I spent my day trying to write my dissertation, and it is really hard.
I suppose it is supposed to be. That is the point of a dissertation, if it was easy then every idle brainless taxi customer would write one, in between needing to be driven just around the corner because of their bad legs.
Still I have had a guilty day of crossings-out and re-writing, followed by more crossings-out and a lot of scowling. Really I should have been doing something else. I don’t quite know what, but there is always something else I am supposed to be doing. I gave Oliver cold pancakes for breakfast and he is going to go to Asda to purchase a pizza for his dinner. I promised Lucy I would alter her curtains for her, and so far I haven’t done that either. I have been so busy trying to write my current magnum opus. I am trying to write a speech in the voice of an angel at the moment and I can’t at all think what an angel might sound like, probably pretty cross if it was talking to me.
I have got lots and lots to do for Cambridge in a couple of weeks, and it is all hard. I have got an essay to write and some pieces to critically analyse and my own critical analysis all as well as the Dissertation Itself, and this afternoon I remembered that it was far more important to sew the lost buttons back on Oliver’s school uniform, and so I did that instead. I know he could do them perfectly well but that would be like keeping Roger Poopy and charging around the Library Gardens shouting Woof at squirrels myself.
The whole Dissertatative Project is not being helped by the creeping decrepitude of my computer. It will no longer read the missives sent by Cambridge, and every few minutes the mouse decides it needs a rest, and sulkily refuses to co-operate for a little while. This only ever happens when I am in the middle of something importantly crucial, and makes me wail aloud, as if I were at an old-fashioned Irish funeral.
We are going to purchase a new one when Mark comes home. I will be glad about that.
I did not even go up the fells this morning. I was just looking gloomily out of the window at the rain and wishing that I had the sort of bad leg that would enable me to get a taxi, when the telephone rang and it was Elspeth. She was coming into Windermere and wondered if I would like a cup of tea.
You will not be surprised to learn that I liked the idea of a cup of tea very much more than I liked the idea of pludging up the muddy fells in my slippery boots in the rain. I shoved the washing in the machine and put the kettle on.
Readers, I sat by the fire regaling Elspeth with tales of my various ailments for ages. She listened sympathetically and then told me all about her own. I can’t remember what we used to talk about in the days when we were too young to have ailments, whether we would have boyfriends, probably, but now we have done all of that it is very nice to have some handy ailments as a substitute.
Elspeth told me that she has got an Old Person’s Railcard. This was the sort of news that has a remarkable impact on one’s self-image. I have not even quite sorted out in my head what I want to do when I grow up yet, although after the film the other night I know it is not Astronaut, and I had not considered that I might be getting fairly grown-up already.
I am going to have to make my mind up pretty soon at this rate.
At the moment it is unlikely to be Dissertation Writer.
I am feeling very brainless today.
