I am trying to set up my new email address.
It isn’t really a new email address. It is my University of Cambridge email address.
It appears that now we have graduated we are entitled to a special university email address in order to make ourselves look importantly learned when we are doing things like arguing with the council or making excuses to the local library about why we are too clever to be expected to pay fines on overdue books.
Obviously I want one, because I need all the help I can get to look intellectual, it is a bit of a losing battle when you are a fat lazy taxi driver who thinks that a trip to Blackpool is the height of holiday sophistication, although disappointingly it just turns out to be my old University of Cambridge email address which used to get me into all sorts of trouble because I never bothered checking it. This time I really will take it seriously, though, and I won’t give it to anybody dull, just to people who write interesting emails and are not trying to sell me dentures or treatments for varicose veins.
I don’t have either, by the way, which is not a shining advertisement for online marketing campaigns.
Hence I have spent the last half hour scowling at my computer and trying to pick my way through suggestions for online lectures and offers of discounted bicycle hire to sort it out. We get endless suggestions for online lectures, all of which we are welcome to join if we like, I could finish up knowing all sorts of useless rubbish if I didn’t have anything else to do. The current ones on offer are inviting me to learn about the history of Sicilian cuisine and the science of Natural Hazards, the two topics are not linked in any way, obviously.
I am not especially interested in Sicilian cuisine, and the natural hazards one sounds unnecessarily alarmist for my taste, and so I am not going to bother this month. In any case I am trying hard to finish my story.
I have finished all of the exciting adventures now, my heroine has finished issuing comeuppances to baddies, and I am on the last stages of wrapping up, the ones where she has to explain what happened to everybody waiting back at home and fibs charmingly so that she and the reader are sharing a secret. I have spent much of today ploughing through one of her more gruesome misfortunes, and set the keyboard down with a sigh of relief. I will be glad when it is over. I have discovered that I do not like this heroine very much. She is dull and weedy and thinks about her feelings too much.
In between writing I am sorry to say that I did not do any ironing at all. I thought about it, but not for long enough actually to bother doing any, and instead spent a very happy hour sitting chatting through the computer to my friend Amanda, who will graduate herself in a few weeks. She is also writing stories, and we talked until the Zoom ran out, and then we started it up for a second time and talked until it ran out again.
In consequence I think I have been quite idle today, although I do not mind this, as I have just explained to a customer, it is one of the nicest things about winter. You do not need to expect very much of yourself when there is a biting wind outside and the weather is considering whether it would prefer to rain or snow.
I had my washing hanging out, and it did both, tiresomely.
I am going to go and carry on being idle. There is plenty of opportunity for this on the taxi rank tonight.
I will see you tomorrow.
