Reading

Patricia Finney: FIREDRAKE'S EYE. Very well written historical detective story, based on Tom O'Bedlam. Her version of Elizabethan London is very alien and strange.

Otherwise, I'm reading Faye Kellerman's detective novels for the first time, and enjoying them. I like the emphasis on Judaism, a religion about which I find I am lamentably ignorant in spite of the presence of a large number of Jewish people among my friends and loved ones.

More esoteric reading is Culhwch ac Olwen, the (allegedly) earliest of the stories in the Mabinogion, for this course. Also rather weird. Either bits of it are lost, or it's written according to satirical precepts which we're just not privy to these days.

"Brits more cultured than the Italians" shock.

Boy, you could have fooled me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,2763,1418110,00.html

Is anyone else really annoyed by that brown sauce advert?

10 Things I've done that others might not have

Meme nicked from klwilliams

1.Was one of the first female postgrads to graduate from Magdalene College Cambridge (they took only a few hundred years to decide to let chicks in).

2. Had a row with a KGB bodyguard and won.

3. Stayed in a guest house overlooking an open-air crematorium.

4. Prepared a corpse for burial.

5. Excavated an Iron Age grave.

6. Seduced a man in a Turkish bath (but got interrupted).

7. Taken part in the first 20th century recreation of a Thelemic Rite to Venus.

8. Had a curse lifted from me by a Siberian shaman, in Siberia.

9. Was nearly murdered (accidentally, OK) by my boyfriend in an Indian hotel.

10. Got lost in a housing estate in Canton.

Reading other people's, I'm just amazed at what people have done! What a phenomenal lot.

10 things I haven't done

Gakked, sorta, from klwilliams again:

1. Had a baby (though I have been pregnant).

2. Lived in the country (though I have lived briefly on a small island).

3. Been anyone's wife.

4. Had a life threatening illness (AVERT!).

5. Taken Communion.

6. Been anywhere in the southern hemisphere (one day).

7. Eaten sea urchin in a sushi restaurant because someone told me it was the most disgusting thing he'd put in his mouth ever, and IIRC this was a man who has tasted eyeball.

8. Learned to speak Welsh properly (working on this one).

9. Had root canal work (please God, no).

10. Died. But it's gotta happen one day, even to me.