philosophy supernatural nude

I asked you all to ask me questions! Here are the answers to some of them.

musesfool asked: If you could plan your dream trip, money and time being no object, what would it be?

I have an odd relationship to travel these days; I've been enormously privileged as far as it goes (depending on how you count, I've lived in three countries and been to 30) but post-pandemic I've become much more someone who wants to take things slow and close. I've seen more of the UK since 2019 than I had in pretty much the 20 years before that.

But also in 2019 I went to Japan, and that sort of lit my imagination. My friends and I went to Tokyo, Nagoya and Kyoto, all of which are on the island of Honshu and not that far apart, and that was great. But while I loved the cities, and loved being immersed in Japanese urban culture, we did spend a few nights in Hakone, an onsen resort town which while I was there was having a distinctively cold snap. What I would like to do is see Japan more like that: slowly, northerly, under snow and ice. Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, the northernmost island, holds an ice sculpture festival every year which I would love to see, and even Tokyo in the winter was beautiful inasfar as I saw it.

Also I saw this picture and I don't think I've got over it yet.

sophia_sol asked: do you like birds more generally, or mostly crows/ravens? do you have good memories of particular times you've seen birds you love?

I like birds in general - definitely I much prefer a place with birds to one without - but corvids are my love! Not quite what you asked, but the ones I think of as "my" crows are such a joy that they cheer me up every time I see them. They live outside my flat, on the main road, which is a proper main road - four lanes of traffic, people, noise, lorries, constant disturbance etc. My crows like the bins. They like the binbags. Not the clear plastic ones; they don't like those, they know those are the recycling; not the big plastic boxes, they know that's the commercial waste. They're not the pigeons and gulls who waste time precious birdly time pecking those. No, they like proper black binbags and nothing else will do, and once they have them they sit on the lamp-posts and caw at passers by, or they perch on fancy cars and make rude little wingtip gestures, or they just flutter into the trees with entire racks of defrosting spare ribs. They're so funny and clever and glossy, I love them.

toft asked: If you had responsibility for naming a cat, what would you name it?

I have maintained for many years that if I got a cat I would call it the Middlecat!! after the Middleman and the jazz hands would be obligatory. A. says I am not allowed to do this. Failing that, a friend of mine had a cat called the Narrator, which I've always wanted to steal. I feel like because cats don't know their names you should call them the silliest thing you can think of. But in practice every cat I have ever known has been consistently referred to as kiss-kiss-kiss, so.

nnozomi asked: How has your language learning experience felt different among the different languages you've studied? (Either in personal/emotional terms, or more along the lines of "why does this way of conjugating verbs make perfect sense to me and this one doesn't AT ALL" and so on).

So I have written about this elsewhere, but I have been formally taught, at one point or another, French, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Latin, and Ancient Greek, and I have a small grasp of Bengali without ever having been taught it. Welsh and Italian I was taught as a small child and remember nothing of except the pronunciation rules, although I think I do remember the pleasure of being taught them, and, well, I'm good at language and languages, and surely that can't have nothing to do with having been exposed to six Indo-European languages before I was eight. (I was way too old before I realised what an incredible privilege that was.)

But - yes. Hindi is my mother tongue, I spoke my first words in it; it's where my mind goes first, or tries to go. Learning it formally felt freeing, rich, liberating, intellectually satisfying and the worst fucking thing that had ever happened, usually all at the same time.

Gaelic is a gift I gave myself. And its stupidly fiendish grammar flows like water for me, either because it's in my blood somehow (which I believe does happen! people just have a language in them like it was always meant to be there, cf. Jhumpa Lahiri on Italian) or maybe because I was taught a different Celtic language at an age when my mind was more plastic. I think it's both of those. Anyway, to learn Gaelic feels beautiful, and also fiendish.

Latin and Greek suited my mind. I regret not having studied either of them for longer; I had all of three years of Latin and one of Greek at school, but there wasn't time and space for everything I wanted to do and they had to be the thing to go. Both appeal to the rigorous, logical part of my mind, that these days I apply to statutory interpretation.

I don't care enough about French culture to speak French. Isn't that damning? But it's the one I should speak fluently - I learned it in a formal setting from the ages of five to sixteen - and I just... don't. It's just, if my Hindi were perfect I'd read Premchand, if my Bengali were I'd read Tagore and also a bunch of magazine SF, if I had the Gaelic for it I'd read Sòmhairle Mac Illeathain, if I'd spent 11 years on Spanish I'd read Borges an Angelica Gorodischer, in French there's just not really a text I dream of reading or a person in my life I'd understand better, so I carry on not speaking it.

skygiants asked: What are all the museum exhibits and gigs you are going to see?

I like this question! Well the gigs I went to see were the Siobhan Miller Band, and Capercailie. Siobhan Miller was great fun, a seated thing at King's Place so all terribly middle-class rather than people actually up and dancing, but I enjoyed it. The support act was a 21yo singer-songwriter from Kirkcaldy who'd never performed in London before. (My fave part: "I'll be out in the foyer after the show. I won't be selling merch, because I don't have any. No albums either. Because I haven't recorded any. But I'll have a piece of paper! For my mailing list!")

Capercailie - hmm. Well, Union Chapel. I love Union Chapel, of course: it's a converted church a short walk from my house with glorious stained-glass acoustics where every remotely folksy-Americanish band in town ends up playing, and it's always stupidly beautiful regardless of who's performing. Venue immaculate, vibes also. And Capercailie are legendary (this was their 40th anniversary tour!). Still. It was a little... fine. Not the same verve and energy as 21yo Niamh the day before, who has not been touring for 40 years, and who is very excited, and not fine.

And it wasn't a museum exhibit exactly, so much as the permanent collections of the London Canal Museum. It's a very small museum with a fabulous setting - it looks out over Regent's Canal, of course, and it looks down into a scary, giant stone walled well, used for large-scale storage of shipped-in ice before refrigeration. It still feels cold. You're walking around the museum and thinking, why is it so COLD. The museum itself is a bit amateurish but fascinating on the history of the waterways and how they co-existed with rail, until they didn't. My friend P and I have an ongoing arrangement where we want to make an effort to hang out one-on-one so every few weeks we go to a weird museum. We've done canals, we've done transport in general, we've done the Hunterian, the Vagina Museum, a weeeeeird exhibit at the Wellcome about milk, of all things. I think we could probably go to a different weird museum every month for a decade in this city without trouble.

The next thing I'm going to see, or someone is taking me to see, is this at the Tate Modern. I've no idea what to expect! We shall see.


Feel free to ask me more things!