I woke up early.
An unusually enthusiastic blackbird was in full rant outside my window, in such persistent and raucous voice that I considered opening the window and flinging something at it.
It is warm in the Hall, and I had left the window open.
After a little while it was joined by an equally noisy sheep, bellowing to her lamb, whose defiant response was clearly not sufficiently satisfactory for its mother to cease her determined calls, as if she was telling it to bring its laundry down the stairs whilst it was watching Tic Toc.
I lay and listened to their chorus until a wood pigeon hopped on to the wall right beside the window and began burbling to some other wood pigeon, possibly one in the next county given its volume.
It was half past five by then.
I got up.
I had another shower, just in case I had been oozing last night’s alcohol out of my pores during the night, and went out for a walk.
Madingley Hall gardens are truly splendid, and this morning they were grey, and damp and still, apart from the deafening avian racket overhead, and I ambled around in peaceful contentment. It was like going forward in time, everything here is so much further on, and I did not even recognise the magnolia tree, now in full leaf with its blossom long gone. The one in our garden is just coming into bloom.
I walked, and looked, and breathed the cool morning mist, and then wandered back into the hall, where somebody had thoughtfully prepared sausages and eggs and hash browns with coffee, to encourage students out of bed and sustain them through all that thinking.
There can be no greater happiness.
Just to ensure my continued contentment, after breakfast I still had time to retreat to my cell and write a couple of hundred words before the first class.
It was the very last day of lectures, and I clung to every word as if it were my last, even the dull ones, although there weren’t very many, except in some critical commentary in a past student’s dissertation that had been marked at genius level, of which I was obliged to confess that I understood not a word.
Fortunately it turned out that nobody else had understood a word either, including, I rather suspected, the lecturer, although it was so very intellectual it had obviously been given high marks. The author explained that she had sought to employ the recurring imagery of reflections in order to engage with a post-colonial understanding of the anthropological project as a fundamentally narcissistic tool of white hegemony, and I did not have the smallest clue what she was going on about. I do not think I will be handing in anything nearly so incomprehensible, which is a shame, incomprehensible scores highly.
I won’t be revealing any conflicted spaces through the polyphony of language and textuality either. At least, I don’t think I will. It might always happen by accident.
In the end, of course, it was all over. I had a very happy hour meeting with my supervisory tutor, and then we went to the pub, where, you will not be astounded to hear, I ate and drank far more than was good for me, including pudding, which was actually my third pudding of the day, if you count the lemon cake we were given in between classes, it is a good job I brought dungarees.
We said emotional farewells to one another, assured each other untruthfully that we would keep in touch, and then everybody buzzed off, except me and my friend Emma, who are always amongst the most determined late-nighters, and we sat by the fire and drank whisky and talked.
We are both Lucy Cavendish students, and in the same workshop group, so we, at least, will see one another at graduation, and probably, we thought, at some time when we could escape to Cambridge with the excuse of further study.
Emma had just discovered that she had been shortlisted for a prize for being a Jolly Good Student Writer. This is a Cambridge prize, not anything to do with our course, and I was truly impressed, her writing is really good.
I was back in my cell before I could get any emails, which was when I discovered that I had been shortlisted as well. There are five writers on the shortlist, so I don’t suppose I will get anywhere, but at the very least it will mean a jolly good Awards Night Out, probably in the cheap bar at Lucy Cavendish with Emma and a bat costume and probably some more whisky, so I was very pleased with myself.
I am also very pleased with Oliver, who has had his police interview today. He does not know if he has passed, it will be another week before he finds out, but he managed to smile with confidence and have a firm handshake, and really I can’t think what else they want, for goodness’ sake.
I am going to have to try and think about something else for a week.
I am sure I will manage it somehow.
