15 - 20 = 1979 - 1984 ... Little Arabic Torture Trick

1979 - 1984

That was a big set of years to pick pictures for. Pretty much all the actual events of those years slipped between the gaps, just like last time.

So many exams, awful results, retaking them all, fine in the end

Bicycling round London day and night

Ballet and skating

Dancing here and there

Sailing across the Channel, deciding never to do that again

Travelling on my own, with another, Paris, Germany, Austria, Venice, Belgrade, Athens, Mycenae, Corinth, South of France, Scotland

Parties, going to them, giving them..!

Reading anything I wanted to

First funeral, first invitation to a wedding

First many things

Working, how could I forget?, all those temporary jobs, I never worked for free

Durham, the beautiful abstract paintings on the walls of the dining room, hung on huge white walls

Meeting people's parents

Living in my grandparents' house while they were abroad and I was working in the summer

An amazing tutor who never smiled, but was utterly serious and respectful, Louis Allen. His room was full of everything including a small stuffed alligator on his desk, but I never plucked up the courage to ask to take a photo of him.

I have just found a paragraph he wrote on fiction, which explains :

Here’s some further inspiration from the great Japan scholar and translator, Louis Allen:

‘In order to know a nation fully you have to go beyond knowing the way it expresses itself in its laws, its military behaviour, and its political systems. You have to know the way it talks about itself unconciously and through its fiction. In other words, the fiction of a nation is as important as the facts of a nation if we want to know it properly.’

Torture trick

Try this to warp your mind: put a white board behind you, take the marker in your left hand if you are right handed and write out the whole alphabet on it as beautifully as you can. I only managed 4 letters, on a horrible downward slant! I'm sure I could write it upside down and with my left hand, but only if it were in front of me.