Thinking man's malt loaf

As you can't fail to have noticed if you've been concentrating, I have a Master's degree in English Literature. I talk about this all the time, because I generally assume that people think that I'm stupid because I'm a girl and I can't back up any of my opinions with statistics because I have numeracynesia and can't remember anything except song lyrics. My MA was a brilliant thing to do, I loved it and I briefly learned lots. But after it finished, I still felt, well, not paranoid, but like I'd only just scratched the surface of General Knowledge. And, three years after I graduated, I still have the sense that I'm pedaling frantically to catch up - my geography still sucks, my concept of world history is vastly improved but still shameful, my British history is patchy at best, my economics is woeful although less so having worked in a bank for 2.5 years, my understanding of politics is as easily penetrated as a 17 year old slapper on pills, and my literary insight is best summed up by the fact that I recently re-read a book without realising.

But last night, in a swing of Copernican proportions, the power balance shifted into my favour when I went to a three-hour-long Brecht play, armed with no prior experience of Brecht whatsoever bar a cursory glance at his Wikipedia page in the afternoon, yet I understood the plot, found it enjoyable and thought-provoking and I didn't fall asleep. OK, sure, it was well-directed and well-acted, and the questionably modern translation was suspiciously easy on the ear, but doesn't that mean I am slightly brainy? I think I must be. At one point in the interval I was cross-referencing it with Beckett. Ness and I even managed to critique some elements of it, deciding that the music, far from giving us a jolt or jarring with the rest of the play, fitted in so nicely that it didn't really serve its purpose. Get us! We were criticising the music because we liked it, because it didn't make us uncomfortable enough. Looking back on it now, it's a bit like when you re-read one of your university essays and have a kind of out-of-body experience, because you can't remember ever learning about that topic, let alone being able to write so coherently and convincingly on it. Anyway, for what it's worth, Mother Courage and Her Children was a great watch - not perfect, but fascinating all the same, and I'd recommend it, if only to prove that there's more to Fiona Shaw than just playing the woman with caviar on her face from Three Men and A Little Lady. Ah, popular culture, I cannot resist thee. I feel comfortable around you. We belong. I nuzzle up to you and we spoon. Brecht sits outside in the wingbacked chair, doing sudoku.