ase

The snow has built a slice of six or eight inches against the glass of my office window, like the honeycomb of an observation hive. Out in the street it looks twice that height not counting the drifts which have crusted where the sidewalks used to be and swamped at least one car and its forlorn antennae of windshield wipers. I would have enjoyed more of the snowglobe of the day without the return of the phantom detergent which spatch could smell even through the storm as soon as he turned up North Street, but I took a picture early on in the snowfall. None of the needles are visible any more.



I can't believe no one has ever written a crossover between Mavis Doriel Hay's Death on the Cherwell (1935) and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935). It must have been unspeakably awkward for Oxford to suffer two unrelated criminal investigations in separate women's colleges in the same year. Just as Sayers modeled her Shrewsbury College on Somerville, Hay fashioned her Persephone College after her own alma mater of St Hilda's and then inflicts on it the discovery of the body of the college bursar by the same quartet of students who were meeting that afternoon to hex the victim with no expectation of such immediate or spectacular results. They plunge into the business of detecting with the same gestalt enthusiasm, a fast-paced, fair-play, often very funny blend of detective and campus novel as their amateur sleuthing attracts the competitive interest of an equivalent circle of male students as well as the police and the resigned relatives who starred in the author's previous Murder Underground (1934). Every now and then an appropriately chthonic allusion surfaces from the winter damp hanging over the river which loops around Perse Island and its contested territory to which an Elizabethan curse may be attached, but it's not, thank God, dark academia; the ordinary kind can be lethal enough. With its female-forward cast and its touches of social issues in the humor, it would have made a terrific quota quickie. "Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult. It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human."

It delights me deeply that my mother regards the young Mel Brooks, as pictured c. 1949 in a recent edition of the Globe, as a snack.