Ramblings

I have been so busy writing that this, which is my actual writing, has vanished into the ether as just being too difficult.  I am not going to write anything here tonight either, but I have got ten spare minutes this morning and so I thought I would let you know how it is all trundling along.

I am pleased to tell you that becoming an intellectual is ace. Not that I am actually becoming an intellectual, it is not something that you catch, like bat-flu, although if it was it would certainly have rubbed off on me by now. I spent yesterday evening chatting intelligently to a BBC news reporter, a Guardian journalist and a clinical psychologist. They were doing the intelligent chatting. I was just making the occasional out-of-my-depth-taxi-driver interjections.

Not that I was out of my depth, I am pleased to say that I understood almost every word they were saying, even though none of them said Heteroglossia. Dearie me, BBC reporters and Guardian journalists are cross with the world. I am very glad I am a taxi driver. I can’t imagine being so utterly gloomy in my opinions about everything and everybody else. I tried to cheer them up by pointing out some of the nice things about life, but they were having none of it.

I had lunch with an ophthalmic surgeon. He was much jollier.

I have had a tutorial this morning, wherein I had the pleasing experience of the tutor telling me that I had underestimated my own abilities, and needed to be more confident when I described them. I will leave it to you, the reader, to decide upon the merits of this judgement, but I have to say that I thought guiltily afterwards that modesty has never been one of my more noticeable failings, and so perhaps he might not have had a point.

We have learned so many, many things. We have been talked to by some of the cleverest people I have ever heard, and in five minutes I am going to go back again and listen to some more. I can hardly tell you how wonderful this is.

Yes I can. It is magnificent. There is a great deal of conversation about things like speech marks, and indented paragraphs, and other matters of utterly captivating fascination. In between these discussions meals of magnificent quality and superb dignity are served up in the panelled dining hall underneath the Tudor portraits. I have died and gone to heaven.

It is now bedtime, and at am in bed. You have got the next five minutes before I go to sleep, but that is my lot. I have had enough words for one day.

We had Christmas dinner tonight. I do not mean our sort of Christmas Dinner, which is generally Tandoori Butter Chicken With Pilau Rice, because the Indian restaurant is the only one that does not mind being open. I mean an excellent Christmas dinner. There were candles and starched napkins, a Christmas tree and little bags of sweets as presents. Then there was a huge plateful of splendid dinner. There was turkey, and a pig in a blanket. which is such a horrid way to talk about a sausage, people are awful. There was gravely, and vegetables and Yorkshire pudding. There was even a starter, with blue cheese and figs, and a pudding, which might also have been figs but was just the usual nondescript brown of most fruity puddings. Anyway, it was brilliant.

I sat next to the psychologist chap, whose company everybody loves because he looks so keenly interested in everything you say, and asks so many perceptive questions. I do not know why he does this, because everybody must behave like I did, and finish up telling him long, breathtakingly rambling and dull yarns about Me and My Feelings, and More About Me. And let me add a bit more about Me.

Or maybe it is only me.

He is writing a book which I think sounds utterly fascinating and am dying to read, so I nobly said that I would look through it as a very great helpful favour. He did not say Get Stuffed, but said that it would be nice, so I shall keep reminding him because it sounds ace, all about his psychology practice, and his patients, and the way it has changed him and his thoughts and opinions.

I told him all of my thoughts and opinions, and fortunately being a psychologist is not like being a taxi driver, because he nodded and pretended to be interested. If you are a taxi driver and people start going on like that you just pretend to be deaf. It saves a lot of tedium.

That is now nine minutes of writing and I have got to go to sleep. Morning is already going to turn up far too early.

I am having a lovely, lovely time.