Die cast

I know we will not get the marks from our first assignments until Thursday, but I have worked myself up into a terrible state about it anyway.

The tutor explained kindly that we ought not to expect to get brilliant marks on this, being our first assignment, that hardly anybody ever got a First, and that we should regard this early attempt at literacy as a learning curve.

This does not alter my conviction that if I do not get a First I will have to shoot myself.

Mark said that this was ridiculous, and that it is quite enough to be at Cambridge, and doing a Master’s’s’s degree, and that on the scale of academic expectations for taxi drivers this is fairly good going. He said that what I need to do is Pass.

He does not know what he is talking about, and I am trying to work out how I am going to cope with the despair if I turn out to be a second class student.

I have been thinking about it all day, on and off, because we have been travelling back down the country. Knitting is not a sufficiently challenging occupation to stop a person from contemplating these awful things, and I have been tugging at it miserably, and hoping that I have not messed it up.

How terrible if I have.

Of course I will write to you and tell you all about it, but I will be humiliated and chastened, and you will need to be kind, or better still, pretend it was a marking error and that obviously the professor in question must have got my work mixed up with the drivelly ramblings of some other idiot.

Of course it is too late now. That die was cast ages and ages ago.

Die is the singular of dice, which is really the plural but you only use it like that if you are trying to sound intellectual. I am quite often trying to sound intellectual so I thought I would explain this to make sure you have noticed.

Thursday seems such a long time away.

In the meantime we have been entirely occupied with our slow return from beyond the Wall. We managed to make it to somewhere just south of Glasgow last night, by which time it was midnight and we had had enough of being Intrepid and just wanted showers and sleep.

Today we came back slowly, because we did not want to be at home doing responsible things. This always happens when we get home. First we have to empty the camper van, and clean it out so that it is pristine and beautiful ready for the next time we want to run away. The next time we are going to use it will probably be when I go back to Cambridge in a few weeks, which will only be happening if I haven’t shot myself, obviously.

Then there is washing to be done, and the fire to be lit, and all manner of domestic chores demanding our attention, and so obviously we dawdled back, delaying the moment when we had got to do them all.

We stopped in Pooley Bridge on the way. This is only in the next valley to Windermere, but in true rural-peasant fashion, we never cross over the mountain pass, and I have hardly been here at all since I came here on some holidays in my youth. I visited with a group who were organising holidays for impoverished urban children. I was not an impoverished urban child, but a volunteer helper, but it is safe to say that I enjoyed them every bit as much as any nine-year-old rascal from Birmingham, and was disappointed to discover, on my visit today, that the beautiful fields where we entertained the urban children are now filled with bungalows.

I don’t suppose the fields were all that beautiful really, but I liked them.

Pooley Bridge has gone as well. It washed away in some ghastly flood a few years ago and has been replaced with a modern construction of graceful curves, which I know is beautiful and ingenious, but which I do not like in the least because it is not like the solid, respectable old stone one.

This is a ridiculous opinion, not least because the old one collapsed after a mere three hundred years. Let us hope the new one proves more robust.

There is a new bookshop as well. I was pleased to see that, even though we do not come here very often, and we mooched around it in the absent minded way you do when you know you have spent all your money really.

We are on the taxi rank now, making attempts to remedy that deficiency. We have done all of the tidying up and so it is now good to be home.

I will see you tomorrow.

Tomorrow is nearly Thursday.