Olives and Cameras

No, I have not been taking photos of olives. That would show a higly disturbing lack of sleep, and a highly disturbing level of boredom (I'm such an easily-pleased and -entertained individual as to render this quite, quite .... well, nearly impossible). However, I did just spend the greater part of the afternoon in the Radcliffe Camera (the big round building generally mentally associated with the Bodleian - and no, I've no clue the why or wherefore of the "camera" part, but it's named after

IOHANNES RADCLIFFE M.D.
HUIUS BIBLIOTHECAE
FUNDATOR

as it is formidably inscribed upon the lofty wall)

Wow. That was a long parenthetical tangental digression.

Anyway, camera. Yes. And after discovering parallels between Jane Austen's life and the life of Mary Gaskell's fictional heroine Margaret Hale from North and South [READ if you have not, and then SEE and DELIGHT in, among other things, summer snow!] and that George Eliot [Middlemarch: READ and then SEE and DELIGHT in ... well, lots of stuff] considered 'art' the nearest thing to life [curious concept, but I love it!], and other such brilliant and probably wholly unuseful-outside-academics [my knowledge as I know it] facts ...

Anyway, yes. Point being, in this blissfully distracted state of mind, I was in the process of returning to the dorm when I passed by an olive stand. Anyone who has had the misfortune of passing through the condiments aisle, yours truly in tow, will assure you that the only hitherto successful method of ungluing my consciousness from that heavenly assortment of little glass jars is to pick one off the shelf,put it in the cart, and then walk away with the cart. Now, of course, I paused. The mad rush of shoppers were forced to swerve around me as I stood in the middle of the walkway and grinned. I grinned and grinned and grinned: I had MONEY in my POCKET, and there were OLIVES for SALE! And the olive man stuck one on a toothpick and held it out to me. I put it to you: how could I refuse? And so I skipped gleefully home with a box of fresh, oily, over-priced olives clutched in my hands. Somehow being over-priced means they must be perfection itself, right? Well, they were.

And now, after an excessively diverting blog post on OLIVES (notice how you can spell 'I loves'* with those letters :D) I am off to finish reading Mansfield Park, in the high hopes of completing it before dinner, so as to allow myself a few moments afterwards to youtube [notice the verbing!] the film. I watched the first few minutes, and then realized I should probably finish the book before seeing the film *sob* like with everything; but it's good motivation to read! ... not that Jane Austen ever needs a visual representation to complete or justify her existence! NEVER.





* as in "I loves 'em" ... though that would require an "em" somewhere in there. EMOLIVES? emo lives? OLIMVESE? like Inglese? a very golf fry ... gravy flo ... I dunno.