A virtual space for (some) writing
There is an ancient tradition at the University of Cambridge amongst art students, which I honour here today: taking a cool-sounding quotation from an intellectual source, and repurposing without context. My title for this post is taken from F.R. Leavis in Two Cultures (no, I haven’t checked the citation, on the principle that I’ve graduated.) …
Continue reading “The essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge”
Just as the cockroach is adapted to survive nuclear apocalypse, so my blog limps on through this third lockdown. Yes, it’s been a few months of silence for my fans* on our isolated patch of the web. In agricultural terms a fallow period has passed. But now we can rejoice and plant turnips once more, …
Just a place where I’m keeping my old Instagram photos … I like taking pictures, but I do not like flogging myself on the internet, so these are from an old account. Fine, it probably aren’t in the Correct Chronological Order of My Life, but then again, it’s not as if memory retells a particular …
I’ve been cooking with citrus and lemon a lot recently. A quick squeeze added green vegetables, oven-cooked fish, yoghurt dips: will it do add anything good? we don’t know, but let’s do it anyway, as it makes me feel like a freewheeling tv chef. The squeezing and sauté-ing and chopping has made up large, salted …
Yes, I’ve opened and closed and reopened this draft most days – without managing to write anything. All the usual anxieties of blog-writing (will people think I’m a narcissist? illiterate? boring? will future employers condemn me on the basis of total foolishness?) have combined with the self-consciousness of pleasing others. A good deal of lockdown …
Continue reading “Unproductive worrying about privilege. (‘Privilege disclaimer’)”
Greetings from the Year Abroad I am now conducting from my bedroom: a year abroad insofar that it is no longer a Year, but a strange, shapeless vortex of timey wimey stuff, and abroad in the sense that it’s not abroad, but is in fact a suburb in North Yorkshire. What have I been doing, …
Since we’ve all been temporarily prevented from travelling further than ‘another government-mandated walk around the block? Well, it’s not as if I’ve got much else on…’ , I thought this would be quite a useful poem to think about. It plays with the excitement of travelling, at the same time as it questions its necessity, …
And so we enter the event I am calling ‘The Second Fucking Time I’ve Had To Flee A Country On The Year Abroad.’ (TSFTIHTFACOTYA for short?). It’s all happened pretty quickly. On Friday I sent an e-mail to the company I was supposed to work for in Beaune, in which I (oh, innocence) wondered whether …
Continue reading “We escape lockdown corona crisis in France”
You’ve probably noticed by now how it’s all gone a bit Exodus, that the newspapers have become great harbingers of doom, and that the world’s generally on an off-day. Coronavirus (for it is she) has spread to France, which is now the 2nd most infected country in Europe, and the ENS has closed. Plus no …
Continue reading “Corona-vacances : she may be small, but she’s shut down France”
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