It never rains but it pours

It's raining now, which is a relief after the awful week of early February weather in late November. I will be doing my bit to contribute airplane emissions over the next three weeks - on Monday I'm going to Queensland to teach the Jane Austen summer school again. It's on Mansfield Park. I haven't had a lot of time to plan it - in theory I was going to finish my marking by last Monday, but I actually did the last piece at 3.30 on Friday - and I feel less prepared than I'd like. Just got to keep reminding myself that last year I found out that what the people wanted was just to read out bits and discuss them. And to look at pictures, of which I've collected a couple of hundred. Here's some. Let's see if I can think of (and quote) captions without checking them in the text:


Dr Grant "was a short neck'd, apoplectic sort of fellow, and plied with good things would soon pop off"



"unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, gives me a feeling of restraint and hardship" (this is the gate to the kitchen garden at Chawton manor)



"a woman can never be too fine while she is all in white"


It'll be fine, I'm sure. One day I will get entirely over this thing of feeling stressed before the doing of tasks that are totally within my capabilities.

I'm going to tell them on the first day that by the end we have to solve the Fanny Price issue once and for all.

I'm coming back on Saturday, spending a week at work finishing three essays and writing a conference paper, then on the following Sunday it's off to Kangaroo Island for the actual conference. Dorian is coming with me to that although I don't think he's going to any conference sessions, just walking around on beaches and that type of thing. After coming back from that I've got until 21 December to get everything ready for teaching next year - and then -


no work until next year.

beautiful words.

let the little blog live

(update - I only just realised the image below wasn't displaying. It's fixed now.)

Alright. Only eight days later. (Stephanie in comments was right - I didforget about marking the essays, all sixty x 3500 of them, plus the 3 x 12,000 ones. I did not however forget about the two unfinished articles, the one unbegun conference paper, or the four-day summer school I'm conducting the week after next.) I'm a bit rusty at this and I can see it's going to take me a while to warm up again. In the interests of doing so perhaps some random dot point commemoration of what happened during the extended lost weekend is in order:

* I did a better job than I knew picking the reading list for the Women Writing subject, which turned out to be an absolute joy to do, the few really hair-raising moments aside, and even though marking essays isn't fun, ever, it's been so good to see person after person writing wonderful things. An essay I marked last night finished with, among other things, the observation that the Doris Lessing novel we read was a work of 'extreme beauty' - and the writer wasn't just throwing that in there, she'd earned the right to that observation by the painstaking and patient reading she'd worked her way through. However, I am very glad that teaching is done for three months.

* The cats are well.

* Dorian bought a double bass and he plays it all the time.

* I gave a conference paper about the Jane Austen dressing up and dancing thing and as a result of the paper I am now going to write a book about it. There is a commission from a very good editor and publisher. I am incredibly overexcited about this work. I'm also happy because it means I'm a bit more likely to eventually get some kind of ongoing job. It also means research trips to Jane Austen beanos in various places: I'm thinking Canberra again and Bath again next year, and then, if I can manage it, California and Florence the year after. Sounds dreadful doesn't it. Also, inevitably, this will mean a great many more frocks about which I will of course keep you far too well informed at every possible opportunity.

* Our apple trees have got little apples on them, which is weird. Last week I ate the first piece of edible fruit from our garden - a mandarine. Verdict: not quite ready. But promising.

* I am considering throwing a Christmas party in my 2m x 3.5m office along the lines of the housewarming Jemaine in Flight of the Conchords had when he moved into a storage cupboard.

* This was the scene at a huge rockabilly dance we went to a few weeks ago. I didn't mind.

Get Rea-dy!!!!

I'm coming back to blog tomorrow, or possibly the next day.

In the meantime here's some music.



I can't believe I lived 37 years in this world before finding out that there is a song called 'get your cat clothes on'.