After a frankly awful day (although I think my lecture did go quite well), I’ve just had the following conversation with Nick in the study.

NICK: Stop it!
ME: What?
NICK: You’re tickling me while I’m trying to lodge a support claim.
ME: What?
NICK: I’m trying to write a “please help me with my software” e-mail.
ME: Right. (Spots suspicious object) What’s that?
NICK: Nothing.
ME: What’s that?
NICK: It’s just a perfectly innocent chocolate bar!
ME: Where’s mine?
NICK: (long pause) Take it.
ME: Oddly enough, I don’t want your half-eaten Mars Bar.

While I don’t think either of us comes out of this conversation looking our best, I do think it’s rather a succinct account of the dynamics of our relationship.

When did iced coffee suddenly become macho?

All the iced coffee ads these days seem to emphasise that this is an inherently blokey drink.

I remember that there was a macho emphasis on some brand of milk-based drinks a few years ago—I can’t remember the name, now—but it seems to be endemic, these days.

I personally blame the Ice Break ads that suggested you weren’t worthy of incredibly sugary iced coffee made with skim milk unless you were also proficient at such extreme physical activities as jumping out of a plane in order to land on and enter another plane, or driving backwards very fast down a freeway and then clambering onto a semi-trailer with the help of some Dalek eye stalks. (Or, possibly, plungers.)

True, the last one did, I believe, have a woman in it. But the overwhelming emphasis is on hyper-masculine men drinking cold coffee from bottles, and I find this slightly odd.

I don’t have any answers, mind.

And they’re still a vast improvement over Lynx ads.

Nick and I, via a discussion of how much fun it is when comment threads build up on this blog, got to the point of wondering whether I am actually a Leavisite (which relates to possibly my favourite title for an academic work, John Docker’s “How I Became a Teenage Leavisite and Lived to Tell the Tale,” from his In a Critical Condition: Reading Australian Literature.

I’m not sure that I can be considered a Leavisite (to be fair, the suggestion was, perhaps tongue in cheek, that I demonstrated Leavisite tendencies, but let’s stick to absolutes for argument’s sake), not least because Leavis’s excoriation of mass culture is something with which, manifestly, I have no sympathy.

(Nick, wandering in, has just suggested “Well, I don’t think Terry Eagleton would find much to be displeased about in your writing . . . although you may talk a bit too much about women.” I think that might be the nicest compliment I’ve ever received.)

I’m not even certain that, as a student of the mid- to late-1990s, I’ve even read any of Leavis’s work. I’ve certainly read Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which I found thought-provoking but frustrating; if I’m not forgetting my reactions—it’s been a couple of years since I read it—I found myself frustrated by a sensation underlying the text that working-class readers were helpless dupes of a publishing industry whose permutations they could barely grasp.

But I can’t recall ever reading one of Leavis’s books.

I’m certainly not in sympathy with Leavis’s canonical bent. I’m not denying the significance, value, or quality of canonical works. But the works that I’ve spent the majority of my effort on—for my M.Phil. and for my Ph.D.—have never been included in any canon, not even the revisionist ones.

But my problem with potential Leavisite tendencies arises with Leavis’s emphasis on textual criticism, divorced—to an extent—from the socio-economic and political connotations of the text’s production. The latter aspect is easier for me to avoid: I don’t identify as a strict Marxist, but my critical interests—and my political bent—are certainly left leaning.

(Incidentally, nearly a decade ago in my first share house—at the beginning of my postgraduate career, when my self-identification was more dogmatic and less nuanced—I did identify as a Marxist, as well as a feminist. This led, in a circuitous fashion, to a friend of one of my flatmates bursting into my room at midnight, while I was reading a Harry Potter novel in bed, to demand that I lend him my lipstick, so that he and my flatmate could draw warpaint on themselves and then wrestle. When I refused—on, I felt, the very sensible grounds that my solitary, very flattering, lipstick was an American brand not available here—he harangued me on the inappropriateness of Marxist feminists wearing lipstick at all, and then slammed the door. I think that’s one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me.)

But I do value what close textual reading can tell us, and I do privilege textual analysis in my own work. I can’t personally encompass the idea of a critical approach—any critical approach—that completely divorces a text from the process of its mechanical production. Regardless of whether we wish to emphasise the value of writing or the value of reading in the construction of textual meaning, at some point an author placed those words in that order.

But the problem with that, I suppose, is that the intentionality of the author is unrecoverable. Even where it is recoverable, there is an element of speculation. We can argue, for example, that the reading list that Mary Shelley included in her diary has an element of veracity. Where reading lists can be a matter of personal representation, which implies a manipulation of the contents to show the writer as a different kind of reader, the private nature of the genre in this case helps negate that point: is there any need for Shelley to manipulate her presentation of her reading in a private document?

Then again, I remember an example from a Dorothy L. Sayers novel—I can’t remember which one it is, now, and I can’t find the reference. The instance is one in which Lord Peter is drinking a sadly dead Victorian port with his lawyer, who discusses the man who passed it on to him: a man who, a lonely bachelor for life, was discovered after his death to have had a rich fantasy life in which he married and lived with his true love, a life that he only expressed in his diary.

This is a fictional example, but that diary, too, is a private document. Had it been discovered in isolation—with no supporting testimony from friends and families—how would a reader have been able to judge its veracity?

I’m not intending to draw any hard-and-fast conclusions from what I’ve legitimately called a ramble. I’m not even entirely certain that I’ve isolated a critical perspective that absolutely works for me, rather than still being a state of flux.

But I am fairly certain that my work will always retain an interest in authorship: not as a work isolated from socio-economic status and historical placement, but certainly the work as the technologised output of individuals.

So perhaps there are shades of the Leavisite in me, after all.

I was an enormous fan of Steven Moffat’s Press Gang as a lass. I was the right age and the right kind of academically focused girl to enjoy that programme.

(I’ve mentioned this before, I know: I may be either repetitive or narrow in my interests. I leave it to posterity to judge.)

But one effect of this interest is my delight in the current renaissance of Lee Ross, or Linda’s long-suffering best friend, Kenny (at least until he moved to Australia late in the show’s run.)

Kenny was a lovely character: he was clever, sweet, and efficient. He put up with Linda because he really loved her, despite her abrasive personality. He managed to woo a young Sadie Frost, albeit via the ghost of her drug-addicted brother. And then he sang in one episode, and all the fans who had a soft spot for a musician were smitten all over again.

So I’ve been really thrilled to see Kenny in a number of things, recently. According to imdb.com, he’s been working regularly since Press Gang, but I’ve not seen him in anything.

But over the last year or so, I’ve seen him in The Catherine Tate Show, in Life on Mars, in Hustle—admittedly, four-year-old episodes of Hustle, but I’ve come to that show fairly late—and in Robin Hood.

Admittedly, he was a fairly unpleasant character in Life on Mars, who quite rightly got punched in the mouth by both Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler. And his Sir Jasper in Robin Hood wasn’t a pleasant man, either. The sketches he took part in for The Catherine Tate Show were simply bizarre. About the only redeeming character was Hustle: sure, he was a conman, but then so are the protagonists, and we sympathise with them.

But then, I don’t really mind that the characters are so far removed from sweet, hen-pecked Kenny.

I just like seeing Kenny back on the screen.

Obviously, at some point in the future I will be able to travel in time. That’s a given. At least, I certainly hope so.

And if there’s one thing that watching television has taught me, it’s that time travellers often have little or no time to prepare for their initial departure. So, it seems a sensible precaution to make a list of things to do when I do become a time traveller.

Number one, currently, is to go and see Shakespeare perform in his own plays. And then heckle him. I get a kick out of the idea of shouting “You suck, Shakespeare! Stick to the quill, you ham!”

(In case this comes across as a little too mad, I must emphasise that I’ve never actually heckled anyone in my life—but I’ll make an exception for the Bard of Avon. On the other hand, I mentioned this to Nick, and he responded “I was with you, up to the heckling part.” I think I have to mention at this point, that this wasn’t originally my idea. But I still want to do it.)

At the risk of sounding shallow (and this, coming from the person who fancies heckling Shakespeare, must be taken as a warning), I think I’d be compelled to do some book shopping.

The main problem with my Ph.D. thesis was the ephemerality of the source material. I could stock up on all the relevant material for about 40 shillings, and save myself an enormous amount of hassle (and save the wonderful university library a small fortune).

Of course, then I’d have to cross my own timeline to deliver them to myself—so that might prove more problematic than I’d originally thought. I’d hate to end up in one of those situations where you think your future self is an apparition and accidentally kill yourself: those never end well.

Still, I’d definitely see about picking up copies (prompt copies, perhaps) of Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. For my own edification only, obviously: you’d never be able to prove they weren’t just very good forgeries.

The main problem with time travel (well, apart from the obvious absurdities) is the tendency to think “Well, if I’m going to travel in time, I may as well go and see some history!” Then you stop and think about what history entails, and it doesn’t look like such fun.

I mean, the French Revolution I find fascinating, not least because of its direct impact on British culture—and therefore British literature—in the period that I study. But I don’t want to see it firsthand. (Mind, I’d love to see the lost Doctor Who story set in the French Revolution, but that’s another story and a different point.)

Ditto with the Battle of Thermopylae. Love the story, but definitely don’t want to see it in person; frankly, even bits of 300 were a little hard to watch.

But I’d like to have a little wander around in the more benign parts of some lost times. A Roman market. Sherwood Forest, before it disappeared. Tintagel in the time of Arthur. London before the Great Fire. Damascus, back when the Pearl of the Desert was largely unknown to Western visitors. Oberammergau, before the Passion Play became a major tourist destination. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A trip on the Orient Express in the 1920s. Perhaps the great ball on the eve of Waterloo, although I suspect that would be heartbreaking (still, you might catch a glimpse of Becky Sharp stealing Amelia Osbourne’s husband).

I asked Nick what he’s do if he could travel in time, but he said he doesn’t have a historicist bent, which led to the following conversation:

ME: You could travel forwards in time as well as backwards.
NICK: Well, I’m not convinced that travelling forwards in time is possible.
ME: I’m not convinced travelling backwards in time is possible.

Apparently, though, it is theoretically more possible to travel backwards in time than forwards, which is contrary to the very nature of Doctor Who. So I think you’d have to at least try and travel forwards.

But you can’t even suggest what you’d want to travel forwards to see. Just “the future.” I would like to see a time when we could actually travel in space. (I mentioned this to a friend once, that I’d like to travel in space, and he said “Why?” Really, there’s no way I can answer that question. I just want to.) But if I have a time machine, travelling in space seems less interesting.

I have a feeling that I should perhaps have listed more noble intentions for my time-travelling future. Things like saving the contents of the Great Library of Alexandria (or even, more recently, the looted Iraqi museums). So perhaps I am shallow.

I’ll salve my conscience by reminding myself that this is all highly theoretical. Perhaps, had I the chance after all, my better self would come to the surface, and instead of exploiting Volcano Day, I might try and prevent it.

After finding that copy of Cardenio, naturally. After all, there’s no hurry—I have a time machine.

(I’m going to do my best to avoid specifics and spoilers in this post, but I am reacting immediately to the final episode, which I only finished watching fifteen minutes ago, as well as to the season in general.)

And thank you, Torchwood. Thank you very bloody much.

You know, I asked really nicely.

All I wanted was some relief from unremitting horror and distress. Occasionally save the victim of the week. Perhaps a few jokes. The odd light-hearted episode.

But could you bring yourself to manage that? Oh, I think you know the answer to that, now, don’t you?

And yet you teased us.

You brought in James Marsters in a role that didn’t make me want to punch his character in the face. (And, honestly, that became the case fairly shortly after the fourth season of Buffy. It certainly wasn’t the actor’s fault, but rather a result of the way in which they manipulated the development of the other characters in order to keep Spike an integral part of the show. That did annoy me. Although I’ll forgive a lot for the sake of his part in the Muppet episode of Angel.)

But he was lovely in Torchwood, and it was an interesting new angle on Captain Jack’s character.

And there were shades of this season that reminded me of the good old days of Doctor Who—the original Doctor Who, that is.

The quality was far more consistent than the first season: some of these episodes frightened me as much as good old episodes like “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy”“. (Oh, those clowns! They still haunt me.)

I even mentioned how lovely I thought Cardiff looked in the show, and you had to go and mess with that, as well.

In fact, was there anything I liked about the show that you were willing to leave intact, Torchwood?

Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing inherently bad about shifting the boundaries of an audience’s expectations about a show. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that programmes that don’t do that rapidly stagnate, and lose the audience that they’re attempting to placate.

But there are degrees, Torchwood. And I really don’t enjoy spending my Saturday nights weeping in front of the television.

So if you could just bear that in mind next season, I’d really appreciate it.

I’m a loyal fan, you know, and I could handle a little bit of placating before I stagnate, I think.

I don’t like to talk about my teaching on here, because I don’t blog anonymously and I really want to keep my job. Not that I’m likely to say anything offensive, because I do love teaching—I find there’s no job so stimulating as teaching young adults, and my students are invariably engaged and engaging. But they haven’t signed up for the courses to be blogged about.

But, I feel it’s safe to start this entry with something I’ve noticed while teaching writing courses: every semester, students claim that, outside university assessment, they simply don’t write. They back down from this position when I point out that, for example, e-mail, SMS, and online instant messaging count as writing. But it prompted me to list for one class the kinds of writing that I undertake regularly, and it surprised even me.

(I’m coming back to this entry a day late, after those rants about my temperamental car, and I’ll probably be interrupted again shortly when Nick returns with dinner. But in the interim I’ve been thinking further about this.)

When I spoke to my students about the variety of types of writing that I produced regularly, I was still in the process of completing my thesis. And one of the things that I found so challenging but also so fascinating about that work was the variety of different ways of organising material that that one document contained.

It had the usual components of an Eng. Lit. thesis: chapters that varied between connecting my object of study to a broader school of thought and close analysis of the texts, sections—such as the introduction and conclusion—that served largely to impose hierarchical structure on the work, a beautifully formatted bibliography (my supervisor said to me, “I was going to say this was one of the cleanest bibliographies I’d seen—then I saw that you’d put all your full stops outside the inverted commas.” Damn.), a Literature Review.

Ah, the Literature Review. How I hated writing you. You’re boring, and depressing, and you bring with you a constant anxiety that in boiling down a hundred years of theory on nineteenth-century fiction I might, conceivably, have missed something really important. But I got through you, thanks to a Jonathan Rose article that raised as many questions for me as it answered—it focused on working-class auto-didacts, which was too narrow for my purposes, and emphasised that working-class authors mentioned Dickens more often than they mentioned G. W. M. Reynolds. Sure, they did; it’s a matter of self-representation, though, isn’t it? And Reynolds still outsold Dickens by some magnitude, so someone was reading him.

Still, Rose is a superb scholar, the article was a fantastic response to claims that nineteenth-century, working-class readers could not grasp classics such as The Iliad, and his encapsulation of the difference between “old” and “new” book history methods was the catalyst that allowed me to get a grip on my Literature Review, for which I will be forever grateful.

But I also had vital sections in my thesis that relied on forms of writing that I’d never undertaken before.

I had one appendix that reproduced the contents of a nineteenth-century album, the absolutely pivotal find in my research, which enabled me to extend the work beyond a single author to draw conclusions about the field of publishing in which she worked. Most of this appendix was made up of a series of reproduced photographs, but organising this material and writing brief but illuminating captions was a challenge.

Then there were two further appendices, both indices to fiction in nineteenth-century penny weeklies. I would never have undertaken one of these if I had realised that it would take the better part of a year. The first—a short-lived, fiction-specific journal called Fiction for Family Reading, which I’ve already mentioned in conjunction with half-naked princesses—only took three days, because the run was so brief.

I knew Bow Bells—which I indexed from 1864 to 1881: 34 volumes in total—would take longer, but a year? I didn’t anticipate that. And I had no idea how time-consuming and intricate it would be to keep this material in order. Or that it would end up adding 164 pages to my thesis. Still, scholarship on penny weeklies suffers under a lack on indexing projects, and I don’t regret doing it. I do regret the fact that it was on microfilm, and working on it therefore triggered my motion sickness, but that’s out of my control.

Then there was the gem of my thesis, in my mind, anyway—my bibliography of the works of Eliza Winstanley. I’m still feeling a little bit smug about the number of works I managed to confirm as hers. But I’d never produced a critical bibliography before, and the fun was in trying to find a format that was immediately accessible but also included as the necessary information.

(Well, no—the real fun was being able to attribute twenty-one anonymous works to her by cross-referencing the journal contents with advertisements in The Times, but I admit that that doesn’t sound like fun.)

But then, as I pointed out to my students, there are all those other, more casual forms of writing.

E-mails have to be written every day: formal ones to students and colleagues, and informal ones to family and friends.

There’s Pownce, which I joined relatively late but love as a private, convenient way to hold conversations with friends when I should be doing other things. And, speaking of Pownce, whither the Pownce, friends? Whither the Pownce? Don’t let it die.

I’ve been doing two kinds of marking, lately: informal global feedback on non-assessed work and formal feedback on assessment.

Slightly more frivolous are Facebook status updates: I do enjoy reading them, though. As a friend of mine mentioned recently, it’s like communicating by SMS, without actually having to send the messages. Of course, they’re much more fun now that we’re not restricted to “is” verb forms.

I’ve also written a book review lately, and thought about ways to write more.

I have a teaching reference for a colleague due in ten days, and am still marking—two different types of assessment for two different grades of students.

And then there’s this blog, which I thoroughly enjoy writing but can’t update every day.

I’m sure I mentioned more types, when I was talking to my students, but if so, they’ve slipped my mind. Nevertheless, given the list I’ve managed to remember so far, I think I should probably stop feeling self-conscious about saying that I write for a living.

Well, that and get on with writing (and hopefully publishing) some journal articles.

Is that really a surprise to anyone?

Apparently, the engine head is not warped. The mechanic is a little surprised by this, and warns me to keep a close eye on the gauge and check the radiator levels tomorrow and again in a couple of days, but at least we don’t have to replace the engine head.

I apologise, machinery. Apparently, you are capable of generous gestures.

(Once again, this post has no bearing on books or reading. I do have another one half written, but this intervened.)

It has become painfully apparent that my computer and my car have entered into some sort of unholy alliance.

No sooner do I crow that we have managed to defeat the computer’s (or maybe—which amounts to the same thing for the purposes of this rant—the server’s) attempts to shut down dialogue on this blog, than my car gives up the ghost.

Of course, it had to give up the ghost on Coronation Drive in peak hour on a Friday morning, didn’t it? Well done, car, if you were aiming for maximum frustration!

Interesting point: apparently, putting on your hazard lights while steam pours out from under your bonnet is the cue for everyone to start honking, swearing, and gesticulating furiously. I have no idea what they expected me to do—it’s not a very big car, but it’s big enough.

Apparently, it overheated, and I failed to notice. (Well, I did notice—but not until it had stopped.) It can’t have been overheating for long, I suspect, because there really was no warning. The gauge would have shown it was overheating, but the gauge is rather out of my line of sight.

I would have noticed a flashing light, so maybe the manufacturers might want to think about adding one of those.

Or perhaps I should have been paying more attention. Hence my Facebook status update: “seriously unlucky with cars, or remarkably stupid? Or both?”

I’m now waiting for the mechanic to tell me whether the overheating warped the alloy of the engine head. He thinks it did, because there’s oil under the radiator cap, but needs to get the results of my new favourite thing, a “sniffer test.”

I think the head probably is warped, for two reasons.

Firstly, the engine head(s) is one part that is specifically excluded from our Mechanical Service Plan. I mean, it couldn’t just be a problem with the windshield wipers, for once?

(No, wait—that already happened. In a downpour. Late at night. On the Bruce Highway. Yeah, I don’t want that to happen again.)

And, secondly, it’s basically Murphy’s Law, isn’t it? I’m starting to think that’s more powerful than Newton’s and Asimov’s Laws combined, frankly.

In other words, Nick has solved the recurring problem with the comments on the site.

Hip hip hurrah!

Technically, Nick and I are spending quality time together, watching the Melbourne Comedy Gala.

In fact, I’m keeping one eye on the television (which has just shown me an advertisement for The Shield—I had no idea that was still going—and a show that, apparently, “just makes courtroom drama look so good“ called Conviction, which I’ve never heard of) while trying to complete my collection of fancy, absurdly named shoes on Packrat.

Nick, on the other hand, is browsing the iTunes store on his iPhone on the opposite sofa, and keeping an eye out for comedians that he likes.

Mind, we did bond over an Arj Barker skit about buying a new bed. I do love a comedian who can use the word “quagmire” in a skit.

There’s nothing particularly weird about this; this is how we spend many of our evenings.

My mother is constantly surprised by Nick’s tendency to say “Ooh, I’ve just read something really interesting; I“ll send you the link.”

But there’s something appealing to me about the online aspect of the relationship. It’s more permanent, in a way, than phone calls (and useful, should one of us dispute what was originally said).

Plus, there’s no separating Nick from his iPhone right now.

And I only need five more shoes.

I’m taking a brief break from Green Wing season two to record the following conversation:

NICK: So I’ve done a bit of design for the site.
ME: But I’ve never heard of it before.
NICK: Well, I’m telling you now.
ME: You live a secret life on the Internet, don’t you?
NICK: You must love my air of mystery.

1. The weather.

Much as I love living in Brisbane, this is largely in spite of the weather, which is frankly rather like suffering a feverish cold for nine months of the year.

But these cold, crisp nights and warm days are lovely: the best part of Brisbane is its beautiful mild winters.

2. The fact that last night’s Robin Hood did not, in the end, throw out the entire premise of the episode.

Mind you, it was still completely daft.

3. The hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to use the sentence “Join me again next week on this episode of ‘Let’s make no fucking sense’ when I will be waxing an owl” in everyday conversation.

4. The new teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I must admit, though, that this is tinged with a certain degree of wistfulness, since my own years of working in a university have included far more hours of marking and far fewer instances of grappling with Nazis than these movies led me to believe would be the case.

I suppose it’s because I’m not an archaeologist.

5. Reorganising the study, so that one can walk all the way into it and, even more miraculous, actually access all the bookshelves.

On the other hand, the downside of the reorganisation is that I got bored before I had quite finished putting everything back. So there is that.

6. Successfully creating a rhinoceros in Packrat.

Really, success is measured by how low you set your goals in the first place.

However, I did have to sacrifice my kangaroo to do it, and now am unable to find another camel, which is apparently a constituent ingredient of the kangaroo—something that I suspect even Darwin didn’t know.

7. A rather nice 2005 Western Australian Chardonnay clearskin that I found in a local bottleshop.

8. The smug feeling that comes from having made a reasonable dint in my marking.

9. A sudden predilection for painting my toenails a shiny pink.

10. The up-coming season of Doctor Who and my state of ignorance about the plotlines.

11. The fact that new Doctor Who means a new year of Doctor Who nights, the highlight of my social calendar.

12. James Marsters’s appearances in Torchwood.

13. An unusual number of lovely dinners with people I don’t otherwise spend enough time with.

14. Re-starting work on the third of the set of braided rugs for the hallway, and the hope that this means that the rugs might even be finished before we move out of this house (at some unspecified point of time in the future).

What will I do if I move to a house with no hallway?

15. My new pillow.

Nick and I seem to have been having the oddest conversations over the past few days. Of course, the sudden cold snap last night meant I didn’t sleep well, so perhaps that’s why they all seem to head in strange directions.

We’ve just had the following conversation, for example:

NICK: Fancy a cup of coffee?
ME: I’ve just been reading about the Zimbardo Experiment. I knew about the Milgram Experiment, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across the Zimbardo one. Did you know they were at school together?
NICK: Was it a particularly strict Victorian boarding school?
ME: This was in the 1960s, these experiments, so I doubt it.
NICK: Perhaps they travelled through time?

I think somebody is getting a little too excited about the upcoming season of Doctor Who.

And again, this morning:

ME: Honey, I’ve just noticed that, um, there appears to be a bucket and mop in the bedroom.
NICK: You’ve only just noticed?
ME: Yes.
NICK: Well, then, you’ve only got yourself to blame.

And the quintessential conversation, held yesterday on the way to the shops:

ME: That’s an ugly Mercedes.
NICK: Which one?
ME: That orange one. Or, no—I suppose you’d call it a warm yellow.
NICK: I’d call it cadmium yellow.
ME: Isn’t cadmium yellow like that? (Pointing to a banana-yellow building) No, I suppose that’s a cool yellow.
NICK: Cadmium yellow’s like that car.
ME: Well, my paints come in cool yellow and warm yellow, so I’m calling that car warm yellow.
NICK: Cadmium yellow is a warm yellow.
ME: Then why are we having this conversation?

The eternal question.

Which means he will be curiously absent for the next few days.

Apparently, the real benefit of this new gadget is that he’ll be able to surf the Internet from anywhere in the house.

I don’t think he’s quite grasped that I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing. True, I have a laptop, while he’s restricted to his desktop iMistress. But I do at least refrain from surfing the Internet while we’re actually watching television or otherwise spending time together. Nick, on the other hand, has been known to dash off to check his e-mail if I get up to make a cup of tea or nip to the bathroom.

Still, such are the sacrifices one makes when one moves in with a geek.