Messy, Choppy, Birdie, Gladdie

What a messy, choppy day. The marking I intended to finish before bed last night I instead woke up at six to do, having been slowed down the previous evening by one glass of wine that turned into a few.

Then I drove into the carwash place in town, still at an earlier hour than I’d normally leave the house, only to turn around and come back because it looked kind of cheap and empty. (That’s cheap as in slightly tatty; the financial kind of cheap is good.)

I got most of my afternoon’s lecture written before the union training day began. I try and keep a little part of me sceptical as union activities roar around me, as it seems like a really rather good fit and I don’t want enthusiasm to turn into uncritical acceptance, just in case the whole operation one day gets taken over by a charismatic but deadly leader. Not that the local organiser isn’t charismatic, but if he’s deadly I’ve yet to see evidence of it (although, as a Dubliner, he has a habit of starting sentences with “you see, t’t'ing is”, which is, I think, not so much deadly as adorable).

I should have known that to leave the workshop in the buzz of setting goals for the months leading up to this year’s general election meant it would all be downhill from there. Only six out of twenty-five students turned up to the extra lecture I’d scheduled, and, in an attempt to give them something more laid-back than usual for the last day of term, I ran over time. At around three minutes past the hour the lecturer waiting for the room came in (it’s usually empty in the hour following me) and said nothing, just stood there looking annoyed.

It was one of the staff from my old department. I said cheerfully that I would soon be out and he returned outside to stare in the window. I can only hope he didn’t hear me telling the students the story of how he was used routinely to ignore all the departmental thesis-writers when passing them in the corridor, but the fact that he returned to the room immediately I stopped talking might suggest otherwise.

A strange, formless sort of end to the day and one that left me feeling rather dissatisfied. Later, I muttered so randomly to Mariella on MSN that even she was obliged to say the conversation was taking an erratic turn. At least I still have my new hair.

Still, tomorrow is another day, and the beginning of Birdie and Gladdie’s excellent adventure. While we’re wondering just quietly if those farmer boys mightn’t be immune to our fast-talking, bead-twirling charms, we’re willing to give the whole night the benefit of the doubt. (For the edification of Miss Hiss and others, kiwi farmer boys are not like their Aussie counterparts: you may imagine a class of gentlemen reserved and taciturn, out of whom a city gal might get a nod following seven beers, but any more is largely the realm of their agriculture-and-commerce-majoring feminine doppelgangers.) And, truth be told, most of our extended weekend’s going to be spend in Dunedin, not the hinterland.

I had lunch with Manon yesterday, who is contemplating applying here to complete this degree once she and Jean de Florette are next year married. I told her to go for it; he’s in a transferrable profession and she’s been working in her current field for six years now. When I flatted with them in student days I remember Jean dF said, airily, “Manon and I will do more postgrad study one day but it’ll be at a British university”. Apart from thinking it was a rude bastard sort of a thing to say, I told Manon yesterday, I thought then that I would likely see ‘em do it one day.

What she’s feeling I recognise too, that wondering if you just mightn’t be treading water. My steps to vary my current routine were much smaller–going back to French has been pretty much the size of it so far–but have given me so much satisfaction (this week’s events notwithstanding) that I think she should do it and damn the obstacles. This is a woman whose office looks like the fourteenth century seen through the eyes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and for whom Britain and Europe was even more a succession of historic places than it was for me.

I’m not anticipating being near a terminal any time over the long weekend, although surprises may yet happen, so instead I wish you all a relaxing break. My students told me this week they were convinced I was only in my mid-twenties, and that I seemed like a newly-graduated teacher, so modern am I. At this I was tempted to declare it “everybody gets an ‘A’ day”, but that will have to wait until I am working for a more corrupt institution, I suspect. Who wants to join me in founding the Tammy Faye Bakker University of Staff Kickbacks? We’ll start with a department of Extra Curricular Studies and go from there.