Flirting with an ex

Who's just moved into your spare room is probably a really bad idea.  That's the problem with going out to dinner with them to dicuss emotional matters and drinking way too much white wine. and then sharing a taxi home with them.  Thankfully ( I think ) we didn't do anything too awful. 

Having retreated somewhat dazed and confused (even more so than usual) to the safety (!) of my bedroom at the end of the evening I finished reading the new biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper by Adam Sisman.  Having previously read some of HT-R's essays and his (posthumous) Letters From Oxford (Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson) I've been avidly reading his biography.

The Letters were fantastic holiday reading a summer or two ago - perfect for reading in a pooside bar with a gentle breeze and a drink or two and a salad at lunch.  Written with a defteness of touch and a wicked sense of humour - enough to make you smile and relax back into reading them.

The biography is naturally more in depth and takes a little more effort to read but it is certainly well put together.  His style is strangely reminiscent of HTR himself and is interesting on many subjects.  In particular, for me, a passage which was particuarly good was the discussion of post war Oxford and the impact of students having spent 6/7 years at war before studying.

At a time of the annual anguish over University clearing it's a reminder to anybody that your life is not determined at 18 and the choices you make then - you can study later and indeed study better if you make a choice when you've seen more of life (in their case a whole lot more).  Coincidently I'd recently been reading a privately printed memoir of a family friend's time in the Army in WW2 which had made me consider these issues afresh.  It's never too late to think about what you're really doing and what really matters to you.

But putting that all aside - it's Friday and it's almost time to go for a drink or three...