This is hardly an auspicious way to return, but it has been an age and I feel I ought to show some signs of life. Still no internets in house, but that might actually really change soon.

Below is a thing I thought I'd posted weeks ago that turned out to be just a draft. Enjoy.

If you are thinking of cutting & cleaning your fingernails, do the cutting bit first, because it means less fingernail to clean afterwards.

I know this is really really really obvious but I only realised it a couple of weeks ago, and it got me to thinking, what else am I missing?

So if you have any obvious advice about stuff, particularly if it's stuff that only struck you relatively late in life, please do share.

Only time enough for Rubbish Friday Joke as I am in the middle of an 11-hour shift which is unacceptably lame and hard.

Q. What do you call Italian military police who are suitable for vegans?

A: Carobinieri.

Har har.

Afternoon. I am going a bit transparenty with hunger so I will skip the pleasantries and get on to Stuff.

In order to Get Things Done, I set myself little tasks, like taking pictures of monuments with a piece of paper with a friend's name on it in the corner, or trying to find the boat with the dancing from Roman Holiday**. Today I wanted to find a particular view of the Colosseum, as I had shown a postcard to several students, all of whom had said it looked a bit funny and that the Colosseum didn't really look like that, so I said I would find the viewpoint and try to replicate the photo for purposes of comparison. Skilled and diligent consulation of map & postcard led to a pleasant couple of hours wandering around the Palatino (as depicted (r) by some French chap), and the answer to the question of where the picture was taken from, which, annoyingly, appears to be "from a helicopter".

Good Things About Today

i. Doing a lesson in a room in Piazza Venezia right opposite the balcony where Mussolini used to do his speeches.

ii. Listening to Us by Regina Spektor while walking down the via Fori Imperiali.

Bad Things About Today

i. Poking head round a wide-open gate to see if it gives access to vertiginous perspectives on amphitheatres, only to be confronted with a finger-wagging vecchia stronza in a car telling me it was private property. Fair enough, I said, ma cos'é? "E' una cosa privata" said she. I don't have many Italian swears yet so I couldn't tell her to get stuffed with her snotty attitude, but it made me cross for quite a while. Of course, now I am desperate to know what this cosa privata is and will look at it on Google Earth when I am not so shagged out.

Things From My Little Blue Book

i. International House of Pancakes IS NOT INTERNATIONAL
Have I mentioned this before? Not sure. But it's pretty bloody rich to call it an international house of pancakes if it's only in America and maybe Canada. I wish they had it here. I like pancakes.

ii. Is it racist or patronising to like the sound of black people speaking French?
I hope not, because I do. I watched Coffee & Cigarettes the other day, which is ace and has Roberto Benigni and The Wu Tang Clan and Tom Waits and Bill Murray and the ice cream man from Ghost Dog in it. And the bit with the two African guys speaking French was particularly good because of the way black people's voices treat the sounds of the French language.

iii. Carla's fava beans joke
We were talking about that bit in the Silence of the Lambs with the fava beans, which are one of those types of beans that has a different name in the UK to the one it has in America (there is a bean that the Americans call a garbanzo bean, which I think is far too exciting a name for a bean to have). So I said "What's a fava bean?" and Carla said "A muvver bean's husband?" It was hilarious.

iv. Fizzy red wine
Don't really know where I was going with this. But it's quite common here, in a way that it really isn't where I come from. It's no great hardship but it's a bit of a shock to pop open a bottle to accompany your lasagne or whatever and find out it's gone all frizzante on your ass.

Right that's it. I have many things to do and I intend to do them with alacrity. I am quite poor at the moment but soon I will be paid and therefore incredibly rich, and I am going to bloody well go to Ikea.

*Ha. This is a thing I like. I was having a coffee before a lesson the other day and when the voluble barista hollered this phrase, it was a sign of my (very very slowly) increasing facility with the language that I knew without having to look round that the new customer was a man with a prominent and noteworthy moustache, and I was not wrong. I will tell about the hairy man on the beer labels some other time.

**It is not there any more.

Season's greetings from Marisa's dog Shortie. There are those that say the giant squid has the largest eyes of any animal. They are wrong.

Merries to all! I have been terribly absent lately due to the the "free" "internets" I was "stealing" having momentarily disappeared like a week ago and not come back, but I'm hoping a solution might present itself soonish.

I do hope everything is well with the nice internets people I have neglected so harshly over these past weeks, and that Xmas is providing festivity and fun things. Bless!

Going to hand in your timesheet and walking up these stairs to the office.

It's difficult to tell because there's nothing to scale it to (and the picture is a bit crappy as I took it with my phone, having brilliantly dropped and broken the only semi-proper camera I've ever owned about 2 weeks into owning it), but the staircase is perhaps 10' wide and the ceiling maybe 15' high. It is ever so grand.

( Under here if you want a picture of a sandwich and a picture of a leg. Otherwise continue to rubbish joke. )

Before we get to the rubbish joke, a tiny bit of Me News. Tomorrow I am moving to a perfectly nice room in an absolutely fantastic location, viz. Viale Giulio Cesare, a minute from the Metro and less than half a mile from the Pope's gaff if you are a crow. Carla & Louise & Lucy have been charming and generous hostesses and temp flatmates for the last three weeks and more, and I shall miss them a great deal, but it will also be decidedly pleasant to have my own bed and my own front door key again.

When I am settled in the new place this diary business will, I am sure, become more frequent and more fluent, but to keep you going until then, here is a terribly obvious rubbish joke that has doubtless been made many times before, but no one has ever told it to me. It goes:

Q. What do you call a large arctic mammal that suffers from manic depression?

A. A bipolar bear.

That's about as good as can be expected at this stage. More things soon.

Carla in the flat is sick at the moment and raging about it. Earlier she expressed her displeasure her multi-vitamins' inability to prevent the encroachment of the illness:

"Multi-vitamins, what have they done for me? Multi-fuck-all!"

One other thing: I was thinking yesterday about lazy collocations - overwhelming majority, blatant prejudice, obscenely wealthy, I dunno. Then I thought of the phrase "inherently flawed", which I've often enjoyed using myself, and it struck me that it would be kind of tricky for something to be flawed in a way that wasn't inherent, wouldn't it? People often say that plans or projects are inherently flawed, but if the plan is flawed, of course the flaw is inherent, no? If the flaw wasn't inherent it wouldn't be part of the plan. Hmmm.

Anyway, if you want brain exercise of a Sunday afternoon, flex the cells on that one and let me know. I'm going to go to the supermarket and think about it some more.

I just did an audio version of the Sean Connery thing but I don't know if it's going to show up. Fingers crossed, eh readers?

I "delivered" my first ever "lecture" this morning and it went rather well, so now I am going to reward myself with a nice juicy slice of sleep pie.

EDIT: It did turn up, twice, and both times it was a load of old crap with bits missing. I might try again later.

Pitifully inadequate, but:

I've been back in Rome for a little over a week now, and it is as gorgeous and curly and big and small as I remember it. I will (really really will) try to update properly some time very soon, because GOD DAMN IT I AM NOT GIVING UP ON THIS DIARY. For now, though:

Something that has given me a lot of amusement over these last few months is saying things in Italian but with a Scottish accent. Both accents possess that pleasing rolling r sound, and there's also a clippedness to Scottish vowels that suits Italian rather well. Living temporarily with a Scottish person, as I am, I have had ample opportunity to exercise this pointless but entertaining hobby, to the extent that it has taken on a rarefied form, that of not simply using a Scottish accent, but of using the accent of esteemed Scottish actor Sean Connery. This is doubly hilarious, as Italian's profusion of sibilants combines very nicely with Sir Sean's most noted vocal inflection. It might not sound like much, but good lord, nothing has made me giggle so much for quite a while. So much so, in fact, that I've had to ration myself to one Italian Sean Connery utterance per day. Here's the one that made me smirk all the way across the Ponte Regina Margherita this afternoon:

Italian Sean Connery Asks A Friend If It's Possible To Meet At 6, Or 6.30, Or 7

"Ci vediamo alle sei? No? Alle sei e mezzo? Alle sette? Sì."

Maybe say that out loud to get the full effect.

Anyway, the sofa beckons and I have molte cose da fare domani. Maybe at the weekend I will have time for something proper.

Jimmy Carr is tolerable and even quite funny on QI. How does that work?

I am working my way up to actually writing something of more than the slightest passing interest, but until then:

Last week I played a little gig in Ealing with Steve "Harry The Steve" The Wheels, which was very pleasant as I hadn't played in public for something like two years. We are doing it again in a couple of weeks, only this time we are going to rehearse first. Anyway, this led directly to my buying some plectrums, and indirectly to my taking two pictures of me with one of them in my mouth.

( Look! )

Lovely end-of-term atmosphere at Hertford as 7 of the 14 or so teachers are finishing today. Bright sunshine, repairing shortly to the Turf for a swifty, then back to London and connectedness until Sunday night.

Just time, then, for a real Rubbish Friday Joke, courtesy of Sarah, my splendid colleague and flatmate of the last six weeks. It materialised during last night's gallon-winning quiz triumph in the Radcliffe Arms, and it goes like this:

Q. What do you call a band of Ancient Greek heroes on a quest for some booze?

A. Jason and the Lagernauts.

Thanks. Lots more over the weekend, I hope, as I gorge myself on hassle-free internets. If you are a person I messenge with, do look out for me, and if you are a person who fancies a nice drink, let me know.

Hullo! I am at work and have to run away and eat a pasty any minute, but here is a rubbish joke that I have been licking into rubbish shape over the last couple of days. Don't worry, it's still rubbish.

Q: What do you call a Parisian maxillofacial surgeon and Emerson devotee who is happy to work on either side of the river?

A: A trans-Seine dentalist.

Yeah, cheers.

Oh! And! My diary was 4 a couple of weeks back, but I didn't notice. What is a good present for a 4-year-old diary?

Yesterday was the first day since I returned to this country on the 25th of June that it didn't rain.

Took 51 Belgians to Bath and Stonehenge yesterday, easily the largest number of Belgians with whom I have ever shared a confined space. Bath is very pretty indeed, with an abbey and a ferocious river and a house recently bought by Nicolas Cage.



Then to Stonehenge, where this fool walked right across my picture in such a way as to make it look rather nice. It was easily the best henge I have seen this year, and I was delighted to read in the visitors' literature that three miles north-east of Stonehenge lies the contemporaneous Woodhenge, a vaguely similar structure fashioned from wood. This minded me to draw attention to some of the other fine henges that are all too frequently overlooked by even the most assiduous henge enthusiast.

Strawhenge, located three miles north-east of Woodhenge, and Paperhenge, a further three miles in the same direction, were built by some very silly druids who were jealous of the henges of their neighbours. Sadly, however, neither was destined for posterity. Paperhenge, while grand and ambitious, was fatally prone to wind interference, and blew away shortly after its construction. Strawhenge was eaten by some goats before it was completed.

A rival Chinese henge erected in Nanking in c.2100 B.C., Ricehenge was briefly the jewel in the late Xia dynasty's architectural crown until it was set upon and eaten by bands of hungry peasants, then rebuilt and eaten again 20 minutes later.

Tobleronehenge, sweet, triangular and delicious, is the last surviving example of the Swiss henge-building tradition. Replicas of varying sizes can be found to this day in duty free shops.

Cronehenge: made of witches.

Commissioned by the Planet Hollywood group in 1990, Sylvester Stallonehenge was built by the Nobel Prize-winning druids of Clonehenge, who produced 32 genetically-identical copies of the actor which were painstakingly rolled into place in the Nevada desert. Uniquely unattractive, this muscular, monosyllabic henge was destroyed by a drunk and confused Dolph Lundgren in 1996.

What's your favourite henge?

I'm on a bus!

Houpla! I got paid twice in 2 days and am now the richest person in the world. I want to buy either a camera to replace the house-brick-sized one I currently use, or an mp3 player to replace the one I dropped on the floor 8 times in one night when Jim came to visit. But how to decide? Oh! I know!

Poll #1021765 Tech-a-nology (To Be Said In A Yogi Bear Voice)
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What to buy?

I said "Other"! Here is why!

I am bored enough to suggest a specific camera/mp3 player. It is:

They're alphabetical from north to south! Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, in that order!

A student told me that. You can learn a lot from kids.

More Europe news later!

I am drinking a lot of espresso out of this darling little cup right now, so what follows is liable to be fractious. Did you ever see those pictures of the webs spiders make when they're on different drugs? The caffeine one was mental.

Back in London for the weekend, which is supremely relaxing. Slept in my Klimt bed last night (picture when stupid camera batteries finish charging) underneath the picture of the African lady and woke up and didn't know where I was. In a good way.

I am gorging on internets as I have none in OX1, so expect more of this nonsense over the next 24 hours. For now, though, here are 15 pictures from the last month or so.

( All the world inside a coloured bag. )

It's almost 5pm and I am still in my night things, which is indolent even considering that I'm on holiday. Might remedy that.

EDIT: Either Photobucket is in a mood or I am a moron, so some of those pictures aren't showing. Working on it. Because it's really important, yes.

EDIT EDIT: Visibility of pictures independently verified, hurray. Also I added a couple more Paris ones.

*

Hullo!

Aw heck, first time I have a second to say a new thing here and I'm too frazzly to be sparkling. I must therefore rely on FACTS. FACTS bolstered by the stern compartmentalising power of BULLETS:

• Am living here and working here and both are very very fine. It is nice that the list of locations on my teaching CV now reads Cambridge, London, Rome, Oxford - great centres of learning and culture, and Cambridge.
  
  
• I have, as may be apparent, no internets at home, which in a way is weird and disorienting, and in another is quite healthy as it makes me go to bed at normal times.
  
  
• Taking responsibility for actual lesson planning is a bit of a shock after getting used to the way Wall Street mollycoddles its teachers, but it's necessary and healthy and I don't mind it at all.
  
  
• Nope, really, that's about all I can squeeze out for just now. As is the way of these things, the last few days have been frantical and wild, but when the first lot of students have gone home and I can start recycling lessons, things will definitely calm down.
  

OK! That's me done!

*NB. Did not take this picture myself at all. Pinched it off the web. Will do my own when time and opportunity present themselves, and maybe it stops bloody raining for half a minute. I walk acrossthrough this bridge every morning to get from the staff meeting to my first class.

Last night was a kind of comedy Woodstock. I've liked David Cross's stuff for a few years now so it was lovely to be right at the front and hear his discursive, conversational observations about gay marriage and getting a handjob from a dog. Then there was Todd Barry, every review of whom I imagine contains the words sardonic and drawl, and who is rather witty. Then the slightly underwhelming Kristen Schall, who overplayed the "ooh I'm a girl" bit a touch, but who had a lovely film to show. Then more David, then Eugene Mirman, who is splendid but I can't remember a single one of his jokes. Finally, the presumably coincidentally present Daniel Kitson was persuaded to do five minutes which turned into 40, and as I shamefully hadn't ever seen him before, I was stunned by how casually fantastic he is.

Decided against trying to meet any of the comics and instead repaired to Dionysus (link goes to Jim's kebab site, navigate from there for details), where beautiful Mediterranean treats were had for less money than is strictly reasonable in the West End. Impulsively dipped into a bar on the way to the tube, sipped a Bellini and thought wistfully of Rome.

There are pictures and reflections and numerous other things, but I have to think of running away to Oxford before it gets dark. I have a meeting at 9.45 tomorrow morning which I am not especially looking forward to. But! New! Things! Excited!

Folx!

Back in the UK, lots to say, no time to say it. But!

LONDON DRINX! HERE! TOMORROW NIGHT! FROM ABOUT 8 O'CLOCK I SUPPOSE!

More later (inc. pictures of falafel).