Kensington Pavilion: A toast to tea

In preparation for reading the Edwardians, we sat down to a proper afternoon tea party in the Kensington Palace pavilion today. And like proper people of leisure we lingered there for nearly two hours.

It's Mothers' Day in the U.S., so lots of sweet pictures of friends with kids and moms on my feed. It made me miss At, Nu, and Huck pretty fierce. 

No reading today as it's a Sunday, but I did share this article that blows my mind every time: “Tea if by Sea; Chai if by Land.”

Pic: All dressed up with pinkies out, cos we're fancy like that.

Oxford: building a longer table

I absolutely love when I can bring my old life and my current life together. 

Today we went to Oxford and my students got to meet my old profs. Lectures, Q&A, a long pub lunch at a suitably long table... my heart is full. 

A couple of students said they'd like to do graduate school at Oxford/in the U.K. I love being able to help--even a little bit--to nudge open the door from our small bubbles into the world.

What we read: papers by Robert and Will because we were meeting them. And also--thanks NGS--extracts from R.F. Kuang's Babel because it's set in Oxford and is about translation and colonialism.

Pic: Profs and students at The Royal Oak. A colleague brought their adorable 13-year-old doggie to lunch... and I had to quickly blink away tears because I started imagining Scout making it to 13.  I miss everyone at home right now, and I think some part of me thinks he'll be there when I reunite with the rest of the family in ten days.

Bloomsbury: reception

The class got a special tour through Bloomsbury with performances from Mike and Cindy. 

A person who yawned in class when I lectured on T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and Rabindranath Tagore is all smiles here. My feelings aren't hurt or anything. 😉

Pic: Mike and Cindy enacting Hilda Doolittle(H.D.)'s dance of adultery.

London: up, down, and all around

I sleep badly and irresponsibly in every time zone. 

Last night, I stayed up past 2 am GMT reading every obituary I could find for Dooce. I was devastated to hear she had died...  by suicide... the day before... and how little coverage there was. Jezebel.com which used to cover her breathlessly hasn't even mentioned her death. I realize she'd done some TERF-y stuff lately, but the silence is depressing. 

I don't know when I fell asleep, but we were on for a tour around London today. We read landmarks of poetry at various London landmarks. The top favorite, I think, was Patience Agbabi's "London Eye," which cleverly references Wordsworths's Westminster Bridge poem. 

Nicole and NGS, thank you for your podcast rec of Stuff the British Stole! It's going on my class notes for tomorrow.  

Pic: Our Thames river cruise with the London Eye in the background. I told my students how lovely they were about not complaining when I asked them to pose for pics. (At and Nu would never.)

The British Museum: just saying no (to cultural theft)

Everyone in class is tickled by the fact that the British Museum is older than the United States. And everyone in class is outraged about much it owns and how it "loans" (ha!) stuff back to countries and communities of origin. 

We prepped for our visit by reading lots of poems linked to artifacts at the museum. Some of what we read:
W.B. Yeats “The Second Coming” 
Thomas Hardy “In the British Museum” 
Daljit Nagra "Hadrian's Wall" 
George the Poet “The Benin Bronze” 
John Keats “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” 
Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ozymandias”
Seamus Heaney “Punishment”

Then we waded through museum studies videos and articles to work our way around themes of cultural appreciation, appropriation, colonial theft, etc. At our visit, I polled the group to see if they thought we ought to--as the museum suggests--make a donation. They went with "Hell no!" 

Pic: Under the beautiful dome of the British Museum today.
 

London: fuzzy glimmers

I, along with tons of people on the internet, learned about "glimmers," which are "the opposite of triggers" on CupOfJo (and elsewhere) this weekend. I cannot say how much I love this concept.

A bit jet-lagged and tired today, but here are a couple of glimmers.

* Made a quick trip to the local Sainsbury's and I found my favorite mango-passionfruit yogurt. Why do they not have this in the US? It's the most sublime flavor IMO and the first spoonful just took me back to uni days.  

* Someone texted me that they got a 4.0 on a test and I haven't figured out who it is--whether friend or student or advisee or kid of a friend, etc... but I'm so happy for them!

Pic: A fuzzy picture of the view from my room (we're right in the heart of Bloomsbury).

Let's do this!

I wasn't packed for The Empire Writes Back: Cosmopolitan England trip at 9 am, but by 9:45, I was all packed. It helped that I had a mental list and the physical list I'd shared with students to work with. Also it's a work trip, so I don't have to look "cute," just capable--so I've relied on my work uniform of pants and blouses. I know from experience that when I take off with Big A for our annual honeymoon, I stress about what to pack a lot, lot more. I have a carryon only again. I overcame the problem of how to take two weeks of shampoo and body-wash in my carryon by buying some nice bar soap and a shampoo bar. (No idea how they work yet, though.)

I'm not worried about Nu, because they have At and Big A and L to take care of them. I am worried about Huck because although she has everyone to look after her too, she's so lonely now and I don't want her to think Mama died too. 

Speaking of which, once I was packed I had nothing to do but worry about the million different things that could go wrong with my meticulously laid plans for the next two weeks. But I just checked in on student travel journals and their excitement is catching... Let's do this! 

Pic: My students and I have matching scarves on our backpacks so we can ID each other even without faces.