Gravity can't hold me back from you

Happy spring! I walked around a reservoir with my brother and was complimented on my hair by a shy teenager. selkie sent me a detailed grammatical explication of the Sumerian dog joke. At the end of it, I was honor-bound to reply, "Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

P.S. I cannot promise that anyone should watch this space because I feel as though someone turned off the tap in my brain just about four weeks ago, but I just saw a trick of time in a movie which I have never seen on film before: I did, however, once dream of it. I had no idea it was part of a real movie. It wasn't even the only thing I loved about this one, but I never expected to see it outside my own head.

Cut your teeth on gritty portraits for the local 'zines

So the detailed grammatical explication of the Sumerian dog joke reminded me of something which I was not able to place at the time beyond the fun of translation, but fortunately I figured it out while making myself lunch after a hellaciously early appointment and yet another abortive attempt to acquire new glasses.

( One large blacksmith threw four coffins about. )

I can't read Sumerian—I never studied it—but Akkadian cuneiform does have logograms and phonetic complements as well as phonetic values which can get a bit handwavy in their signage, making me intensely sympathetic and in hindsight perhaps slightly prepared for Vivian's experience that "Universal symbols did not exactly stand for letters, nor for whole words either. You had to fit the things the symbols might stand for together, and then try to make sense of them. Vivian's brain began to complain that it had never worked so hard in its life. Every so often it went on strike and she had to wait for it to start working again." I would not have said for years that A Tale of Time City (1987) was my most formative Diana Wynne Jones, except that things keep turning up in it that are so important to me, like the imprinting of time, the discovery of the unpredictable world, and the funniest and most agonizingly recognizable depiction of translation I have still run into, not to mention Sempitern Walker. Time-ghosts, walking in my footsteps before I did. I didn't remember, though, the line about "I've just come from a flood of reports from the Eighties threatening World War Three two centuries early."