Well, it's a tricky one this week.

I'm not sure that I have learned any hard truths about myself. I knew most of what has emerged from nearly three years of journal keeping already.

You see, I didn't join to make this a confessional journal, exploring myself and reading as others explored themselves. I joined because I was playing a game, and other people who were playing the game had live journals, and I wanted to join the gossip.

(In parenthesis, I should say that in the film "Another Country", the spy Guy Burgess, exiled in Moscow, is asked what he misses most about England, and he says, is a slightly strangulated voice, "The cricket". By which, I think, we are meant to think of his golden youth at Eton, with the long golden days of pleasure there. But I was more charmed by Alan Bates rather more raddled portrayal of Guy Burgess in Alan Bennett's "An Englishman Abroad"who, when asked by the redoubtable Coral Browne what he misses most, says wistfully, "The gossip. Not great ones for gossip, the comrades." That had the ring of truth to me.)

So the journal was for gossip and then Torvald started making an appearance. Now, although I am a cat lover and have had cats most of my life, I would certainly not see myself as the sort of person who blogs about her cats. But then, Torvald is not a normal cat - and you can see here - and here - and, most unfortunately, here.

Still.

The most intimate period of my journal was probably the three months when my father was ill, and then subsequently died. I have a lot of online friends; rather than IMing or emailing them all individually, it was easiest just to post a general outline of what was happening. And that did become a release, and a kind of therapy. I'm still hugely grateful for the support I got at that time. But it didn't teach me any hard truths - although it did show me what great friends I have.

I have done some sort of confessional posts, but they generally tend to be responses to memes. I made up one for myself last Christmas, which I did enjoy - posting the Twelve Records that mean most to me for the Twelve Days of Christmas. Some of those were perhaps confessional - but some just fun stories. You can see those posts by clicking on the "twelve records" tag.

So what Hard Truths have I learned from LJ?

None that real life hadn't taught me long before, I fear.

Hearing those words, my subconscious takes over and slides seamlessly into the Creed.

"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth ... "

It's the Creed as given in the Book of Common Prayer, written (originally) in the early 1550s by Cranmer and his helpers - largely by Cranmer himself, we're given to understand. But it was an organic text - it drew on the practices and traditions that were already happening in English cathedrals up and down the country. Different cathedrals had evolved different traditions and clung to them fiercely. What Cranmer created was a synthesis of those traditions, one that endured for four hundred or so years before people began to talk about 'modernising' the language (although some of the more aggressively Puritanical elements were removed post Restoration in 1662, the book most commonly in use till the C20th). And the language is beautiful; take The Order for the Burial of the Dead, with its many haunting phrases. You can see it here in a 1762 printing, with long f's for s's. The synthesis is apparent in the way that, for example, the Lord's Prayer is said twice during evening service, using two different versions.

The prayers and collects and services are deeply ingrained on my subconscious. I've heard them in magnificent medival chapels, where they have been spoken daily for more than 450 years. I've heard them in a small, cool stone church in the middle of a Muslim (and shortly to be Marxist) country. I've heard them in a Welsh church by the shores of the sea, where the responses were sung to Welsh folk tunes and the crash of the waves on the shore was a background. I've heard them in the Victorian church with its ancient Saxon tower, standing for over a thousand years, where opur wedding was blessed.

And do I believe?
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When I saw this title, I was reminded vividly of an early foray into literary criticism.

On my reading list for Oxford was EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel (or perhaps I was told to read it when I was studying for the Oxford exam - at all events, I came across it that year.

It's a fascinating book, well worth reading - not least because it's very readable. He talks about character - and originated the idea of flat and rounded characters, which I still find invaluable - and also wrote about the concept of the "story".

He posits that if you ask people what a novel does, none out of ten will answer that, "It tells a story" - and he goes on to give examples of the tone that would accompany this - ranging from the puzzled to the rueful - but all the people saying the same thing - "It tells a story". In fact, he says, memorably - "Yes--oh dear yes--the novel tells a story." And that, by and large, is what novels have done and do.

This chapter (originally a lecture) contains a vivid image - Forster sees that the function of the story-teller must have gone back to the dawn of man's existence, and he envisages a group of cavemen sitting around and listening to one of their number telling a story (and presumably, hitting him over the head if they didn't like it). Actually, I suspect that first story-teller was a woman; novels have always been women's art form just as much as they have been men's. Women have always told stories to men - Scheherazade was only one of a legion - although the risks she ran were extreme.

But the reason that the image stayed with me vividly was because something like that happened to me.

From the age of elevn until about thirteen, I was a girl guide. I was among the youngest in the group at first, and was definitely the baby when we went away to camp.

I hated it. The food, cooked over an open fire, was awful, and you were expected to eat it all up. The loos were primitive - and we had to expty them each day. Washing up was ghastly - cold scummy water. In short, it put me off camping for a good twenty years, until Greg and I were sufficiently broke as to try it one year on the shores of Lake Garda, when we had a really lovely time (certainly in the highly civilised Italian sites - the French were ... variable).

Anyway, I struggled at guide camp with the conditions and the sheer rigours of the life (at only twelve). But at the same time, I didn't want to let the side down. I needed to find a way to make a contribution - and I found it in story telling.

I had always told stories and devised games for my friends (something that continued to this day, of course). But on this camping holiday, I began to see how it might actually be made to serve a profitable function. People would PAY for the stories I told - not in hard cash, but in favours. I got to dry up rather than plunging my hands into scummy washing up water. Someone else carried the heavy smelly loo bucket and emptied it, while I just scrubbed the cubicle. And someone else ate the appalling cold scrambled eggs that I couldn't force down without gagging.

Everyone needs stories. And if you can tell them, and tell them good - you'll survive.

When modern civilisation ends, I'll be the one telling the stories of the past - and of fantasy. And I'll be devising the games that will give people the circuses they'll need as much as bread.

"Yes--oh dear yes--the novel tells a story."

Thank heavens. Because I shall be there, telling it.

aka A Cross-Cultural Study of Internet-based Linguistics

A few years ago, I was chatting on MSN with a couple of friends. I was here in the UK; another was somewhere out in the West in Oregon; the third was in Oklahoma on the Texas border. It was quite a serious conversation - the Southerner was talking about strains within her marriage, and her unhappiness. And then she typed, "And last night, as I was floating in the pool, I was thinking about all this ... "

And without thinking, I flipped back: "OMG - you have a pool????

It was the sort of thing that you might suddenly blurt out in conversation. But I was sitting at my computer, typing. Surely there should have been longer to think - essentially a disconnect between my brain and my discourse. But no ... it was as smooth and flowing as though I had actually spoken the words - and I then was apologising as frantically as I would do in speech.

That little incident has stayed with me when I think about these new metalanguages we are evolving - for that is what is happening here. We're creating new languages that draw on existing languages, but find new ways to create communication. We are given new channels (such as email, chat, text messaging and virtual environments like Second Life), but the mode of communication we evolve to fill those channels is all our own.

What we invent might be a true meta language, such as the prisoners' language evolved in Stalin's jails, which relied on the sound of tapping pipes, and occasional gesture - the way on touching someone's back. But it might also have aspects of a secret language like Polari - the slang invented from a mixture of Romany, fairground language and (I suspect) Italian, which was used by gay men during the 1930s-1960s, when homosexuality was illegal in the UK - and which weas then, bizarely, popularised in the Kenneth Williams and High Paddick "Julian and Sandy" sketches on the radio show Round the Horne.

But perhaps it would be truer to call the new forms of communication 'dialects' as opposed to 'languages', because they are, by and large, offshoots of existing languages - namely English (does anyone know if any other languages are evolving their own web/net/txt speak?). A dialect should possess a distinct vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation and all of these - I would maintain anyway - are present in online communication.

To me, one of the most important elements of this new communication is how stripped down and bare it is. Unlike most other communications, which make some allowance for the human beings delivering the communication, all of these are stripped of context. Even in virtual environments such as Second Life, where avatars are present, the range of emotion is so limited that people frequently use the old IRC trick of adding /me does something to add gestures. The same is true of chat - and here additional prompts become essential, I believe, to provide the necessary context that would otherwise be supplied by all the tricks of non-verbal communication - whether kinesics, proxemics, orientation, cues such as pauses, tone, intonation, pitch, or even head nods and eye contact. All of this is lost in online communication and emoticons and accepted verbal shortcuts such as LOL have come in to fill the gap. Some people hate these - I think they are crucial in supplying context.

And the floor is open for disagreement!

What do you like best about where you live right now? What do you miss the most about a place you've left behind?

On the surface, this is a question about place. But for me, I think, and perhaps for other people, it's a question about time as well.

The above was the question we were asked this week, and at once it made me think of something that happened when I was teaching.

Come summer, back in those days, most of the college used to have classes on the lawn. We'd gather up our books and march outside to commandeer benches or - if all else failed, sprawl on the grass. We would read poetry, or Shakespeare, or one student would present an essay to the class, while the rest listened and then we would discuss its strength and weaknesses. Or, if it was a Communication class, we might role play an interview situation and analyse the issues it raised.

Students coming and going from their classes would cycle down the drive, vaguely glimpsed between the bushes and hedges that screened our classroom retreats. Generally, it was easy to ignore them, but one day I heard a student cycling in and giggling about something. It was a very jolly girl I'd taught (a talented photographer), and so, as my class were engaged in some puzzle, I got up to see what was amusing her so much.

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When Housman wrote of the Land of Lost Content, he neglected to mention that the reason why he couldn't return was that they'd built a Conference Centre there.

Some day he'll come along ... the man I love.
And he'll be big and strong - the man I love.

Well, er no. Actually.

From a very early stage of my romantic life, I knew that the man who came along would be a small dark Celt, intense and intelligent.

My first serious boyfriend was a small dark Celt. So was the first man I fell in love with (two boyfriends down the line, since you ask). I was at the Girl's High School, and two years ahead of us at the grammar school were a very bright Oxbridge set (oh, see Alan Bennett's The History Boys). I dated two of them, and one who had dropped out earlier ... It set a pattern.

Oh, of course I had the drop dead gorgeous blondes, sleek and aristocratic and rather superior men in my life too. But somehow, they never quite worked. The sort I was attracted to made me feel a bit like a Bad Girl, which was fun for a time - but took a bit of living up (or perhaps down) to.

Although I did have a wild youth.

In fact I had several. And some civilised ones too.

So ... cut a few years down the line ... and I am having an off/on affair with an old friend (small, dark and fantastically clever Celt) who was working in a high level political position. We dated, we slept together but he lived in London, and I lived in Oxford, and we both had busy lives. So we met once every few weeks, went to parties together, went out to dinner, enjoyed talking and the sex and the wit. But I was growing conscious of a gap in my life. I was reaching an age when I wanted to settle down ...not go on sharing a house with a gay friend while my emotional life stagnated. Could R (my lover) be the one? We had both been in love with other people - but not many. Perhaps this was going to be as good as it got, and we should talk seriously about the future ...

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Bother ... this comes of falling asleep after work and forgetting to post.

And I had a post ... yes, I'd faced up to the facts ... My biggest mistake was pressing ahead with the invasion of Russia.

You'd think I'd learn from history, wouldn't you?

Listen, kids, if you feel the urge to match on Moscow ... just do what I should have done.

Just Say No.


And now I've missed the deadline and face the long inglorious retreat through the winter snows ... all the way back to Oxford.

Perhaps it wasn't the best place to start the Long March from. We did get very wet. And then cold.

Well, I don't usually go that far.

I'm more likely to say, "I'm fine" or "I'm good" - an interesting phrase in itself - and one I'll come back to.

But generally, when people ask my how I am, I don't take it as an invitation to open up. I take it as part of the greeting ritual ... and I remember, many years ago, teaching the expression "How do you do?" in an English as a Foreign Language class.

"Hello. How do you do?" (pronounced how'd y'do" with no inflection on the end).

And what the correct response? As our Italian students struggled to express their state of health ("I 'av hhhead-ake"; "I em vairy well") we smiled and shook our heads.

No.

The correct response to "How do you do?" is ...

"How do you do?"

I never really understood it, either.

But I usually try to radiate a positive attitude. That's why, when asked how I am, I'll usually initially answer that I'm fine. If the person seems genuinely interested then, as the conversation continues, I might reveal that, after two weeks of sheer unadulterated agony, I took myself to the dentist (I hate the dentist) and offered up my broken tooth as a sacrifice to the god of pain relief - and he very kindly accepted it.

Er, that was three weeks ago. It didn't seem worth making a fuss about at the time.

Not making a fuss ... it's a terribly English good quality to have. It ran even stronger in people of my parents' generation. They, after all, had fought in a World War when they were young - most things could seem trivial in comparison with that. Making a fuss over the minor inconveniences of life would have seemed like bathos to them, perhaps, and so they continued to 'get on with things'. There was an advertising campaign for an insurance company which had the reassuring strapline, "We won't make a drama out of a crisis," and I think that draws a nod of the head from many English people. That's the way of it - getting on with things. Not making a drama out of a crisis.

But I think my really strong quality is one that makes me blush a little. I want to be a do-gooder. For me, that term has never been pejorative, because can you think of any higher and simpler aspiration than doing good? Not bossing people about, not acting for what you think is their good and not taking their own hopes and feelings into account. That's not being good or doing good. In fact, rather the opposite.

But, putting it simply, doing good is wanting to make the lives of people you know, and people you don't know just a little better - whether it's by sharing what you have in abundance, or making efforts to make other people's lives happier, better more fun. And that can be as simple as telling someone a joke that brightens there day, or as complex as lending a shoulder to cry on. There's a lovely passage in one of my favourite poems that captures it (an extract from Autumn Sequel by Louis MacNeice that often gets anthologised as Fanfare for the Makers):

As sometimes in the blackout and the raids
One joke composed an island in the night.

As sometimes one man's kindness pervades
A room or house or village ...

So that's what makes me super. Not that I am good, but that I have the aspiration to be good. So when I say, "I'm good," when asked how I am ... really, I'm expressing a hope.

(An entry for the Real LJ Idol competition)