Nearly as long a a life sentence.....

Just a quick blog this evening, folks, to share with you my amazing new discovery. I do believe I have found the longest sentence in the world – not the prison variety, but the written type.

I thought Anthony Powell and Aphra Behn were bad enough for long sentences, but this one takes the biscuit. Or should that be coconut…..?

For my OU module, I have to read Sam Selvedon’s “The Lonely Londoners” which is written from the narrator’s viewpoint. The narrator in this book comes from Trinidad, therefore this book is written in both first and third person in Creole – so at the best of times, it is quite hard to “get” (especially for a grammar snob like me!).

Well, I was going great guns until I reached page 92. Then something happened. Either the narrator (via the author) had swallowed some oral laxative, or there had been an error in publishing (I have the Penguin Modern Classics version) but a sentence started which went on and on and on and on and on, without punctuation or paragraph breaks, and on and on for TEN pages! So not only was I craving a strong dose of caffeine, but I was having to decipher a constant stream of Creole, trying to get it to make sense by inserting full-stops etc into the appropriate places. Phew!

Excuse the poor quality of the photo – my dinosaur iphone 3GS has a rubbish set of cameras – but these are pages 2 and 3 of the neverending sentence. It’s like a game – “Make the next ten pages make sense – extreme edition featuring Creole English”.

Hmmm, methinks it won’t catch on.

I think I have gone slightly mad

You know when you do something in life and you really wonder why you do it? I think my recent battle with the big C for the third time has done something to my brain. 


I have a "bucket list" - a list of things I would like to do/wish I had done in life; and now I have gone and actively registered for one of these things. I have decided to study towards a Masters degree in English through the Open University. I have actually registered for the thing - and after a couple of modules that I need to do first (seeing as my first degree has NOTHING to do with literary critical analysis and big important literary jargony type words) - I will be the Mary Beard of the Literary world. Well, almost. 

Because I already have a degree, I don't need to do another undergraduate one - thank goodness - but the staff at the OU have recommended I get up to senior arts student level by doing these two modules first....the first one involving scrutinising 14 (yes FOURTEEN) pieces of writing, six dissertations and an exam. Sounds a bit like a Christmas carol! I now have the reading list which includes weird and wonderful concoctions such as:


The Sign of Four - Conan-Doyle
The Duchess of Malfi - Webster
Othello - good old Willie Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights - Bronte (no not the Kate Bush song! - plus I've already read it)
Candide - Voltaire (read this one!)
Oroonoko - Behn
The Lonely Londoners - Selvon
The Emigrants - Sebald
Dancing at Lughnasa - Friel (yeah, I hadn't heard of this either!)
Dubliners - Joyce (have read this one - nah nah nee nah nah!)
The Beach at Falesa - RL Stevenson
The Confessions of an English Opium Eater - DeQuincey
Questions of Travel  - Bishop
Metropolis - Fritz Lang


I've read maybe three of the above, so that means I have eleven to wade through before the course starts in September. Right now I am thinking "waaahhhh" and now you will see why I think my cancer treatment has done something to my brain!


That's nothing to what I will have to do in the next module! And I am already fretting about what I will find 80 pages to write about in my Masters dissertation......


See that bucket list of mine - I think it needs revising........ As for now, I have to pick one of the above to start on tomorrow. Eeny meeny miney mo......