Category Archives: College

I have two confessions to make.

One is that I am a Liar, and a Bad one at that. And don’t go using Logic on me. If Person A says they never lie and Person B says they always lie, should you believe either of them when they state whether the other would lie: that sort of thing. I told a lie last Thursday that resulted in my parents being woken at some unearthly hour (8:00 am I heard) and nearly got me sent a double bouquet of flowers for the imaginary twins that I announced to a large portion of my family. At last count something in the region of three uncles and two cousins were convinced to my knowledge, despite unlikely names, impossible timings and an image of not-quite-newborn twins which a short google image search provided. Maybe there were more (it would be interesting to know!)

I feel bad. But I did make a lot of people laugh, and as joy is one of the great things in life (spiritual and otherwise) I do hope that a small amount of untruth can be taken in context. We all need to be fooled from time to time, and if people genuinely take me seriously much of the time I hadn’t realised the power and responsibility that held. Hmm. I expect it’ll all come back to haunt me when I meet up with many of the family in the summer.

The second confession is that I have miscalculated Lily’s heritage and needed to be corrected by my mother. Lily is not one-eighth Cornish. She is one-sixteenth. This is a lot less pasty than I had reckoned on. It also made me draw a diagram with concentric circles representing each generation, with double the ‘slices’ in each one. All this proved was that the other sixteenths were mostly a mystery to me. Although I am certain Lily’s great-great-grandparents were all born in England, I cannot place more than three of them without more research. Possibly more pregnancy forgettory, but I suspect there is more to it: I just don’t know. But then I don’t know quite a lot these days.

Unlike a certain Alex Guttenplan, who I think ought to be our next Prime Minister. He gets my vote solely on the basis that he was prepared to correct Jeremy Paxman, who claimed he had guessed an answer on the way to winning University Challenge last night for a local university team. If you can stand up to someone called Jeremy you must be a good egg. And knowing a few facts can’t help* either in politics.

We have made progress on the colour of the front door though. I decided something sage green might be nice, so chose something else (I am not certain why), which looks blue in some lights and green in others. Farrow and/or Ball call it Green Blue. Or Blue Green. I forget and cannot reach the thingy any more. Anyway, after a few days of doubt having put the first coat on, the walls of the house have now been painted something in the region of magnolia, which has meant that Green by Green Blue is actually quite a good choice. Dad suggested it looks like Cambridge Blue. In which case I feel personally responsible for helping our local university out in both the TV quiz last night and the boat race last Saturday and would like to take some of the credit.

You can rest assured that I will not be running for parliament, calculating inaccurate heritage statistics or announcing any more April Fool jokes for at least another 360 days. I have other things to work on, and having washed the microwave and de-cobwebbed every vertex in the house today I hope and suspect the next job may involve producing and sustaining a newborn for the foreseeable future.

* Errata – for help read hurt…