Blog challenge Day 2: Your first love

In Turgenev's novelette First Love, one of the characters says: "I never had a first love, I started direct with the second". I did, however, have a first love. I was eight, and he was in my class. One of the most popular boys. I did the classic thing, described in so many literary works and private stories: I wrote a letter, decorated with hearts, and put it on his desk. The teacher intercepted it, but not before all classmates had seen it. If I had been bullied before it got ten times worth. But I had my reward. We got "engaged", Tom Sawyer style, exchanged homemade rings, and we were both firm that we would get married when we grew up. Then I discovered that my fiance was in the same manner engaged to another girl, a close friend. I told her that it was silly to be engaged and advised her to break up. I don't remember whether she followed my advice, but I remained engaged for a while before it wore out. We were in same class for the rest of school.

Ugh, that was boring! I could have invented something much more exciting.

Blog challenge Day 1: Introduce yourself

I am a displaced hedgehog. I am a nomadic subject. I don't belong anywhere. There isn't a place about which I can say: This is where I come from. I haven't thought much about it, but I started doing so recently, not least because my husband keeps going back to Sweden and accidentally on purpose takes a detour to his home town. Where would I go? To the little town of Pyatigorsk in Northern Caucasus where my grandmother was born and grew up? I gew up in Moscow of course, but I don't feel I belong there. Can you belong in a big city? Maybe.

I am a mother. I am also a stepmother, which always makes me wince when I discuss fairy tales with my students. Since fairy-tale stepmothers are merely circumscriptions of biological mothers I actually have no problems with that.

I am a grandmother. It makes me very old. When I was young I could imagine being a mother, but being a grandmother was way beyond imagination. I don't mind being old as such, but it comes with a lot of physical changes which implies that you can never trust your body anymore. When you were young and fell ill you knew it would be over. Nowadays any silly malady can be the beginning of the end.

I am a wife and life partner. Having said that, I realise that I very seldom contemplate this role because it is so self-evident. But it isn't. We should all think more often about it.

I am a daughter, but it's a chapter I don't want to elaborate on. Let's say I used to be a daugher. I used to be a granddaughter too, but it is much less painful.

I am a teacher. When I took my first degree and started thinking about what I might do with it, the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn't want to be a teacher. I think I am a good teacher, and there is no better reward than seeing your students successful. In my imagination, I am sitting under a tree with a circle of pupils around me. In my imigination, they will remember me when I am gone.

I am a scholar with world reputation. It's immodest to say so, but I am proud of it. I can even prove it, because I am one of the twelve scholars in my field who have received an award in recognition of their lifetime achievement.

I am a friend. When I left Russia thirty years ago I was convinced that I would never make any new friends. But I have made lots of friends since then, and I mean friends in the Russian sense of the word, not merely someone you know. Some of these became friends successively over many years and are much closer now than some friends I once thought would be close. But my best friend is still the one I have known since we were two.

I am a reader. Mostly professional reader, but also passionate reader at large. Not omnivorous through. I guess I have quite an elitistic taste in books. 

What else? Can I call myself a gardener, a skier, a potter, a dollhouse maker? No, but I can say that I like gardening, skiing, throwing, making miniatures, as well as star gazing, watching waves on a beach, listening to classic music, movies, theatre (but not opera), birdwatching and just walking around in the nature.

Something I think about often these days is that although there are many things I am or have been, there are fewer and fewer things I can become.

Blog challenge

My daughter Julia participates in a blog marathon in Sweden. An exciting idea, so I am joining it. The point is to write every day on a particular topic, which are:

Day 01 – Introduce yourself
Day 02 – Your first love
Day 03 – Your parents
Day 04 – What you ate today
Day 05 – Your definition of love
Day 06 – Your day
Day 07 – Your best friend
Day 08 – A moment
Day 09 – Your beliefs
Day 10 – What you wore today
Day 11 – Your siblings
Day 12 – What’s in your bag
Day 13 – This week
Day 14 – What you wore today
Day 15 – Your dreams
Day 16 – Your first kiss
Day 17 – Your favorite memory
Day 18 – Your favorite birthday
Day 19 – Something you regret
Day 20 – This month
Day 21 – Another moment
Day 22 – Something that upsets you
Day 23 – Something that makes you feel better
Day 24 – Something that makes you cry
Day 25 – A first
Day 26 – Your fears
Day 27 – Your favorite place
Day 28 – Something that you miss
Day 29 – Your aspirations
Day 30 – One last moment

I am two days behind, so I am starting now to catch up.

Ecclesiastic feline

Exeter has a magnificent cathedral. I only have a hour before I must take my train so I almost miss the most interesting detail. Right under the medieval clock there is a little, inconspicuous wooden door with a round hole. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't read the guide folder. It's a cat flap! From the 16th century, the guide says. Mice were attracted by the lard used to lubricate the ropes inside the clock. Yes, exactly: Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock!

Always new things you learn when you go to conferences.

Tactile pleasures

For over two years, since we have moved here, I have been looking for a place to do some pottery. Like my many other hobbies, such as papermaking or dollhouses, throwing is a late passion, or perhaps latent passion: I had always wanted to do it, but didn't know how to start. Once again, it was my wonderful daughter Julia who inspired me. Some years ago she simply found a studio near to where she lives, booked us into a week course, and there we were. As usual, she was brilliant, and I was worthless. It took me several courses to learn how to wedge and more before I could make something that looked even distantly like a pot. (Julia was by then making elaborate teapots and engobe mugs). I am just not good at it. But I like it. It makes me happy. (It makes me frustrated when a pot collapses, but it's a healthy frustration). As with papermaking and many other things, it cleans your mind. You cannot think about supervisions or deadlines when you are throwing.

Anyway, two long years I have been looking for a place to throw, and all the time it was within reach. I searched the web for vacation courses and weekend courses, and asked friends. I just couldn't believe that Cambridge wouldn't have a pottery place. And finally...! I was telling someone at a party, for umpteenth time, that I was looking for a pottery course, and this someone wondered whether I had asked a certain colleague at the Faculty. One underestimates colleagues. Or perhaps it's my lack of imagination. I think of colleagues as academics. But some of my colleagues are actually artists. So when I asked my artist colleague whether he knew of a place where I could do some throwing, he took me to the Faculty art studio, showed me a Very Lonely Wheel in a corner and said: "It's all yours".

Today I had my first go. I was apprehensive because it had been two years, and I was never good to begin with. But I thought that there was nobody there to judge me and I could sit there as long as I pleased without making anything worth saving and anyway I don't care. I brought a pair of very old jeans and a t-shirt. I changed in the corner by the wheel. There was no one there. Just the huge studio with large windows, and me and my wheel. Now, the only throwing I had ever done was on an electric wheel, and this one wasn't. It's an additional effort to coordinate the foot and the hands. I had thought it would be hopeless. In fact, it went quite fine. Ah, the feeling of clay on your hands! The memory stored in the hands and suddenly pouring out, and you know that something is wrong although not exactly how to make it right. The peace of the huge, empty studio, the humming of the wheel, the clay on hands. I didn't save the two pots I made, but it doesn't matter. It's the process, not the result. I could have stayed there for hours.

It took a long time to clean up the mess. Then I changed back into my professorial attire and left the studio without anyone seeing me. Or so I hope.

Paper pleasures

I wonder whether any girls today play with paper dolls. Why would they when they have Teletubbies or whatever they have these days. Shame because it is such fun with paper dolls. I made some for the oldest granddaughter when she was five and visited in San Diego. She was delighted and packed them carefully to take home to Sweden. She had never seen a paper doll before.

When I was young, every girl with self respect had dozens of paper dolls and boxes upon boxes of clothes. Sometimes dolls could be found inside chocolate bar wrappers, but mostly we would draw them, copy the best from each other and make all those clothes with tabs to fold over the doll. There was scope for imagination! All the clothes that we couldn't even dream of we gave to our paper dolls. We never had problems with keeping us busy on rainy days - long, long time ago, before computers and videos, almost before television (there was one channel, with children's hour at six).

The reason I indulge in these idyllic memories is that one of the dollhouse magazines I bought yesterday has cutouts of Victorian paper dolls. It surely kept me busy this evening. (But I think I deserve it, after a day of personal-statement writing - see my previous post).

Self assessment

I am spending - wasting, as it were - a beautiful autumn Sunday writing an annual report. Of course it's my own fault, I shouldn't have put it off until the very last days, but, frankly, writing annual reports is absolutely the worst part of being an academic, worse even that Quality Assurance and Grade Adjudication put together. And it's not just the regular Faculty audit where all you have to do is move "in press" to "published", "under review" to "in press" and "in preparation" to "under review", plus invent something to put under "in preparation" that you can hopefully move to "under review" next year.

It is not even an annual report. It is a biennial report, summing up my achievements since I came here two years ago. I thought that when I reached the height where I am now, all this would be over and done with. I cannot climb higher (because I don't want to be Head of Faculty, or Head or School, or Second Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor twice removed). I cannot be fired. Let me be. But no, I must write this report, with everything I've done since I came here - I wish I've kept track - with a list of publications, five most important highlighted, two academic referees from Cambridge-acknowledged institutions who must know me well, but not too well, and the worst of all, a personal statement. I am sure there are services on internet that write personal statements for anyone, although I wouldn't quite trust them. But if I could pay somebody, from the pay increment I might get through this painful exercise, to do this for me! I find it tediuos and humiliating. I understand it is necessary - or is it? So many hours, days, perhaps weeks spent every year in academia to write these reports that will be scrutinised by numerous committees, and how many hours and days do I spend writing references for other people going through the same process. Perhaps I would not make a sensational scientific discovery today, Sunday, instead of writing my report. On the other hand, who knows? I am not sure whether it was on a Sunday that Newton was hit on his head by that famous apple, but surely he was sitting and meditating in one of Cambridge's many pretty gardens rather than writing an annual report.