Sunday, 20 April 2025 (Easter Sunday)
Easter…we live across the street from a Paris church so I cannot be unaware that it is Easter: bells have been chiming at various moments all weekend and I try to remember the biblical sequence of events. As a child I would have been taken to church, on Palm Sunday, on Easter. I remember the branches and I remember that it was day when women got a chance to wear a hat — but I guess Christmas traditions and songs made a deeper furrow in my psyche.
What I really meant to say is that I am in the middle of watching A.E. Stallings February (2025) Oxford Lecture on Cavafy, and I’m thinking that both her lectures and Alice Oswalds’ are quite a triumph, in their different and original ways for women: that women bring something new to the male-monopolised field of lecturing, from the gesture (Stallings) of tucking a pesky strand of blonde hair (she has a lovely poem about going to the hairdresser in Like) behind her ear, to Oswald’s limpid lyricism in her plain (do I recall this?) knit jumper and her audios. Really, I think if women, they say, bring a je-ne-sais-quoi to the corporate boardroom, they also refresh and enliven their turns at the lectern. Brava and thank you!