I shall name all the minor characters in this novel after characters in Galsworthy. Not after Soames himself, of course. And "Jolyon" is too silly a name to be used casually. But Young Nicholas is a useful name. As is Jesse Hayman (brother Giles Hayman, alas, not a useful name). Imogen! Imogen married some perfectly boring sports-mad man named Jack Cardigan. Montague Dartie! Chankery! Septimus Small! Mervyn Waterbuck, QC!

I have no icons of the Eric Porter Soames. I must remedy this deficiency.

Tromped around Oxford today and got rained on quite hard. Saw some of the things I wanted to see. I'll have to come back to the city when my sister has gone and my husband has joined me here in London. Which he'll do Friday. There's more I'd like to see. I'd like to see it while not soaking wet. Nonetheless, we did hit a couple of touristy high points today: Christ Church meadow, its gallery of paintings, the Bodleian, and the Radcliffe Camera.

Oxford is the kind of city I'd like to spend a few months in, just living and hanging out. Made me long for my grad student days in Berkeley. Though I guess you can never really go back. Two thoughts struck me: students look the same the world over, and man oh man, college students are looking really young to me now. Like children. Thus does middle age creep up on me.

I tried to think about the city as Giles might when he was a student. Though it's sometimes hard to notice places as places while you're there with a mission. What you think about while living somewhere is what you're doing with your life, not the place you're living as place. Hmm, I have to find a better way of expressing this concept. I mentioned Berkeley, where I was a grad student for a couple of unsuccessful years. While I lived there as a student, mostly what I thought about was my classes. Bookstores were places to buy books if I could afford them. Cafes existed to provide me coffee while I worked. I didn't really have a sense of Berkeley as a city with a flavor and a personality. I am aware of that personality now. (People do make fun of Berkeley, but I am fond of it, and would cheerfully live there again.)

I wrote a long rant about bookstores that I published on my Yet Another Boring Life Story blog thing. The rant mentions that I'd found my copy of On Forsyte 'Change at the Strand in New York a decade ago. This book has always struck me as being essentially fan fiction. Okay, fanfiction written by Galsworthy himself, so not fanfic in the needs-disclaimer sense. But Galsworthy couldn't stand to leave the characters alone. He wanted them to live a little longer. Isn't this why we write fanfic?

Read "Cry of peacock" and tell me seriously that it's not fanfic. It even ends with sex, or at least sexual longing.

More London, more theater, more galleries, more just plain walking around. I think I can write the Holmes-meets-Giles story now. I've been seeing more of it in my head, anyway. I have some feel for locations that I didn't have before.

My sister and I did some Forsyte-inspired walking yesterday and today. We walked around Montpelier Square, for instance. A desireable residence indeed. (Though No 62 doesn't exist; the highest number is in the 40s.) One can picture Soames walking round and round in mortal agony. Park Lane, Green Street, the Bayswater Road: all the Forsyte locations studded around the Park.

I should point out that my sister and I both know the novels best, sentimental and second-rate though Galsworthy may be. I'm also a fan of the 1967 BBC production. I don't have the time of day for the recent Granada remake, which treated its viewers as idiots incapable of keeping the large family straight. Fooey on that.

Remind me to post some Forsyte fanfic some day.

Giles has a Forsyte chin.