The Purloined Princess: Chapter Three

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In Which, Much To My Chagrin, I Have My Doom Prophesied

I don’t know how long I was unconscious for; all I know is that I was brought back around by a hand plunging into the snow, fingers outstretched and grasping. The probing hand happened upon my regal face, and as it prodded my buried flesh, I heard excited yells coming from above ground. The fingers gripped my face by the nostrils and hauled me up through the snow, slowly and painfully excavating me, inch by inch, and the wrenching agony wasn’t helped by the fact that the mead had worn off and I was now deathly hungover.

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Poland | Krakow

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I didn’t go to Krakow to see Ralfi – not specifically – but I was glad to meet him outside the airport, glad I’d booked an extra day at the beginning of my trip to spend time with the Polish engineer, the friend I’d been tutoring in English for almost two years. A tall, handsome family-man in his 40s, Ralfi is the kind of man I’ve always enjoyed: someone with energy a little beyond himself, a streak of naughtiness and a heap of curiosity. His capacity for wonder in our lessons has always made me smile. Some students, you teach them a grammar rule and they nod and say ‘okay’. Others, they open their eyes and mouths wide and say ‘wow’. Moments like that are the reason I do what I do.

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London | Don’t Give Up! Submit!

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New things:

I am reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. I avoided reading this book for several years, despite it being at the top of so many must-read lists, because of the title. I assumed it would be something dewy-eyed and soft, and on impulse I usually swerve those kinds of books (not that I know why, because whenever I’ve read dewy-eyed and soft novels I’ve invariably loved them). But Beloved is not in the least soft. It’s gorgeous and lyrical and absolutely fucking brutal. I can feel parts of me getting rearranged as I read it, shifting around like complex hydraulics on the door of a bank vault.

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London | Serious Writer

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I’ve been consuming a lot of media recently about the 1960s. It wasn’t on purpose – it just sort of happened. It started a few weeks ago when I went to visit Vic in Bristol for a summery nostalgic weekend and on the way there on the three-hour bus I listened to a song in my headphones – I forget what it was exactly, maybe She’s So Heavy or Her Majesty or something – but it was a Beatles song, and I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.

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London | A Walk To Brixton Station

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Open the door. Look down: see the ginger cat with sky-blue blue collar who makes a bed of the planter by the front step. She flees, hissing, down the garden path – follow her but watch your hair; the thorny arms of the rose bush are overgrown and reach overhead in a long arch. The postman caught his forehead on one last week and gave me a telling off, which I was determined not to feel guilty about because A) it’s not my fault that plants grow and B) he should watch where he’s going.

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London | Darth Vader Freaking Out in Hawaii

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Thought I’d switch it up a bit – something new. I tutor a nine-year-old boy from China, now living in Melbourne, Australia. Every week we read a few pages of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, because he is really into magical adventure stories and he’d never heard of Narnia. He speaks English at a level that’s close to native but his parents want me to help him with his writing.

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