Academia is a weird thing. (You all knew that, anyway). I really wasn't happy with the way my paper went on Thursday, it felt rushed and incoherent, but all the responses have been very positive, and people keep buttonholing me to burble enthusiastically about particular points. (It's odd and rather wonderful, to have my usual inflict-on-my-friends acababble not only reciprocated, but spontaneously inflicted on me by others in a direct mirror of the way I usually inflict it on my long-suffering friends. My academic life is characterised by either babbling at my colleagues about the theory but without shared texts, or babbling at my friends about the texts without shared theory. It's an unhear-of luxury to have both, and to match content, background and enthusiasm three out of three instead of one or two).

It was also odd to read through my paper again last night, preparatory to sending it to the Times Educational Supplement (about which, fear, because they're doing a piece on the conference and want to assess the critical merit of the proceedings, which means there's a good chance of brickbats and hatchets) and to realise that actually it's a fairly coherent and well-substantiated argument, and if I got most of that across to the audience, it was probably OK. At the time it felt terribly scattered and unfocused.

And the other fascinating aspect of this whole bunfight has been, bizarrely, the religion. I didn't realise how much the St. Andrews theology thing was going to permeate the people and the proceedings. They have an Institute of Theology, Imagination and the Arts, and a number of papers were given by grad students from the institute (a result, I suspect, of a certain amount of strong-arming by one of the organisers who is also attached). It had honestly never occurred to me to consider HP in the light of its religious content, other than the odd bit of magical symbolism which is pretty much a given of Western culture, mostly because I'd personally categorise the books as entirely secular narrative. But, wow. Analysing HP symbolism from a viewpoint firmly entrenched in Christian mythology seems to give rise to surprisingly coherent arguments about its Christian content. Then again, one of the papers I really enjoyed was on pagan elements in Rowling's depiction of magic, which I suspect came firmly from a Wiccan background, and it was also coherent and convincing. Basically, a good solid symbol can dance through any number of hoops with suspicious virtuosity. Symbols are sluts.

Last night, of course, ended up in a pub drinking cider and arguing about religion, because clichés exist for a reason, and honestly there's only so long I can bite my tongue. A a solid phalanx of the religiously earnest is basically handing me a cupcake labelled "Eat Me". I instigated a spirited debate about how you deal with a student who tries to argue a critical insight from the point of view of faith (Divinity student: "Point out that their interpretation of theology is flawed." Me: "Absolutely not. The point is that their interpretation of theology is irrelevant." Divinity student: "I do not follow your Earth logic.") It's a fascinating thing, watching a trained postgrad intellect trying to remain critically rigorous and religiously convicted simultaneously. You can see the furrowed brows as space warps around them.

The whole thing reached its logical apotheosis in the second keynote paper, which was by an HP pundit who is an independent scholar and doesn't have an academic background. He's also devoutly religious. His paper basically insisted on a sort of Coleridgian notion of literary experience as a recognition of logos, i.e. the spiritual/divine aspect of the self recognising the same in the other. It was an extremely interesting paper, if a wee bit Dan-Brown-conspiracy (literature as alchemy, and ring construction), but its suppositions effectively left no point of access for a non-Christian: if you were an atheist, there was no argument. It was quite an eye-opening insight into the kind of critical rigour the grad school experience inculcates in you, whether you like it or not - the ability to think critically not just about a text, but about your own critical processes. I have to say in St. Andrews's defence that their Divinity grad students, while all fairly devout, were also scholarly enough to be fully aware of the gaps in the keynote thesis. It was an interesting debate.

I have spent a happy morning wandering around St. Andrews without actually freezing to death (go me) and now face several hours, alas, of marking. The penalties of leaving two days before both the end of term and the final essay submission date, and arriving back the day after the exam. My inbox is filled with essays on fan fiction. There are probably worse fates.

Scotland's cold is of the order of bite which indicates snow somewhere within breathing distance: it has fangs. It's been freezing and rainy today, with muffled scads of Harry Potter academics scuttling, blue-tinted, between venues under an outbreak of umbrellas. Yesterday, when I arrived, was actually sunny, but nonetheless stepping out of the stuffy plane onto the tarmac was a sudden plunge into an icy, intangible vessel. It shocked me out of the dull fuzz of muggy aircon and recyced breath into vivid alertness as my brain woke up and rushed into overdrive, whooping with exhilaration. I cannot sufficiently stress how much I love this weather. Some kindly meteorological deity dreamed it up just for me, and I worship at their icicle feet.

Of course, I don't dress for this climate worth a damn. Cape Town certainly does cold, and I have the clothes for that. What screws me is the bloody central heating. Anything I wear which protects me outdoors immediately causes me to overheat and blow a fuse the minute I enter a room. This is the land of the giant overcoat, such as I do not possess. Also, I hate central heating with the savage chill of a thousand winter wolves, or whatever else is theexact inverse of the fiery hatred of a thousand suns. A centrally heated room doesn't actually contain air, but a sort of strange, indistinct substitute which acts as a stifling mental eiderdown.

It would, however, be unjust to blame the fuzziness of my paper, delivered a few hours ago, on the central heating. The fuziness of my paper was due to having too much to say, and not enough time to say it in, and editing it on the fly. It was, I think, lively and provocative, and engendered a lot of debate, which was kinda the point, but I'm not entirely happy with the idea that the slightly incoherent filmed version is going to be wandering around the internet. I also, I realise, am still becoming tired too easily, and delivering a paper at 5.30 in the evening does leave me groping for words more often than I'd like. On the other hand, the written version is going to kick butt.

So far this conference has offered a bunch of lovely papers, a couple of boring ones, a lot of very animated discussion, a plethora of Americans, a surfeit of religious people (St. Andrews has a major Divinity school, and I keep having to censor myself, as I realised after a throwaway remark last night garnered some shocked looks¹), excellent chocolate brownies in the tea breaks, a ridiculous amount of beautiful medieval architecture, and a conference attendee who looks enough like Jake Gyllenhaal to be actively disconcerting. Tomorrow it offers more of a lot of the above, plus an interview by BBC Wales. Right now, it offers me the slightly luxurious sense of lounging on my giant, swanky B&B bed typing in my notebook, and almost immediate sleep. I am OK with all of the above.

---

¹ I mean, if you're going to talk about Mormonism being a religion based on a fantasy text, of course I'm going to immediately contend that all religions are based on fantasy texts. And yes, we were discussing Twilight.

Britain still does that thing to me where a random piece of landscape is like an unexpected blade to the heart: a combination of a sharp, intimate sort of realisation with a sense of slightly deadened loss. I suppose it's the legacy of a colonial upbringing with a highly British-centred experience of children's literature, so that the land itself is above all an imagined space, and its sudden reality poignant and shocking.

I was last actually in Edinburgh when I was about 8 years old, on a family holiday which I remember only in snatches (Edinburgh castle was cold and the hill was steep). But today the bus took me past the Spitfire memorial on a roundabout near the airport, and my response was one of visceral memory. We didn't fly to Scotland on that family holiday, as far as I can recall. I don't know if we even drove anywhere near the airport, but my subconscious firmly believes my dad was all enthusiastic about the replica of the old plane mounted in flight. My dad was a frustrated pilot, who flew gliders and spend his national service in the air force as a packer. The memory, even if it's a false one - the sense of familiarity - was very strong, with the same sense of not-quite-real distance.

The potential horrors of a 12-hour plane flight with a DVT in my recent past were, in the event, not as horrible as I feared. I think the challenge of this sort of trip is really in the expectation: once you're actually on the ground doing what needs to be done, it's just one foot in front of another, logically in sequence - paper-writing, packing, not having ones knees explode en route, the slightly complicated bus journeys to traverse the ordered, fertile country between Edinburgh and the university. The bit I was really dreading, actually, was injecting myself with anti-coagulant just before boarding, and in the event it was a total non-event - a nifty little self-contained syringe which is thin and sharp enough that it slides in with rather terrible ease to the soft tissue of one's stomach flab. (Reasons, I suppose, not to have a toned stomach). And I leaped up religiously every two hours and stood in the galley area waving my feet around in a circulatory sort of fashion.

I feel better than I usually do after that flight, actually. No sleep, of course, but less stiffness or swollen feet. Also, I have watched the latest Mission Impossible (silly plot, excellent cast except for Tom, that Jeremy Renner lad is really growing on me, Tintin (fun, faithful and rather beautiful in every aspect except Tintin himself), the new Muppet movie (awwwwww) and the second RDJ Sherlock Holmes. This last was a dreadful movie: RDJ's Sherlock has become a caricatured buffoon who owes nearly nothing to the source material. I'm not angry, just disappointed and a little hurt.

The town of St. Andrews - or, really, the university with a sort of frill of town on it, since I am in the midst of campus in a rather lovely B&B on the high street - is beautiful, medieval, green, immaculate. I am typing this on a wireless connection which randomly refused to work when I first booted up, I expect because of rogue Windows upgrades stuffing with my settings. I don't have the technical skill to work out why these things happen, it appears to be some sort of implacable enmity between long strings of arcane acronyms tending heavily to P and T and V, but I spent an hour systematically changing every setting I could think of until something worked. I feel obscurely triumphant. Not a geek, really: slow and inept, but persistent. Ah, Barracuda.

I am also, as you can tell from the flow of consciousness, suffering the logical effect of having not slept in nearly 36 hours, 20 or so of which have been spent either in airports or in aircraft. I'm a bit punch-drunk. I shall have dinner with the conference organisers tonight, count myself ahead on points if I actually remember or consciously control more than about a third of what I say, and shall go to bed extremely early. Tomorrow I give a keynote which is apparently being filmed for the benefit of the UK media attention this conference is randomly garnering, and which I suspect is about twice as long as its slot and will have to be ruthlessly pruned on the fly. Wish me luck.

The owner of this B&B apparently sold his old house in Edinburgh to JK Rowling herself a while back. I am obscurely cheered by this.

There’s a post from Joss on Whedonesque where he refers to his latest, box-office-record-breaking movie variously as “The Scavengers”, “The Availers”, “The Ravagers”, “The Lavenders” and “The Avoiders”. I could wax lyrical on the way in which every single tongue-in-cheek substitution is perfectly accurate for a particular facet of the movie (my slashy-subtextual defense of “The Lavenders” is a particularly fine piece of justificatory acababble), but mostly I’m just happy at the way in which Joss’s characteristic self-deprecation also perfectly encapsulates the mood of the film. The Avengers managed to construct itself as that chimeric and mythical entity which is at once a big-budget summer-tentpole blockbuster, with all its attendant boom and glitz, and a character-driven movie with an actual plot. It has heart and swash and its slightly angsty superhero tongue firmly in its cheek at crucial junctures, and consequently works as only something by Joss can work when it’s working well.

You may be noticing a slight subtextual hint that I enjoyed this movie. I loved this movie. I mean, I’m the world’s easiest sell on superheroes, you flap a cape at me and my inner “Whee!” takes over, but I also love the archetypes enough that, while bouncing happily in my seat, I am also supercritical about how they’re depicted. Joss, of course, gets it. While not quite descending to the levels of grit and angst promulgated by Nolan’s Batman, Avengers is simultaneously an ensemble film, a comic book movie, and one about real, live individuals. It partially rides, of course, on the success of its predecessors - both Thor and Captain America were amiable, character-driven pieces, and Iron Man was rather more than that - but its strength is in its ability to synthesise those individual backstories, simultaneously recognising the angsts and drives of the individuals while subjugating them to the needs of the group. And I am, as always, absolutely about the superhero ensemble. Joss himself acknowledges that the common trait of all these superheroes is their isolation, to a greater or lesser extent, into a world of their own - super-wealthy playboy, man out of time, alien god, assassin, sniper, Jekyll-and-Hyde entity afraid to be among people. In spite of that, he pulls them together into a whole that is coherent, functional and, by the end of it, even joyous, without ever losing sight of individual motivations and abilities, or stretching our credulity too far. (Inserts such as revelations of Nick Fury's manipulation of them contribute materially to this). It's quite an achievement.

The action in this film is pretty much non-stop, so it's interesting to look back on it and realise quite how character-driven it is. There's a particular skill with which the wildly varying power levels of the different superheroes have been integrated and balanced: Black Widow's martial arts training isn't even faintly in the same class as the powers of a Hulk or a god, but the script manages to assert her value nonetheless. (It's a particularly lovely bit of footwork which affirms the part-superhero, part-normal powers of Captain America, who resolutely remains my favourite character in the ensemble). Primarily, though, the explosions and what have you never feel gratuitous; they feel consequential, integrated, and in addition, they're also fun. This is absolutely not Batman. There are moments which epitomise the sense of superheroes as the sheer pleasure of agency, Hulk bounding around the show slapping aliens out of the sky in a sort of joyous abandon, or Iron Man "bringing the party to you". I also love the film's sense of play with the geeky stereotypes which speak both to comic book fans and to Joss's own following - one of my favourite moments in the film is Coulson geeking out over Captain America and wittering on about the pristine set of trading cards he wants signed. (Also, slashy subtext ftw).

No rhapsody about this film would be complete without noting that Joss seems to have pulled off the impossible, particularly, with the Hulk: the Avengers Hulk restores my faith both in the myth and in superhero film-making as a whole. It's possibly a bit odd to talk about the Hulk being humanised, but that's precisely what happens - certainly in the special effects, which neatly avoid Plastic!Hulk and integrate Hulk and Bruce Banner essentially and credibly via the motion capture, but above all in Mark Ruffalo, and in the script. Actor and writing work perfectly together to create not only a credible, world-weary man who retains something resembling a sense of humour about his situation, but also a rather endearing monster who stands not just for unrestrained violence, but for an unrestrained, childlike joy. If Hulk embodies a lack of sophistication, a stripping down to essentials, then the film demonstrates, vitally, that this does not only apply to the "smash" aspect of the character. Hulk is an important component in the film's address to a swashbuckling essence of superheroes: not the angst and conflict, but the simple coolness of magical, unlikely power. Hulk vs Loki is one of the great vignettes of the contemporary superhero story, both an assertion of evil's inevitable destruction within the superhero paradigm, and an amused and knowing nod to stereotype, comic-book power, and the villain's rueful subjugation to narrative expectation.

There was a terrible fear in watching this film, that a geek icon like Joss wouldn't have been able to pull it off. His experiences with Fox (hiss, spit) demonstrate all too clearly the extent to which a confident creative integrity is subject to the whims and warps of marketing. Marvel has generally a much more sane and coherent approach to their mythos films, but the fact remains, if Joss couldn't make something of this movie, it would have suggested, inescapably, that the giant blockbuster superhero ensemble simply couldn't be done. Thank the cosmic wossnames that it can, and the Marvel write-in campaign to put Joss behind the sequel starts here. I'm in.

I had a weird and slightly horrible experience yesterday, which was to wander into the university library in order to dig books out of their stacks. The nice library assistant person who checked my record (and to whom I have definitely given curriculum advice in the last year or so) revealed that I last took books out over a year ago. This is not quite as sad as it sounds: it's not that I'm not doing Serious Academic Stuff, it's just that these days I seem to do the Serious Academic Stuff either from online versions of journal articles, or (given the peripheral and non-pc-in-the-SA-context nature of my interests), by simply ordering copies of the books for myself. The academic landscape has been radically transformed both by the contemporary movement into virtual idea-exchange, and by my still rather new and bizarre possession of disposable income.

What it did mean, though, was that I haven't tried to use the library for actual research since they did a huge re-arrange of it at the start of last year (bang, may I add, in the middle of my orientation programme's attempt to put 1300 students through library tours in two weeks. The confusion was indescribable). It's a very swish space now, all comfy chairs and fancy wall-mounted computer monitors, and filled with studious students umbilically attached to laptops. What you don't see when you first wander in, though, is any particularly striking number of books. The main area has become a reference collection, with no shelves above about waist height (and it's not real L-space until they're over your head) and a lot of computers and info desks. I couldn't find the 800s section where I am wont to hang out. They'd moved it into the subterranean lair that used to hold the older journal issues. I cannot help but find this worryingly significant.

And they're breaking up the Special Collections libraries, including the speculative fiction collection we originated back in the Tolkien Society days, and which has grown in the interim, by the efforts of its wonderful librarian, into a significant chunk of genre material, both primary and secondary. You have to study sf/fantasy in genre, not scattered in isolation across vast tracts of the Dewey. It's about writing in community and context, and particularly in the academic sense, if you don't appreciate that, you're lost. But clearly non-pc-non-South-African collections Take Up Space even more than other categories of books, and are therefore expendable.

I am very much a denizen of the internet, and I couldn't survive academically or intellectually without it, but I also can't help feeling that something has been lost. For a start, I shouldn't be alienated by my own library. I grew up in this library, all the way from a titchy undergrad and right through the rigours of a PhD. It should be my home planet, the warm seas or intellectual air through which I breathe or swim. I should be at home in its most involuted and space-warping corners. If I have become disconnected from it by a process of abstraction, my intellectual pursuits all solitary and virtual, then I am no longer at home among its musty stacks. And anyway, they seem to have shrunk. Does the virtual realm even have L-space? Its own twisty byways, certainly, but not created by the sheer weight of words on paper in the way a proper library does. And I shudder to contemplate the virtual version of a .303 bookworm. You don't want to meet a .404 hollowpoint bitcruncher in a dark corner.

It is deeply significant that enormous piles of books are the one thing in the multiverse I don't mentally classify as cluttery, and therefore undesirable, stuff. And libraries damned well shouldn't, either.

Yesterday was Star Wars day, which means, ye gods, it's May. You can tell by the weather, which is still pleasingly damp and becoming bloody cold with proper wintery gravitas, and my state of fret. I give a conference keynote in less than two weeks, and the paper currently consists of about six pages of notes with "aargh" written at intervals, and a giant pile of books on the school story, through which I propose to wade this weekend.

You must forgive my lack of blogging: my moments of free time, of which there have been significantly few owing to an insane rash of meetings interspersed with angsty students, have been pretty evenly divided between finding succinct and creative ways to be rude about the Hogwarts idea of education, and retreating from same into a re-play of the first Mass Effect. (Because I played so badly first time around. My skills and tactics were horrible - I realise, post the Mass Effect 2 experience, that I managed to play the first game entirely without using cover, which does explain the wear and tear on the medi-gel. This time round I am pwning it slightly more handily, as well as picking up all the bits I missed).

It also means it's a new month, and time to acknowledge my debts. (This is becoming easier given that my blograte is so far down. This is a temporary state of things, I promise.) Reading chronologically, April has nicked bits thusly:

• 2nd. I actually have no idea where I dredged this up, it's one of those phrases which has passed into the proverbial lore of the slightly pretentiously gothic. It's actually Falstaff, from Henry IV Part II, a play I have never actually read. (Although I studied Henry V for A-Level, and am rife with opinions about it). The correct quote is "We have heard the chimes at midnight". I vaguely associate it with Thurber, although I suspect that's just the slighly ponderous gait of the phrase.
  
• 3rd. A quote from a rather amusingly sadistic nursery rhyme sort of thing, in which there were three in the bed and the little one said "roll over", so they all rolled over... etc. In retrospect, it's rather dodgy. You start out with a veritable orgy of ten in the bed, and whittle them down until the little one ends up splendidly alone and going to sleep. I remember my mother singing this to us, I have absolutely no idea where it originates. It does resonate rather well with my sleeping habits, though.
  
• 10th. A fragment of Magnetic Fields in marginally depressive mode. The song is "Infinitely late at night", off their album I; the flavour of the tune is sort of languidly-swaying French-ballady, a mode I associate with the fake-Frenchy elements of "Those Canaan Days" from Joseph. (News from the front: I can still recite all the colours of Joseph's bloody technicolour dreamcoat).
  
• 17th. "Jade Lady" is the name given to Phyrne Fisher by her luscious Chinese lover Lin. It refers to her tendency to look like a Manchu princess apart from the bright green eyes.
  
• 20th. The obligatory David Bowie quote, here from "Cat People", which is a song I seem to mine fairly regularly for quotes, it being strangely congruent with my interests.
  
• 22nd. Quote and song title from Postal Service, one I've actually used before, but it's such a lovely image. (Although the song is apparently about nuclear war, it has an odd balance of apocalyptic and sappy: "I've got a cupboard with cans of food, filtered water, and pictures of you/ and I'm not coming out until this is all over...")
  
• 28th. I actually referenced this one: Joss Whedon on cats.
  
• 30th. Quite one of my favourite quotes from The Avengers, entailing probably my two favourite characters in the film, and deploying the nicely Whedonesque balance of reference, fan service and tongue-in-cheek, ironic reinterpretation. Postmodern, in fact. Damn, I must write that review. Maybe tomorrow, if I conquer the school story theory.

Allons-y! Dissing Dumbledore waits for no man, although it may actually wait until I've finished Virmire. Dammit. My self-discipline is not only a small, fluffy, reluctant thing lurking on a rock somewhere, it's lurking on a rock while hunched manically over a computer game and refusing to be distracted. Sigh.

Ways in which The Avengers, seen yesterday at Cavendish, was precisely calculated to elicit outbreaks of geeky and fangirly glee:

1. Trailer for The Hobbit. Squeee! (The dwarves singing still makes me cry.)
   
2. Trailer for Prometheus. It looks both gritty and beautiful, and I will overcome my dislike of being scared in movies to actually see it.
   
3. Trailer for Spiderman. I like Spidey, and anything has to be better than Tobey McGuire.
   
4. Trailer for Men in Black III. Even if it's terrible, the essential good nature both of the movie and of its stars is likely to make it watchable. Also, aliens ftw. And, could the summer releases be any more geek-friendly? We've mainstreamed. Oo, er.
   
5. The movie. Joss Whedon is my master now. That was a perfect balance of character development, humour, pathos and severely kick-butt action. Wheee. I shall probably dissect it at length anon, but I'm still cogitating.

Ways in which watching The Avengers in Cavendish was precisely calculated to eject me from the cinema growling and swearing and gnashing my teeth at passing kiddies:

1. The 3-D. While this was nicely handled in the movie, I deeply and fundamentally object to the darkness of picture which inevitably results. Cavendish's light levels are always too low anyway, and there were tracts of this which were murky beyond belief. I will be delaying my re-watch until someone puts it on in 2-D.
   
2. The ham-fisted and oblivious incompetence of the Cavendish projector team, who turned the lights on full halfway through the mid-credit scene, rendering it both illegible and inaudible as two-thirds of the audience immediately started talking and leaving. I also have no idea if there was the usual post-credits easter egg, as there was no point in waiting for a tantalising washed-out glimpse. The level of fury this has engendered in me is slightly worrying. They may as well have replaced the entire credits with a large sign reading "YOUR EXPERIENCE FAR LESS IMPORTANT THAN YOUR SPEEDY EJECTION IN FAVOUR OF THE NEXT LOT OF BUTTS ON SEATS".
   
3. The inutterable twit who insisted on waiting for my parking place as I was leaving, blocking the road and forcing me to approach the ticket machine at right angles and necessitating a lot of backing and filling in the middle of a stream of cars. I'm afraid I shouted rude words at him.

It's actually bizarre how badly the lights-on thing wrecked my experience of the movie. The easter eggs are a sort of geeky in-joke, and staying for them is an expression both of insider knowledge and of investment in the text, both of which the unspeakably malignant cinema is obliviously slapping in the face. I swear, most of my future watching is going to be on the DVD version, and I hope Ster-Kinekor, its empty cinemas and all its bloody incompetent ilk sink gently into the sea.

On the other hand, mad props to the actual 6 students in my class this morning. There should be about 40, but on a Monday between public holidays I was expecting about 3, and I'll cheerfully settle for twice that.

I am not entirely enamoured of the feline tribe, right now. Not my feline tribe - or, at least, only my feline tribe by extension and adoption. Jo&stv are away bestmanning a wedding in the UK, and I've drawn catsit duty owing to the unaccountable whims of their previous steady catsitter, who went and got herself her own house. The duty entails feeding the cats daily, and also keeping a weather eye on the houseplants, garden and general property value. (The garden bit has been dead easy owing to the weather, which is currently rather pleasingly inclined to the vertical descent of water from above).

The cat-feeding gig has become somewhat fraught with danger, given my tendency to a slight unsteadiness on my pins even when sober, and the reaction of young Sproing, half of the jo&stv feline tribe, to the prolongued absence of his pink blobs. He becomes extremely needy and clingy, prone to walk just in front of one's feet nearly continuously, while he yowls and purrs in a slightly schizophrenic fashion and I fall over him at intervals, cursing. I can hear the yowls from the moment I get out of the car, as he lies in wait behind the front gate, presumably drawn by the sound of the engine. (It's amazing how quickly cats learn the finesse of engine note distinction which generally characterises only professional mechanics and Tony Stark).

The cat-sitting gig has also led to the occasional night spent in the house, by way of reassuring the kitties that they haven't been utterly abandoned. Sproing's state of clinginess is such, however, that he is a far from ideal bedmate. He curls up reasonably peaceably in the crook of one's knees, but is also driven, at random intervals during the night, to sashay up the bed to stick his nose into one's face, purring loudly. I am not accustomed to this. My own felines, by virtue of my fragile and dependent relationship with sleep, have been rigorously trained not to do this sort of thing. The third time he did it, it woke me up out of a fairly deep sleep in a state of disorientation which caused me to react instinctively and adversely to a giant, blurry, orange and white shape filling my entire field of vision - i.e. I went "aaargh!" and batted it away with enough force that he landed on the floor several feet from the bed. I am somewhat guilt-ridden about this involuntary action, but am pleased to note that (a) he appears unharmed and just as clingy, and (b) he didn't disturb me again last night. Also, you can see what I mean about the rigorous training of my own cats.

None of which, of course, prevents me from reacting with absolute approbation to the latest lovely quote from Joss Whedon. In reply to the query "Cats or dogs?", he gives us: "Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here's a mouse." Also, the Avengers movie is at about 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, causing me high levels of anticipatory fangirly glee. ("The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming." Hee). I'm going to go and see it tomorrow. Possibly twice.

In other news, I finally finished Mass Effect 2, as a result of which (a) I'm wandering around the house twitching vaguely from the withdrawal symptoms, and (b) this Harry Potter paper is actually taking shape. Also, as you may have noticed, (c) I'm blogging again. Blogging is clearly adversely affected by computer game obsessions, except, of course, when it isn't because I'm blogging obsessively about computer games. Watch this space.

The bird life in this garden is vaguely increasing, most notably in the case of the hadeda who has spent portions of the weekend sitting on the highest point of the house roof and whooping meditatively to himself in the approximate tones of someone being slightly distractedly murdered by inches. I blame global warming, myself.

Unusually, I can't also blame the cats for the unhappy dove corpse I found on the front doorstep the other day: it had clearly broken its silly neck flying into the big dining room window, and was moreover otherwise intact. If the cats get hold of a dove or pigeon it always explodes into approximately ten cubic metres of feathers all over the house, in an area effect which is in no way in keeping with the small size of the bird. I think it's something to do with quantum.

I am saddened by dead ring-necked doves, they're pretty and inoffensive creatures who are not prone to the slightly lobotomised, avian snickering of pigeons. What I have found, very weirdly, however, is that the dead dove appears to have left an absolutely perfectly bird-shaped impact mark on the window. I have spent all weekend wandering out there at intervals and attempting to photograph it, from a variety of angles and in a variety of lights. This was last night, and seems the most successful: while it's not a great photo, I'm pleased with the detail.



It's a rather pleasingly strange and ghostly phenomenon.

Jumping through all the hoops set by the British in the visa obstacle course has caused me to go back to old blog posts in order to work out where and when I travelled at various points in the last decade. (Couldn't find my old passport, so thank heavens for the online diary). This has vouchsafed to me the revelation that I used to post an awful lot more photos than I do currently. I'm not sure why, although I suspect the post-exhaustion reconfiguration of my working day not to start at 7am has cut out a lot of the early-morning-Common shots, alas.

Thus, in mitigation, have some random cats. This photo demonstrates, variously, (a) the beautiful colour graduations in our feline population, (b) a slightly illusory instance of their actual and amicable co-existence, (c) something of the reason behind all the jokes about the Left Wing of the Evil Landlord's Bed, (d) the ineradicable fact that I still haven't got this focus thing quite down, and (e) ears.



Working at home is very civilised. I am contentedly noodling through a week's worth of plaintive student plaints, putting out fires with no more interruptions than the occasional need to replenish the tea supplies, dodge the nice charlady's vaccuuming endeavours, and wind the clock.