What's brown and sticky?*

As it happens, the subject line for this post is My Favourite Joke Ever. (Why yes, I am a cheap date too. Unless you take me somewhere expensive.)

But! It is not my favourite description of a workspace. I am, of course, in the Lit & Phil - and Someone Else Is In My Chair, At My Desk. Grr. So I am at the substitute desk, where the fake-leather top is brown rather than the more desirable black - and some unmentionable degraded unsoul has been eating marmalade (Paddington, I'm looking at you) and left it smeared all along the desk-edge. So that now my hands are sticky, and I have to go and find a cloth and do housework. Double-grr!

(Also, I do not want to write this book today.)

* A stick.

For the curious

The book launch went okay last night, thanks for asking. Something on the order of fifteen people, which felt thin but not embarrassing; and they did buy books, yay. I think I knew them all, but we have established long since that I really have no audience beyond my friends, so hey.

Today is not going so well, but I'll survive it. I just wish I could get this book rolling; it seems to be all corners at the moment.

Going to go out in the lovely sun now. Today, the doctor; tomorrow the dentist. One little thing at a time.

I keep looking at things in the house and thinking "I wonder, does one take [item] with one, when one emigrates? Or replace as needed over there?" The items in question range from little tupperware spice-containers to desktop computers, and I find myself equally baffled every time. I've just no idea, what's sensible and what is stupid, to take or to leave behind. And then I get all anxious about culture-shock, and wonder what I shall do for lamb's kidneys and proper sausages and Marmite. (Actually, if I take a jar of Marmite it'll probably last me to the end of my days, for I never think to eat it; but, y'know. It's the principle of the thing.)

[EtA: one of my friends last night offered to adopt the boys, to save the hassle of moving them across the Atlantic. Oddly, they are almost the only thing it has never occurred to me to leave behind.]

Well, damn

You know this packing-to-go-away thing that I am struggling with?

Just for a moment there, I had entertained the charming notion of not having to worry about my archive, that whole thirty-five-years-of-manuscripts thing. I thought I'd leave them behind, house them with the Lit & Phil, make them available to scholars and so forth. Have them out of my hair.

Tragically, the Lit & Phil has no space, so I guess I have to take 'em after all. Karen has no space either, but hey. I can winnow; we can cope. (Or I could just stick 'em all up in the attic here and abandon 'em to whimsy...)