Well, we have our results a day earlier than expected and although I do not think I need to shoot myself I am not very impressed.
We have not been told the grade boundaries, so I do not know what grade I have managed to achieve, but it is not brilliant.
We were told that nobody would score seventy, that seventy was above and beyond expectations and nobody would manage that. I have scored sixty five, which by that standard is entirely respectable, but by my standards utterly beneath contempt.
In fact actually I was just hunting out the gun when I started to hear what the other people in my class had scored, and so put it away again. Things could be a very lot worse.
Things have not been helped along by the tutor comments added to the work in order to help me to Improve Myself. One marker – there were four – commented that really a critical analysis does not need to be funny, which has alarmed me somewhat, because I was not trying to be. In fact I was trying quite hard not to be, so it must have just crept up and squeezed out whilst I wasn’t looking.
The rest of the comments just made me laugh. Another tutor said that my notions of the modern world were archaic, that my views about gender might be considered offensive by gendery people, and that I would find it easier to write poems if I did not constrain myself with a rhyme scheme and a fixed rhythm.
How very perceptive, you can tell it is Cambridge.
One marker wrote on one poem that she felt it was inconsistent that a family who could not afford the funfair in Blackpool would be spending their money on ice creams, which made me feel I could reasonably ignore everything else that she said, and somebody else said that I did not say enough about the comparative authors. This was fair enough since I hadn’t bothered to read them. The same marker commented that perhaps I ought to consider the ways other people have approached critical writing whilst composing my own. I have never read any of that either, and so reluctantly acknowledged that this was a reasonable point.
All in all I am not as cast down as I might be. I do not yet know where this ranks me on the university grading system, but I am encouraged to have discovered that it is pretty good in comparison to everybody else who has told me their mark.
Onward and upward.
I have occupied the rest of the day in dusting, as befits a second-class poet. Somehow we have grown a lot of dust this week. I do not know how we have managed this since we have hardly been here for most of it, it must puff in through the walls when the wind blows. Mark buzzed off to work and I took the dogs off over the fell to make up to them for having spent all of yesterday in the camper van.
It was very muddy indeed. They were revolting when they got back, and are now confined to the kitchen. It did not rain whilst we were out, which was great good fortune, because water has absolutely sloshed out of the sky ever since. I have been trying to dry the post-camper van washing, which is not too bad now that the fire is lit, but it is wearisome to have a house full of steaming pillowcases.
I am now at work, at least in the sitting-on-a-deserted-taxi-rank sort of way, and I am having a very splendid time with a large flask of tea, a book about microbes which I am about to give up on, and my knitting.
I am going to go away and contemplate my lack of poetic ability with a light heart and compensate for it by knitting a nice cardigan.
I think this will be a splendid way to spend the evening.
