Finely put off

Boyet
Who is the suitor? Who is the suitor?

Rosaline Shall I teach you to know?

Boyet
Ay, my continent of beauty.

Rosaline Why, she that bears the bow.
Finely put off!

Boyet
My lady goes to kill horns, but, if thou marry,
Hang me by the neck if horns that year miscarry.
Finely put on!

Rosaline
Well then, I am the shooter.

Boyet And who is your deer?

Rosaline
If we choose by the horns, yourself. Come not near.
Finely put on indeed!

Maria
You still wrangle with her, Boyet, and she strikes at the brow.

Boyet
But she herself is hit lower. Have I hit her now?

(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV.1.109-119)

Finely put on, finely put off. Millie’s stint of doggie agitation has apparently ended, and we are back to normal. Mmmm, sleep. Could it be because I sat up late last night, watching I’m Alan Partridge and laughing from behind a cushion? When the dogs see I’m happy, they’re happy, but I suspect Millie associates my sitting at the computer with anxiety.

Whatever; the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing and even the thirty odd feet of, erm, weeds in the garden are in bloom. I may be out of diet c*ke but there is plenty of tea in the pot (unlike for poor diamond geezer). The only blots on the landscape are the coming need to write my application for a salary review, tomorrow, the day on which applications are due (since I forgot to bring home the list of criteria), and the sad fact that the inlet valve on my dishwasher seems to have developed a fault, since the cycle is proceeding but no water is coming into the machine. Like one bereaved who orders the absent family member’s possessions as if they were still there, I continue to load dishes into the washer, refusing to face the fact I am going to have to wash them myself before the tech guy comes to fix it.

The salary review application is a more irritating prospect, since the criteria by which we must apply are not in reality the criteria by which we are assessed, and pointing out the thorny snarls of logical fallacies by which this situation came to pass will do me no favours. Now that I am about to cross over the bar (by virtue of my tertiary teaching diploma), I am applying for an accelerated progression, but despite the fact that I can offer proof of my general professional specialness and wonderfulness according to the supplied criteria, the decision maker has already whispered in my ear (literally, in the sense it was pressed to the telephone receiver) that the fact my present salary is slightly (and I mean slightly–less that two percent) above its official ranking will count considerably against me in the review process, which is to say, it will be “taken into account”.

The way this process is executed within our little corner of Concrete University makes both me and my colleagues feel rather dirty (and not at all in a good way), not least because none of us has, to my unionised knowledge, ever been granted accelerated progression, which would suggest, in terms of the criteria with which we are supplied (excellence in performance, value to the university and so on), that we are no better, in the eyes of our directors, than we should be.

But let us set aside the burnt chop of industrial relations in favour of the shiny fruit basket of journalling my recent holiday. The fog of introspection cleared with my departure from Dunedin and on to a route I’d never travelled before: inland through the Strath-Taieri to Middlemarch and then on to the Maniototo, eventually coming to a stop at Naseby, a former gold-mining town turned holiday destination for Otagoans (perhaps Otagoers would be a better collective noun?). This is upland country, a landscape that changes from the green and gorse you see near the coast to barer tussocky hills, surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges.

Middlemarch is tiny, but you can get an idea of at least some of its character by this conversation I had with the owner of the café:

Birdie: Hello, how are you?

Owner: Another day in paradise. What would you like to eat? Name me anything and I’ll make it for you.

It is a sad reflection on the state of my culinary imagination, that all I could think of at that point was a toasted sandwich; eventually I picked something off the menu.

If I tell you that my journey out of Middlemarch and into the Maniototo was characterised by remembering the work my former office mate did on Janet Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo in which she looked at how the Maniototo in this novel is identified with the Kantian Manifold and thus effectively becomes a schematic of the artist’s imagination, you must promise not to call me either a geek or a lost cause. I took the back road to Naseby, which was unsealed. In Central Otago this means something quite different from the Gravel-with-a-capital-G backroads of Canterbury which my car simply can’t cope with; here, it was a road of pressed yellow dirt and dust that was almost as easy to drive on as its sealed counterpart. (The roads through the whole region are fantastic, particularly in light of the low population.)

Naseby was a revelation, although by the time I passed the sign which declared the town to be “2000 feet above worry level” I already had my full holiday freak on and was so relaxed as to be kept vertical only by the angle of my carseat anyway. Sunshine, mountains, trees, beer. What people there were on the street said hello. I felt as if I had the place to myself, until the evening at least, when the camping families and outdoor enthusiasts with mountain bikes on the back of their 4X4s came back into town. I had turned up to the pub early enough that they didn’t impinge on my seat or my view, however, so all was well. Everyone sat in a state of nominal community, one arm raising beer or wine glasses, the other waving mobile phones around in the air in hope of getting sufficient reception to send texts to friends to say what a great time we were having. (I have to remember that A-Lee doesn’t have my number programmed into her phone; each time she gets a text from a number she doesn’t recognise but whose owners appears to know what she’s doing or about to do, she thinks she’s being stalked).

You can see pictures from this part of my journey in the holiday gallery, also linked to from the “galleries” menu at left.

I stopped in Ranfurly the next morning, a larger town nearby, known now for its art deco buildings which have recently been preserved, but in light of my super-relaxation of the previous day it was a mild disappointment, not least because of the Queenstown-level price of breakfast and the fact the place was crowded with school reunioners and their edgy spouses, many opining about how, nice though it may be, they were glad to have left and pitied those who remained. Local teenage girls walking their babies in strollers earned judgemental stares from the couple at a table next to me. The woman had grown up there, and was telling her husband the story of a family whose youngest child, a five-year old (an “accident”, and the only girl, she said) had one day drowned in a swimming pool.

“They’ll be there today,” she told her husband. “Don’t mention it to them or anything.”

A well-fed cat stalked café-goers for bacon from their breakfasts; he could sense my vegetarianism from ten kitty paces and ignored me. It’s only without my doggie crew that I could get within even one hundred paces of a cat, so it was an event nonetheless.

Now I must go and confront the crockery that will not wash itself. I hope this is a temporary aberration that will be cheap to fix, although I will ignore the cheapest option of all (the one my employers will likely take with my salary review) which is to do nothing at all. S[p]end no money now, etc..

Pedablogue and After Nadath now have the same template as this journal, about which I am rather pleased. Except that the brewing of posts for Nadath in particular is slow going and the results slim pickings, I hope they will continue to be little sisters to this site, which will remain however the most ruminative, narratorial and (heaven help me) whimsical of the three.