Rain and Disraeli

Ack, I had a coughing attack TWICE in the middle of seminar. At least this time I wasn't stuck in a lecture hall, and could excuse myself to go be disruptive outside. I think my professor thought I was dying, though. It only happens when I'm sitting down too, which is not conducive to class participation. Okay, enough whining. It means my cold is going away, so hooray, I guess.

Anyway! Sybil was...interesting. Disraeli, being the political animal that he was, couldn't help but vacillate between trying to tell a romance and giving a treatise on historical and political theory, with some race and class analysis thrown in for good measure. Not precisely entertaining stuff, but it was a fairly good survey of the political climate and the state of unrest among the working class in the 1830s and 40s. It was published the same year as Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England, and one can see Disraeli warring a bit with those socialist views in the Sybil, which was quite interesting, particularly since Disraeli was fairly conservative, and had some rather interesting opinions about how aristocrats should completely separate themselves from the working class so as to better care for them in a terribly paternalistic way. However, my basic knowledge of Marx, or even Carlyle, did not prepare me nearly enough to parse what precisely Disraeli wanted to say about his own political model, because he made it incredibly dense, convoluted, and often a shade hypocritical. That, woven in with the romance of Sybil-the-woman, and Sybil-the-ultimate-symbol-of-Albion-itself, made for some seriously uneven text. But hey, those are more fun to have discussion about, because then we have room to complain a bit.

Incidentally, getting to class was a bit of an adventure, as all us poor English students had to venture into the giant scary complex of science buildings in order to get to our assigned tutorial room. I was very glad to run into some classmates before actually getting into the building, because otherwise I would have been woefully lost. There is some seriously bizarre architecture around that whole block, which reminded me a bit of the H.R. Giger architecture from the Alien movies, except in concrete rather than black piping and slime. I'll post pictures when I finally track down a cable to attach my camera to my computer. I'm very glad I don't have to deal with that part of campus that often. It's even more confusing on the insides of the buildings.

In other news, today was my first genuinely rainy day in England. It's rained a bit during the night before, but I had to drag myself through a light to medium downfall to get to class this afternoon. It was a bit unappealing in terms of actually willing myself to go outside, but it wasn't bad once I was out there, so I suppose that bodes well for my general tolerance the weather here. I'm also mostly used to looking to my right first before crossing the street, sorting out the shapes of all the coins and knowing their corresponding value, and generally getting about. I'm even getting used to saying that 18 degrees is nice weather. So all in all, it's been a fairly easy acclimating period, no doubt aided by massive ingestion of the BBC.

However, I will say this: I cannot for the life of me understand Manchester accents. They are impossible. The guy who came to fix my faucets had a broad Manchester accent, and about four in every five words he said was completely unintelligible to me. Same with Erin's housemate, who's also from around the Manchester area. I'm going to have to develop my ear a hell of a lot to get used to that.