“As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of Toys, and St Nicholas too. . .”
I just walked from the kitchen to my room several times singing very loudly ‘The Happy Wanderer.’
I’m sure Spencer, from the back of the house, wasn’t too happy about the singing.
But it is so GOOD to be back. ( :
It is early, and I woke this morning to the sound of my roommates saying goodbye. My favorite quote? “I’m not leaving. The bus driver will be driving away and I’ll be sitting in the back and screaming, and pushing every last bus stop for 20 stops. He’ll have to tell me to calm down.”
It is a sad time, these goodbyes. But we manage to have a little humor.
Back in Oxford from Paris, and getting packed up and ready to go. It’s a sobering process.
Today is particularly misty and foggy – you read of ‘London fogs,’ but this is the first time I remember this much fog in Oxford, and the buildings on the street ahead are partially obscured by white. This is the fog film directors dream of.
Also, how many other places in the world can you buy blackcurrant-flavored throat lozenges for your cough? They taste a little bit like applied market research.
Charles de Gaul airport has a piano-player. I didn’t expect that. It’s incredibly wealthy, I suppose, and huge, but who ever heard of a piano accompaniment at the airport? The equivalent of flight hold music, I suppose – but nicer.
It’s reminding me of home, of the Christmas piano music we play when everyone is moving slowly this time in the evening. And it reminds me that I want to be home next to a gas fireplace and watch somebody read the paper, and to sleep with one of our Christmas afghans wrapped up to my shoulders.
Oh, also: after this trip, I am determined that I want to marry a Frenchman. I never found them especially attractive among Europeans until I saw the Academy Awards last year when I saw Jean Dujardin win his Oscar for The Artist, and from then it was almost all over, until I came on this trip and realized that there are many more like that.
London from the air is indescribably beautiful. Aiken probably could describe it, but I haven’t the tools at the tip of my pen.
“who are you,little i
(five or six years old)
peering from some highwindow; at the gold
of november sunset
(and feeling: that if day
has to become nightthis is a beautiful way).”
— e. e. cummings
Dear tutor,
When I write ‘astronomical’, I mean astronomical. Do you think I put these things in my essays because I secretly was hoping to submit them as manuscripts in my undercover career as a suspense novelist?
The Rain & the Chickweed 