BACK!
Was going to stay away until I had something to say that wasn't a complaint, but realised that the day would never come and I do rather miss blogging. So, um, hi.
Can I recommend to you Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves? She wants to set up a militant wing of the society for the protection of the apostrophe (apparently that society does exist and in a most respectable and genteel way) to go around correcting misplaced apostrophes on greengrocers' signs and movie posters and I feel her pain. Besides, she's funny. And she has convinced me of the virtues of punctuation, even in blogs and emails. I am a reformed creature.
And (though she would deplore my tendency to run to italics) there's a wonderful example of a misplaced apostrophe in her book: BOBS' MOTORS. If I ever have a son I shall call him Bobs. Or not.
I should say this on the book blog we all share, but um I've forgotten how to post anything there. (If you're reading this, will you teach me?) So. In the last few months - god has it been that long? - I've stumbled upon George Eliot and never looked back. So far I've read Mill on the Floss, which I now regret refusing to read back when my sister was doing it for A Level Lit (sorry); Daniel Deronda, which I tried to like and couldn't; and Middlemarch, which gives me the same sort of muddled bewilderment that Marx does - I know I'm in the presence of a master, but it's too much to absorb. I can't like Dorothea much, though. I like her in her muddled and anguished moments, and I do sympathise, however reluctant I am to admit it, with the Dorothea at the beginning of the book, but it's too hard to like someone who's beatific half the time. I was looking for Middlemarch because A. S. Byatt said she read George Eliot as an undergrad and couldn't understand the appeal, and then read Middlemarch when she was struggling with teaching and writing and bringing up her kids and wondering what the hell it was all about. Well I've far more choice that Dorothea did, so much so the comparison's ridiculous, and it's probably unsound critical practice to take books quite so personally but - I can see myself doing that, getting into some modern-day equivalent of a marriage to Casaubon (or getting into a marriage with a modern-day Casaubon), and then being terribly unhappy because I can't get out of it. (Beat.) Want to help me break my bond? But what would I do then?
Damn but I wasn't going to talk about my job, or my utter failure at it. There are some days when I'm awfully depressed about work and some when I'm all psyched up about my job and I've come to the realisation that these days bear absolutely no correlation to the work itself. Do you think it's all hormonal, and maybe I should just go have more chocolate, or something? I shall go find some.