Dancing (or things I'm really bad at Part Two)

When I was four years old my mother enrolled me in a local ballet class.

Three weeks later I dis-enrolled.

This was a wise choice for everybody involved and I haven't looked back since, but it always disappointed my mother who I think had hoped to live through me. Not for any great length of time and not in a way that would affect the quality of my life or turn her into one of those warped stage mothers but just a little sojourn into living through her daughter - something shorter than a childhood but longer than three weeks. Once a keen ballerina herself she had been told aged twelve that her 'loud knees' were just 'too faulty' to continue, and assuming that I had inherited my father silent stealth-joints she thought I should give ballet my best shot.

My best shot was dreadful. It ricochetted off the walls wounding other children, I'm speaking metaphorically here but I might as well be speaking literally. It was apparent even before the first session ended that raising my arms, positioning my feet in different directions, and bending without toppling over were all activities beyond my modest ken. It was really quite perverse of me to stick at it as long as I did.

In many ways my lack of skill was a blessing in disguise as it turns out I didn't inherit my fathers click-free joints and now (even at the moderately spry age of twenty-one) am basically a human-version of one of those Noise-Makers that people whirl around at football matches. I can't move without clicking. If I draw a circle in the air with my hand my wrist sounds like a cement mixer, and my neck (which I crack often and violently in order to dissuade people on public transport from sitting next to me) makes a noise akin to someone breaking a bundle of stiff twigs in half. If I were to do ballet now it would sound as if I had castanets hidden about my person. What a stroke of luck, then, that I couldn't do it.  It would have been galling to have discovered a genuine talent and then suffered the same knee-based fate as my mother. In all likelihood it would also have left a dreadful legacy as I, in turn, forced my daughter into ballet in the hopes that she could live the dream, only to discover that she in turn was entirely comprised of click and would have to press her own daughter into it... who would also be clicky. And the horrible cycle would continue ad infinitum, each Savory woman marrying not for love but for the supple qualities of her husbands click-less knees in the hopes of breeding out what would come to be known as "The Curse".

Anyway, joints aside, the point of all this is I can't dance and I should have realised this aged four rather than aged eighteen when, surrounded by gyrating, hair-flicking strangers on my first and last night of clubbing, I attempted a sort of bear-like shuffle and noticed that they were politely averting their eyes.

"So you dance like an arse" my friends said "Just get drunk. You are too self-aware that's all".

They were wrong.

I can get fantastically drunk, completely separate my mind from my body, and at no point does it imbue me with the ability to dance. It is not a matter of inhibition it's a matter of skill.

"Just listen to the music and move with the rhythm" recommended hateful well-wishers. This is equally useless. It's like saying "just put your lips together and blow". It sounds simple, but it only makes sense if you can already whistle. If you don't know how to whistle and you actually put your lips together and blow you just spray spit everywhere through your closed lips.

My dancing is very much the choreographic equivalent of spraying spit everywhere through your closed lips.

I really can't do it. Not only can I not do it but I actually don't like doing it. If I could do it, I wouldn't. Ever. This general aversion is probably the reason it took me so long to discover the full extent of the problem. There was a fourteen year gap between ballet and clubbing and I spent the entire time refusing to dance.

We had dance classes at my school but, fortunately for me, they never involved anything that you could actually call dancing. Other schools taught their students to waltz or cha-cha, but not us. Looking back this may have been due to what I can only describe as 'the fervent anti-lesbianism measures' put in place by the leather-clad Head. On arriving she observed that a small number of us, out of either natural propensity or possibly boredom, were having relationships with each other and decided that the best way to deal with this (rather than just letting it happen) was to impose a series of sanctions on that famous homosexuality inducing subject - Performing Arts. We were not allowed to put on plays that included romantic plots (think about it - that is most plays) because of the drag and subtle girl-on-girl undercurrents so it stands to reason that they wouldn't have wanted us slow dancing with each other either. Eventually The Head just banned drama and dance outright, but for the first few years that she was there the school opted out of traditional dance and replaced it with something more akin to half an hour of creative flailing.

For your flailing lessons you needed no rhythm or syncopation but you did need that sort of unabashed gusto and cheerful disregard for looking like a tit that comes so naturally to self-aware pubescent girls. You didn't need a partner (who you might accidentally start to find attractive) either. Creative flailing was an entirely solo pursuit. Sometimes you might be asked to band together with five or so other flailers and all flail around each other. But not often.

At the start of each lesson we would assemble surly and poe-faced around the edge of a mobile that smelt strongly and unpleasantly of our own feet, and after a few dreadful stretches set to whatever song was popular at the time, our 'dance' teacher would give us a sort of brief. This was usually a situation like "marooned in the tropics" but sometimes it was just a noun like "cat" or "tree". We would picture these things, and then we would 'dance them'.

I think they were hoping that we would lose ourselves in this enchanted world of imagination, and give completely free rein to our natural flailing instincts. Whirling off around the room like acid-eating dirvishes lost in our colourful minds and completely at one with our expressive abilities.

This never happened. Well, at least not to me.

On one occasion our dance teacher, (who was actually a P.E teacher and clearly considered the lesson more than her jobs worth) bought in a C.D of the sound track to War of the Worlds and gave us a more detailed brief...

"I've brought some music in and I have choreographed some dances for you. You can take one of two roles..."

She took us through the roles, and the dances. I say dances, it still wasn't dance, not really, it was something like mime but with more repetitious stepping...

"Pretend the aliens are coming and you are working your regular jobs. Perhaps you are an office worker, in which case you do two steps forward, type on your imaginary computer, two steps back, turn, drink your imaginary tea. Housewives, two steps forward, peg out your imaginary washing, two steps back, pretend to chat to the other housewives. When the music changes register that is when you see the crafts hoving into view, ok? And then I want you to do two steps forward, FEAR, two steps back...."

I remember opting out of the office worker or housewife scheme. Instead for the duration of the War of the Worlds I 'danced' a role of my own creation - Gravedigger. Two steps forward. Dig an imaginary grave. Two steps back. Dig a second imaginary grave positioned two steps behind the first one. Two steps forward... and so on. When the 'crafts hoved into view' rather than pointing or crouching dramatically like my classmates I leaned on my grave diggin' spade and had a contemplative cigarette, watching the saucers with the Stoic calm of a man who knows that this invasion will ultimately be very good for business.

It is testament to how little our 'dance' teacher cared that she never once asked what I was doing. Maybe she thought I was giving free rein to my natural flailing instincts. In a way I suppose I was. My natural instincts were anti-flail and the gravedigger was a very still and thoughtful character, his flailing kept to a bare minimum at all times. He became a sort of vehicle through which I subtly expressed my hatred for the indignity that is dance.

The thing about actually hating dancing though (as well as being crap at it), is that it makes me a bit inhuman (just a bit). Dancing, like eating and hugs, is something people are hard-wired to enjoy. All cultures dance. It's one of those things. It is, also, a sort of social shorthand for 'everything is great'. So far in life my no dance policy is going quite well but I am very aware that there is every possibility I might get my self into a situation in which I am socially obliged to dance in order to show my happiness/approbation/joy/what have you and if I don't I will be implying that "everything isn't great" which will look quite rude. Other peoples weddings is a good example of one of these situations. My own wedding is a better example.

I've got that one sorted now though. I think for my first dance I'm just going to reprise the gravedigger role. If I've married the right man (ie. married him for love rather than for his knees) he will go along with it or, better, mime a corpse. Me in white with my imaginary cigarette staring stoically at the sky and him prostrated and motionless at my feet. Both of us together as the guests look on. Beautifully still. Expressing our perfectly static love with a jubilant, celebratory lack of movement.

Terminally Unemployable

A month ago (against my better judgement) I graduated from university. Life since then, rather than being the blur of champagne and cakes that I envisaged, has been an endless procession of people, some of whom I hardly know, asking me questions that are, at once, vague and horribly all-encompassing. The kind of things that, in any other circumstance you simply wouldn’t be able to lead with in polite conversation...

“So” they say “what exactly are you going to do with that life of yours?” 

and 

“Will there be a job? Or will you just be a burden to family and state from here on in?”

I generally try to spit, subtly, at these people but perhaps I wouldn’t be so thorny if I could present them with an actual plan. The fact is I have nothing sensible or realistic to tell them. I haven’t seriously aspired towards any sort of job for about seven years, and I will tell you for why.

When I was in year nine my entire class took an online aptitude test that provided you with a list of all the possible professions (I do mean all of them, French Horn Polisher was an option) and ranked them in terms of suitability based on your answers to a series of questions. These professions were marked with either a green tick (for those jobs that would bring you great happiness and advancement) an orange circle (for the ones you weren’t suited to but could basically muddle along in without anyone noticing) or a red cross (for those jobs you should never under any circumstances enter in to, ever). Unlike the majority of people who second-guessed and calculated their way through the exercise, wanting to be reassured that whatever profession it was that they had their eye on was indeed the one their personality marked them out for, I answered the aptitude questions with complete honesty. 

For my efforts the computer rewarded me with a long list of red. 

I had one orange (Snake Milker, no really, which seemed unviable.) 

It was sobering.

A lot of people were unhappy with what the computer had determined was their ideal career, and sat long faced for the remainder of the PSHE lesson ruminating on their grey futures in poultry wrangling or the professional horn polishing business, but I didn’t even have that to look forward to. At my most open and honest, and with what was surely the most comprehensive list of professions ever compiled to choose from, I had been deemed terminally unemployable. Sure, I could struggle through with the snake milking but I would always know that I was only hanging in there by the skin of my teeth. The other snake milkees, the ones that had got a green tick next to Snake Milker, the ones for whom The Milking was a calling that had ‘chosen them’, would look down on me, and rightly so. 

This all stuck in the craw to such an extent that I basically gave up on aspirations and decided to dedicate what remained of my life to reading. It was working well until a few months ago when my mother pointed out (forcefully) that this was never going to make me any money, and my sister had to sit me down and make me work out exactly what it was I wanted to do. “Satire?” I said after a while this was dismissed as about as viable as the snake milking “Give me a break, Jonathan Swift” my sister said “what did you want to do before you became a posturing and delicate soul?”

I can’t remember exactly when I became a posturing and delicate soul, as I think it was quite a gradual process but I can remember incredibly clearly all the jobs I wanted to have before actually having a job was a possibility. As a child I was very clear cut about my (at that point, distant) future (it would be a concerning joyless child who wasn’t, really, “What do you want to be when you grow up Timmy?” “Oh...pfftt....something in an office?”)From the ages of four to eight professional acrobatics was my sole aim. My parents had already prepped me for the role by naming me Anna.

Anna the Acrobat!

Alliteration, I had observed, was the key to the profession. As long as the name caught on my lack of coordination and general dudities would be overlooked. 

I could just see it.... 

Anna The Acrobat - wrought in bright colours on posters peeling from dry-cleaners windows. Anna The Acrobat - for one night only! Watch her walk the high wire using only her own massive head as a ballast! Marvel at her feats of daring-do and pause only briefly to allow her some quiet time with her inhaler between acts!

I have no idea where all this came from, as far as I can remember I never saw any particularly inspiring acrobatic displays as a child, I don’t even remember going to a circus. The notion just arrived fully formed in my soft child-head one day “acrobatics - that’s the thing for me”. My parents, ever supportive, installed a trapeze, hand-crafted by my father above my bed, and I practised each night with the sort of fervent self-disapline that has been entirely missing from my life ever since. If only I hadn’t expended it all on that damn trapeze, maybe I would actually have a real job by now.

Anyway, in spite of this initially fervour at age eight acrobatics was left in the dust as I slowly progressed through the dictionary of professions to acting. I was to play Belle in my infant schools production of Beauty and the Beast, opposite James, a flamboyant boy that teachers had decorated so that he resembled a gigantic horned slug. My beast.

Because the role was far too sustained for any one eight year old to tackle singlehandedly they split it between three of us. Other, less talented girls played Belle in the first and third act when she was either flacidly underdeveloped and innocent, or flaccidly developed and rightous, I on the other hand played her in the second, when, captured by slug-James, she went from pure provincal virgin, to Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, to committed lover. To my mind it ranked highly in the list of most complex roles in the western dramatic cannon.

I don’t want to sound boastful but it was staggeringly well received. People threw roses and the such like, asked for my signature, copied my hair cut. I was a hit. The amusingly named Mrs Badger took my parents to one side and suggested that they take me out of main stream education and enrole me in drama school. I knew they would because they had been so supportive with the acrobatics dream and it would be inconsistent of them not to be behind me in this - my true calling. 

When they didn’t take their youngest daughter out of school at the age of eight and sentence her to a life of child-acting with all its attendant mental trauma, I started a long campaign of hate against them, pointedly sulking and not speaking to them for days in a way that I hoped would highlight my natural propensity for drama. Looking back I’m really not sure they noticed. Desolate and seeking comfort I turned to television (I still do this, by the way) and spent long evenings watching the Real Actors. Hating them. With that hard knotted hate that only children are really capable of. Fortunately after a while this subsided, but I kept on with the television watching and, in time, repeated exposure to Rolf Harris, who would leer grotesquely over dead or dying animals every evening at 6.30, suggested a new career path.

Along with every other nine year old in the county I spent the next three years discovering to my horror that you didn’t just become a vet. You couldn’t stride into your local practice and begin magically healing animals like St Francis of Assissi until someone decided to pay you for your trouble. Instead the preparation for the role involved really quite offensive amounts of science and by age twelve, realising that even small amounts of science offended me, I called it a day on vetinary surgery. From then on I floated about, fixing on various professions for short periods of time until year nine, when, as we know, all professions (bah one) were entirely ruled out.

Usually I like to tie up these blog entries in some way, but I still don't have a job, so I can't. I want to say that one computer run simulation doesn't genuinely dictate what jobs you can do, I think that is probably true, but I have no proof of it. I haven't been an acrobat, or an actor, or a vet, or a glass eye maker (that was on the cards for a bit) or a satirist even. I've been an Avon Lady for two hours but they fired me before it began. So far in life all the evidence points to the computer aptitude test being right on the money. I am terminally unemployable.

So I'm going to conclude, desolately, with an image.

Heres to the future...

(You were imaging real milk, weren't you!)

She actually looks quite expert, I wouldn't be that good, that snake would have become tangled in my hair by now, or I would have broken the glass or the snake by holding them too tightly.

Seriously though, if anyone needs a satirist, do let me know.

Sticks and Seduction (Nailing the pretentious title!)

A meeting was called by the Women in Charge mid-way through my first year in sixth form. It was the kind of large important meeting that we were all told about a week in advance and that meant that we all, the entire lower sixth, had to gather in our library-adjacent common room to be addressed as a collective.

The contents then, logically, concerned us all.

The Women in Charge had called in back-up for the occasion and sat against the wall along with her were Mrs Grey (The Gray-ster) and Miss Kermit (Kermy!) Kind and witty, respectively, and not above idle gossip, collectively, The Grey-ster and Kermy were lower-sixth favourites. They had a difficult line to walk however between their natural goodness and the terrible demands of duty. They were for the most part good to us though, like friendly prison guards who gave you extra cigarettes when the warden wasn't looking, or rather like friendly prison guards who let you come in and weep all over their office and abuse the warden terribly, when the warden wasn't looking.

Now the warden was looking they sat ashen faced and uncomfortable, staring at their shoes.

Once we were all settled the Women in Charge waddled her way up to what she must have imagined was her soap-box and tilting forward on the balls of her small feet, trilled at us "Laddddiiies."

"Sorry to keep you after school (general inward grumbling) but there are two things that have come to my attention and that really need to be dealt with straight away. The first is that someone has bought a stick in to the common room, (the eyes of about 10 good friends shifted towards me, and mine shifted towards Sticky, my proposed sixth form mascot who rested forlornly in a corner.) It needs to be removed immediately. The second is that there is still some very inappropriate dressing going on. We have been over this before ladies, sixth formers need to look respectable! I don't want to see any more clevage (eyes probably shifted in various directions here,) any more corsetry (100 pairs of eyes, back to me) or any more, any more...abundancies of lace, (ah, that was everyone, everyone's eyes, even The Grey-ster and Kermy had allowed themselves a quick glance up from their shoes towards my corseted-in-tits-out-lace-swaddled self.) Correct it ladies! ("lady" chimed in everyone mentally "correct it, lady.")" The Women in Charge stepped heavily down from her imaginary soap-box and exited with as much gravitas as she could command.

It would have been annoying if it wasn't so hilarious, The Women in Charge could have just sidled up to me as I walked to a class and said "Anna, stick - out! Stop dressing like a Victorian whore! Comprende?" but a meeting for the entire year? With extra staff members present to really hammer it home? I resolved to purposefully drag my feet on both issues until they could learn to be less childish about the whole thing.

I wasn't given much oppertunity to drag though. When I came in the next day I found that Sticky was not resting in his usual corner.

Sticky. The God of our legend.

Having decided that sixth form was really grim and dreadful, that we had prefered GCSEs, and that all changes being made managerially and acedemically were for the worst, some friends and I had decided to buoy up spirits by appionting a stick we had found in the grounds as Sixth-form mascot. We felt it correctly reflected our disillusionment with the current state of affairs...

"Who is your mascot? Is it a horse like on the school badge?"

"God no, it's that old stick, over there."

The brilliant thing was that, in spite of his unassuming appearance, Sticky was working, a girl with access to the art block supplies had offered to paint him pink and blue and varnish him. We were going to carry him to important events, hold him aloft like a beacon of excellence as the head girls were announced, dress him up appropriately for Christmas. He had brought us all closer and, frankly, rekindled our collective hopes and dreams.

And now he was gone. His favourite corner, empty.

I burst in to The Grey-ster and Kermy's office.

"What have you done, you monsters! Where is Sticky?"

"What? Who?"

"Sticky - The Sixth Form Stick! Don't act like you don't know, we had a bloody meeting about him yesterday!"

"The old stick in the corner of the common room? The Women in Charge made us throw it out back outside where it belonged."

"He! He - and he belonged in our hearts!" - I would have said but didn't.

I turned and exited disappointed with both of them.

When an extensive search of the area below the windows of the common room and a more general sweep of the grounds yielded no Sticky, it became apparent that their "outside where he belongs" business was a crock. It was like telling a child that their cat had gone to live on a farm.

For a long time I expected The Women in Charge to send me woodchippings through the post. Bargaining with me until I was dressed appropriately and Sticky was returned to his rightful place, though maimed and a shadow of his former self.

It never happened. Much more sinisterly he was just quietly and mysteriously disposed of. A-level history had taught us that you don't ask questions when this sort of thing happens, so we didn't ask them then. We made our peace with never seeing him again and our collective heightened spirits disappeared along with him. 

A few months latter having, presumably, matured slightly, The Woman in Charge tried a different tack in regard to my dress-sense. Appearing at my side one lunch time as I sat innocuously reading Pope in the library.

"Ah Anna."

I put Pope down.

"Now let me just say at the outset, I do...like what you are wearing."

"We both know you don't" I should have said but didn't.

What I was and wasn't wearing

"but I mean really, Anna, come on!...it's just too avant garde. It's not necessary! No dresses from now on, stick to jumpers and t-shirts. Please! There will be complaints! I can't have things like dress offending anyone."

She nodded smartly and bustled away.

I nodded back and picked up Pope again. This was ridiculous. Avant garde? As in ahead of it's time? Challenging? I could understand the application of the term if I had come in skin-tight disco-ball lycra. I could understand if I had come wearing a burka that completely obscured my face but that had a panel cut out of it that meant that it also entirely exposed my bare breasts, that she could reasonably worry that my manner of dress might offend.

But I was wearing an empire-line cream dress, and a tailored black jacket. I'd even gradually eased the corsets out of my clothing cycle. Nothing was out, nothing was pinched in, nothing was overtly offensive. I was sat reading Pope in an empty library. I wasn't avante garde. If anything I was extremely retro.

And besides even if I had been a little daring in my sartorial choices it wasn't like everyone wasn't fully aware of why. Unlike the numerous other people in the year who were lounging around with skirts cut up to here and tops cut down to there for no good reason, I was trying to quickly and effectively seduce my english teacher. Everyone knew it. It had become part of the hive mind of Fort Pitt. All members of staff knew it. The years sevens in my form knew it before they had met him or me, as if it was a piece of information passed to them in their introductory assemblies

"Here at Fort Pitt we try to uphold excellence at all times. You will eventually grow used to our mixture of dictatorialism and incompetence. You can eat lunch in your form rooms if your form tutor allows you. There is an avante garde looking girl in sixth form trying to bed a member of staff." and so on.

The refusal of the Women in Charge to publicly recognise my well know agenda as well as the terrible fate of Sticky as ordained by her, meant that I churlishly retained my mode of dress until the day I left, as much for the sake of defiance as for seduction. My spirit outlasted hers. After nine more months of corsetry, ruffles and cream lace she stopped mentioning it, stopped contriving horrible little tete-a-tetes in libraries, stopped calling meetings to address it in front of the student body. 

The last time she ever mentioned it was about a year later when she called me into her office to brief me for my Cambridge interview, just a subtle little dig to let me know that she hadn't laid the issue to rest yet...

"And for goodness sake Anna, if you want to be taken seriously, just watch what you wear."

"...What the fuck have you done with my stick?"

I should have said but didn't.

Languages or Things I'm Really Bad At Part 1.

Five years ago, when I was in my final year of GCSEs, my French teacher dedicated one of her lunchtimes to a half an hour phone conversation with my mother. I don't know if she made some small talk or whether she just dove straight in there, but the purpose of the call was to establish why I was so bad at french. Take a while to consider that. She phoned home to ask why, it couldn't just be that I was bad, I was so bad that there had to be a deeper explanation!

"Anna is perfectly capable in other areas and I was just wondering if there was anything going on at home that might be affecting her ability in French."

"Anything going on at home?"

What my mother should have said, tearfully, was "At home? At..? Oh god I was afraid of this. You see I've recently taken a French lover. It's tearing the family apart but I just can't leave him. Anna's french was perfect before Pierre came into our lives but now she can't bare to use the language that she hears us speak when we make love."

What she actually said was

"What? No. I can't explain it, sorry, she's not good at French. There it is. Bye Mrs C-"

This annoyed my teacher who I think had genuinely expected a reason, maybe not Pierre, but something to explain my complete inability to pronounce "soeur" ("sir" it transpires, not "sewer" or "sue-eeeur-r-r-" In my defense look at those vowels! Freakish.)

There were in fact a few reasons; the one that stands out for me is that my french teacher was one of the most singularly terrifying and intimidating people I have ever met. There was nothing necessarily formidable about her physically (she wasn't some sort of broad-shouldered, leather-clad, Ratched-figure like The Head,) but she was tall and severe and just generally gave the impression of being wound up tighter than a clockspring. Unspeakably intense, she would, before an oral, adopt what I can only assume was her "interested listening position" it involved grasping her jaw-line tightly with one hand, bending her trunk forward so her face ended up about 30 cm from your own, and glaring.

Some people were fine with this but no matter how many times I saw her adopt it I never started an oral without thinking "Ho-lee-Christ, woman!"


Another and perhaps more genuine reason was the one flagged up by my mother; I have no natural skill with French just as I have no natural skill with any language. As far as I'm concerned it was only sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of my parents that meant that I managed recognisable English. I learnt to speak pretty fast, considering my deafness (I was a complete dud of a child,) but in my haste I failed to appreciate the finer points of phonetics. After four years of being "Anna Thavory" a women came once a week to bridge the terrible gap between my loose bundle of speech impediments and actual spoken language, teaching me, with the aid of balloons, how to pronounce Hs, Vs, Ss, Ths, and Bs. A lot of the process involved holding my head against the balloons, talking into them, and feeling the syllables sort of knock playfully against my five year old face. This was fun but looking back I'm really not sure it was an approved technique.
It worked though and "I'm not an animal I'm a fu-thum-fuman b-being." became "I'm not an animal I'm a human being." Obviously that was just a sentence for the sake of comic example. I wasn't given that to say, as few speech therapists like to draw vocal comparisions between their pupils and the Elephant Man
(how ever apt they may be.) It's just not good practice.


I want to say that perhaps if Mrs C- had been aware of my lack of talent for accurate sound making she would have accepted it as the reason she was seeking. It explains "sewer" at least. But it wasn't just pronunciation with French, it was everything. Sense, word order, number of words required for a sentence, the whole haphazard and contrary business of gendering things (vagina is masculine. Why?) Words on their own were fine, I couldn't say them but I liked them, pamplemoose for example, what's not to love about that! Ecchymose, hilarious! But no matter how much I like the constituent parts of the sentence it would be beyond me to say "my grapefruit is bruised." I don't know what sex grapefruit is for a start, and for all I know fruit bruising has a different term. I just can't do it. There is no explanation.


About once every two years I'll forget all this and make tentative steps towards learning a new language before remembering about a month in when things get beyond words and phrases and into construction "Oh right. I'm really bad at this. It's all coming back to me now."
This summer I tried Hebrew and Arabic, I liked the latter because "My name is Anna" translates as "Ana ismee Anna." as in "Anna! It's me! Anna!" and I liked the former because to my mind it is what Bob Dylan would speak to me in the passionate throws of our love making ("Ken! Erev! Ken! Oh, Yekiri, ken,... ahuv sheli." and so on.) Both of them feel more natural in the mouth than French ever did, both make use of the sort of guttural chokes and lispings that I was obviously trying to go with when I first learnt English. I want to say I'll be good at them but deep down I know I won't. There is simply no future for me in Gaza Strip diplomacy.
I know it. Mrs C-, if she's out there, glaring intensely at the screen, she knows it, although neither of us are able to work out the reason for it.


That's all.


Leila Tov and Jayyid Sa'adat.