supremely trivial mundane membranes will smother all unthinkably lame namers of names

First off, Happy New Year.

Well, it's been a good while, and I don't know quite what i can do in terms of making up for all this lost time. I think nothing. I must constantly remind myself that I'm doing this for me and not for you. Even with that hurdle overcome, there are so many obstacles obstructing the paths that led me up to writing this.

The very keyboard I am using is FUCKED. The "L" key doesn't work, unless I first press "K" . Pay close attention here, there may well be some instances of missing letter L's, scattered throughout this bog. It's incredibly annoying. I want to throw our 10 year old Sony Vaio from our 10 storey window. I shoudn't thoughl. How many modern devices ike that have such a remarkabe ifespanl.

We had a guy round here once to repair a pane of glass that had started to crack in our living room window. The man I called out to do the job was, on first appraisal, both hapless and hopeless. That initial judgement proved to be entirely accurate. I watched on in horror as he dropped his hammer, not once, but twice, 10 floors to the street below. Fortunately, no one passing below at the time had the misfortune of breaking the hammer's fall, but it could easily have been quite different. In a fatal way.

Anyway, I've had enough for now. I'll leave you with a bit of what's on my tiny little mind right this very instant:

What are the limits of language? What can be said and what cannot? Is there a real difference between a dialect and a language?
How many uses are there for the word quite in English?
I've decided that as a teacher I should trade in descriptions and not explanations wherever possible.

Some mild mispronunciation fun:

"When I go home tonight, I'll asses my email account."

Bye for now.

Chapada dos Veadeiros

horny issue

The building is supposed to represent a crown of thorns.

But what is thorns?

Well, do you know what a rose is?

Isn't it something sexual, something about sex?

Not quite, I think you're thinking of arouse.

toilet humour

Don't you think it's time you got that out of your cistern?

the locus of my focus is hocus-pocus

Last night I was in Glasgow, in George Square. It was late afternoon, overcast and snowing lightly. A man was straining up at the sky with binoculars in his hand. He turned to me and said, " Can you see that up there? That eagle? I can't make out what type it is." He handed me the binoculars and I pressed them to my eyes. I looked up and saw a rectangular form and I could make out a spotted pattern, unlike any eagle I'd ever heard of, never mind seen.

Within an instant it was coming in to land. Much to my awe and bemusement it wasn't an eagle at all. It was a flying lynx with flaps of skin between its legs like the sugar gliders and the flying squirrels. It came to land like a fighter jet settling on a warship. For a few precious moments it stood stationary surveying the square before padding off hastily towards the East End. Naturally, I pursued.

I'm not sure how, but I managed to keep it in sight, following it through some strange architecture; concrete passageways and tunnels confused with scrub and coniferous bushes, until eventually it paused on a gigantic flight of steps. I wasn't certain if the people around us were indifferent or simply oblivious.

Desperate to document the extraordinary beast, I reached for my camera, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it in focus.

I awoke thinking about getting up to see if I'd managed to capture anything on film. Gradually that thought gave way.

The UK is in Front, and The US are Behind

That's just a way of remembering where I am,
in terms of time zones.
A time zone can at the same time be a country.
China.
One nation, one time.

Mystery of Mansfield

Last Wednesday I was teaching a member of my student body: current body count: 14. At some stage in a conversation, this particular student began to extol the virtues of a writer, one Katherine Mansfield, and urged me strongly to familiarise myself with her prose. Now I always welcome tips, suggestions and dicas from students: restaurants, films, places of broad and places of specific interest, music, places to go to find stuff, bars, plumbers, slang, shortcuts, sound advice, etc, and I often write them down at the back of my notebook and forget all about them. Thus I wasted no time whatsoever in noting down this writer with a view to doing the very same. I left the house of this student, boarded my bus and headed on to my next port of call.

I always teach this student in her study, walled in by an impressive library. I seated myself, as I always do, and my eyes wandered casually around the giant wooden table while she searched out a cigarette lighter on which to fix her concentration, and I gathered thoughts in the name of education.

Something at once caught my eye. What should be sitting on top of a pile of books right in front of me but a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield.

Now that in itself, I agree, is not terribly strange, but when I asked her about the book and what she thought of it, not only had she not read it, but she didn't have the slightest clue where it had come from, and claimed not to know who it belonged to. In other words, she assured me it wasn't hers. That's just the mystery of Mansfield.