anactoria

Off to my first Welsh class in ~12 years shortly.

I have A Lot of Feelings about learning Welsh. Maybe one day I’ll marshal them into coherent form. In the meantime… er, at least mutations have got to be easier to remember than kanji, right?

Were. Awesome.

I am not normally a fan of massive gigs, but fuck me, the atmosphere in that place was immense. They pretty much played a greatest hits set, which is what you expect at a festival, after all, and really, I have no complaints. Because being one of fifty thousand people standing in a field singing along to "Sorted for E's & Wizz" is kind of... euphoric and hilarious at the same time, and "Common People" still sounds relevant and pissed off and fucking epic, and oh my God did he really just dedicate "Babies" to his mum? D: I was jostled, bruised, knackered, footsore, and very, very, happy.

Several other very good bands were seen during the day, but really, everything else just paled in comparison. Yesterday, we didn't catch the Megabus home until six in the evening, so spent a nice day doing general Camden/Chinatown wandering, drinking bubble tea, and generally chilling out. And for once, wandering through Camden market didn't miraculously cause all the money to fall out of my wallet, which was a definite bonus. The only problem, really, was... coming home. I always get a sort of horrible normality comedown when I've been to London, and have to start plotting excuses to go back. British Library, here I come...

Damn, I do seem to have been rather neglecting the LJ again lately. Sorry about that.

Tomorrow I am off to London, to see Pulp! XD I can pretend it's the 90s again! I can wear a hideous velour crop top and platform trainers! Well, okay, maybe not the last part. But. Pulp!

/incoherent blather.

How is everyone else?

I start teaching again tomorrow. I feel like I've spent the past week or two doing nothing but around like a headless chicken, and I AM NOT READY DAMMIT.

...surely I'm too old to be scared of looking an idiot in front of some hungover first-years by now?

I will shortly be heading back up to sunny Cambridge for the weekend, to go to my sis's graduation. She was one mark off a First, I'm so proud of her. XD

See you all next week!

So I've handed in the draft of my second chapter and finished (regular) work for the summer, and I'm rediscovering the reading of actual books, for pleasure rather than work purposes! I'm currently about halfway through Sixteen Shades of Crazy by Rachel Trezise, with whose writing I have a kind of love-hate relationship. On the one hand, it's often pretty bad. Her prose is often stilted and riddled with clichés, she nicks lines from song lyrics and plonks them in where she thinks no-one will notice, and seriously, nearly every chapter in this novel begins in the same, "It was Wednesday night, and Ellie was walking home from work..."/"It was Saturday, and Ellie was on her way to the pub..." format.

However. Her first novel, In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl, suffered from the same faults (uneven plotting, heavy-handedness, greeting-card shorthand) to a much greater degree, and -- aside from the ending, which I like to just ignore -- I loved it. It was a thinly fictionalised version of Trezise's own teenage diaries, and very much read that way, but it also had the kind of undisguised emotional rawness that's more familiar to me from confessional poetry and Courtney Love records than novels. Trezise writes about life in the South Wales valleys, and there's something in the way she captures it that really resonates very strongly with me. I'm from the Eastern Valleys, not the Rhondda (though I do spend a hell of a lot of time there) but at the heart of it I think the issue is the same. It's not just the unemployment and rampant drug use (which is worse there than here, I believe) but the sense of being caught between aspiration and a desire to get the hell out, and a wish to remain loyal to a national identity and a culture which can often be insular, somewhat sexist, and vehemently, proudly anti-intellectual. The way she handles that in the psychology of her protagonist, Ellie, has been beautiful so far. I'm actually almost afraid to carry on reading, in case the ugly revelations which will no doubt come out later in the novel hit too close to home. ;)

She also has an occasionally brilliant ear for dialogue. ("And rub ewer foundation in. Ewe look like a fuckin' baked bean." Something I've often felt the urge to say to say to girls on the valley line train, though not in so many words, they'd probably punch me.)

In other news, I'm heading up to sunny Cambridge tomorrow to visit my sister and hopefully imbibe quite a lot of wine. I'll post up the next section of The Deadly Light sometime on Wednesday, I expect.

I swear I'm more nervous marking essays than I ever was writing them and handing them in. WHAT IF I GET IT WRONG? THAT'S SOMEONE'S DEGREE!

Matters are not helped by the fact that all I really want to do is write about Dan trying to stop Rorschach and Adrian from killing each other while they investigate nefarious cults. Shouldn't there be some way of switching fannishness off while you're trying to do the stuff you actually get paid for?

I made vegan pistachio and rosewater cupcakes this evening. They didn't go flat or rubbery, or get burned, and they're really rather nice. I'm feeling very pleased with myself as a result. My cake-fu is improving. XD

Dad will still need to go in for some more tests in a couple of months, but the hospital are fairly certain he's okay. I cannot tell you how much of a relief that is. ♥


( Cut for meme-ishness. )