Testament of folly
Jun. 17th, 2013 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceOkay, class: what have I got in my pocketses do I most want, right now?
Quite right: a beer. Go to the head of the class.
What's that you say? You all said that? Very well: everybody has won, and all must have prizes. You may all process to the head of the class. That's okay: this class is multi-headed. Like Cerberus, but more so. I privilege only that student who brings me a beer, for I have none, alas.
I have, mostly, had a lovely afternoon. Tonight is yogi night, for the first time in a long time, and I have been cooking. As it happens I cooked yesterday and the day before and the day before that, but phooey: a meal is only a meal, but a yogi dinner is a feast. And Jeannie sent me a recipe for whole roasted tandoori cauliflower, so there's that, plus a beef pilao and an urad dal and a fresh mint chutney to go with.
The beef pilao should of course have been lamb, but Lucky's let me down, can you believe it? They've had lamb in plenty for weeks. Today, when I wanted it? Nothing. Bah humbug.
But the nice thing about all these dishes is that they're time-demanding early on, so I really have been busy all afternoon; even browning the onions took half an hour's close attention*. And Karen was working from home, so I didn't want to play music; so basically my mind has been following its own tolerably arbitrary tracks all afternoon.
I mused awhile on my facility with quotation - which may be less limber than it used to be, may indeed be positively arthritic now but is still there, embedded in my patterns of thought as much as speech: little phrases, snatches, echoes everywhere - and what it actually means when consciously or not, deliberately or not, we express our thoughts in someone else's words. Individually or culturally. And was there perhaps a blog-post there, or was I just too stupid to write it? And like that.
And then I was thinking about Oxford, and wondering whether students these days still use the old slang - is Christ Church still the House? - the way we did when we were kids; but actually we weren't students at all, we were locals and we'd learned it all from books or from our parents, and I really don't know whether the students of my Oxford days followed the old ways themselves.
And then I thought how odd it was that I had come this far in my thinking without the word "Wimsey" crossing my mind at all, because honestly: quotation, and Oxford? And the university argot, when he has himself a nephew up at the House and is not afraid to say so in so many words?
And then I was thinking about Lewis Carroll, and how I never really liked Alice despite Oxford and Sunderland too, despite my family and Bryan Talbot also, despite days on the river and nights in the text; and how none of that keeps me from quoting her, and there we are again, back at the head of the maze, picking up that thread to follow it down...
So, yeah. I was having a lovely afternoon, until I poured boiling water all over my hand. (Stoopid recipe: did they not stop to think that if you demand measurements of boiling water, in cups, those cups are going to overspill...?)
Anyway. Now I really really want a beer, and I do believe I just might go and get one. Or two. Or...
[EtA: or maybe not. Maybe I'll just stay home and drink gin.]
*Mind you, in her detailed instructions on the browning of onions, the nice recipe-writer says "My research has turned up no equivalent process in French or other Western schools of cooking." Has she never come across French onion soup...?
Quite right: a beer. Go to the head of the class.
What's that you say? You all said that? Very well: everybody has won, and all must have prizes. You may all process to the head of the class. That's okay: this class is multi-headed. Like Cerberus, but more so. I privilege only that student who brings me a beer, for I have none, alas.
I have, mostly, had a lovely afternoon. Tonight is yogi night, for the first time in a long time, and I have been cooking. As it happens I cooked yesterday and the day before and the day before that, but phooey: a meal is only a meal, but a yogi dinner is a feast. And Jeannie sent me a recipe for whole roasted tandoori cauliflower, so there's that, plus a beef pilao and an urad dal and a fresh mint chutney to go with.
The beef pilao should of course have been lamb, but Lucky's let me down, can you believe it? They've had lamb in plenty for weeks. Today, when I wanted it? Nothing. Bah humbug.
But the nice thing about all these dishes is that they're time-demanding early on, so I really have been busy all afternoon; even browning the onions took half an hour's close attention*. And Karen was working from home, so I didn't want to play music; so basically my mind has been following its own tolerably arbitrary tracks all afternoon.
I mused awhile on my facility with quotation - which may be less limber than it used to be, may indeed be positively arthritic now but is still there, embedded in my patterns of thought as much as speech: little phrases, snatches, echoes everywhere - and what it actually means when consciously or not, deliberately or not, we express our thoughts in someone else's words. Individually or culturally. And was there perhaps a blog-post there, or was I just too stupid to write it? And like that.
And then I was thinking about Oxford, and wondering whether students these days still use the old slang - is Christ Church still the House? - the way we did when we were kids; but actually we weren't students at all, we were locals and we'd learned it all from books or from our parents, and I really don't know whether the students of my Oxford days followed the old ways themselves.
And then I thought how odd it was that I had come this far in my thinking without the word "Wimsey" crossing my mind at all, because honestly: quotation, and Oxford? And the university argot, when he has himself a nephew up at the House and is not afraid to say so in so many words?
And then I was thinking about Lewis Carroll, and how I never really liked Alice despite Oxford and Sunderland too, despite my family and Bryan Talbot also, despite days on the river and nights in the text; and how none of that keeps me from quoting her, and there we are again, back at the head of the maze, picking up that thread to follow it down...
So, yeah. I was having a lovely afternoon, until I poured boiling water all over my hand. (Stoopid recipe: did they not stop to think that if you demand measurements of boiling water, in cups, those cups are going to overspill...?)
Anyway. Now I really really want a beer, and I do believe I just might go and get one. Or two. Or...
[EtA: or maybe not. Maybe I'll just stay home and drink gin.]
*Mind you, in her detailed instructions on the browning of onions, the nice recipe-writer says "My research has turned up no equivalent process in French or other Western schools of cooking." Has she never come across French onion soup...?