Memories

How better to spend the last day of the Spring term than visiting Sigmund Freud's final home in London at Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, now a delightful museum? I only spent an hour here but it was fascinating (let me resist saying it was a dream). Freud's study, along with the famous couch and all his books and ornaments, was wonderful. Everything there is (more or less, I imagine) as it looks in the photos of when he was alive. Indeed, all the items in his study were imported from his home of 47 years in Vienna after he escaped the Nazis in the late 1930s. It was also the room in which he died, I gather. The house, like others in the street, is a beautiful Edwardian building not unlike my own and resembles it in its style (see picture on right).

Winter has taken its time to depart but we are finally peaking through the curtains at spring. This term has involved getting up at 5am one day a week and cycling to the train station (no buses in Leicester at this time) to journey to London to give a 10am lecture. Clearly I'm aging cos it's rendered me exhausted most of the week and annoyingly vulnerable to illness. In a case of undoubted conversion hysteria I even lost my voice for three or four days. Still, it's all over now and with luck I can rearrange that lecture next year. I will bury the painful memory of early rising along with some of my stranger desires ...

We are all faring well enough now. The stretch of time from Christmas to Easter involves mostly an improbable hardiness and unfeasible repression of joyful libidinal instincts; we are all grateful for the lighter mornings and warmer days. Luis has been taking photos with the camera I gave him for Christmas and many are real beauties. You can see them here at his personal photographic web site. Some lovely ones of Esme and Jacob there too. Jacob emerged from Christmas with a whole new ability to chat and has been undertaking the talking cure with a surprising frenzy, giving full vent to his remarkable ego (they have noticed this at his nursery, where he has settled in very well indeed). He even talks on the phone to me when I'm at work. Awww.