They�re worthy of near-worship. Delicately swathed in a fine layer of grease, meltingly soft through and through, the merest hint of light charcoal singeing along each of the roughly shaped edges. they are deep-fried potatoes of the gods. They are probably also softened with industrial supernanohydrogenated semi-fortified 'vegetable' oil, light-dusted in arsenic and double fried in goose fat. But it's some damn fine goose fat.

Speaking too of aged ones, my Nan is coming round to work tomorrow lunch to drop off a care package from Canada!! Huzzah! prezzies! So that's three whole grandparents in two days, madness!

I�ve a huge deadline for tomorrow, have I started? YES! Am I anywhere near completion? NO! do I have time? NO!
I must go. I work tonight, I write tonight, I read tonight. My ambition knows no bounds.

****meepeola