Woken marginally before the alarm went by A. putting the radio on – she has an even earlier start than usual, with a quick appointment for a routine blood test before heading into work. Got up to do last night’s washing up, remember to take a bread roll out of the freezer for her lunch and make tea; thick head full of phlegm, as the cold that’s been hanging around for the last couple of days seems to be coming out. Cats are still being very weird after Hans’s death last week; Hector briefly sits next to us then makes a grumpy noise and jumps up onto the wardrobe, which Olga takes as a cue to disappear under my legs under the duvet. News full of stupidity; apparently Lee Anderson is the true beating heart of Conservatism – which would actually confirm a lot of entrenched prejudices about the Tories, if one thought most of these unnamed MPs were entirely sincere, rather than sharing his prejudices but quietly sneering at his vulgarity.
Possible explanation for Hector’s mood is suggested when he throws up on the rug during breakfast, including a dark fibrous mass that can plausibly be linked to the catnip toy he eviscerated and shredded yesterday; obviously feeling better, he switches to righteous fury about not being allowed outside yet. Strange as it feels to have only two cats in the house for the first time ever – not counting times when they’ve all been off in jail, before and after we take a trip – there are times when just one cat can make it feel very small. Hector is not a subtle cat; Olga, on the the hand, slinks and wheedles.
Working at home today, so the first key task is to work out what’s causing the awful smell that suddenly turned up in the study yesterday so I can actually bear to spend any time there. In fact the smell as just as suddenly disappeared – which suggests a link to the lunch wrapping that was left in my satchel over the weekend… On with the emails and teaching prep, the latter made slightly more complicated by the fact that students were offered the chance last week to complete mid-module feedback; only a couple have actually responded, entirely constructively but I’m left with the dilemma of whether I change my approach on the basis of a tiny, probably unrepresentative sample, or ignore them although these are clearly the students who are most engaged. Are the others basically content with everything, or mired in alienated disaffection and apathy?
Rather than the feelings of moderate illness dissipating in the course of the morning, as they’ve tended to do in recent months, these ones hang around; work is slow and a bit of a struggle as a result, especially as, once I’ve updated my Roman Political Thought lecture to include a load of portraiture (to consider the depiction of virtue and leadership), my key task is to prepare a class on Xenophon’s historiography that isn’t simply a rant about his general inadequacy. Break for online meeting of departmental leadership team in which my presence feels as redundant as ever, break for lunch and watching an episode of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who on catch-up (the one in which he slips into a parallel dimension where Nicholas Courtney has great fun playing a fascist version of himself, that I remember – as with all of these – from the novelisation). Break for online Q&A session with Greek Historiography students in relation to forthcoming assessment; eight of them attend, most of them with actual questions, and it’s good to see that at least a couple of them are considering taking the Generative AI optin, as I was afraid they would all end up being too small-c conservative and afraid of trying anything unusual. More Xenophon; break for tea; finally finish Xenophon. And have to start thinking about the following week, exploring a different aspect of Xenophon – which, to be fair, is easier, as anything not involving the Hellenica is easier…
A. returns home after an aggravating day, including being ticked off by a manager for using the wrong font in some minutes; the cats get very excited at the possibility of being able to persuade her that I had forgotten to give them some nice food at half past four. She lights the fire – the weather has turned unpleasantly cold, and it’s not just because I’m feeling under the weather – while I get on with supper, experimental Persian-style marinated salmon and saffron potatoes. We watch the final episode of season 6 of Buffy together – the semi-annual rewatch has finally staggered to the end of the worst season ever, and even developing a theory of its uncanny prescience (everyone’s miserable, horrible things happen, no one takes the creepy misogynists seriously enough) has not persuaded me that it’s any good. Then I headed upstairs for half an hour of musical tinkering – I am definitely not in the mood for having my homework looked at in jazz class this week, but I am certainly making sure that I have some just in case.
Back downstairs to the fire, the kittens squabbling over the smaller cat basket – it would be big enough for both of them if Hector didn’t insist on stretching out his legs in all directions – and the first episode of season 7, which is a breath of fresh air after season 6, especially the final scene with Spike being harangued by a series of deceased villains from seasons past. Then Great British Menu, trying not to get annoyed about the very shaky connections to the theme displayed by some of the chefs – the Olympics doesn’t appear to be as inspirational a brief as last year’s cartoons and illustrations. The really fascinating aspect this evening was the entirely plant-based cook doing a fish course – it’s oddly easier to imagine a vegan approach to the massively meat-based main course, perhaps because there the goal is to replicate texture and heartiness, whereas the fish course is more directly linked to a specific kind of ingredient. Well, good news is that we get to see this theory tested tomorrow…
Nine o’clock: bed, feeling very tired and achy, and a bit grotty. Olga as ever comes up for her regular cuddle – she’s been demanding more cuddles throughout the day since Hans began to decline, but the bedtime session is clearly a fixed point in her day. Once we’ve actually in bed, Hector comes to lounge against me and have his tummy tickled until I stop doing killer sudoku and turn the light out, at which point he goes back downstairs to enjoy the last of the embers. Dream, recursively, about dreams.
Any season with Once More with Feeling can’t be all bad
I quite like Tabula Rasa as well. But I think it is notable that only the ones played as comedy, leavened by all the ongoing psychological issues and relationship problems, come out as at all enjoyable.
Didn’t Spike wear that outrageous suit in “Restless”? I hope he had it dry cleaned at some point.