I am so tired I can hardly see the page.
It is midnight, and I have only just made it into bed despite coming rushing back here from the last lecture instead of hanging about in the bar.
I do not think I could have hung about in the bar, actually, those adventures are best left to young people.
Not even to young people in this case. All the young people on this course seem to slope off for a health-giving early night. The enthusiastic drinking crowd seems to be the over-thirty-fives.
I like to think of myself as an enthusiastic drinker, and indeed, tonight I have had two glasses of wine.
I struggled with the second. I had reached wine-saturation point by the time I got to the bottom of it, although that might have been the poetry.
I have spent every single minute of today either writing things or listening to people talk about writing things or reading things they have written. We have had some truly magnificent lecturers on this course, and a very great deal of cake. I can hardly believe how much cake Cambridge seems to think a student needs in the course of a listening day, the answer is a very lot indeed. It is served at every meal, including breakfast if you count the sticky pastries, which I do, and a fresh tray of the stuff is left outside every lecture room for each break. There are about five of these in the course of a day. Given that we spend the whole of every day just sitting about listening to things with no exercise whatsoever, it is a jolly good job that I do not really live here. I would have diabetes by the end of the first month.
Of course you aren’t actually compelled to eat it, but it would be a shocking waste not to.
Anyway, it is exceptionally nice. It is the sort of cake that tastes like cake ought to but never really does. It is a very happy addition to the day, especially since I am wearing dungarees which have no waistband whatsoever, and so any shocking new rotundity is not in the least obvious, even to me.
We have learned all sorts of new things. I can’t remember any of them now but I have filled pages and pages of my notebook, written a pitch for a film, a plot for a radio play and a treatment for a television series, and that was just today. It is utterly fascinating to listen to what everybody else is writing. All of the young people are writing about their heartaches and concerns about their parents not understanding them, and other youthful issues. I had forgotten about the agonies of these and am listening with amused but sympathetic interest.
The older people are writing all sorts of gripping things. The chap who is an ophthalmic eye surgeon during the day wrote an ace piece about grumbling patients, the psychiatrist wrote one about a psychiatrist on the edge, and the chap who used to be an exciting foreign journalist wrote about exciting foreign things.
I am exhausted and inspired, unlike poor Mark who seems just to be exhausted, when I rang him just before I got in the shower he was still crawling under the camper van where he is still having a difficulty with springs. I do not quite know what this was but it seemed to have been making him swear very much.
I wish I could help him but of course I can’t. He said he has been eating the curries and biscuits I left for him so at least he has not starved, maybe I should smuggle some cake out as well.
Home tomorrow. I am both sad and profoundly relieved. If I have to do any more thinking my brain is going to dribble away out of my ears, having become completely liquid with the effort.
I am going to sleep.
Tomorrow night when I write I will be on my way to Scotland, so don’t expect much.
