Listening to:

In a funk on Saturday, I walked up and across campus, then back home through the Meadows. I ended up walking back by a very roundabout way, taking a path that didn't quite lead me home, so that I could keep watching a guy fly his kite. It wasn't a normal kite, though: it was a funny parallelogram shape, with two strings leading off opposite sides, and the guy was holding one string in each hand, twisting them to make the kite dip and twirl in the air. And when the kite fell to the ground, he just propped the spools in the ground, ran and propped the kite on its side, then went back and yanked the strings up. And voila! Kite's back in the sky! It was amazing.

That cheered me up. A grown man playing with a kite, that's got to bring a smile to anyone's face. Plus, you know, the path through the Meadows was lined with blossoming cherry trees. That didn't hurt, either.

There is further potential for happiness this weekend, as not just one, but two friends are coming to see me. One from home and one from Liverpool. Which means, gentle readers, that I might be able to drag one of them to either a ghost tour or a ceilidh, depending on what's happening in the city. Hopefully both!

In the meantime, though, there are books and plays to be read. The more I read the less-popular Shakespeare plays, the more I want to believe that he was just a name for other playwrites to use, an Allan Smithee of the Renaissance. How can someone who wrote the brilliance that was Hamlet have also written the brain-numbing mush that is Troilus and Cressida?

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