My Dearest Annika

What a strange town Glasgow is. The locals, for some inexplicable reason have taken to shouting and singing in a most off key fashion! It is a horrendous fouling of the air. Though I suppose it is unfair of me to complain of the quality of music, considering my own abilities. However, it would not be nearly so bad if either they sang loudly and beautifully or softly and inexperienced.

The weather of late has been grey and wet. The type of wet that coats the world in water, like clouds hanging too low. It is very drab. It also makes the streets a positive nightmare to navigate.

Happily today was a rare sunny day, dry too! I was most delighted that this fine weather coincided with my day off. How perfectly splendid! To make this day even better, I was able to go out on an adventure.

It is near the end of term here for most of the University students. In all the confusion of comings and goings I was able to sit in on an anatomy lecture! It was most thrilling to walk the halls of the University, to peer covertly into offices and lecture theatres and to explore the main anatomy lab. Dead bodies are rather fascinating to look at. And just think, someday you too will be a corpse.

James McDonald presented me as either an aspiring undergraduate to the world of education or his sister. By this means I was effectively smuggled into the sacred Halls of Science. The lecture was about the functioning of the heart, but alas, there was no galvanisation of the corpse. Just a regular dissecting of the body, which was all new and exciting for me. James and his friends thought my eagerness a trifle amusing and spent the afternoon teasing me for it. After the lecture we had a grand time wandering about the campus grounds.

Sean Fraser was particularly entertaining. He is from the west coast of Scotland and has such amusing phrases. Not that I will venture to share many of them with my mother! She would not be impressed. But he had me in stitches for much of the time. It was lovely to spend a day surrounded by people my own age and standing!

Have you had any further contact with Edgar? I do hope you have managed to avoid another such incident! Though, I don’t suppose anyone would have suspected Mr Strongwin’s brother-in-law to be such a noodle.

I am sincerely looking forward to this summer season. Even to returning home to my family, though I am not sure I will like living at home nearly so much as the freedom of being on ones own. There is a certain liberty to the current set up – not much, but enough to make this past year tolerable.

I fear I must send this off now. I have an early start on the morrow.

With deepest affection;

Elizabette