sarah eve kelly

This is my take on the Friday Five. Bear with me.

• It’s been snowing in Cambridge for the past week - throughout the south of England, actually, but I’m here, so here is all that matters - and the average Briton’s ability to deal with adverse weather conditions is pretty goddamned laughable. I understand that I come from northern Canada, and that my jeering might be unfair. But here’s how it is: in Cambridge, it rains All. The. Time. Temperatures slide below zero and the rain turns into snow. Back above zero, the snow turns into sleet and back into rain. Below zero again, raining ice followed by snow. This is the point: it’s hovering right at zero. It is not cold. It is sleety and disgusting and miserable, and I want to end it all most of the time, but frostbite (about which pamphlets feverishly circulate) is not amongst my concerns. Funny Britoids.
• Academic research has never been easier than it is now, in this era of online database searches, scanned documents, and - well, all that stuff. Nevertheless, I have never been worse at academic research. I flit like the butterfly (who will not beat its wings in this fucking weather) from books on prostitution in medieval England to articles on lock hospitals for venereal disease and whores’ reformatories in the eighteenth century. I’m bounding around my era, as I like to call it. My era is early modern England, viz. sixteenth, seventeenth, early eighteenth centuries. I am looking for prostitutes in early modern England. I know you’re there, ladies! But it’s not going well.
• I am joining a gym this week in a bid to lead what I like to style A More Three-Dimensional Life. I broke down today and got the British equivalent of Rub A535 for my knees, something I haven’t done in two years. Back in the day - during my MA, when all synapses were firing and I was a big genius and not remotely a fraud - I associated sore knees and the granny-smell of A535 with productivity, with bounding intelligence, with glory. Now, I associate it with another failed search, with Don’t Think Too Hard Or Your Brain Will Break. I would rather not resort to the granny meds this time, if only because I don’t want to ruin the smell of victory. And so: I am joining a gym instead. Of course this will help; of course it will.
• Mike showed me a video of our legal wedding this week (we had to have two weddings, the small legal one and the big non-binding one - long story) and we were both horrified. We couldn’t listen to our recitation of the vows, for a start. It’s like listening to yourself on an answering machine (I sound like that?), except worse because you’re saying something really important. But the crowning horror was my appearance. I make a lot - a lot - of jokes about having a heaving bosom. I do. But I had no idea that they were that big. I looked like a fucking cartoon. This wasn’t even the one I was wearing a dress for - I wore jeans and a wraparound top. And yeah, it might sound funny, but I’ve been walking around with that picture in my head for the past two days and it makes me never want to leave the house again. I. Want. Surgery. So. Badly.
• Revisions of The Fidelity Trial are with my agent and her assistant for review. I am once again waiting on a verdict. So when I’m not thinking about the horrible grey sky and sleetiness outside, my circuitous research, my pre-arthritic knees, or my embarrassingly enormous cans, I can retreat to the comfort of what-if-she-hates-it-she’s-going-to-drop-me-I-want-to-die.
• It’s 6:30 and I’ve been chasing my tail for a full eight hours. This is when one takes a thoughtful moment on the balcony to count one’s blessings.
• I’m fine, I’m fantastic, why do you ask? How are you?

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