You never quite believe it - you think for a moment you must actually have locked it up somewhere else, and I had a futile wander up and down the road just in case it happened to be leaning around somewhere else, but of course it was not. Some bastards saw an opportunity and went for it. Thing is, because I am paying it off in instalments, I will be paying for another six months for a bike I don't own any more!! Am waiting to hear from HR at work about what I should do now - was it perhaps covered by some Museum insurance, because technically (I guess) I do not own it until I have finished paying for it? Can I have another Ride2Work scheme bike on the go while I am still paying off the last one?
Sooooo annoying, as the weather has been beautiful this week - mild and autumnal - and I keep wistfully looking out of the window and wondering how lovely it would be to cycle home in... Also I have been feeling under a lot of pressure with work - again, as I suppose is becoming usual now, as we lose staff and don't have the money to replace them, so everyone is doing an insane amount of work... so it would have been great to have the cycle home to de-stress. Instead I have to battle with the tube - and the Victoria Line has been positively boiling with the unseasonally warm temperatures this week. I was at Green Park station during rush hour last week - coming back from attending the Oriental Ceramic Society council meeting, followed by a very fine tea with George in the Royal Academy café - and there must also have been some problem with defective trains, or defective tracks, or god knows what, because three tube trains came and went and there was no way that all the people on the platform, which was constantly filling up, could cram themselves into the already-full carriages. In the end, I changed platforms and went north to Warren Street, changed platforms again and went back south. It was the only way to get home!! (without losing too many of my marbles)
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I have started a new research project - for an encyclopaedia article I have to write by the end of January, on Almoravid religious spaces in Fes and Marrakesh. It's nice to start something new, and also to get back to research areas I want to expand into, rather than endlessly going over old ground, which is what it feels like with my Islamic Arts from Spain book, now that the third set of proofs is about to come in... I have been reading photocopied articles while I travel to and fro on the tube, most of which are in French, since it was mainly French scholars of the early 20th century who have worked on the architectural history of North Africa - and not much done since, due to an unfortunate hangover of European imperialist perspectives that the cultural achievements of Africa are not worthy of serious scholarly attention... Happily, that is changing now. And it's good for my French too.
But in between trying to get my research done on the tube, I have been enjoying having a free subscription to the London Review of Books. A colleague 'gave' me this subscription by putting my name forward - she got something out of it too, a book token or some such. But I am completely hooked and will certainly pay to renew the subscription when the time comes - very clever marketing on the part of the LRB. It is very satisfyingly left wing, and snobbishly makes me feel very intellectual, surrounded - as one usually is on the tube - by readers of the Metro. When I first moved back to London and started commuting to work (my own "year in Catford", as satirised - that very year! - by The Chap magazine, which is very sadly not available on their online archive...) I was taken aback by getting on the train in the morning and being met by a wall of everyone reading the very same newspaper. Talk about brainwashing. Since then we have had to endure the ridiculous street competition of the free evening rags - the London Lite, and the London Paper, which has already mercifully folded, excuse the pun. Hopefully the London Lite will go soon, now that the Evening Standard is back, and being given away for free!! (oh the politics of freebie London newspapers!)
BUT in the LRB, I have become completely addicted to the classifieds, or rather I should say the personals. This is a typical offering:
Small but perfectly formed ex-hack turned jurisprudential insurrectionist seeks proper gent/unicorn with wit, charm and optimistic approach to Bakhtinian dialogics. (F, 29)A few months ago, there was one in Latin! I would have loved to see the responses - I hope they were in Latin too!
I also love the fact that I read about things I would not have read about otherwise ... but I suppose that is in the nature of magazine subscriptions.
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The clocks have gone back now, so it's dark when I leave work. My body clock is so adjusted to 'working till it gets dark', that I now think about leaving work a bit earlier, which is a good thing, but then I don't actually do it, which isn't. They went back last Sunday, which meant I spent the whole day experiencing that feeling of it being later than it was, because it was, and then the whole week feeling I was late for things. Why is it we do this again??
----------------------------------------------------------Thought for the day: If you Twitter, are you a Twat?
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