Another week has gone in a blur. There have been Olympic games, but between the time difference and the absence of the sports I most want to watch from the BBC platform, I've watched very little. Bits of archery, climbing, badminton and table tennis, but no fencing and very little cycling. It all feels rather irrelevant. Instead I've filled my time with marking essays and counselling students. Very important, but no medals are awarded to them or me. I have managed to fit in a couple of bike rides, a walk with colleagues and filling my boss with enough whiskey and animal fats to satisfy Mr Creosote though.
I did read a draft MA thesis about identity, fandoms and #freebritney which was astonishingly good though - far outclassing all the media coverage I've read. I'm hoping that student will go very far indeed, though obviously the government thinks that - being working-class and provincial - she should confine her ambitions to manual labour. But at least in future all those nurses will have good Latin. Not that I'm opposed to Latin per se (see what I did there?). Indeed I have a very poor A-level in it, and a better GCSE in Ancient Greek. I just think that feeding children, fixing up school buildings and teaching modern languages might conceivably be higher priorities. There seems little point in deliberately abolishing music, art and humanities at university level while simultaneously turning school-level Latin into a totem. Perhaps Gavin Williamson thinks that it's his inability to bandy popular classical tags around that kept him out of the top spot…
I'm trying to do my bit for the economy as we emerge from the pandemic, mostly through buying books and music. My purchases this week: the final part of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy; Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (which sounds hilarious); Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun; David Ensor's Verdict Afterwards (another forgotten but rather scandalous politician-novelist); Louise Lawrence's rather uncheery Children of the Dust; Lord Berner's Collected Tales and Fantasies (he was the model for Nancy Mitford's Lord Merlin); Shola von Reinhold's interesting-sounding Lote which might well find its way onto a module reading list; Sathnam Sanghera's Empireland and the book I'm reading first - an omnibus of the first three Ngaio Marsh Inspector Alleyn 1930s detective novels. I'm not particularly interested in contemporary crime fiction, but Marsh wrote 30+ of these over 50 years, so it will be interesting to see how she negotiates social and cultural change. I've read all of Margery Allingham's Campion novels, which started off quite conventional but became interestingly odd in the post-war period - 1952's The Tiger in the Smoke is unsettling and fascinating.
I've also bought some new music: Katharine Priddy's modern folk album The Eternal Rocks Beneath which isn't as edgy as I expected but is really good (she gets extra marks for wearing the hippy shirts we all sported in 1990s Bangor), a new recording of Nico Muhly's Shrink and Philip Glass's String Quartet No. 3, Missy Mazzoli's Vespers for a New Age and cellist Maya Beiser's new arrangements of several Glass pieces. Oh, and KD Lang's greatest hits because no music collection should be without it. Though saying that reminds me of the immortal Alan Partridge exchange.
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