What a happy day.
I have done it. I have finished the difficult-to-write yarn of Symon the Black and his unicorn-related misadventures. It needs a very great deal of editing yet, and so it is not actually finished, but it is there in its soul and in its structure, and editing is always a happy thing to do, because editing involves lots of sitting about considering which word might be the very best to say exactly the thing I want to say.
It is the literary equivalent of looking out at the universe and wondering absently about what exactly a light year might be. It is intellectual milling about, and I like doing it very much.
Compared to writing it, which has been like trying to pull out my toenails with the pliers, it will be a breeze.
All the same, I have got to get it right. It is the next dissertation bit, and I do not wish to have to shoot myself for getting less than a First. So far I think I have walked about fifty miles over the fells with the dogs, searching for Symon the Black. It would be awful to waste it.
In celebration, Elspeth and John are going to come over for the evening and we are going to drink too much and feel dreadful in the morning. I am not looking forward to that bit but it will be nice to have an evening of thinking about something that isn’t a bloody unicorn.
In another nice writing-related thing I have had a very kind letter from my tutor. She has heard that I have been invited for interview for the Masters’s’ degree and wrote to congratulate me, because lots of students have applied and been turned down. She will herself be doing some of the interviews, although not mine, obviously, and wrote to ask if I would like any help preparing for it.
Obviously I said yes, because I have got the interview skills of somebody going in front of a probation board at Belmarsh, in that I tend to fidget in my chair, look guilty, not understand the question, and then burst out with all sorts of inappropriate nonsense just as they are gathering their papers together and saying Right Then Close The Door Behind You.
Somehow the bit of my brain which deals with words has inadvertently connected to my fingers and not my mouth, and although I can write perfectly sensible ideas and opinions and feelings, when it actually comes to saying things, I turn into a Cabbage Patch Doll.
You might remember them, they were fat with stupid grins and a tendency to giggle.
Anyway, she is going to speak to me via Zoom at weekend. I am almost as nervous about this as I am about the interview itself. It is a scary thing, how dreadful if they said no, get stuffed, half-wit.
In other news, I still do not have a taxi. I don’t want one very much, so this is all right. I am going to go to work in Mark’s taxi tomorrow night whilst he mends mine. He could have done it last night or tonight, but rain has been pouring down over the Lake District as if the Gods had been emptying their paddling pool, and it would not have been nice to be trying to mend a car in it.
It has not been very nice doing anything in it. I got drenched yet again tramping over the fells this morning. I have got some waterproof trousers, but it turns out that they are only a bit waterproof. They do not work if you are practically swimming.
I am going to go. Mark will be home soon, and Elspeth not long afterwards. I have done all of the things I know I ought to do, like sweeping the kitchen and hanging up laundry, but I have been a lamentably deficient housewife this week and I have got a lot of ground to make up.
See you tomorrow.
