Well, we so needed it, a rainy day, and Frederique was so happy to be able to put her PINK raincoat on and her Bill the Builder (she can't be convinced otherwise) gumboots on and run in the rain.
The orchids have exploded this year - it's the first year we've seen flowers since 2003 - they seem to like the inner north and the dry.
I've been rewriting my short story and an exegesis for university, and then I'm finished for the year. An exegesis must be about the most ridiculous academic exercise I've ever had to do, contextualising my own work in terms of the reading we've done this semester. Such an artificial and unrevealing process, it really says nothing about the story or the writing process and creates a sense that ideas come from one or two concrete sources, that writing is a deliberate act of conveying meaning, of articulating ideas through a fictional construct, when the imagination is actually a lot more freeform and a lot less traceable than that.
On Monday when I hand my essay in I am going to see Ben Highmore talk and then I'll be attending a workshop with him about researching the everyday. He's going to be talking about food. The abstract says:
Because food is often a focus of both racist reaction and cosmopolitan desires I theorise why food has been such a contested and viscerally active agent in the forming of multicultural Britain. Using 'sense studies', psychoanalysis, theories of affect, and cultural history I open-up popular cultural representations on to the histories of migration and the psycho-social dynamics of alimentary culture.
It's the first time I've been able to make use of the opportunities made available to PhD students because these seminars usually happen on days when I need to look after the girls. Geekily, I'm really looking forward to it.
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