Sitting on the Sofa for three hours this evening, after Id finally got through putting other peoples children to bed.

Sitting on the sofa for three hours, wrestling with Oscar Wilde.
And he’s a big fucker, too.

I mean, you’d think if I was going to pick a classic playwright to tussle with, I could at least have picked someone like Samuel Beckett, who was old and thin and weak and would have been out after a couple of punches to the knees.
Or George Bernard Shaw, who had a beard that you could grab onto while you were kicking him in the nuts.

But no, not on the reading list for next week. So Wilde it was.

And I’m having to research a play I really love; The Importance of being Earnest, which is great.
But for some reason, it took me 3 hours to get through 6 pages of it.
For… some reason.

Or perhaps some reasons.
I was watching television. That was one reason. And then I had to change a fuse, and get a sandwich. And a cup of coffee. More reasons.
And play with the kittens, and then one of the girls woke up. And then something good came on television.
And then I had a sudden compulsion to use the phone.
And then the toilet. And then the phone again. And then there was something else on the television.
And I have the concentration span of a carton of Orange Juice.
Those were some reasons.

ALSO: It was in French.
That was the over-riding reason.
It was, well, it is, in French. Its sitting there, on my bedside table, glaring at me. In French.
And I don’t read french. I don’t speak French, I did 4 years of French 10 years ago, and received quite poor grades for it.

But something deep in me seems to believe strongly that I know how to read French.

This is the second time that I’ve borrowed a script from the Library in French, and I’ve no idea why I do it.

I’m looking around for a different angle on the text, a different edition, edit, something that might help understand the evolution of the play through production or the fine-tuning of the playwright over time. And then lo and behold, I find a translation, and I think “Well now! Won’t this be fascinating, learning a little something about how the wordplay translates, and all that, yes, this will be brilliant!”

So yes, when I pick it up, it seems like the best idea in the world, and I go, I check it out at the desk,
and its only when I’m outside, walking away from the library that I realise…

Je ne parle pas français.