Mornings were still at the edge of the cliff

The good news is, I didn't jettison Wiscon and then promptly perk up. I have spent the last several days feeling—and continue to feel—appalling. That's also the bad news. I want a refund on my entire body. I think the most intelligent thing I have done since Wednesday is summarize my rewatch of Pirates of the Caribbean in an e-mail to Eric. Translated some Pliny. Experienced a belated epiphany concerning Eastern Promises (2007—it's a perfectly classic film noir, we're just seeing the traditional relationship of femme fatale and mark from an unfamiliar angle). Had a really, really unhelpful doctor's visit. And this afternoon identified an old photograph of my mother's as All Souls College, Oxford:



It was taken in 1968, the year she backpacked around Europe. I think she has to have been up in the tower at St. Mary's; she considers this plausible, since as a reader of Gaudy Night, she would have had a sentimental attachment to the roofs of Oxford. (One of the slides in the same box is a shot of Christ Church Meadow, which she remembers taking because of Alice in Wonderland.) My father has started scanning the photos from this trip into the computer for safekeeping, but of course none of them have annotations except for a small notebook my mother carried around with her, and she did not necessarily write down the kind of information that is useful forty years after the fact. I may be doing this for the rest of the week.

I think that's about it for excitement. At least I don't have bronchitis again.