Orange mousie!

The kittens have a favourite toy: an orange mouse with catnip inside that makes a very intriguing rattling sound when you skid it along the floorboards, even though someone bit off its tail on the way home from the vet a few weeks ago. I regularly have to scoop it out from under the couch, and there is then great joy and much scuffling to work out who will play first. They do take turns, there is no doubt. One rolls and chases and pretends to ignore, then pounces and sends it flying. The other waits and watches patiently. There must be an agreed time period after which it is fair game to move in.

This is such an excellent game that when they are prowling around and looking a bit distracted, if I can find the mouse then they entertain themselves for ages.

However, a new, less than welcome development this morning. Wulf has discovered that the very best place in the house to play this game is ... on my desk!

OK, back to work!

Blue and brown

The young man is better, I'm glad to say, and has gone off to Chinatown for his customary Saturday lunch with friends, since he hardly saw them all week.

But Paul and I are both struggling with colds of various degrees. I'm not too bad, but he and I kept each other awake last night with a barking cough.

I struggled to Italian class this morning, and made a few neighbourhood stops on the way home, so our lunch was a ball of burrata mozzarella (with gorgonzola also inside), on fresh Dench grain bread, drizzled with porcini oil. Unbelievably delicious.

I feel ok now and am doing chores on the computer. Behind me, Paul is stretched out on the couch with a pillow, a blue mohair blanket and two burmese kittens. I'd love to post a picture, but the ipod is playing and I don't want to wake him up. It's on "shuffle" so we are jumping from jazz to Leonard Cohen and girly pop songs and retro 70s and 80s pop and lots of Beethoven and Sibelius. Something rather personal about him lying sleeping/listening to my mix, which desperately needs updating, except that my laptop is too old to use the current iTunes.

The heater's on. My three brown cats (one wearing a big brown jumper) are asleep. The sky is wintry pale blue, though at mid-afternoon the shadows are already long and the sunshine weakening.

I ploughed through a huge pile of emails and chores yesterday, and just as soon as I finish these grant assessments, I'll be ready to write a talk for Thursday and finish polishing my Langland talk to send off.

Health and sickness. Winter and sun. Blue and brown.

Sick day

Lovely post from Jeffrey about (US) Father's day.

My parenting today consists of supplying my invalid son with tea, toast and vegemite as he recovers from a nasty virus (vomiting, skin rash, cough, headache). He's reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, trying to contain two Burmese kittens who think that a boy on a couch with a mohair rug is a perfect playground, and alternating with watching Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Here's the trailer (try and ignore the Disney voice-over). It is an astonishing movie, and in this household, Miyazaki is often the director of choice for a sick day.

I'm at my desk with a streaming headcold myself, about to start the ARC grant assessments that are due today.

This afternoon we will go to the doctor's. Still can't believe that we had a good half-hour's house call yesterday from two doctors. One cuddled Orlando while the other gave Joel a good interrogation, and recommended a blood test. And the whole thing was paid for by Medicare. I went to get the cheque book but all they wanted was the Medicare card. Hooray for a decent national health-care system!

Chuntering on...

In my Middle English reading group we are reading bits of Piers Plowman. We read the Prologue and Passus I, then skipped over the whole Mede episode (I know: it's a scandal), and marvelled at the author's apologia for his life (newly introduced in the C-text).

Today we read the conclusion to this passage, where Reason and Conscience send Will off to the church. "Wepyng and waylyng," he falls asleep and has another vision. He tells us,

Of this mater Y myhte mamele ful longe...

Our intrepid editor, Derek Pearsall, glosses "mamele" as "chunter." Pearsall's glosses, in this and in other editions are mostly helpful and accurate and are often engagingly inventive. This one is simply terrific: we explain one rare and imitative verb with another equally rare and equally imitative verb, though "chunter" is coined somewhat later than "mamele". Both seem to mean to "mutter", or "murmur," while "mamele" seems to be formed on analogy with the Dutch lollen, which gives rise to the contentious noun, "lollard," in the fourteenth century, with all its freight of heresy, etc. So speaking and muttering and mumbling and rambling on, in this period, is risky business, indeed.

"Chuntering" is one of those words that blazed into the language at the end of the sixteenth century, and isn't recorded after the 1870s. In addition to the muttering, mumbling senses, OED also lists "to grumble, find fault with, complain." The OED's last example is from 1870: E. Peacock, Rolf skirl, II. 117 Th' capt'n went away chunterin'. 

Sometimes a word just comes back into the language, even by means of a slightly odd gloss. A bit like a song that gets into your head, the word "chuntering" has got into mine, and under my skin today. I keep thinking so much of our lives — reading, writing, emailing, blogging — could be described as "chuntering". Perhaps it's the buried suggestion of trains "shunting" along; perhaps it's the Led Zeppelin song, "Rambling on"? Either way, today at least, as I go about my tasks this afternoon, when I describe myself to myself, it'll be as "chuntering on."

Beginnin' to see the light

For too long now I've been struggling. My job, while wonderful in so many ways, is also really hard sometimes. Yes, I get to work on wonderful material; and yes, I get to travel around a bit; and manage my own time. And indeed, I get a great sense of achievement in my work when I finish big projects. I am also the first to admit that my path through the professional and intellectual minefield that is the modern university has been easier and more straightforward than that of many people. I've been wonderfully lucky in my students and colleagues, locally, nationally and internationally. I'm pretty well paid for what I do. I have excellent superannuation and health care in a country which is also providing my son with excellent health care and education through the state system. We are heavily mortgaged, but there are two of us on full salaries and our house, while badly run down and crumbling in places, is spacious and pleasant. We eat well; we are happy as a family; we are close to friends and family; and our lives are full of music, words and images. Even my own trajectory through breast cancer was relatively straightforward: the end of this year will mark the end of my five years' treatment and the point where I will have substantially reduced the risk of recurrence so that it will not be much higher than the risk a woman my age might face of first contracting the disease.

And yet too often these days I wake in the night and toss and turn about the always-unfinished, always imperfect and utterly invasive nature of my work. It goes on and on. It is never finished. It is never perfected. It is never complete. Instead, it feels partial, incomplete, unfinished. I can't control the endless emails; the online forms and processes; the constant requests to assess, grade, quantify and rank that eat into the time and concentration I have available to read and study medieval literature. I feel I have cleared the mental space to write this blog entry only because I've been working so hard to delete and file emails (I have processed over a thousand of them in the last few days in a concerted effort to control them) and have cleared most of the surface of my desk and home.

I try to give myself Saturdays off, so I had a "normal" day today: breakfast with Joel (Paul comes home from Europe on Monday); Italian class; gym workout; leftover pizza for lunch; made chocolate and cherry muffins. We introduced the kittens to my parents who came and sat and drank tea as we watched Wulf and Orlando taking turns to play with the toy mouse (Wulf tired first and climbed up on my father's lap, while Orlando knocked herself out leaping and tossing and chasing the mouse before climbing on Pa's lap to curl up with her brother). I then raked up about eight barrow loads of leaves, and raked the gravel paths before I came in to watch the last scenes of The Ghost Writer (I had fallen asleep on the couch watching it the night before), walked it back down to the video shop, then made mushroom and spinach risotto (secret ingredient? a big spoonful of creme fraiche right at the end) and watched Dr Who while we ate it.

But even a normal day like this feels less like a good balance of work and life and more like a day of respite snatched from the chaos and the lurching from task to task that seem to characterise every day — and the anxious reliving of that chaos that often characterises the hours between 2 and 4 am.

I'm sure I'm doing it all wrong. I'm sure I could be more disciplined (sigh) about being organised and prioritising stuff. I'm also pretty sure this feeling would be one clearly identified symptom of mid-life crisis. I'm pretty sure most folk in Australian universities - and elsewhere - will be feeling many of the same things. Even so, I'm hesitating to write this, as I feel I'm normally so upbeat about my work. And I guess that is also the professional persona I have cultivated. So it feels like something of a betrayal of all that.

And yet. And yet. I'm going to "publish post" in a minute, anyway. This is what I set up my blog for, in any case, to trace these vicissitudes. But can anything be done? Will it always be like this?  For now, I'm going to put the kittens to bed and read a chapter of the book I'm reviewing before I go to sleep.

One for the protocol office.

As my book edges ever closer to the precipice of entering final copy-editing, the lovely Caroline has emailed me wondering whether we should flag the mentions of Prince William and Kate Middleton in my book for updating. What a nice problem to have? We'll have to work out the protocol of referring to them before they became Duke and Duchess and all.

And ... can I just say about all that stuff about tradition and modernity in The Dress, and the Duchess's bringing of a new fresh modernity into the institution of the monarchy ... that this has been the dominant discourse of the royal family for at least a good sixty years. I'm just saying: read my final chapter!

Gow

It's nearly three years since I blogged about my gorgeous ex-brother-in-law, Gow. I mentioned there his having come through a major health scare. Alas, there is every sign that his disease has returned.

Two days after I arrived in London, I met my sister after work at Green Park tube station (she works in a small investment bank in Mayfair) and we travelled north to Belsize Park, where he was in hospice care. It was a balmy spring evening, and it was a pleasure to be out of my usual Bloomsbury haunts and out into the leafier suburbs.

Gow was thin, and being medicated for pain relief, but his usual good humour and grace were shining through, though there were a few moments, I have to say, when we were all conscious of the gravity of his situation. His room was full of flowers, and he was having lots of visitors. He'd been out in the garden that afternoon, too. The hospice was clean and bright, and his room was lovely, but he had been there for a couple of months, while the doctors worked out what the next steps might be, and while he gathered strength for the next round.

He showed us these extraordinary collages he'd made, images of his internal organs and the weird eruptions the body produces: really, the art therapists must have fallen all over themselves when they met him...
















 
 A close-up, to show you how he made these assemblages from rolled threads and twists of fabric:

 
 And my favourite, which I'm calling "self-portrait with giant medications."  In this one you can particularly see the influence of the blue and white Japanese textiles amongst which he has been living and working...
 
 And here he is, smiling through...



Gow is keen to go back to Japan, if he can, but at least the first step of that journey is complete, as I heard last week he had checked out of the hospice and gone back to his own flat in London. And his brother is moving back to London to New York to help care for him.

It was wonderful to see him, and to see how strong the friendship between him and my sister still is, after all these years. We are now facebook friends, and I said I would load up my pics onto facebook as well, which I'll do now, too. Keep on shining through, darling.

Rejoice with us, for we have kittens

This has been a plan in the making for a month or two, now. I still feel the presence of dear Mima, and her photo is still attached to my computer screen. I also looked for her when I came home yesterday, after nearly three weeks away. But for a while now the house has seemed to lack a certain something; and yesterday we brought home two wee kittens, just three months old. One is dark brown, whom we have called Orlando, though I am already thinking of her as "the lady Orlando", as in Sally Potter's film. Here she is:

And her brother we have called... well, here's a question: should it be Wulf, Woolf, or Wolf? Which is the least naff? He has a tremendous appetite, so Wolf may be the most appropriate. But should we indulge the medievalism of Wulf? Or the link to Orlando of Woolf? Votes welcome!

And just in case there were any doubt about their utter cuteness....

Imogen and I go shopping

OK, I have been a very terrible blogger. Something about finishing my book, then really having to work hard to finish a big lecture for the Piers Plowman conference in Oxford (it may not sound it, but it was a huge gig for me), and various other tasks, have made it less likely for me to blog. Though I feel I may be getting back to it.

Starting with photos. Today I have spent a very pleasant day. It's my last day in London, and I slept in after getting in late from Rome last night.

Then Imogen, my niece, and I went out. We bought sandwiches and strawberries and had a lovely picnic in Kensington Gardens.

 
and then went shopping for her long-delayed birthday present. First I tried on a pair of shoes. You can't quite see how enormously high they were from this photo: they looked fantastic; and felt great too, except when I actually tried to walk around the shop in them.


Then we bought a pair for her. The poor darling has feet that are hard to fit: long and thin, like my sister's, and with the same long toes that she and Joel have, too. But look what we found: they are fantastic, and being worn tonight to a party with purple socks.







A very satisfactory aunt-niece day, concluding with an impossibly rich cold iced chocolate on the bus on the way home.

Friday night is pizza night

Most Friday nights, for the past sixteen or so years, we have got together with our dear friends: our mirror family, as I call them. Two academic parents, one blond child, and a bunch of similar interests, politics and lives. When various family members are away, we meet anyway. We eat pizza (or sometimes cook), we drink an extra glass of red wine, we eat chocolates and lollies. We argue, we laugh, we tell jokes. We look forward to it from Thursday evening, sometimes. Joel has his last lesson (piano) at 5.30 on a Friday. Once we pick him up, the weekend begins as he starts to relax, too. And when visiting scholars come through town, we love to welcome them along and induct them into Friday night pizza.

Last night was a mega-version of this ritual. The six of us were there, plus two of Paul's research partners and their partners, plus our neighbour, plus a visiting Candian, her partner and their twin daughters. There's a head missing from this photo, but this was fifteen people sitting down to eat pizzas from Al Albero (tiny pizza bar down the road: ring ahead and given them plenty of time, and pick up from the shop; ask for thinner base than usual, if you don't like a light but turkish bread-style base; recommendation? slow cooked lamb, or marinara with giant prawns and scallops). We had the twins on the old piano stool at the end, and you can see Joel and Eva, his Friday night sibling, on the left. Friday night bliss!