I need you Jane Austin.

I hate Indlish, and tonight, just now, I hate non-native speakers. This is a tortuous way to make money, not only do I have to correct English so broken that it needs three passes before it’s respectable, the subject matter reminds me of all the old teachers I had and my negative frame of mind means that I’m thinking of teachers I hated with a passion.

I hate this kind of work, I can feel my written expression slowly drivelling down the plug hole of the stilted expression of a non-native speaker of English who comes from a low-context language. I need to read some Jane Austin, feminist writer's comfort food if there ever was any. Full of simpering idiots, but what well written idiocy! Written by a woman who truly had a room of her own…and I can’t find her. There’s some dickens I suppose, I haven’t read Barnaby Rudge yet and there’s always finishing the Pickwick Papers. But I want Jane Austin damn it. I want fluff - and well written fluff at that - to drive out the horrors that my writing brain has been exposed to over the past few weeks. I looked at a first year essay yesterday, it was brilliant compared to the drivel I am producing now. I used to be able to coin a phrase, now I couldn’t work a synonym slot machine. My writing style has been reduced to the basic and often erroneous grammar of a 7 year old by this pure shite I’m being asked to correct. I am NEVER doing this soul destroying work again.

Looking for Jane…. looking for Jane…. DAMN IT!! Why do my bookshelves have to be full of high felutin bullshit?!! I don’t WANT oliver sacks, or quatitative chemistry, or derrida for beginners, or freud, or the latest on the daliah lama, or an encyclopedia of witchcraft, or “what is mathematics really?” or anne summers or books on conspiracies, politics, history, brains, minds or religion. I want Jane, and my complete collection is nowhere to be seen.

I think I must have put her into storage. Why? Why did I ever put her in a box? Her books used to snuggle up next to my bed on the night stand, always there when the likes of Kate Atkinson and Tom Robbins drove me nuts by trying too hard or the latest SciAm mind or New Scientist just seemed too dry to swallow.

Now, at midnight, with two hours of academic shadow writing on a topic that bores me to tears ahead of me, I am taking her absence very hard indeed.