It has rained, and rained, and rained.
Fortunately I was not doing anything outdoors once I got back from my walk, except for hopelessly trying to get the washing dry, and eventually I gave up on that and just lit the fire.
This was a sensible move anyway, because the house was cold. It has been a very chilly sort of summer so far, I do hope the new Government does something about it. Matters were not helped because my plan for the day was to sit and write my story, which is not exactly the sort of activity to get the circulation pounding, and once the washing was draped all over the stove, I put a jersey and some warm socks on and got on with it.
Suddenly it is very lovely indeed to be writing again. I know I have been writing my dissertation for weeks and weeks now, but really it is not the same thing at all. The only real point to the dissertation is to make me sound clever and intellectual, which is simply a tedious exercise of trying to dream up long words and then remember what they mean. I was caught out with that when my tutor asked: Well, what is it that you want to say, and accidentally an honest answer slipped out before I thought about it, and I said Well, nothing, really.
I spent a very happy hour reading what I had written last time, and deleting it and writing it again, which I did several times before I thought it was more or less coherent. After that I had a small interval in which I talked to my friend Amanda on the Zoom thing. My new computer will do this. The old one could be used for Zoom telephone calls, but not very reliably, and there were lots of agonised moments when I thought the screen would go black, which once or twice it did, leaving me talking into a terrible void in a shocking panic.
The new computer is far too loftily perfect to do any of these things. It is seamless and magical, and so crisply streamlined that it makes me feel slightly grubby by comparison. I thought I would eat my bowl of porridge in front of it this morning, whilst reading a piece that a fellow-student had sent to me to criticize, but it seemed like a sticky sacrilege when faced with such cool sophistication, so I didn’t, and read my library book instead.
It is almost my last day of solitude, not that it is solitude any more, because I have got Oliver in residence. It is difficult to count him, though. because he is always either at work or buried in his bedroom-cave, with his headphones on and playing something exciting on the myriad of computer screens that are grouped around his desk. He had an online cyber-meeting today with Norland, where he will be studying in September, and came down afterwards to tell me all about it.
He is finding it difficult to imagine that he will really be going, and that a new life starts in a very few weeks. He has been at Gordonstoun for so long that the thought of moving on is a bit troubling, and I am not in the least surprised. It is very hard to leave the fellowship of friends with whom you have lived, and worked, and played, for the last five years, even if you have thoroughly outgrown school and all of its quibbling rules and its inexplicable insistence that you keep your shirt tucked in. I am not excited about his going either, having discovered that it has got an elaborately smart new uniform, all of which is going to need name tags sewing into it.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Mark will be coming home the day after tomorrow, so I am going to have to do some hasty tidying up, there are library books and bits of computer all over the place. I am looking forward to seeing him, although anxious that he might volunteer to be helpful and do upsetting things like hanging the washing in wrong places. Also he always wants to stop working to drink cups of tea, which means that I run out of day before I have done everything. Mark does not care if he has run out of day. He just leaves everything lying about until tomorrow.
I suppose it is like that when you are not on an oil rig and can do what you like.
It will be nice to see him anyway.
