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‘Well’, said the rabbit with the face like an old man and the look and feel of a balding head. ‘You had simply better carry me properly, or I will be forced to hang onto you with my teeth sunk into your face.’
My dreams are not well at the moment, it seems, and like sick dreams always do, they make me jittery: I am constantly attempting to kill people, or waiting for them to kill me.
But in my daytime-world, where I am battling with practical advice for the anchorite (do not own cattle – a holy woman should own no pet but a cat), improbably dense paleography homework (hugely helped, I admit, by this marvellous game, wherein you can drown a 17th century woman if your transcription isn’t up to scratch), a feeling of blind work panic and an enormous craving for these, I am buoyed up by several good things.
The first is a flurry of theatre: seeing a friend (http://dropstitchesnotbombs.blogspot.com/) in a play. I just don’t like Joe Orton much, and never have done. Funeral Games is vicious, macabre, and funny, but it is also cruel, devoid of sympathetic characters, grossly camp, often indulgent, and scrupulously without insight. The cast were solid, the costumes rather nice, and the Corpus Playroom (a rather Orton-esque name, I think), is a very good venue to see it in.
In general, it is a lovely venue, although I agree with a friend that seeing a bad play in it is like being in a nightmare: the performance space is tiny, and there is nowhere for an audience to hide, far less sneak out.
Tonight I am off to see Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, as a small consolation prize, as I am so snowed under with work that I can’t go to London.
The second nice thing is this time of year. I sang in Thomas Luis de Victoria’s Requiem Mass for All Souls, – I like to think we sound nicer than this, but this is actually a rather nice sample. God I love it. The suspensions (check me and my spurious musical knowledge) are the perfect mix of melancholic and comforting.
and then offset the smells and bells with other, far more Bakhtinian smells and bells at the Midsummer Common funfair, where I went on a ride which looked like a giant pregnancy test and made me want to die. Polly and I then won a phallic bubble wand by hooking a doe-eyed plastic duck on a long pole. Carnivalesque it was, and I rounded the night off with half a pint, no less, of mulled wine.
There have since been smatterings of fireworks (what better kinds of magic are there), and the promise of going to the theatre again tonight ought to spur me off this nonsense and into the library.
But not yet, not quite yet.
I want to leave you with small samples of collector’s vanity, and dubious craftmanship (ie, I like my hair curly and this necklace is ever so pretty and you’ve indulged me this far, albeit against your better judgement, so go on, have a look and force out a small appreciative ‘ooh’.
Accretion. That’s my problem. I belong entirely in the Middle Ages, before any discretion was exercised about which knowledge to save and value and transmit. Look at me, forcing my accretion all over you all. (Eew).