As a few of you know, I lived four years in a students' hall in León while I was doing my first degree. Most of the experience, as a few of you know, I loathed: I didn't like to share so much room for so much time with people who(m) I don't give a damn for. I put on about seven kilos during my first year due to the fatty food... OK, due PARTLY to the fatty food. I was at the end of my tether by the middle of the fourth year, wishing a slow and painful death not to one, but several boys in my corridor. Overall, you can tell I didn't exactly enjoy the experience.
Despite the BITTERsweet memories (ah, the memories), I will always be grateful for the few friends I made there. Of approximately 250-300 people (it's far from accurate... If someone wants to do the maths, please do), I talked more than five times with about 30, and almost eight years later, I'm still friends with... Three. An engineer and two scientists (biologists), for which I am also grateful because, how would I have met scientists and/or technical experts if not showing my lack of social abilities in front of other 120 human beings in a dinner hall and a TV room? They were great, and they still are, and no matter how life (mis)treat us, it is comforting to know they are there (and I hope they know I am here).
Tearful confessions made, it was thanks to the biologists that I finally understood the evolution theory. Haha, you will think, that's so easy it is embarrasing you didn't understand it! Fine. Laugh if you must. I used to believe that evolutionary movements in the history of species were governed by a general impulse towards improvement. "No, no, no, NO", my exquisitely patient friends would say. "No impulse towards anything. Just change, and random". "But if not for the best, how and why do animals evolve?". "What you just said, that's intelligent design speaking; you think that there must be a force behind evolution, somehow guiding it towards the best... Maybe God. But animals don't change for the best, or governed by a superior being or force. They (we) just do." I understood what they were trying to tell me - I mean, I understood how they used verbs and clauses, and their connotations (I am a linguist, after all), but I didn't grasp the implications of the theory.
 Oh well. One sunny afternoon I was in my parents' orchard, just hanging around. I was feeling guilty because everybody was working but me, so my father gave me a plastic bag and a pair of gloves. "You can pick up the beetles on the potato leaves". The beetles are black and white, and easy to spot, so easy in fact that the task soon became boring and my mind, as usual, drifted away. "You poor little buggers, being black and white over a sea of green. Picking you up must be a piece of pie for your natural predators, as it is for me now. It's unlucky, if only you were green...Wait. Crazy diving into the gene pool, suppose one of you were born green. Your chances to survive would grow exponentially and you would be able to impregnate a lot of females (yuck, yuck, pregnant beetles...). Most of your descendants would be black and white, but at least some of them would be green like you... And that would give them advantage over their black and white brothers and sisters". With a slightly embarrased smile on my face, I realized. Finally.
 (Guys, feel free to correct me if needed. As always).

The Other James

It never ceases to amaze me how many times we depend on sheer luck. In WWI, a young German soldier left a trench seconds before it was blown away by enemy fire. Just a few more seconds lingering, and Chancellor Hitler would have never been (I must admit that this could well be a myth, since similar stories are told about Franco during the Spanish-Moroccan conflict of 1911-27). Luck, fortune, fate... Call it what you please, it is unsettling how importat a role it often plays. Taking it to the extreme, what if you struggle to excel in a field where you share a name with someone brilliant by all accounts? Every time your name is mentioned, the first thought of all present will be for the other. You will always remain as "the less famous X" or, even worse, "Oh, that X". M. R. James was roughly a contemporary of Henry James, the Nobel Prize; he was "Oh, that James". He never achieved such a recognisition but, truth be told, I suspect he never truly wished to. M. R. had other sources of self-assurance; he was a scholar in Cambridge, a antiquary who enjoyed his job, and, above all, he was an English gentleman as English gentlemen wished themselves to be - meaning he probably never allowed himself to feel anything as demeaning as jealousy. M. R. "Oh, that James" went on writing little, deliciously creepy terror stories. Yes, his short stories always follow the same pattern and, after a while, they become repetitive, but the same can be said of other writers writing at the same time who become deservedly famous: Arthur C. Doyle and Agatha Christie. You do not read them in hopes that the originality of their plots will take you by surprise: you read them because they are reassuring in their familiarity, and because you know you're in for a treat and little else. No earth-shattering self-discoveries through the experience of literature here.
 Despite his monotonous plots, M.R. James devised some strategies that have become classic in the horror genre. First, the complicity between writer and reader without the character involved being wholly conscious of what's going on. The main character, staying with some old friends, trips over a huge form while going downstairs in the middle of the night. He is half-asleep and thinks it must be the kitchen cat (but we know it isn't). You have bought a cheap engraving of a manor house. Your friend comments that the sinister hooded figure in the background is remarkable. Although you hadn't seen the figure when you bought the engraving, you tell yourself it must have always been there (but you're wrong). Cheap it is, easy it is, but it works.
 A second reason why everyone (that is, everyone interested in the Gothic genre) should give James a chance is the amazingly modern treatment of time and space in some of his tales. It is not that ghosts do not seem to be affected by the physical laws (that has always been their premise): James literally achieves to recreate vertigo, with his characters, and vicariously the reader, experiencing the unexplainable: alone in his library at night, and observing the map of the perturbing maze in his garden, a little black point catches the attention of a man - he intensely stares at it until the point becomes a hole, so deep it makes black look pale, and feels he is falling through it to meet what lies on the bottom (while a part of his mind is perfectly conscious of him being at his library having a look at a map). So (splendidly) scary.
 The other James, maybe. But what a James.