Groan…

Today, I need to write lectures on Book 7 of Malory's La Morte d'Arthur, one on the 'Miller's Tale', and one on Joanna Davies's Ffreshars/Freshers. Instead, I'm off to a casework meeting for the union, and then a branch meeting to receive yet more bad news about this place. God alone knows when I'll get the work done…

I feel like a very old man this morning. I went fencing last night, and really pushed it because loads of good opponents turned up and I didn't want to waste the opportunity. For a change, everything went brilliantly, and every move I tried worked really well. I'm not actually any good, but I am awkward, which works quite well until people start thinking about what I'm doing.

So by the time I got back from fencing it was gone 11, at which point I thought I'd dip into Jo Walton's Among Others (sample): a post-industrial Welsh/English adolescence fairy fantasy novel, amongst other things. It's a book obsessed with the possibilities of reading: the central protagonist is a teenage girl obsessed by science fiction and the potential ways to live, think and dream expressed in the multitude of books she's read (though her addiction to Tolkien is rather off-putting).

Come 3.30 a.m., I'd finished it and was wide awake, hence my grumpy mood this morning…