Kerewin, beneath the distant luminous dust of stars:

[helenic]

In the next couple of days I have two weeks worth of work to do; trying to cram in everything before the end of term as well as a backlog of unfinished essays. Days like these, with the wind in the chimney and beating against the windows like the sea, all I want is to be curled up with a book, watching the twilight from within my pocket of warm. Every time I try and engage with the social conflicts of the Roman Republic I end up withdrawing into my head for up to half an hour at a time, unable to concentrate on anything but a nameless sort of yearning, staring at the tossing leafless silhouettes of trees. Today I'm in a distant, fey sort of mood. I want to be on the beach, surrounded by sea-sounds; skywatching.

My sleeping patterns have been all over the place recently. I was writing a practical criticism until 1am on Friday morning and then spent at least an hour reading through forgotten files on my computer, things I'd written when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, characters and moods I'd forgotten how much I'd loved. I'd like to return to them, but know I couldn't. I wasn't able to sleep until dawn that night, when despairing of the silence I got dressed and walked across college to Iain's room, crawling in beside him and finally subsiding to the comforting rhythm of his breathing and heartbeat. I had to get up three hours later but the day for all its busyness wasn't so bad, managing to hand everything in and go to every supervision and even hold another casual conversation with Laura without letting it worry me overmuch. She and I both meet for supervisions in the faculty foyer at 11am every other Friday, and while I understand (and hope to accept) that we'll never again be friends, perhaps we'll end up being acquaintances.

I'm re-reading The Bone People and as always my head is full of it, the strange prose-poetry language of it scattered with tantalising fragments of Maori; ka aha ra koe, e tama. Sometimes a book gets under your skin and stays there, and even when it's over you carry it around with you afterwards, infecting the way you look at things, the way you think. Words can be a contagion.

On which note, my copy of Lord of the Rings arrived today. I've wanted my own ever since I left home and had to borrow my brother's to read in London. This is the same edition as my parents'; a HarperCollins boxset in dark green with gold engraving, and Tolkein's own ring illustrations on the front of each of the four paperbacks. It smells like a mixture of cigar smoke and strawberries. I looked at the leatherette collector's editions, and the illustrated ones with fold-out maps, but I realised what I really wanted was the one I grew up with, that I first discovered aged eight and have been compelled to return to at least five times since then. It's too soon to read it again now, but I have a mind to reacquaint myself with the Hobbit.