new glass to be stared through

Yesterday was...well, I've been asked "How'd it go?" about a million times today and I still don't have an adequate response. I genuinely have no idea what happened exactly - it feels like some surreal dream, something someone else did and I just saw the film. In years to come I'll remember it as a blur of climbing ridiculous spiral staircases, sitting on massive sofas, eating chocolate biscuits, being told "WE ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE YOU EAT A TENNIS BALL", getting trapped at the market by the rain, standing by the river and briefly wanting to cry, then sitting in that FREEZING room and talking and talking and talking, and burning my tongue on a mushroom, and then at the end standing at the entrance to Pembroke for ages trying really hard to resign myself to the fact that I'd probably never see it again.

I don't know. After this entry I'm just going to stop talking/writing/thinking about it. Feel like the past month or so has been this colossal tide of Oxbridge Fever, and I accidentally got swept along in it even though I never intended to, and now I've been spat out the other end I can see how stupid it all is, but I still feel kind of...deflated.

If there was ever a time to write "anyway" in big capital letters, this is it.

ANYWAY.

Now that the recent insanity has subsided I actually have free time - I mean actual genuine free time, not time spent procrastinating while twenty thousand unfinished thingamajigs await. Yesterday I bought Ciaran Carson's First Language for £3; not really sure what to make of it yet. I think I like the idea of his poems a lot more than I like the poems themselves - a problem I have with a few other poets actually (Ted Hughes, Mayakovsky sometimes). The entry title is a line from his (otherwise patchy) 4 Sonnets, which I read on the bus coming home, staring out the window and feeling slightly morose while a drunk guy nearby yelled "TOMMY TOMMY LISTEN TO ME" down his phone. It felt apt.

Also reading my first novel in about six months - Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (should there be two l's in that or one? even the edition I've got can't seem to decide), which has been on the To Read list for a while. So far, awesome. I don't know why I feel the need to tell you what I'm reading - maybe because it feels sort of new and fresh and exciting to get new books, break their spines, read the first pages for the first time, and so on. Simple pleasures.

P.S. Current favourite silly Latin word - "ubiubi". It means wherever. I haven't been so delighted since the discovery of "plumbum" (meaning lead), and keep getting urges to incorporate it into 'Ruby' by the Kaiser Chiefs - as in: "ubiubi ubiubi! aaaah aaaah aahaaaaaah..." No one finds this entertaining except me.