Phineas and Farfara

Symbolic first box of belongings (including the phrenological head named Phineas) brought to Farfara.
Monday, June 20, 2011
 
We arrived in London yesterday, bleary and Boston-soaked.  I'd been in the Bruins' city for the past two weeks attending a seminar in theatre and performance research, which was, needless to say, rollicking good fun. The days were long and filled with dense theoretical readings and fairly enthralling lectures, and sometimes I came home to a mound of homework (terrible shock that being a professor doesn't exempt me from homework) complaining that Theodore Adorno made my brain leak out my ear.  My hostess (childhood best friend turned oncologist) would reply, "Today my patient's brain herniated down his spinal column," and I would think, "Alright, if it's going to be a competition...." 

Sunset at Farfara
Hyperbole damns me again.

Don't revoke my access to my new Canadian homeland, but I have to admit that I didn't watch any Stanley Cup hockey during the whole of my two weeks in Boston.  This fills me with shame not just because Bostonians are the ancient Maritime brethren of Haligonians, but also because one of the Bruins' star players hails from Tantallon, just down the road from our new house.

Oh, that's right.  Did I neglect to mention that since last I've written on Sycorax Pine, we've become home-owners?  Proud possessors of 12 acres of ocean-view forest we've decided to call Farfara.  Closing and moving and dealing with the thousand shocks owned homes are prey to account for my unusual blog silence of late.  And now we've left Farfara in the most beautiful time of the Nova Scotian year, ne'er to return (until late August).  It feels me with melancholy, and not a little sense of house-betrayal.

At any rate.  Two days ago we made our sad, exhausted way towards London.  Who needs a taxi?, D said when we landed.  What an egregious expense! We've got a mortgage now - it's time to spend more wisely. 

We spent the next couple of hours wending our feeble way towards the London flat on a public transit system that seemed determined to go *absolutely anywhere* but that part of the city, while I struggled mightily not to crow with vindicated smugness. 

So we're here now, and you can expect (I say cockily) a veritable flood of blogging about this year's London adventures.  I'm determined this year: what doesn't get blogged gets lost in the mists of memory, never to be of use to my theatre research.  See?  Blogging = time spent working.  That's the ticket. 

But not right now.  We've come back from a night at the new Bush Theatre, and I'm exhausted.  Tomorrow.  Yes: tomorrow.

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