Tonight I have had my very first direct encounter with Cambridge, and I am still shaking from the nerve-racking anxiety of it all.
We were all invited to a Zoom meeting, which is like an actual meeting except that everybody else is inside your computer, looking out at your room to see if you have got something accidentally rude on your bookshelves.
It was not a lecture. It was a sociable Getting To Know One Another sort of thing, as if we were real students and going to be eyeing one another up giving the totty marks out of ten.
I had been at work, because obviously I can’t just take a whole night off just for half an hour of social computering. I set an alarm on my phone and came belting back up the hill, ditched the taxi in the alley and rushed upstairs to the office. I had planned to make a cup of tea and peel off my outdoor taxi-jumper and generally organise my life in preparation for a smoothly-running and effortless computer hour.
It was going dark, so I brought the washing in out of the yard on my way past.
I have got absolutely no confidence in my computer’s commitment to my success at this sort of thing, and so turned the screen on five minutes early, so that it would warm up whilst I was still hanging up washing and faffing about.
I was nowhere near ready, and hence was horrified to see the tutor’s face looking back out at me, smiling a first-day-at-school smile.
I swept all of the washing off the desk and on to the floor and tried to shape my face into an academic sort of expression, with no success whatsoever.
I looked like an old person in an inappropriate Mickey Mouse jumper peering out from behind some left over socks on the desk.
My concentration was not helped about halfway through the session when I could hear Mark rushing about downstairs, trying to put out the fire where I had put the kettle to boil on the top of the stove and then forgotten about it.
We do not have an electric kettle. We have the sort that are left on top of the wood burner to get hot, and then put on the gas stove to boil when I want a cup of tea.
The house did not burn down so it must have been all right.
The other students were much more convincingly academic, with rows of books and intellectual haircuts and their houses not on fire at all. Fortunately I had not got round to switching the light on either, so after about ten minutes my bit of the screen was shrouded in gloom, and I could only be seen by the light reflecting back at me from my own screen. This was red-coloured, possibly because of the reflection of the jumper, and made me look as though I was suffering either from extreme mortification or Slapped Face Syndrome.
I tried to ignore myself and concentrate on what was being said.
The tutor said some very nice things about choosing students, and about the standard required to be allowed to be one. I will not repeat those here because I will only get a swollen head, and I did wonder if she had got my admission papers mixed up with somebody else’s. She also talked about the standard of reading required from all of us, but said that we were of the sort of calibre where she expected we had extensively read lots of literary works anyway.
I do not think that she meant Jilly Cooper.
She said that she would be interested to hear about our reading at some time, so I will either have to do some or make something up. I was glad that the computer was not pointing at my bookshelves. All the difficult books with actual literary merit are right on the top shelves where I can’t reach them, because I never bother reading them.
I have re-read Pollyanna since I re-read Anna Karenina.
I had hoped to tell Mark all about it when it was finished, but he was lying underneath the taxi swearing, with just his legs sticking out, so I thought it was better not to bother him and sloped off back to work. It failed its MOT today, although not for the terrible things that we were worried about, just some welding on the exhaust. This, although difficult enough, was not an agonising worry like the sort of light on the dashboard that needs a diagnostic machine. Mark has fixed it now, and I can just take it back in tomorrow.
It is a huge worry that is over for another couple of months.
Thank goodness.
