I am now in possession of all the details about my fast-approaching University course.
They are absolutely terrifying.
I am beginning to think that maybe I am too thick after all. Also a secret part of me is starting to wish that my parents had been right, because when I told them that I had been accepted to study at Cambridge University, they worried in case I was falling victim to a dastardly Internet scam.
Would that I had been.
At least then all I would have had to worry about would be looking like an ordinary, middle-class sort of idiot, the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, easy mistake to make, and so on.
Now I am going to look like an incompetent sort of idiot, the sort whose ridiculously over-ambitious ideas delude them into thinking that they have got Academic Potential, whilst actually not being able to string together a correctly constructed sentence.
I read the course programme and barely understood what on earth it was going on about. I am going to learn, it appears, how to contextualise my writing between a variety of traditions and genres. I will even learn to show appreciation for aesthetic and practical issues whilst choosing my material. They had better be jolly good teachers, because I have got a long way to go.
Then there was the reading list.
I have not read a solitary book on it and have not even heard of most of them. They are written by people with modern-sounding surnames like Shafak and Offill. I wondered at first if the latter might be a joke, because the writer had shirked out of her day-job during its composition, but on reflection decided it probably wasn’t. The list did not seem heavily slanted towards humour, and there wasn’t a single suggestion of Jilly Cooper or Piers Morgan on it anywhere.
It would appear that I am so lowbrow that it is a miracle that I can see out from underneath.
It starts in a very few weeks now. Cambridge University assures me that most of the books on the list can be found in libraries or second-hand bookshops. This suggests to me that they have never been to Windermere. Most second-hand bookshops in this part of the world are fully stocked with ancient Ordnance Survey maps, badly folded with a few mud splashes, and the library specialises in Westerns and books featuring young women in crinolines on the covers.
Thank goodness for Amazon.
I was not sorry to abandon the university information and go and get on with the rest of my life, most of which was, as usual, centred around laundry and baking.
I made some chocolate cakes, and after that I made the mince bit to go in the mince pies at Christmas. I thought I had better do this now before I got too busy contextualising my genres, it would be awful to be too scholarly to be able to do proper Christmas things. Students are not, on the whole, renowned for their domestic achievements, and there is probably a good reason for that.
I am back in Mark’s taxi for the night. He is at home dismantling mine, which still needs lots of things doing to it before its MOT on Friday. So far he has spent four hundred quid on bits from Autoparts. I queried this in case there was anything that he could make at home himself, but he said that modern cars are not the camper van and you can’t do things like that.
I suppose it will be nice to have a car that has not got anything wrong with it, although I hadn’t really noticed that it had got anything wrong with it anyway, since it goes perfectly well.
I suppose it will at least go four hundred quid’s worth of better afterwards.
I wonder if it will go any faster.
