Random things

• My mum's doing well after her knee operation. She is surrounded by 90 year olds on her ward and, as a youngster barely into her sixties, she's a real hit with her fellow patients - as is my dad who is enjoying the hospital visits but is feeling rather lonely at home without his wife laughing with him and nagging him and generally keeping him company.
  


• I was in hospital myself today, for a routine checkup in Oxford. In the oncology department this afternoon, I was the youngest there by decades and everyone probably assumed I was a doctor. I felt quite sad walking through the corridors. I've been all clear for a few years now, but still the memories rock me.
  


• Better memories enlivened me as I strolled through Oxford on my way back to the rail station. I sipped smokey lapsang souchong at The Grand Café on the High Street, where I used to meet my friends; I tottered across the Radcliffe Camera's cobble-stoned square, where I used to take a shortcut on my bicycle en route to rowing or the gym; I walked through the inner courtyard of the Bodleian Library - "The Bod" as we called it - and looked up with a touch of longing at the windows glowing orange, remembering the days and nights I was inside with my head in a book taking copious notes on things I've now forgotten. I've lectured, studied and given papers at other universities, but still I rate Oxford the most highly. The intellectual rigour of the place is superb and I met some amazing people studying there, from all over the world. And quite simply, the place so resonates with history that it feels magical, even unearthly. If I have children, I will encourage them to go to Oxford, just as my own family encouraged me.
  


• I am deriving enormous amounts of pleasure cooking for M. The happiness spread across his face when he returns from another long day and smells all the aromas coming out of the kitchen is priceless. When his hours become more manageable again he will start taking his turn to cook during weeknights, which I'm really looking forward to as he cooks so well. But for now, it is just me. On Monday, I cooked a feta and courgette frittata and served it with salad; this lasted into Tuesday when I served it with steamed spinach and garlic. Tonight, I will cook a white cannellini, chorizo and tomato stew. That will most likely last into tomorrow too. If we can't go out to eat on Friday, then I think I will prepare a simple gnocchi, tomato and basil stew. I brought all these recipes and more back from my parents' house this weekend gone.
  


• This week, I managed to nip out to see Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar at The Photographers' Gallery during one lunch break. I would call it America's cabinet of curiosities. Simon's large-format lens casts an unsentimental eye across a range of things that are an integral part of everyday US life but remain inaccessible to most peoples' eyes: Playboy magazine in Braille; a retarded, in-bred white tiger in a cage in Arkansas; radioactive capsules glowing neon blue at a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State (top photo); the device holding the dead bodies of the wife and sister of Robert Ettinger, a pioneer in the field of cryonics at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan (photo below). The photographer is tenacious and often waits up to a year to gain permission to photograph in some highly secure zones, including C.I.A. sites and prison death rows. But it must be in the family blood, because her father worked for the State Department and photographed Soviet cities during the Cold War, restricted sites in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and other inaccessible places around the world.