Author: Leah Didisheim
For this year’s issue, we asked our dearest staff members for their Christmas wishlist and they kindly agreed to take the time during this stressful period to write their wishes down. So, (drumroll please!) here are their deepest desires revealed here and only here just for you! And thanks to their generosity, you can appreciate the best baby pictures they have of themselves. Without further ado, let’s read about our favourite teachers from another angle!
Kevin Curran:
1. The chance to relive my youth! (But this time with friends and without living in my parents’ basement until the age of 35.)
2. An opportunity to explain myself, properly, about that “incident” in Las Vegas, which I think has been misinterpreted and blown way out of proportion.
3. Further to above: My dignity back
4. A statue of me, erected in a public place, that says something to the effect of “He Was Right After All.” Nothing too fancy. Just a little larger than life-size. Not embossed in gold or anything like that. Marble will do. Perhaps in a Grecian pose?
5. A written apology from all those who have wronged me. You know who you are! I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOUR BETRAYALS AND YOUR . . . [is hastily bundled out of the room by men in white coats]
Kirsten Stirling:
1. Some research time
2. A direct wormhole to New York
3. The complete collection of Moomin mugs
4. Another date with James McAvoy
Anita Auer:
1. Heaps of snow
2. A little red riding hood cape to go with the dress
3. A time machine to listen to all the different dialects in the history of English
4. A date with Poldark
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet:
1. Necromantic superpowers
2. A one-way ticket to Ibiza
3. Dinner with Edgar Allan Poe
4. A magic mushroom home-growing kit
Benjamin Pickford:
1. An invisible, immaterial bookcase, which would hold all my library without taking up any actual space in my apartment, but still hold actual books and not electronic files
2. A complete set of the OED, all 20 volumes, to go on that bookcase
3. Fluency in French, German, and Italian, instantly
4. A year’s supply of Branston Pickle (this can be an ongoing Christmas request, I could never have too much Branston on hand)
5. A pub crawl with Karl Marx, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche, though I’m not sure that any of them were notorious boozers (maybe it would be more fun with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and Mark Twain…)