Getting stuck into Cicero

Some progress, some lack of progress… As far as I can tell, the baby is coming along quite nicely, which means that I have a great sense of achievement without having actually done anything except provide a comfortable, alcohol- and caffeine-free home. The 20 week scan revealed a lot of gymnastics going on, which makes me absurdly proud.

However, possibly because of this, progress on uni work has been slow to abysmal. I’m not even going to talk about the proposed summer reading – suffice to say that, like the summer, it didn’t really happen. I have a voracious appetite for novels, but not for anything that involves work – can I count this as a pregnancy craving?

But, with the new term looming at the end of the month, I have begun to make a start on the Pro Murena. This is reminding me why I always liked Cicero – he is so shamelessly self-aggrandising, I imagine the other senators thinking ‘Oh, come off it, Cicero’. And I do love his sentence structure – great complicated riffs on a subject that threaten to lose themselves in grammatical complexity but always resolve beautifully like a well-formed equation. Maybe there’s hope for me after all.