Thursday

Time races onwards. At this time next week, I'll be returning from meeting the Münsters to get the translation job officially started; the morning after that I shall fly to Canada. Please don't ask how my speech is coming on, as a poke in the eye often offends.

Dept. of it never rains but it pours: two weeks after being drawn from the hat to take part in a new competition, we are drawn from a different hat to take part in a second competition! Huzzah, but my gods who is going to do all the work? They overlap too, the submission date for the second is only a week after the first.

It occurred to me today that I am actually running the current competition: G and U turn up every afternoon for an hour of discussion, then disappear again. All the design work, all the drawings, all the investigation of what is actually at stake, has been my work. It feels strange to be doing real architecture again after so long (a decade or more), exhilarating and discomforting at once, like getting onto a bicycle after twenty years and discovering that, while you still know how to ride, your body no longer works quite the way it used to.

Lunch in the Dead White Male Poet café this afternoon, sharing a table with another regular customer whom we shall call the Furniture Man. In the course of conversation, it turned out that he had thought that I was the boss and G and U the assistants. Apparently that's how the body language reads. Fascinating.

In other news the current motto (underneath above my photo) is from a series of articles in the Guardian Unlimited in which writers describe their "offices," usually with a photo or two. Fascinating.

In other, other news I have decided to ration my use of the word "fascinating."

In otherest news here's a passage from the book I'm currently reading, The Cloudspotter's Guide, which made me laugh out loud. To set the scene: the author is describing how Jupiter took the form of a cloud to ravish Io.

In contrast to the violent scene described by Ovid, Correggio chose to depict Io as though she were having a rather good time with the cloud, and in the process created what must be the most erotic painting of a cloud ever put to canvas: the first—and sadly the last—example of sixteenth-century cloud pornography.

Oh, I'm going to enjoy this book!