When we get back to Pip’s after the show she's only gone and bought a bottle of bubbly, so we drink that – as if we need to – and end up talking about words. In the early days of our friendship, Bartelt and I spent a lot of time talking about language. But you know how it is with relationships, people change, priorities alter, and before we know where we are we're discussing the washing and sharing a bed but not having sex..... So Pip is a very exciting addition to our team, an injection of the exotic. And she's much, much more exotic than she seemed: she owns the complete Oxford English Dictionary. And it's not digital, it's made out of book and everything. She runs upstairs to get it and brings it down – with the requisite magnifying glass – and tries to settle the argument we are having. Secretly I am pretty sure already that I'm wrong, but this is plenty of fun for me and an extreme amount of fun for these two bibliofiles. It makes me miss my brother. We might have settled it without the dictionary if he'd been heer, but I suspect Pip would have gone and got it anyway.
I don't remember what the argument was about now, but I'd like to point out, for the record, that this is not because I was probably wrong, or nearly wrong, I forget my victories too, together with proper nouns, dates and.... I am an egalitarian, though, I forget the names of the famous, the historical, and those I have known and loved for years. Surely my most annoying and embarrasing trick is my ability to get names wrong, both confusing people and simply making up names. It'd be funny if I didn't cause so much offence.
It's another summer's day as we set out with Pip the next morning: she has taken the morning of work and is giving us a guided tour of lots of Oxford and the Bodleian. Like I said, she knows everything there is to know about nearly everything, but especially things historical. We wander around, trying to avoid the tourists, sometimes in danger of being swept away in a shoal of school students.
I've never seen the Bodleian, even from the outside, and... it's old, man. Pip's telling us all this stuff about Henry VIII. It's so interesting. At the same time I am realising, for the umpteenth time, what an extraordinary privilege it is for any undergraduate to study there and how very unfair that I was never going to be academic enough to go there, which has disadvantaged me throughout my profesisonal life, and maybe even my personal......
Probably need to get over that, I think, reminding myself that the fact I can read separates me from so many women in the world: the education I have had is an enormous privilege. And I try to bring myself back to the rather amazing fact that we are having this guided tour today, that I did learn something as an undergraduate (I learnt I was not an academic, to speak Spanish and how impossible depression is to handle if I have no friends around me at all, amongst other things). I am very lucky to be doing this tour, lucky to have met both Martin and Pip and lucky to be lying on the grass in beautiful Oxford 'preparing' for another sell-out show tonight at the Playhouse.
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