azdak

antisoppist, being a lazy so-and-so, has given me the same set of questions (almost) as she gave nineveh_uk, but you can console yourselves that at least the answers are different.


1. 1. What would you like to tell me about Austria?

Oh Lord! I'm pouring pretty much everything I've ever thought about Austria into the current writing project, so perhaps I can get back to you on that one in a year or so? Suffice it to say that it is not, and has never been, remotely like it is in The Sound of Music (and don't get me started on The Sound of Music, you really don't have three hours to spare for this sort of rant. Did you know that Captain von Trapp was actually Captain of a submarine, decorated for sinking the most numbers of Allied shipping in WW1? And did you know that... *gags self*).

2. Peter, Bunter, Charles Parker or Impey Biggs?

Not Peter. I would refuse point blank to change my title from Dr [Azdak's Real Name] to Lady Peter, and he would write me a letter saying, "Either your pride or mine will have to be sacrificed – I can only appeal to your generosity to let it be yours," to which I would reply "Tough titty to you, fishface," and that would be the end of the engagement. But even if he was prepared to give up the title, I don't think I could standing being married to him. It's hard enough having a husband as omnicompetent as Wolfgang, who can put up shelves without drilling through cables, and never parks the car with the wing mirror sticking so far out that it holds up the trams for half an hour. I hate feeling like Bridget Jones, and if I were married to Peter I should feel like Bridget Jones all the time. On top of that, I would loathe the whole business of walking on eggshells in case I said the wrong thing at the wrong moment and wounded him terribly. And I have no work ethic, and I wouldn't get half his allusions, and he would be forced to the tragic recognition that I was not, after all, his soulmate.

Not Bunter, either. Bunter would expect his wife to do for him all the boring domestic tasks he does for Peter - running hot baths, cooking meals, keeping the house in order. And I suspect he'd spend a lot of his free time down the pub. There is no way on earth I would contemplate matrimony with such a man. However, should he show an interest in the position of sex slave servant-with-benefits, I would be willing to consider his application.

Certainly not Charles. I'm sorry, the man reads books of evangelical theology in his spare time.

That leaves Impey Biggs. And why not? It could be a marriage of mutual convenience. He is the handsomest of the four, so he could be my trophy husband, and I could be his beard. He's intelligent, wealthy, entertaining to watch in court, and presumably tolerant of unconventional sexual arrangements. I could promise not to interfere with his canaries, and in return, he wouldn't ask where I spent my nights. Yes, I think Sir Impey will do very well. I might even grow quite fond of him.

2. What fictional home would you most like to live in, with or without its existing occupants?

Good God, what kind of question is that??? Does it count as fictional if it exists in real life? Because I should certainly love to own Max Reinhardt's baroque palace, as featured (as the von Trapp family mansion) in The Sound of Music. Otherwise the only houses I can think of are in Jane Austen, and they're mostly set in bits of England I don't fancy at all. I suppose Pemberly would be all right. Oh, wait a minute, what about Gormenghast? Though the repair bills would be hideous, and I should certainly want central heating put in.

4. What are you reading?

I keep re-dipping into the bits about Austria in "The Rape of Europe" by Lynne Nicholas, which is a fascinating – and astonishing – book about Nazi art theft during World War 2. I'm also dipping into a book by a young German who sailed round the Gulf of Bothnia, but I can't read too much at a time because I get too jealous. And I've just finished the first Stieg Larsson book, but I read it in German and I don't know what it's called in English. It was okay, but there was an awful lot that I disliked about it (note cunning lack of spoilers for those who might be thinking of reading it). And I want to read – badly – a book in the Austrian National Library called "Ohne Ariernachweis durch das dritte Reich" ("Through the Third Reich Without a Certificate of Aryan Racial Identity"), which sounds charmingly like those travel books with titles like "To Asia on a Donkey" and "Up Kanchenjunga on a Monocycle", but which I confidently expect to be full of fascinating details about daily life in Hitler's Germany. However, this involves going into Vienna to sit in the library and I never seem to have any time these days.

5. What have you left undone that you ought to have done or done that you ought not to have done? (that you are willing to share with the world)

I still feel guilty about the few thousand quid I got from the British Academy to go and make recordings of Viennese schoolchildren, which I never got round to transcribing, let alone writing up (because I was too busy bunking off to do plays…) before I decided to leave academia for good.