First class

We have had our first university day school.

This was brilliant, although rendered tiresome by the irritating detail that last night, after almost two years of being closed, the local nightclub reopened its doors for the first time.

I did not at all want this to happen.

It is all very well having a cash pot of intoxicated idiots sitting halfway round the longest one-way system in the Lake District, but this means that our contented lives of early nights and hence creatively occupied days, are over.

By early nights I mean before three in the morning, by which time absolutely everything has been closed, and everybody taken home.

I like nights like this.

Last night it was getting close to six in the morning before we crawled into bed. The nightclub had been packed with jubilant young people, all joyously celebrating the long-awaited return of their late-night party venue.

Some of them celebrated by having a fight outside it.

One or two celebrated by undressing in the road.

None of them wanted to rush home, and they all hung about for ages, even after they had been chucked out.

This took a very long time.

We did not feel very well when the alarm went off this morning.

We had set the alarm for the last possible minute, and I struggled into my clothes and tried to work out how to switch the computer on whilst Mark made coffee.

The coffee helped a bit.

It did not help very much. Also the sort of meeting where you can see yourself goes much better when you have not got huge dark circles underneath swollen fat eyes, and a scarlet nose.

I do not know why my nose goes bright red at times of stress, but it does. It does it with drink as well, but mostly it does it just to embarrass me.

I tried not to look at myself, and occupied my time wondering how everybody else always manages to look lean and glossy with glowing skin and bright eyes.  I put my glasses on for a while, hoping that they might disguise the dark circles, but they just brought everybody else’s bursting good health into sharp focus, so I took them off again.

I like the writing course so much that I am going to be utterly bereft when it is over. I think probably it is going to be over at the end of this year, because really I do not think that I need the bit that I had expected to do next, which is about writing non-fiction. I think that this year will give me everything I need.

All the same I am going to be very sorry indeed to finish it.

It is as if somebody has set off a firework display in my head, and in the explosions of light I can see brilliant books and brilliant minds and brilliant new ways of seeing things. This spills into everyday life, because the books are there to be read on the taxi rank, and everybody else’s work is there, in my computer, to be considered and digested and analysed.

There is nothing in life as thrilling as listening to, and being questioned by, really clever people.

We spent this morning talking about other people’s extremely skilful writing, and this afternoon talking about our own, rather less skilful productions.

I listened and thought until my brain practically burst, and longed with my whole heart to be a person who can earn so much writing that they do not need to drive a taxi, and can pay somebody else to hoover the stairs.

I am going to jolly well keep trying.

We have got to think about our Mills & Boon characters before tomorrow.

I asked Mark about it, but he just said that a Mills & Boon hero could probably have any kind of career. The only qualification that he needs is that he knows what a woman wants before she starts shouting at him rather than afterwards. Then he laughed.

I do not think I had better say that, although I am afraid it is probably true.

I am looking forward to tomorrow’s class very much indeed.

I am going to go away and think about it.