Hurrah, it is the weekend.
As you know, this is the time when Mark stops having a day job and just has his taxi-driving night job. This meant that this afternoon we have had several hours of almost completely free time when he was not doing either and it was still daylight.
Mark occupied this by going up to the farm and digging up some beet and carrots for me to feed us with next week. You never know when the Russians might invade, and I do not wish to have to rely on an interdependent network of food chain supply links culminating in Sainsbury’s under those circumstances.
We will have to eat the vegetables quickly because we are going to go to Scotland to get Oliver on Thursday, and as you know, Oliver does not really do vegetables, not even if I cut them up and spread them on pizza.
I wonder if he would notice if I mixed them in to his chocolate cornflake cakes. He might do. He certainly noticed when I tried to smuggle some raisins into his diet by this method.
I did not go up to the farm, but Mark took the dogs, which meant that I did not have to bother doing a lot of tiresome exercise tramping over the fells and contemplating my writing activities. I was very pleased indeed with such an opportunity to shirk, and once I had made dinner and hung the washing out there was about half an hour left that I could occupy doing absolutely anything I wanted.
This was an unexpected luxury, and I dived upstairs to sit at the computer and do some of my college stuff, where I was very pleasantly surprised by various email communications from other students awaiting my attention.
It had never occurred to me how much I would miss them all over the holidays, imagine that, feeling regret over the absence of people I have never even met. I think it is partly why I had hoped so badly for a place on the Master’s’s course, because it is so splendid to be in the company of people who think that the structure of a sentence is of earth-shaking importance. It is chastening and wonderful when somebody tells me that I jolly well should have used a colon instead of my obviously misplaced full stop. How glorious it is to be in a real conversation with somebody who actually wants to consider whether it might be better to choose small-case letters rather than capital. Class starts again on Monday and I am absolutely counting the minutes.
I had a discussion on the taxi rank last night with somebody who could remember the number plate from every taxi he had even driven, and who was prepared to recite them. I know my number plate, although Mark would have to go round the front to look at his if he needed to know it.
All the same it is not the stuff that great intellectual and philosophical discussions are made of.
There was an interesting fight outside one of the pubs, though, which occupied us all for a while. The bouncers won, which they usually do, and the police removed the losers.
I still haven’t heard about the Masters’ degree, by the way, although I am not expecting to be awarded a place. This is not modest self-depreciation, but because I am painfully aware that some of the other candidates are very good indeed, and no matter how entertaining I can be on these pages, I am certainly not capable of creating a fairy story drawing together Chaucer and Ovid and combining elements from both to create something meaningful.
I think I am doing rather well if I can manage to remember a quote from Wordsworth.
This last is not difficult because they are written all over the buses here.
Not to worry. There are always taxis, and another couple of tonnes of carrots and we will be self-sufficient in vegetables as well.
Onwards and upwards.
