And now the end is near ...

 

The temporary end of my working life I hope rather than anything else!

It's been another fantastic week of lunches & catching up with people.  Thank you so much to those of you who have taken me out or had a coffee with me.  I know it's not always easy to spend the time when it's not you about to disappear off into the sunset. 

This week I was lucky enough to have lovely lunches with someone I've worked with for about eleven years (yes, honestly!) - our conversation ran to honourable footballers and super injunctions withstanding there weren't many we could think of!  Wednesday, lunch with a friend and a discussion of why renaissance towns in Italy are so well preserved (how intellectual are we?), if you know the answer please let me know.  On Thursday it was another lovely if enormous lunch and on Friday lots more food and great conversation.  (By the way I promise not to record all my meals for the rest of the life of this blog - this is more about thanking the people I've shared them with).  In addition a lovely coffee with a friend who, I'm certain, will be publishing academic papers well before I do!

I've also had some beautiful presents: notebooks (which I absolutely love and will definitely use); a lovely pen (not sure when I'll need that LOL), beautiful candles and flowers, just some of which you can see at the top of this blog.  I'll treasure them and the messages which have come with them.  Thank you.

So Tuesday is my last day (tomorrow is a public holiday in the UK) and I'm not sure how I'll feel about it.  I'm definitely ready to start my new life but there are so many people I will miss so please do keep in touch.

Leaving definitely got a lot easier on Wednesday night when I went to the Opening Evening at King's for those holding post-graduate offers.  Wow, there were a lot of people there and some of them did look like they should just be starting secondary school but it was great.  We had a welcome from the Professor who's in charge of the graduate school and then went for a mini seminar/discussion with one of the English tutors who was just lovely.  After that the obligatory glass of wine, listening to the KCL jazz band and a quick discussion with one of the professors from the English department and finally the real deal-sealer.  We went on a tour of the college (obviously the pretty bits) including the college, the bar with a terrace over the Thames and the library.  I've attached a link to a 360 view of it - it used to be the Public Record Office & was then given to King's.   It's beautiful, absolutely stunning and whilst I appreciate if you were lucky (and clever) enough to have the real Gothic deal you might think it's nothing special, I really like it.   

Other than that it has of course been a week of more reading but I think I'll share that with you tomorrow.

Thanks for reading ...

Feeding my brain and my stomach

Okay, so today's post comes to you directly from my new I-pad. It wasn't supposed to be like this but my computer has decided to play up in a big way!!

So - hello and thank you if you have read any posts before and wanted to come back. I've had another lovely week of lunches and catch-ups with a few academic bits and pieces and of course quite a lot of vampires thrown in.

Last week I focused more on Imperial City than the friends I ate with so I will try and put that right in this blog. The friends I had dinner with at Imperial City are very special to me - it has been a strange and sometimes confusing world we've lived in and without their humour and support it would have been a lot less bearable.

This week I caught up with an old friend over coffee and that was lovely. As we talked I realised just how much change there has been within the company and also how clear it is that there is a good life outside. I also had some very enjoyable lunches with other friends, looking at pictures of Washington (making me wish I was going there soon), Florida (making me wish I was going to Disney), talking with a friend who has recently left the group and looks much more relaxed for it and on Friday fish and chips with a great friend! It's so lovely to be able to share time with all of these people and now I have another week of it - lucky me!

Other than eating I have been doing some work and studying. T has edited my final essay for my OU course (clarity and spelling only of course), so now it's just a case of printing, sending and then waiting until August for the results.

In the Modern American Novel we started looking at As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. It's a modernist novel with 15 narrators and stream of consciousness.  I don't particularly like it but I can and do admire his technique.  Basically it's about a family, with a useless father, taking their mother home for burial in Jackson, Missisippi (sp?) and their thoughts about their lives and their journey.  Would I recommend it - yes if you like this kind of style.

This week we are looking at Ceremony which I know absoutely nothing about so I am really looking forward to that and Sense and Sensibility  on the Jane Austen course.  I am supposed to go to a talk on Thursday by CK Williams who is an American nobel laureate and poet but at the moment I just don't feel too enthusiastic.  We'll see how that goes!

I'm jumping around a bit but last week I went to a Royal Society of Literature event with Penelope Lively and Edmund de Waal.  They were talking about memoirs and how memoirs have changed from something very conventional ' I was born in X ....' to something far more complex so de Waal's Hare with Amber Eyes mixes his inheritance of his uncle's netsuke with the fate of his family over the twentieth century.  I really enjoyed it and am now wanting to read his book (another for the summer - just as well I have so much time off).  Before I went into the talk I had a look at the exhibition in the forecourt of Somerset House and took some pictures:

I also went a bit mad on my Southern Vampire mysteries (hence the fact I have to hope I love Ceremony and can read it in a couple of sittings).  I am now on book 9: Dead and Gone and things are getting much darker. I'm not going to give the plot away because you really should read them - they're not too much in the horror genre - but I really, really am on Eric's side now and I can't believe how far we are from the TV series.  I was supposed to be leaving some of the books to read on holiday so I'm really going to have to restrain myself.

This week I have an open evening at King's (College, London) on Wednesday night where all people holding offers for post-grad courses can come along, have a tour and listen to some sample lectures.  I'm both excited and nervous - what if I'm the oldest person there?  What if I'm older than the lecturers (and I'm bound to be older than some)?  What if everyone else is so clearly brilliant they'll make me stand in the cornr with a D on my head!  I'll report back next week.

Thanks again for reading (if anyone is reading this) and have a good week

Sandra

Mythical creatures, characters and weddings

Don't you just love these four day weekends! 

I've managed to write the first draft of my End of Module Assessment (EMA) for my Open University course on Myth in the Greek and Roman Worlds.  I'm writing about how the figure of Pygmalion has developed in some 19th & 20th century poems and paintings to express contemporary social concerns (treatment of women mainly).  It's just editing to do now!  

The course has been interesting, I think, but I'm not sure it was quite what I expected.  I chose it because I wanted to learn about lots of myths, mainly because they have quite a big influence of many of the authors and literature I have been/will be studying but the number of myths we have studied has been fairly limited (although perhaps it's my fault for not spending enough time studying?). 

I was, however, fascinated by the mix of myth and 'science' in Greek medicine - have a look at these pages from the Science Museum to give you an idea about the temple at Epidaurus.  Whilst you slept at the temple it was believed that snakes would come & heal you or a god might come to you in a dream and tell you how you needed to change your ways.  'Doctors' at this time were very into purging so you can see this 'faith healing' would probably prove far more attractive to people.

Of course I digress.  If you think this blog is worth returning to you'll learn I have quite the butterfly mind!  Writing about Pygmalion was very apt this weekend when we had the Royal Wedding and Kate Middleton being transformed from peasant to Princess.  Because of the magical powers we believe the dress has in this process I guess Sarah Burton (dress designer) was a bit of a Pygmalion in the process.  For the record I liked the dress and (probably more controversially) liked the trees in the Abbey.  It would have been nice to see all the flowers on the Saturday but £16 each was a bit much in my pre-pauper state!

The other thing I have accomplished (?) this weekend is to read Living Dead in Dallas and part of Club Dead.  They're part of the Southern Vampire Murder Mysteries written by Charlaine Harris.  A friend at work introduced me to True Blood  a few weeks ago and I am hooked.  I don't know if I enjoy it but I really am intrigued by the stories and the world.  If you don't know it: Vampires were able to come 'out of the coffin' because of the invention of True-Blood, a synthetic blood product, and Sookie Stackhouse the heroine has become involved in their world.  There's a lot of swearing and sex/nudity and some violence so it's probably not for everyone but it's not too horrific (it can't be, I couldn't read Dracula for my 19th Century Novel course - Buffy is about my level). 

The books are different from the TV series: a lot less swearing and the sex is obviously less graphic.  Characters change as well - some become more important on TV such as Tara, Jason and Lafayette and plot lines, whilst loosely based on the books contain elements from elsewhere.  They're a good, easy read and although I have to move onto something more 'literary' after Club Dead, I will return to the rest of the series.

I start my 'The Modern American Novel' course this week with Oxford University Continuing Education.  This is my fourth course with them, they last for 10 weeks and it's a good way to read and think about some new books and some old favourites.  I need to re-read The Great Gatsby this week ready for Week 2 of the course.  Gatsby is an old friend (wow, that sounds pretentious) as I'm sure it is for many of you.  I love the sense of doom that pervades the book and the mystery of Gatsby himself.  (The fact that Robert Redford played the part doesn't hurt either) I've never studied the book before tho' so I'm interested in the new insights I get from really paying attention to it.  I'll let you know how it goes.

If you read this please let me know what you think.  Is it too long?  Too many links?

Thanks for taking the time.