I am on the taxi rank, and pleased to say that there is not a single kitten in sight.
Life without kittens is very easy and peaceful. I have been doing things which involved kittens for the entire day, and it is very nice indeed to be doing something else.
The things that I was doing were not supposed to involve kittens. They just did. One of them had a very narrow escape when I almost shut the dishwasher, and saw something move at the last minute. The other one got covered in glue and walked glue paw prints all over my office desk.
Lucy leaves tomorrow. I can hardly imagine how straightforward my life will become.
Actually it won’t really make my life very much different, because I will be leaving on Sunday. Hence you must not expect many words of wisdom, or indeed even any words of mildly dopey confusion, from these pages for a day or two. Tomorrow is Saturday, and we will be busy, and then on Sunday I will be driving to Cambridge. The last time I did this I finished up sitting in the solitary dark of the camper van at one in the morning, rubbing my eyes and longing to sleep, but writing a diary entry anyway.
I don’t want to do that again. I will write when I have got something sensible to say, and some time to say it.
I am looking forward to this bit of the course. It is about writing stories, which I like. There will be a lecture by a novelist, one of whose books I have actually read, although I regret to say that I found it puzzling and incomprehensible, even after three goes. I might ask him if he will explain it. It is not often you get chance to ask a novelist to tell you what they were actually going on about, in plain words of just one syllable, unlike their book, and I do not wish to miss out on an opportunity.
I didn’t even understand the title. If there was a bit later in the book which explained what a Bardo actually was, I lost patience before I got to that bit every time. It was about an American called Lincoln and a Bardo, and actually seemed to involve a lot of dead people going on about things that really shouldn’t trouble dead people.
I don’t think anything should trouble dead people. Once you are dead then everything else ought to pale into insignificance. Certainly an entire book based around tomb-centred whittering seemed to me to be a bit much, although I am told it is a work of literary genius. I don’t think it is. I liked The Thursday Murder Club much better.
I have been frantically trying to read everything I am supposed to read before the course starts on Monday. I have read most of it, but honestly, Cambridge doesn’t seem interested in talking about the sort of books that anybody might actually want to read. I like books with a jolly good plot line, nothing too scary or thrilling, written by somebody who says exactly what they mean instead of you being supposed to work out that because it is raining in Chapter One, that means everybody’s life is hopeless and depressing. This sort of stuff is rubbish anyway. It would mean that nobody ever wrote anything about the Lake District except variations on Wuthering Heights.
It is perfectly possible to have an entirely cheerful and fulfilling life even in rubbish weather, as everybody who lives north of Birmingham can probably tell you. I like books much better when the weather is just normally random, the way it is in life, instead of being code for some sub-text you are supposed to understand but don’t.
I might mention that in class as well, now I come to think of it.
I am looking forward to it very much.
I will be in touch when I can.
See you on the other side.
