Some fives:

[eye_of_a_cat]

Top five ways to spend an evening on my own:

1. With a comfortable chair, a lot of newly-bought books, and hot chocolate (preferably on tap).
2. If it's summer and still light, exploring places I don't know.
3. Walking my dog, even in the rain and dark. Either back in England, where it's all hills and woods and the dead bracken turns copper when the sun sets, or where I live now, where it's all winding paths through Victorian cemeteries, and old churches with musket-fire scars on their walls from the Jacobite rebellion, and strange paths around castles where the woods always seem to be misty and you're half-sure that any minute now, the ghost of one of the Stuart kings is going to come walking the other way.
4. However geeky this sounds, especially since I work in one: in a library.
5. Painting. With paper everywhere, and jars of water I forget about and tip over, and paint all over my hands and arms.

Top five ways to spend an evening not on my own:

1. At a ceilidh. I love dancing. (Plus, it does your ego no harm at all to have a selection of cute men offering to dance with you.)
2. There is a great deal to be said in favour of sitting in small pubs in Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning, arguing about liberation theology.
3. Time spent with the old friends-from-home I don't get to see very often is always good, especially when they're all in the same place at the same time.
4. Watching 50s sci-fi B-movies with my dad.
5. Commiserating with housemate over workload/supervisor/writing stress, deciding we damn well deserve an evening off, and watching Angel while eating takeaway pizza with a puppy curled up asleep on my lap.

Top five holiday destinations:

1. [Insert Scottish tourist propaganda re: "we have HISTORY and TARTAN and MOUNTAINS and TARTAN and LOCH MONSTERS and TARTAN and WEIRD HAIRY COWS."] (Actually, it is really pretty, and when I don't live here I'll want to visit.)
2. The Pyrenees. Mountains! Summer snow! Vultures!
3. Brittany, for the dolmens. (Although I don't think you can get so close to them any more.)
4. Lyme Regis. (Fossils.)
5. Hay-on-Wye. (Books.)

Top five books that literature students should be made to read (discounting the Shakespeare they'll probably have done at school):

1. The Name of the Rose.
2. Wuthering Heights. (Applies double to people who think they know what it's about and say "Ew, I hate love stories.")
3. The Grapes of Wrath.
4. Lord of the Flies.
5. Three Men in a Boat (just because everybody should).

Comments

[kakodaimon.livejournal.com]

Victorian cemeteries? Gah. *geography jealousy*

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

The Victorians used to do organised cemetery tours around this one, so it's all very Educational. Weeping angel, statue of hero of Presbyterian reformation, shrouded urn, bizarre pyramid thing. It's an odd place.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I have yet to read two of your 'must read' list, including #1. Bad me.

I like your ways to spend evenings.

I have been to Brittany but have not seen the dolmens. However, I have been to Vendée and seen a couple of dolmens and some menhirs, one of which I drove past about five times and walked past twice before I realised that the reason I couldn't see it was that it was about three foot tall and almost hidden behind a small sapling.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

it was about three foot tall and almost hidden behind a small sapling

Hee! I know someone who once drove all the way through Andorra and out the other side, looking for a parking space.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

That's ... quite impressive!

Now I'm wondering whether the plural of dolmen isn't dolmen, because 'dolmens' is starting to look wrong. 'Menhirs' must be OK, because that's in Asterix. Who, me, using a comic as a dictionary? *ahem*