Rolling home across the foam

Third week in December: I am saddened to report that the quality of British Airways' food has dropped dramatically, leaving Virgin Atlantic the clear superior in all aspects of transatlantic travel except the accents of the staff, where British wins by sounding more British.

Coming home to no dog was awfully sad. No little paws, no mad barking. livredor and pseudomonas turned up in due course, which was awfully jolly nice. How to describe the pleasure of having several days to spend with one's best friends? P's, you left your paperback here, if you email me your new address I'll post it to you.

(no subject)

Going into last week of December: courtesy of jillt driving at 5am, pseudomonas, livredor and I went to the airport and swopped the two Tabs for my W, who had been detained in NYC by school commitments and who had bravely travelled from Riverdale to JFK during the transit strike (thanks to MJNH for good travel advice).

Big sis J later took us out to Emsworth, to visit Bro, Bro's Wife, and Smallest Niece (still officially the cutest child in the world). Much loveliness. Bedtime happened while we were there, and we all sat on Bro's bed and read lots and lots of story books. I'm boggled by the kid's ability to comprehend pictures - you can point to any picture of a bunny, and she'll identify it as a bunny - or a clock, or a flower, or the moon or a cloud* - even though pictures are presented in so many different ways, from photographs to relatively representational coloured drawings to line drawings to cartoons - all kids are like that, pretty much, but how do they know? I tend to think of pictorial representation as being rather an abstract concept, like numbers. I must be wrong. Anyway, this was so fascinating that we read four books instead of the usual one or two, and Smallest Niece peed on the bed. Should've put the nappy on before book time.

* She didn't get on so well with Psychology Today - it only has pictures of psychologists and that got old pretty fast.

Limmud

We shabbated in Oxford, which was utterly lovely, of course, and thence to Nottingham. Train travel on Christmas Eve is disgustingly expensive and tremendously inefficient, just for the record.

Limmud: fantastic. Yay Anglo-Jewry. I didn't end up going to all that many sessions, in the end, but I did spend a lot of time talking to people - some entirely random ones, and some Influential Figures with whom it was nice to get acquainted.

( two sessions )

I had the best fun teaching calligraphy. ( about calligraphy classes )

At the end, they said ( nice things )

The 12-14s in Young Limmud wanted to have a calligraphy session, ( more about that )

Most of the sessions I went to were either ones by scholars on feminism, or performing arts ones. ( the arts, including a )

rendering of "Summertime" in Yiddish - hysterically funny. Something about the way the taut Yiddish idiom and clipped vowels sit with the lazy, confident theme of the song. Yiddish is the language of "Oh God, everything's going wrong," and Summertime is not that kind of song at all!

* Normally I'd say the art of beautiful handwriting, but you can't say that and then ask people to use coloured pencils to trace letter outlines, not if you want them to take you seriously.
** Some of them buggered about and didn't do anything much, of course