"A Long-Expected Party" (VII)

By waiting patiently for the 22nd, I can really feel the expectation that the hobbits were experiencing. Today, new changes have taken place. In fact, this morning, hobbits have woken "to find the large field, south of Bilbo’s front door, covered with ropes and poles for tents and pavilions. A special entrance was cut into the bank leading to the road, and wide steps and a large white gate were built there. The three hobbit-families of Bagshot Row, adjoining the field, were intensely interested and generally envied. Old Gaffer Gamgee stopped even pretending to work in his garden".

And this is all the excitement that hobbits - and myself - are going to get for today. Tomorrow I'll read and write about the next paragraph and in two days time it will be Wednesday, the eve of the Party, with barely a line to comment on - concerning,  ahem, the weather. But then Thursday, the Big Day will finally arrive, we'll have a great party and will then compress 17 years in one reading.

As for my own life while re-reading The Lord of the Rings, I am writing this from my hotel room in Alicante, thankful for the technology that allows me to carry a digital copy of the book in my computer. Tomorrow, at home, I will go back to my paper copy but I was already carrying my computer and a thick PhD dissertation; adding extra weight was not an option I wanted to consider. By the way, I can now formally congratulate Dr. Lorraine Kerslake for an excellent dissertation on Ted Hughes's children's literature analysed from an ecocritical perspective. It was great to meet one of her supervisors - Silvia Caporale Bizzini - and to see again the other supervisor, Terry Gifford, and his wonderful wife, Jill, as well as sharing the board with José Antonio Álvarez Amorós and my dear Antonio Ballesteros González. I am tired, but moments like these, with people like them are some of the privileges of this job.