My main impressions are:
- meeting with my old University friend (yes, this world is really small!);
- buying an English translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America (I’ll be writing about this later);
- attending three very interesting presentations;
- spending about half an hour with a very interesting multilingual lady, who recently wrote a book about a cultured cat.
I’ll leave the third one out till later. Meeting my old friend was one of the biggest surprises in my entire life. I wrote somewhere on the blog about the new website that aims at bringing together current and former students from all Russian high education institutions. So this girl has finally registered there in early April, we exchanged a couple of messages, and then we found out that both of us were going to London for the Book Fair. Naturally, we decided to meet, which occurred in the form of stumbling into each other in the foyer. Soon after we sat outside chatting about each other and our unimates.
Strange things come out in these conversations. We had a girl in our year, who was a dedicated student of German medieval monasticism. Although a devoted Russian Orthodox, she was once very seriously discussing with another girl, whether they should attend the Christmas service at a Catholic or a Protestant church in Moscow on December 25th. Ultimately, she went to study in Germany for a year, where she’d met her present husband, a Muslim, for whom – reportedly – she’d converted into Islam. On one of the photographs we saw she was wearing a burqa.
Buying an English translation of Mayakovsky’s digest of visiting America was another huge surprise. When I saw the book on the stand, it didn’t even occur to me that I may not be able to buy it. So I just asked how much it cost. I bagged it with no problem whatsoever. Yet believe it or not I still haven’t read D. H. Lawrence, so when I saw several of his books on Wordsworth Classics stand, I asked if I could purchase Sons and Lovers. Turned out, they weren’t actually allowed to sell books. This was confirmed at another stand where I saw a book on successful blogging.
And the lady I spoke to is Brigitte Downey – a multilingual, cultured, well-travelled, exuberant person who spent years making documentaries and loving opera, and who had some wonderful recollections of Russia and Russian ballet. Half an hour that we spent chatting after I shared with Brigitte my knowledge of search marketing by explaining the difference between organic and sponsored results is the time to remember. And Chapter One of Diaries of a Cultured Cat is generally reminiscent of my experience of Moscow and Manchester that I have mentioned in chapters 1 and 4 of Visiting London.
In Egypt, as we know, cats were worshipped. And in 1932 T. S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats that was adapted for the stage by Andrew Lloyd Webber. You can browse the chapters from Old Possum’s Book here, but this is an extract most relevant to us:
You’ve read of several kinds of Cat,
And my opinion now is that
You should need no interpreter
to understand their character.
You now have learned enough to see
That Cats are much like you and me
And other people whome we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse –
But all may be described in verse.
Brigitte Downey is describing this in prose, but even after one chapter I feel her knowledge and style will make this book an insightful reading.
Links:
Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America
Brigitte Downey, Diaries of a Cultured Cat
T. S. Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
London Book Fair
Wordsworth Classics
Brigitte Downey’s website