It’s all evolution

Manon is fast becoming my favourite Yum Cha philosopher, now that our preferred pastimes of lunch and nattering have combined into one happy eighty minute extravaganza. It seems, too, that we are becoming recognised as regulars: today brought not one but two unsolicited dishes to our table (one of which was mostly pork, but that’s hardly the point).

Manon’s contention of the day was that we are each evolving, not in the Darwinian sense but as a metaphor of the self-and-psyche, which I paraphrased as getting closer to living in our thirties the way we would like to have done in our twenties. Employment helps, as does experience, but it’s confidence that’s the real securer of our happier equilibrium these days; that, and ever maintaining a kind of wry critical distance from our questing, scheming psyches. We watch like Jane Austen’s narrators as we try and fit everything together, mediating bouts of frustration and most unladylike anger with a mutually forgiving ear.

That I seem to be spouting angry words by way of small talk at the moment (as bewilderedly alluded to in the previous post) is unsettling to say the least, but remains, I can only assume, some strange return of the repressed that strikes me—how often? Seasonally, maybe? The last written record of it here is my unexpected reference to RH, my late girl and ticket to doctoral-land as “that dead bitch“, and that was over a year ago. This time, it seems, I’m angry at the failures of the last six months, at the history of workplace hillocks over which I’ve had to climb in years past to get to my current modest vantage point, at the opacity and contrariness of people in general. Trouble is, as I alluded to below, it’s coming out in large part like the first frame here. Coprolalia ho!?

Meanwhile, there is plenty to which I can attend, and not only that which dives beneath the surface of the text. My Japanese girls continue to delight, the puppies thrive, and there are just four teaching days to go before my break, when I’ll be halfway through this heavy initial loading.

Yesterday’s authorial visit was a treat, with Morey surprising, delighting and encouraging my students and me alike. She is tiny, quick of repartee and insight, and well-furnished with knowledge of shoes, bags, ponies and dogs. I gave her a copy of the lecture notes, and she signed everybody’s copy of the novel. It was all organised at a very rapid pace, piggy-backing on another visit for which she was present, and I felt pleased with myself for grasping the mettle. She encouraged several students in their own writing endeavours, about which we talked afterwards: it only takes one published writer to give an aspiring writer the push in the right direction and we all have those to whom we must tip our hats for this (thank you, NB). It was an afternoon that left me in a state of elation.