I have not written a word of acceptable-quality fiction since NOVEMBER. True story. I haven't any reason to believe this has changed, but I finished watching Sherlock this week finally, and, eh. In other news, it's very warm, I've had a headache for a month and my supervisor moved me into a new, clean office on Thursday and it now has five ring binders, four stacked files, a layer of spread papers, three half-used legal sketch pads, several gallons of sweet wrappers, several fake handbags and a Peters projection map in it. Why self, must you be the COOLEST.

fic:: and now, the shipping forecast
by Raven
4000w, Sherlock (BBC), gen, John, Harry, ensemble. After Sherlock's death, John thinks (too much), drinks (not enough) and, on a tide of sisters' ex-wives, cheese and kindness, sails on.

Warning: (skip) oblique handling of suicide aftermath; oblique references to a murder.


( november )

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Hello, flist. Apologies for being quite as crap as I have been being recently. I have a migraine. It's no good at all. I had about fifteen migraines in two weeks, and then on Thursday I started having a migraine that hasn't stopped yet. Three types of pills and a lengthy visit to out-of-hours haven't helped, and although everyone has been very nice (I tweeted about how much I heart NHS Direct - they retweeted me! I thought it was sweet) I am in pain and cranky and very, very worried about work.

( about that )

So that's why I'm a little out of things. To try and keep my mind off things I am watching Satyameve Jayate on YouTube, which I am enjoying thoroughly - I always like it when actors whom I love because they are delectable are also likeable for reasons of being decent human beings, and really, Aamir Khan is - and it's kinda melodramatic and scripted but hey, where's any other show doing what it's doing. So. Y'all should watch it. (I've had no luck finding a version with English subtitles, but will post if I do.) Episode 1 deals with female foeticide, and episode 2, I am told, with child sexual abuse, so this is my trigger warning.

I'm also watching The Golden Girls and thinking about how much I love Bea Arthur. I thought about more Game of Thrones, but somehow I think it would not be so good for the headache.

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A few days ago I wrote:

"My fannish engagement with [Game of Thrones] probably goes like this AU where Ned Stark is married to his gorgeous South Asian wife Catelyn, who worships different gods to him, and they've got one kid who's a fashion designer and another who's a disability activist who yells at the TSA a lot, and Ned is an unwilling transplant into politics from the simple academic life even if it is really fucking cold up north."

This is that story.

fic:: you shine in love you are born annointed
by Raven
4000w, gen, Game of Thrones, the Stark family ensemble. "Your net contribution to the world, Eddard Stark, is sitting out there in lawn chairs playing Clue and drinking bad Riesling."

( they don't go in for security theatre up here )

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So I kind of want to write a Game of Thrones AU about Eddard Stark, professor of political science at Cornell, asked by an old friend to run for the congressional district and gently pushed into it by his wife and six adult children, one of whom has just gone away to join the Peace Corps.

...I don't even know, okay.

Well, okay, I do. I am halfway through the second book in the series, and halfway through the first episode of the HBO thing, and I am enjoying them thoroughly with a painful consciousness of their many, many failings. (And also don't want spoilers? I appreciate the books came out forever ago, thanks for indulging me thus far.)

So far I like it all a lot. The worldbuilding is, if sometimes unoriginal, sometimes very impressive, and there are details, interesting grace notes, clever twisting plots, really good villains. The Stark family appeal to me on many levels - I love stories of families, and their ways of fitting and splitting, together and apart - and I particularly like Ned Stark. (On the flight back Shim read it too and we agreed that Ned Stark, intelligent, wry, and genre-savvy, is in a lot of ways a refugee from a very different book. (As is Tyrion Lannister - we eventually agreed that Tyrion could march mostly unchanged into a Wodehouse novel, gripe a little about his horrendous aristocratic family and then attempt to filch Anatole.) As for Ned Stark, I think we agreed that his closest relative might be Aral Vorkosigan, or at least they would have a lot to talk about, esconced in a bar somewhere with several bottles of red wine.

And Bran is the cutest, if possibly the most self-aware eight-year-old in the history of fiction. (I was pleased to note he was aged up slightly in the HBO version!)

But: the problem. The thing is - the thing is! - I do not like what is commonly known as "heroic fantasy". The women are always evil, for one thing. ( spoilers for the first book/series - mentions rape briefly )

So I do know, then, why my fannish engagement with this series probably goes like this AU where Ned Stark is married to his gorgeous South Asian wife Catelyn, who worships different gods to him, and they've got one kid who's a fashion designer and another who's a disability activist who yells at the TSA a lot, and Ned is an unwilling transplant into politics from the simple academic life even if it is really fucking cold up north. (Yes, Ithaca = Winterfell in my head, what of it.)

Also, I went to New Zealand. (Winter was coming there.) I have a lot of posts to make!

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This has been a strange week, in which we have learned a) I am not very good at being ill and b) I am not one of life's born litigators.

I didn't go to work on Monday, and went in on Tuesday promising friends and relations I would take it easy, and ending up coming home at seven because stuff needed doing; then I went to work on Wednesday morning to do some urgently early-morning work and be ready for a morning meeting with a man who sells bolts. I did the research, which my supervisor asked several incisive questions about, before conceding that I'd found the case he wanted me to find, then he told me that the meeting with Bolt Man had been cancelled, and then he told me to go home.

He's my supervisor, I have to do what he tells me. I came home. Shim got me soup and sushi and told me not to do anything, and to emphasise, if I had to do anything, to lie on the sofa and read fanfic. I did manage to do this! Sort of. I might have cleaned the house a little.

So then I said, well, I'll go to work on Thursday and take it easy. This went so brilliantly well I got home at quarter to ten. I'm told City lawyers do this all the time, but luckily I'm not in such vaunted company. Eleven straight hours of redacting documents does funny things to your brain, though. (By hour eleven we were throwing paper aeroplanes at each other and scaring the cleaning staff.) I was particularly proud of the letter that had everything redacted except "Dear", "and", "the" and "Yours sincerely". It was a work of art. We got through twenty-one files, five reams of paper, five whiteboard markers and six packets of post-its. I hand-delivered the disclosure this morning at the crack of dawn, and now I have four days off and don't know what to do with myself, so this evening I took a nap for three hours and watched 3 Idiots again for another three.

3 Idiots! Let's talk about that. I watched it vaguely in India over Christmas on a four-hour bus journey from Chandigarh to Delhi (and, alarmingly, Shim watched it happily despite not knowing the language) and then such_heights kindly me got a copy with decent subtitles, so now apparently it's a film I watch when skies are grey.

3 Idiots is the highest-grossing Hindi language film of all time. It has Aamir Khan in it, whom I have been somewhat starry-eyed over for the last decade, and it is three hours long, kinda melodramatic and bits of it have clearly been commissioned by the tourist board of India. So far so samey, but I adore it. It's based, very loosely, on Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone, and is on its face an anecdotal film about three friends at IIT Delhi the entirely fictional Imperial College of Engineering. But unlike the novel, which I liked but didn't love, it's full of heart and clarity and ideas, and it's... well, it's remarkable. It opens ten years on, with two of them driving from Delhi to Shimla to find the missing member of the trio, and they tell the story in flashback on the way. (Shim found the depiction of the Delhi-Shimla highway very aggravating. "Where are the crazily-overtaking lorries and the herds of cattles crossing the road?" Artistic licence, dear.)

So, okay, some of the stereotypes about Indians are true. (Okay, maybe a lot of them are.) Middle-class Indians in particular have this Thing about education, about good grades, about getting 100% in everything. (My family, too: while not as bad as some, they're bad enough. When I was at school, they used to alarm my teachers by never being at all impressed by my grades. A's across the board isn't something to be excited about, they explained; it's just how things are supposed to be. I mostly chose to see this as heartening rather than demoralising as sin.)

And, of course, middle-class Indians are very much known for setting out their offspring's lives for them at birth. Those of you who've been around a while will remember my three-year-long epic battle with my parents about how they wanted me to be a doctor, and I wanted to do PPE at Oxford. (Spoilers: I won.)

So, says Farhan, the narrator of the film: I was born at 5.15pm on a sunny day in 1978. At 5.16pm, my father said: "My son will be an engineer."

Cut to him rolling up on his first day of classes. The class are ready to do battle: for good grades, to be first, for perfection. His brand-new roommate, rejoicing in the name of Ranchodas Shamaldas Chanchad, suggests to him that he might be here to learn. He doesn't take this very well. The third roommate, Raju, is too busy doing puja to get good grades to even pay attention to this. Over the next four years they get drunk a lot, Rancho gets them in a lot of trouble, they end up on very firmly on the wrong side of Virus, the belligerent dean. Rancho falls for his daughter, Pia-the-very-magnificent, and that causes more trouble, and with time it becomes evident that there is something about Rancho that he's not told his two friends.

And it's clever and very witty - Raju's home life, Farhan notes, is like something out of a 1950s black and white movie, and the camera accordingly switches to black and white whenever we see anything of it; there's an adorable running joke about engineers not being allowed to name things, e.g. the three campus puppies, Gigabyte, Megabyte and Kilobyte - and the dialogue is hilarious. (Raju complains at one point, paraphrased, "I am the only man in history to drive from Delhi to Shimla with nopants.") But more than that, it really has something to say which I didn't think Indians were saying: that memorising rote facts is not learning, and A's in everything are not necessarily education; that doing what we love matters, sometimes, more than family; that we're worth more. It leaves me with a great deal of warmth and joy. And it ends on top of the world, in Leh-Ladakh, in a landscape only of sky, and it just has such breadth and wonder at what we can be. I love it.

(Also it has lines like this: "Until yesterday I was a law-abiding citizen of India. In the last twenty-four hours I have grounded an aircraft, threatened to flush a man's ashes down the toilet and now I've kidnapped a bride from her wedding.")

Okay, now I'm going to bed.

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Let me tell y'all about weddings #2 and #3! They came on the heels of an ill-starred few days - on Friday I had a bit of an accident on Hills Road and flew off the bike. I was fine, it was all fine, but it was a little alarming; and then on the way to wedding #3 from wedding #2 I blithely dinged my car. Well, I didn't - thank goodness, my car was fine and so was the one I hit (!) - but also, alarming. But then the clouds cleared away, fig. and very much lit., and then all was sunshine.

(About that, yes. Wedding #2 was in a registry office in St Albans. A distant family wedding - the bride is my second cousin - but I am quite fond of her and her now-husband, and St Albans is on the way from Cambridge to Oxford. It was a sweet, simple wedding, it was nice to see my family however briefly (Shim, my father and I stood very awkwardly in the garden while the pictures were taken - it was a bonding experience) and also I caught the bouquet! I wasn't trying to - it just sort of fell from the sky onto my head. So we left cheerfully, with a lovely collection of roses, and went on to Oxford.)

brightlywoven and exactlyhalf put us up, as they have done with all kindness several times now, so the four of us went for dinner at Red Star (oh, how I miss the Cowley Road) and then drank a lot of pink wine and laughed a lot. In the morning, we went down the High Street to Oxford Town Hall in suit and kilt and dresses ("We're cool like Reservoir Dogs," exactlyhalf noted) in the midst of the sort of glorious spring day that gets under your skin. I lived in Oxford five years, I remember saying, and have visited so much in between times, and yet it's still possible to fall in love with the cherry blossom outside All Souls as though seeing it for the first time. It's the loveliest city in the world.

Oxford Town Hall is surprisingly nice inside. It has lots of pretty stonework and glass, and the artwork is interesting if sometimes not on-mood (the wedding ceremony took place beneath the head of John the Baptist in glorious Technicolor) and it really was a lovely place for a wedding. We all gathered together, there was a harpist, there were adorable tiny children in tiny waistcoats, there were many old friends.

Then the bride and groom came in, both escorted (and I think this was such a nice way to do it) by both their parents, and then me, I was done. brightlywoven had kindly and shrewdly provided me with tissues beforehand. She and I and thecapitalc and pretty much everyone present sniffled their way through the next twenty minutes. Maria looked so, so beautiful, in a sleek and glorious dress her mother had made, and even she was choking a little when she said her vows. Everything was perfect and simple and done with immaculate class. Afterwards we threw confetti on them in the gorgeous sunlight and the grandparents were helped into cycle rickshaws, while the rest of us wandered down the High Street. More cherry blossom; more beauty.

The reception was at St Edmund Hall. Oddly I don't think I knew anyone who actually went to Teddy Hall, so I'd never been inside before, and it's really very nice: a small quad colourful with flowers. They had photographs in the graveyard of the college, which sounds morbid but was actually gothically romantic; none of the graves is less than a couple of hundred years old and it's amazing how sun-warmed stone can glow with people's happiness and discarded champagne glasses. The medic contingent made medic conversation, and I laughed a lot over dinner. (I love them so; after seven or eight years of knowing them I still have not learned that they will talk about catheters over dessert.)

The speeches were a delight (and live simultaneously-translated into Russian, which I found very impressive). All except the best man woman's speech, which was in verse. With citations. She sat down and knocked back a glass of red wine to riotous applause. And then there was Maria's father's speech, which stuck in my mind, because of what he said about "Oxford, where we learn among a community of distinguished scholars, and dear friends". Yes.

We had to be back, no excuses, on Sunday night, and preferably early. Accordingly, around half past five, Shim and I began trying to leave. But there was cake cutting and Ethiopian coffee; there was music; there was the first long day of British Summer Time; there were so many of the people I love. I think we left Teddy Hall and crossed Magdalen Bridge around seven, and made it back to Cambridge gone ten, with no regrets. It's such a cliché, but it is such a joy and a privilege to have grown into adulthood and myself in an old and handsome city with old and dear friends.

Wedding #4 is in two weeks in New Zealand. I am steadfastly unprepared thus far.

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I have been thinking a lot recently about names. Partly this is because the sunshine and change of job have given me the energy to work at languages again, so I'm thinking about words and grammar and such more generally, and partly this is because of this being the Year of Weddings. I witnessed a deed poll at a wedding recently, and then the other week, during Maria's wedding ceremony, it was very obvious that the somewhat smarmy officiant said her first name at normal volume, but her patronymic and surname very softly.

I think you must already love your friend, if you're there to see them married in the second row with your tissues out, but if possible, I loved her a little more at that moment: she had been speaking softly, but she said her names clearly and loudly for the world to hear. The officiant had the grace to look embarrassed.

For reasons I have explained many times, I have a Western, Scottish use-name. I have my surname as well, though; it's not at all a Western name. As this is a public post, I'm not going to tell you what it is. It's the same surname as a lady in a television show whom you all love. Which is, okay, me being flip, but also that is important: I look back now, and think, if I had been in primary school and there had been a woman in a TV show whom all my friends loved, with the same name as me, well. Imagine how life would have been, then.

I hated my surname then. I hated it for being weird, for always having to spell it, for never knowing how I ought to say it, for being weird weird weird. I was twenty years old by the time I sat up and said, thought, I have one of the commonest names on the planet. There are heads of state with my name, there are mathematicians and poets and sports people and there's also me and I am a person too. But before then, I had learned to mispronounce it - to say it like white people say it. Because then they will spell it right; then it's only one letter different from a proper white-person name, it's almost a real name. Then I won't be weird any more.

I will never change my surname. I don't plan to take my partner's name on marriage; I am unlikely to change it for any other reason. So here, today, I have decided: I am going to say my name the way it should be said. If people mispronounce it, I will correct them; if people mispronounce the name of the nice lady in the TV show, I will correct them, gently, and go gently named true.

And if they can't spell it, they can look it up.

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In wedding #1 of the year (of six possibly seven!) Colleen and Richie are married. I am so pleased.

All in all, it was a perfect weekend. We went up on the Caledonian Sleeper on Thursday night, and despite the drunken stag party four doors down (why, why would you get the sleeper as a stag party, what is even the point) I enjoyed it very much - I fell asleep when the train left the outskirts of London and woke up when they brought coffee at 6.45 am, and then you have that moment of stepping out of the train and suddenly - you're in Scotland. We went up to St Andrews in the afternoon through miserable murk and rain and made it in time for the wedding rehearsal. I don't think that before then it had actually sunk in what we were all gathering together for - Colleen announced her engagement, and asked me to be a bridesmaid, fourteen months ago, which is long enough to know something but not to internalise it - but then we were all standing there in jeans under the enormous panels of stained glass listening to the chaplain go through the order of service, and discuss the readings, and there was a great sense of descending imminence. The chaplain was very nice and helpful - and about seven feet tall and towering over most of his congregation - and took great effort to learn everyone's names, including what he called the hired congregation (Shim). After that the party retired for dinner and very necessary frozen margaritas.

The day of the wedding dawned washed-clean and sunlit and the entire party had gone to bed early with books the night before and were improbably calm (Colleen) and happy (me and Katie). I associate being woken up early in hotels because Colleen wants me to be somewhere with a different type of event entirely, but I went down for breakfast cheerfully and ordered a Scottish fried breakfast, and Colleen and Katie and Shim filled me in while I was eating it on the lifespan of the haggis, a little creature with one leg shorter than the other who runs around mountains until it gets speared in the Great Haggis Hunt, and that was about eight thirty in the morning; and I'm sure things happened between then and two o'clock (well, I know they did: among others, Colleen getting her hair done, Richie sending over champagne and glasses for the ladies to start the afternoon sloshed, several people reporting odd pre-wedding hallucinations of men in lederhosen and its subsequently coming to light that St Andrews celebrates Oktoberfest in March) but they either all happened at once or in about a ten-minute period, because it was very shortly after that they poured the two other bridesemaids and yours truly into a cab and said we'll meet you at the church.

The guests started appearing. Katie and I were freezing to death in our little green dresses in the wind off the North Sea. The photographer, who turned out to have distinctly dictatorial tendencies, rearranged us all bodily. And still Colleen didn't turn up. Shim said, thoughtfully, "Well, we know St Andrews doesn't have a train station." The organist struck up.

And then Colleen appeared, walking, holding up her dress, and wailed, "Oktoberfest stole my taxi!"

And after that, it went off perfectly. It was a beautiful, very human ceremony: the chapel is small and the guests only took up one half of it, and while I had a perfect view, standing off to one side holding Colleen's flowers, so did everyone else. Months ago, Colleen had been casting about for possible readings - she wanted the biblical one not to have too much hellfire - and I said, flip, "Why don't you have the bit from Corinthians, the tongues of men and angels." I was really touched to discover that was exactly what they read. After that, ann_pan read from Shakespeare, and the chaplain spoke about love as part idealism, part pragmatism, and held up the Doctor as a role model for those seeking idealism and good in the universe. (He spoke admiringly of the TARDIS and Dalek tattoos on Katie's arms, too. The congregation were delighted.)

Richie and Colleen looked just lovely, of course, but also entirely themselves. And nothing was polished nor perfect: I wobbled on my heels, the youngest bridesmaid confided that she was sure she was going to fall on her face on the flagstones, the groom was dead pale and the bride had to hand me over the flowers at the last moment, but that was the warmth and collective humanity of it, wasn't it. No one had to try to be anyone else. Colleen punched the air and said, "Yes!" as they were pronounced husband and wife, and we filed out into the sunshine in the quad and that was my best friend's wedding.

Photography outside was very, very chilly - more of the wind off the North Sea, but the sun was out, and I'm sure the pictures will come out beautifully. At one point the photographer looked at the bridesmaids, the ushers, the bride and groom, and said, "Now you're all young, maybe we can try for something cool and hip." It was less cool and hip and more incredibly awkward - Katie and I were muttering to each other about being a lawyer and a civil servant at a Doctor-Who-themed wedding - but she persisted and persisted and finally let us go inside for dinner and champagne toasts.

The reception was glorious: geek music, geek dancing, people in kilts tossing around inflatable Daleks, a lot of wine, a lot of sheer and incredible joy. The DJ played the William Shatner cover of "Common People" and the entire party hit the dancefloor; then he played "Star Trekkin'" and the entire party knew the words; then the Orbital remix of the Doctor Who theme; then the groom's family started looking a little alarmed. Halfway through Richie asked me to come and witness a deed, which I have done many times before but never barefoot with glass of wine in hand, and he walked back into the room with a different name. I went back with my glass of wine and danced with lots of old friends - tau_sigma in a lovely hat, vacillating ditto, moralrelativist with no hat but v. pretty dress - and Colleen's sister noted that she'd never seen me let my hair down like that. (c.f. one of colleagues, also last week: "I don't think I've ever seen you happy before.") Like I said then, I no longer worry about cows for a living and my oldest friend got married. What more do you ever need out of life.

At midnight, the party broke up to fading strains of the Proclaimers. Shim and I wandered home under an absolutely clear sky. It was all, not glassy perfect, but real and wonderful. I gave the lovely couple a recycled paper wastepaper basket to start their lives together - they asked for it! - and have lost my voice from laughing and singing so much. I hope that's a promise of things to come.

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Things. Well. I am moving departments in a week. I would say it's gone quickly, if it were not for the fact it has taken several eternities. I am finally, a week from finishing, getting to grips with things. (I have rather a big project of my own to undertake - which, if you shaded it on a map of the UK, would show up at all reasonable scales, which freaks me out rather - which for various reasons must be done and dusted in the next couple of weeks. "We have to be on top of things," my supervisor told me one morning before I'd taken my boots off.

"Don't worry, we're on top of things," I said.

"No," she said, darkly, "you're on top of things" - which cheered me up rather.)

On Friday night we had a pub quiz for Macmillan (a thoroughly fabulous idea, incidentally - enormous fun and we made more than £200) which the Caped Crusader and I won, resoundingly. Unfortunately the prize was a round of drinks and my planned sensible evening went the way of all flesh. By the end of it I was staring through the bottle where the white wine used to be, and one of chaps I work with gave me a kiss on the cheek and lovingly informed me that the entire department is as scared of my supervisor as I am. "Why couldn't you have told me that SIX MONTHS AGO!" I shrieked, and was poured gently into the good night.

While I will not miss the stress, disorganisation and general bone-deep anxiety of my current job, I will miss the people. I work with the sort of people who bring me coffee without asking and leave sweets on my keyboard. And threaten to SIM the moon, which is the sort of thing that's very funny if you're me and you've been doing my job for six months.

On Monday I move to contentious intellectual property, just in time for me to start volunteering for OTW legal. I am very interested in, but almost entirely ignorant about, the DMCA. The thing is, I'm bound to be - and although the team do claim they need non-US lawyers, I am, myself, doubtful. Nevertheless, I've volunteered. I doubt I'll be of any use, but I've volunteered. The thing is, I am such a useless lawyer - my academic interests are in philosophy and jurisprudence, my net experience thus far is of obscure ways of holding land - that I almost wish I weren't one, where these things are concerned. People hear "lawyer" and think, well, not of me. We'll see, I guess.

On Saturday morning bright and early, Shim and elb and I went to Oxford for the Taruithorn Banquet, which this year was sparkling as all years, full of good company and wine and origami birds. I met many old friends, spent lots of time giggling with brightlywoven, danced and served plates and ate a lot of food and had a lovely time. As usual, we went there for two in the afternoon and didn't leave until midnight. We left the car a few streets away and as Shim and I were walking down to the community centre, cealdis waved at us out of a car window and shouted, "We're going to buy blowtorches!"

"Ah," Shim said, "We're home."

And we were, too. I miss Oxford, I really do, just because it will always be home to me in some way. Yesterday the sky was blue and the sunlight was sparkling and it's really the loveliest place on earth, when it wants to be.

This week I have to work late a lot and not sleep much, I suspect. (My supervisor again, at nine o'clock this morning: "I am demented enough without your assistance!") I am still keeping on, and feeling better than I did a month ago, though. Sort-of-excited sort-of-scared about new things, which is how things ought to be, and looking forward to the spring. There will be weddings, and sunshine, new people, and also new Fringe. Hurrah.

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I went home for the weekend on Thursday night, actually spent my study leave studying, then gave up on that sometime on Friday afternoon. hathy_col's hen party was epic and fabulous; I laughed a lot, ate cream and scones, played 'Pin the Appendage On The Gentleman", dressed up as Susan Sto Helit, drank awful psychedelic cocktails in an eighties glam bar, met many marvellous people and saw many marvellous people again, danced and danced, and poured myself home down the M6 yesterday feeling rather like toothpaste does when you've squeezed it out of the tube.

My favourite part was being greeted the following morning by Colleen saying mournfully, "I killed Whitney Houston."

(As she killed Michael Jackson by going out dancing the night of graduation, bets are being taken on whom the wedding reception will kill. The good odds are on Status Quo.)

My second part was arriving at the flat on Saturday afternoon and being invited to explain to the other sixteen women in the room how I know Colleen to start with.

"I met her on the internet," I said. "In 2001."

And now I'm the bridesmaid at her wedding. What a wonderful world.

The slightly alarming coda was being asked by one of the other trainees today, apropos of nothing, "How did you get the white stuff in your hair?"

It is charming, I think, that my colleagues find my Secret Other Life quirky and endearing. Even when pictures of me holding plastic weapons appear on Facebook.

In other news there is no other news. I have two weeks and four days left in agriculture; I really, really love the Gaslight Anthem; Shim and I are watching a lot of Scrubs and apparently I have many feelings about Dr. Cox and Jordan; oh, and I haven't seen this week's Fringe yet! Too much glitter, too much dancing. I'm working on it as we speak.

Last night I was driving very gingerly down the A14 in the thick fog, with nothing in front or in my mirrors but grey and black, thinking, the only way out of this is through. Two weeks, four days. So much glitter, so much dancing.

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I am on holiday. On Wednesday afternoon, at 4pm, I had an email from my supervisor detailing, with usual lack of clarity, a task they had for me, finishing with urgent. I did it till five and then did it till I was late for my dinner plans, and then it was getting on for seven and I left the building, and since then I have been on holiday. On Thursday I slept without dreaming until ten, and went out through the crystal cold day and wrote the novel in a cafe and went around the shops and watched a bit of TV and took a long bath, and it was all a little misanthropic but very reviving; today I took a French class, went to London and met roga, who is visiting from Israel, and we went to Camden Lock and to the Wellcome Collection, both of which were great fun in different ways, and we walked around in the cold talking and drinking hot apple juice. For dinner we met gavagai, who is carrying a lot of luggage, these days, while wearing Docs with silver sequins on; for some reason she thinks it very hilarious that I described her a glam rock polar explorer.

By which I mean to say, I think I needed, really needed these two days: a day to be misanthropic, and a day to see people and do things. I still think, incidentally, that my job is sucking all life out of me. But I shall be doing it for eighteen months more only - I will not be one of those people who does something they hate for forty years. So I told my French teacher, when she asked, in shaky and ungrammatical French, that I shall keep doing these lessons with her, infrequently but not stopping, and after eighteen months are over I shall do something sensible like go and spend a solid chunk of time in a French-speaking area and learn more that way. I shall go to India and learn to read Hindi newspapers.

And I bought red boots - Docs, but not glam rock - the other day, when my parents said to buy something nice to mark my birthday. They're lovely, rich ruby red, not at all practical, not at all something sensible grown-ups wear to work. But I have this gorgeous black frock coat from Topshop, that I'm wearing all the time now; I bought it full-price the December before last, then didn't take it to Ithaca because it wasn't thick or sturdy enough for the climate. It lived in a cupboard for a year until I pulled it out this winter, and I love it just as much as ever. In the same way my red boots will live in the cupboard for eighteen months, which is not that very long. More than eighteen months ago, I was accepted by Cornell, and that was recent, as major life things go. So I go on and I go on, and I will do these eighteen months and qualify, and then I will take the New York bar exam, and then, at the age of twenty-seven years and one month, I will be done with grown-up life forever. I have been told, by people who mean well and people who don't, that I'll grow up and know better than the life I foolishly think I want to lead. A life where I don't make very much money; an itinerant life, a life that contributes to GDP not a whit and my pension plan hardly at all; a life as a researcher, a scholar, a public servant, a fan, a writer, a citizen. A life like both my parents have led, like both my grandfathers led.

Well, I'll be able to say then, I am grown-up. I am a lawyer in two jurisdictions, I have worked in private practice. I make the choice not to be unhappy; I make the choice to aspire to other things. I make the choice to wear red boots and to be a fangirl. You can't rescue me from myself. And then when I think about it like that: that I can dispense with that life in a year and a half, that I can say to myself, self, you made a choice, you took responsibility for your own happiness, you made a choice to live by your beliefs, then I think it's all worthwhile, after all.

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(When all else fails, list format. For the unfortunate alpha readers wondering where this week's novel installment is - it's somewhere. It's somewhere. Maybe it'll crystallise next week when I have a day off. I hope so.)

1. I am having a bad day am having a bad month am having a bad year. Lord, but I hate the day job. To top it all off, today I was honked by the driver behind me - because I stopped to avoid running a girl over. Driving in Cambridge really hurts my head. As for the job, I went downstairs today (I work on the third floor, in a windowless office under a tinhat roof) to fetch coffee and one of the other trainees' secretaries said, "Hey, you have something stuck to you. Oh, it's... part of a title plan."

Other people get toilet paper stuck to their shoes. I... don't.

2. It was my birthday! And now it is not my birthday. But it was not nearly as bad a birthday as I'd feared; quite the reverse, in fact. Even though I did spend the day marking up title plans, my department signed a card for me, and the other trainees went to dinner with me, and bought me cake and bath stuff and a £20 Amazon voucher which I still haven't spent. (Not sure what to get! Oh life, so hard.) And my parents sent roses, as they're away. And now I am twenty-five, and have been for nearly a week, and... well. Still here.

Today is Republic Day, though. Happy birthday, India. We love you.

3. I am caught up with Fringe! I am still head over heels for it: smart, character-driven, full-of-heart plots, and witty, sharp writing. What gets me about it, though, is okay, the shows of my heart from the nineties, SG-1 and Voyager and whatnot, they had great characters almost despite themselves. Because of the format, because of the need for the reset button, they had great characters, whom stories happened around. What I love about Fringe is that it is a story about Peter, Walter and Olivia. (I wish it were more of a story about Astrid and Broyles too! But that's something for another time.)

So yes. I adore it, and I am especially enamoured of musesfool's spot-on analysis: Olivia is the superhero, with the superhero backstory (she's a former Marine and she can save the world) and Peter is the fairy princess, with the fairy princess( (spoilery) backstory ).

So... as, the novel is not happening with the writing so much, and to be honest neither is anything that doesn't involve work or crying about work, does anyone want a Fringe ficlet? Prompt me if you would. I'm trying to coax the ol' brain into writing again, which so far slim success.

4. There is no number four. I am writing this in the bath, okay. There is only so much cope with which to cope.

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Oh my god, you guys, I have ALL THE FEELINGS about Fringe. ALL THE FEELINGS.

Okay. Here are my non-spoilery feelings about Fringe. I love you, Olivia Dunham, and I love Peter almost as much. (And Walter and Astrid and Broyles too!) All the feeeeelings. I still think it's a show that owes a lot to The X-Files, not quite a spiritual successor but, clearly, would never have been made if The X-Files hadn't been. But it's, oddly, less foreboding - because, as one of my friends I forget which wisely said, the characters have control over the world around them, and that makes all the difference. And, they are real characters: they have family dynamics, desires and wishes and wants and loyalties and backgrounds, and these play out in front of and behind the "main" plots in a way I really, really like and isn't common enough in television science fiction. Although, actually, I don't think Fringe actually is sci-fi - I think it's got the glass, the chrome, the bleeping machines and the explanations, but really, it's fantasy, complete with quests, feet of clay and lost children.

Also... this is so embarrasing, right, but I love Olivia and Peter and I ship them liek woah. I have not been this much of a drippy shipper since I was fifteen. But I looooove them and I want to squish them together and make them have many babies. Okay maybe not the last part. But so much loooooove. And part of it is for grown-up reasons, honest!

What I love is that Peter is, for many reasons, the central character of the show - the plot almost literally revolves around him - and yet, Olivia is the protagonist. This is Olivia's story. Olivia's character arc, in a lot of ways, rings horribly true to me: a woman fighting against the pressures of an unfair world, against internal currents and forces that all seem devoted to telling her she's rubbish - and against that, the people who love her and see her truly, telling her over and over again that she is extraordinary, she is beautiful, she is strong, she is more than just good enough.

( more concrete spoilers - nothing huge )

I am now on 4x01, "Neither Here Nor There". Please do not spoil me! Though there is not that much to spoil me on, now. Oh show.

Also! If I could vid, I would make a Fringe vid to "New York Minute" by the Eagles. Just sayin'.

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I am now on Fringe 3x01, "Olivia". Here are my thoughts on Fringe, you guys.

( spoilers, natch )

But I'm still watching. Please, no spoilers, I'm really enjoying watching it unspoiled.

In other news there is no other news. Job still awful, life correspondingly so. I have started copying out poetry on the bathroom tiles because I am JUST THAT COOL.

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I just drove 200 miles without a break, I am sleeeeepy.

Anyway. LJ's latest seems to mean that more people have begun using Dreamwidth. Which means people subscribe to me/give me access, and I think, oh, I should reciprocate.... and then forget.

Hence the following. Also, re: tumblr - I've finally joined the 21st century. My tumblr is singlecrow, but currently has no content. If y'all let me know yours, I'd appreciate it.



pee ess if you don't want to answer the DW poll, or can't, or whatever, please comment and tell me about your tumblrs and recommended tumblrs! I really want to know.

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( end of year meme )

Other notes, on reading and writing:

A very good writing year, which has startled me somewhat. After a few years of doing badly on this front, I really do seem to be writing regularly again, for which I'm very grateful.

Anyway, in 2011, I wrote twenty-two stories in thirteen fandoms (including two for Yuletide). I was particularly pleased by New Beautiful Things Come, the 17,000 word X-Men bakery AU, Lilies of the Field, a Vorkosigan story about Cordelia and Alys, and these are the days of miracle and wonder, a M*A*S*H story written after ten years away.

Also! Excitingly, I have finally started to write original fiction for the first time in many many years. The novel is hard going a lot of the time, but at the time of writing I have nine chapters of Receiver of Wreck written, and a lot of planning and outlining for the second half of it. Many, many thanks to those of you who are reading it for me; I'm very grateful. Add the novel, and I've written a round 100,000 words this year, and that's good enough for anyone.

On that note, I do think that writing fanfic for a decade has made me a far, far better writer than I would be otherwise, and I suppose, now, aged twenty-five, I'm tired of being told that fanfiction is juvenile or lesser. (For one thing, I am always suspicious when a female-dominated creative enterprise is infantilised and made to seem less important. Call me a cynic.)

Book-wise, I mentioned above that Kalpa Imperial was for me the stand-out book of the year. I loved it so much that here, I am actually going to quote some of it at you. These are its opening lines:

( the storyteller said )

What I love about this, about all of it, is that it's not so much political but ur-political: before you even get to politics and democracy and all of that, it tells you, you need free people, and ignorant, illiterate, uneducated people aren't meaningfully free. I love that; I love how it's unashamedly literary in one particular sense, that people need stories and histories to be people.

Anyway. It's lovely. Read it.

And, finally! I also read three Chetan Bhagat novels this week, which are happy 250 page slices of Indian life. Shim picked them up and read them after me, and also enjoyed them, but even so I am reluctant to recommend them exactly, because, well. Bhagat, for me, writes so well and so engagingly because he writes about India and Indians, for Indians, in Indian English. Which for me is charming and real and part of what makes Bhagat excellent, but, y'know. You don't want to recommend books that non-Indians are going to pick up and read and put down and feel pleasantly superior that, failing everything else, they're not Indian and don't say things like we are like this only.

But given that, I do recommend them: they made me laugh and they had something to say: 2 States is his best, I think, but I like them all. They have a delightful, almost Victorian conceit in that the events of all of them reportedly happened in some way to the author (he always begins them by explaining how someone emailed him, or he met someone on a train, and that person usually turns out to be the protagonist of the novel) and I especially like the way this plays out in One Night..., in which the reader would be excused for pointing out that the events of the denoument don't work if there were any witnesses other than the characters.

No problem, says Bhagat, there was a witness who witnesses everything. And it's nice to hear God evoked in a Hindu way - as a stranger on a train.

Anyway. Enough talk. More washing up.

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I am almost obscenely fond of Seat61.com. I have just spent a happy hour planning fantasy routes and itineraries along the route of the Silk Road. Some day, some day, etc.

So. This is 2012. For the first time since 1990, I slept through New Year entirely. I meant to stay up and I meant to stay up, but jet-lag hit me hard around 10pm. Terribly pathetic, of course. For the last week of 2011, I took Shim with me to India, and that, at least, was a good end to a very mixed year. In one week, we went (sometimes very briefly) to Delhi, Solan, Shimla, Chail, Chandigarh and Agra, and not disappearing from places between places, as you do on an aircraft: all the way the landscape between, stopping for coffee and chaat in dhabas, watching the mountains and the plains roll on past the windows, and the wheels raising the dust.

We went to Solan first. It's a small city in Himachal Pradesh, and it took us a day to travel there from Delhi, on a smooth flight into Chandigarh and then a boneshaking drive upwards.

My family's house in Solan is called "Chinar", which Google tells me is known in English merely as Planatus orientalis, and it's on stilts on the side of the mountain heading down towards the valley. As a result the roof is on a level with the Kalka-Shimla railway line. It's a narrow-gauge railway, tiny, built a hundred years ago by the British to move to the summer capital from the plains to the mountains, 100km with more than eight hundred bridges, 103 tiny, numbered tunnels, climbing into the Himalaya metre by metre of perilous altitude until it reaches Shimla with the clouds beneath. I love everything about it.

( Solan station [all pictures are Shim's] )

(Also, Railways! I guess most people who know me get to know after a while that I love trains (and planes, but not automobiles) with an irredeemable romantic love. Upon enquiry, my father sagely informed me that there is a gene on the 23rd chromosome that code for a love of railways of all kinds. This, he admits, is entirely a lie, but my father has never lived anywhere where you couldn't hear the sound of trains; my grandfather ran his household on railway time; my great-grandfather was the station master of New Delhi Railway Station.

And, me, I love trains: I love the vibration they make inside your bones, I love the lights streaming past in the dark, I love waking up for a moment in the middle of the night as the train passes through above. The world's as it ought to be when the train comes through on time. And then, take a train in India and you can go anywhere. You can take the train from Thruvanathapuram to Jammu. What a train is, is freedom.)

( this is the night train )

From Solan, we drove up to Shimla, which I have described before in these metaphorical pages, and to Kali ka Tibba (it only means 'Kali's hilltop'), which is a hilltop temple at Chail, and you reach it through a meteoric rise in altitude that involves driving inches from a hundred-foot drop around bends. It's dizzying, and on the day we were there, a little transcendent: the sky was polar blue and the sun felt close. The family's temple of choice in Delhi is the Hanuman Mandir, where we go on Tuesdays where possible; it's large, chaotic, noisy and a little frightening, and monkeys steal your shoes. I am having trouble with religion, lately; I end up feeling like all those people who say, politically and spiritually I'm a lesbian, I'm just in a relationship with a man! (I do that too, sometimes.) Well, I am politically and by inclination an atheist - I'm just... not one.

That I'm not an atheist is a fact, not a fact like my height and eye colour but like how I'm a writer, and a thoughtful person, and in love with a particular person. But there's that and there's being a person whose faith carries her; who carries something of value around with her because of how the world is. It's easier in those high places, it was easier in that hilltop temple with the toothpaste-clean air, the polished marble, the single tree so wrapped with red and golden thread that you couldn't see the bark. It's a thoroughly modern temple - it runs on solar power. And you remove your shoes and go barefoot, as you do in every temple everywhere, but the marble was freezing and salutary under your feet. I'm working on what kind of belief I have and want to have, but that was a wonderful, invigorating, close-to-the-sky place.

( Kali ka tibba )

We came down from the mountains on the fourth day, drove to Chandigarh and took a bus on to Delhi. All of that was much less painful than I thought it would be. In Chandigarh we had lunch at the Indian Workers' Coffee Cooperative, which offers lunch for such strangely precise prices as Rs. 30.20. In Delhi the family's house is shut up at the moment, so we were staying in an apartment at Green Park Market, and from there we went to Agra to show Shim the Taj Mahal (which was beautiful, but very surreal - my family and I could be Indians and got Rs. 20 tickets, but pretending Shim wasn't a foreigner was more difficult; his ticket ended up an eyewatering Rs. 750). The Taj itself is, well, it's beautiful, and what more can you say about it, but I'm not very fond of Agra itself, which is hotter, dirtier, and dustier than Delhi, which is hardly a cool, clean, comfortable place in itself. I did like the camels, though. All camels have ridiculously long, flirtatious eyelashes and immensely disdainful expressions. Sadly, we did not get a picture of them.

( the Taj Mahal )

And then, one day in Delhi - one day to see Rashtrapati Bhawan and India Gate. Having Shim along was delightful, but particularly because my aunt went to see the Taj Mahal for the first time, my mother went to see the president's residence and Parliament House for the first time. Both lived for years in Delhi. We went to Connaught Place and wandered, and got the Metro back to Green Park, and I was completely and utterly delighted by it. The Delhi Metro is new - well, ten years old, now, but new - and smooth and marvellous. (My mother was talking mournfully about how much more fun college would have been for her, if the metro had existed then.)

The metro is symptomatic, but, generally, Delhi is a different city from the one I first knew. Of course it's been twenty years, but it's larger, louder, noisier, chaotic, as you would expect, and I'm not sure the march towards development is permeating down to all levels. In fact, I know it isn't. But we came back on December 30th, drove to the airport through the fog, and this time, again, more than last time, more than the time before, I didn't want to go, I didn't want to go, don't make me go, I don't want to go home, I want to stay home. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't. My family reported that after we left, they went back from the airport to a four-hour power cut and we left at just the right moment. But given the lack of power, given the chaos, given the dirt and dust and stray dogs, given the mountains, given the temples, given the city and the railways, I wanted so much to stay.

I read a lot of Chetan Bhagat novels this week, and the dedication in his latest is: To my country, who called me home. Bhagat is like that only: words have power in simplicity. I don't know what to do about it.

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BEARS.

Hours till my flight: 23

Words of yuletide written: 4404

Hours till deadline: 3.5

Words left to go: approx 1000

Suitcases not yet packed: 2

Data transferring: 11.79 GB

Billable hours: 6.5

Cups of coffee drunk: 5

Number of meals missed: 2

Number of talkings-to re: previous: 3

Deeds to be boxed, certified and sent off tomorrow: 22

Pretty china mugs, with cheerful owl print, and marshmallows, received by entirely undeserving trainee from terrifying supervisor: 1

Number of alcoholic drinks consumed during work hours: 2 ("Where are commercial property?" / "In the pub.")

Sunset: 3.30pm

Sunset tomorrow: 3.34pm

Corresponding optimism: unquantifiable

BEARS: BEARS BEARS

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Hello, flist. I am home ill, flu-ish, headachey and not a little bit over-anxious. (Case in point: I thought I would make use of the time by at least popping out and sending some parcels. Mission aborted when yours truly was too pathetic to find somewhere to park, and came home having smudged the parcels' labels in the rain, but not actually sent them.)

So I am lying on the sofa, whining gently, trying to write my yuletide (it is awful, all is awful, I am a horrible writer, all is woe) and watching Fringe. Y'all have been watching this show for a few years now, and I have realised I will never get another show like my heart wants - happy, optimistic science fiction! remember that? me neither - and, well, I did like The X-Files. I liked it a lot. So I'm giving Fringe a try.

Thus far, I am four episodes in and I sort of like it. Sort of. Okay. Here's what I like:

-Olivia! I didn't at first, but she has grown on me; she's such a sensible sort of heroine to have. Ditto Peter - in the pilot I thought he was one of those insufferable know-it-all manly types that, inexplicably, whole shows are built around (The Mentalist, I'm looking at you), but actually he's not that bad. He's kind of sweet, in his way. And Walter, too: I love his combination of super-clever and very naive.

-Also Astrid, although what the show means to do with her I have no idea. At the moment it seems to be, well, passing things and answering the phone. She's lovely, and the actress is epically fanciable. Want more Astrid. Yes.

-And the cow. Dear cow, I like you.

Here's what I don't like:

-Naked women get tortured quite a bit, don't they? And then there's screaming. And I'm like... okay. Don't want or need.

-And I don't exactly dislike the homage, but I have seen The X-Files. It's not so far in history you can reuse its plots wholesale. Although, I appreciate it doesn't do the whole incredibly-stilted-monologue thing or the "let's turn down the lights! no, more!" thing. Instead it seems to use a swimming-pool palette, washed out blues and greens, which is nice and creepy without being invisible on VHS. (Not that this is a problem now, but oh, X-Files, way to stamp on my love.)

-Also, fringe science? I get that that's the thing, yes, but surely I am not the only person who wants to laugh sometimes at a show with the aesthetic and tone of The X-Files and the scientific realism of The Middleman. I mean. Really.

-Probably this is just me, but. I have the attention span of a gnat. Watching fifty-minute episodes is too long for me. I get twitchy in the middle, and fast-forward through the bits I'm sure are going to be some species of revolting. Really, I just have too short an attention-span for being a grown up. Surely there's some age you reach when the little man in your head doesn't jump up and down and shout, "I'm booooooooooored!"

Anyway. I am told I have to stick with it until the second season before it gets really good, and okay, I will try. But do I really have to watch another sixteen fifty-minute episodes? A whole bunch of you have lists of episodes that I actually need to watch in the first season. Please tell me.

In the meantime, I shall keep on watching this episode about a bald dude with no eyebrows, eat teacakes and feel sorry for self.

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Dear friends, I have been meaning, as you do, as you mean to do your taxes, and see about registering with a dentist, and rescrewing your bike-light mounts, as you do, as you mean to do, to change my passwords. For a while. I'd get around to it, thought I.

On December 6th someone who wasn't me took £496.13 out of my account.

The bank, and PayPal, have been very nice about it, and they tell me I should have the money back pretty soon. (PayPal's customer service impressed me rather a lot: I rang them up in a panic and a nice man from Ireland said, before anything else, "We do this every day. Now you just sit down and don't worry about a thing, we'll fix it all for you.") They also said I didn't need to cancel my card, but I did anyway, for peace of mind. Having done that, I have just spent half an hour of my life changing my passwords for Gmail, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Land Registry and HMRC. Some of them I had changed, at some time maybe. Facebook informed me I hadn't changed my password since October 2005. I changed it. I changed them all.

Can I please entreat y'all to do the same. I now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

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