Happy thoughts

I'm afraid this blog has become very bad-tempered. I haven't even got any good reason for it as I have tons less marking than most people and much less than last year. Maybe it's my forthcoming 31st birthday. My mother, who usually asks me what I want for a present, is insisting that this year she is going to buy me some sensible shoes, and has sent me a sensible shoe catalogue so I can make my choice. I had to negotiate hard to prevent her stipulating that they had to be sensible sandals... But usually I find this sort of thing funny, so I don't know why I'm being all irritable about it. Mothers are allowed to worry about their children in strange and creative ways.

And I should say, I'm not against marriage as such -- it's not something I'd put on my list of where I see myself in ten years' time, but then, as Michael Ball put it, Love Changes Everything -- who knows what the future will bring, &c. I just get bad-tempered when people act as though the subtitle to my life is "Rebecca's search for a man" rather than "Rebecca's attempts to live honestly while exercising her brain in some way".

So to make up for bad-temperedness I am putting below a nice picture of some flowers. This is Rosa cymosa var. Rebecca Rushforth, flowering outside my parents' house. It has pretty vicious thorns. My Dad named the variety after me quite a long time ago. I think he found it in Bhutan. It amuses him greatly to refer to the plant as me, and say things like "You're looking a bit straggly this year".