Oh, I always read the bit in brackets as Forest's censorship of Giles's actual salty oath rather than Giles being self-reflexive. I agree, this is as tolerable as he gets, and there is a touch of Lord Uxbridge's leg in his cool acknowledgement that, why, yes he could have been drowned, but he'll be fine after a quick nap. There is a possibility that Giles is the sort of person who's good in a real life-and-death crisis but crappy when it comes to minor everyday upsets. Hard to tell, given we don't really see him again till Run Away Home, in which he is first insufferable, then unconscious.
I have an un-Muriel-like propensity to Schadenfreude and always rather enjoyed that chapter. I had a teacher just like Redmond, actually. She disliked me intensely, having concluded (erroneously) that I was a child of cosseted privilege, and kept making snide comments about it. It was quite crushing, at thirteen, though I'm rather amused by it now; often she was so far off the mark that it took me a while to work out that she was talking about me. The fact of my being an only child seem to be a particular irritant, as if I could somehow have induced my parents to be more fertile if only I'd put the effort in. She was big on effort and baffling, character-building rewards and punishments that she never revealed the rationale behind.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-05-30 10:32 am (UTC)I have an un-Muriel-like propensity to Schadenfreude and always rather enjoyed that chapter. I had a teacher just like Redmond, actually. She disliked me intensely, having concluded (erroneously) that I was a child of cosseted privilege, and kept making snide comments about it. It was quite crushing, at thirteen, though I'm rather amused by it now; often she was so far off the mark that it took me a while to work out that she was talking about me. The fact of my being an only child seem to be a particular irritant, as if I could somehow have induced my parents to be more fertile if only I'd put the effort in. She was big on effort and baffling, character-building rewards and punishments that she never revealed the rationale behind.