No Kidding

I am very annoyed because I am still feeling too ill to go very far from my sofa, and I had been going to spend the evening in London with Mr Kidd. (See extremely unflattering picture of him left; those are breadsticks and I think he did eat them later.) We were going to eat curry and flick through his hundreds of cable channels, sniggering at things in our best Beavis and Butthead manner. It'll be ages before I can get down to London again. Next weekend, for example, I will be on a retreat where I am the only woman: on the plus side I will get a bedroom to myself, but on the minus I will spend the whole time being called a "lady" by those both aware and un- of its modern overtone of unconvincing trans-sexual. And the weekend after that I have a big student dinner in my department. The problem with Cambridge is how much it takes up of what ought to be my own life. I'm not 100% sure what my own life is, or would be, but I think it would involve less time wearing smart clothes, or trying to be a good example (or at least not a bad one).