Caked up

It is over.

Well, the first week is over anyway. I have now got a million books to read and two assignments to write in between customers in the taxi, before I go back again in November.

That is ages away. I will have forgotten everything by then.

We spent the day talking about one another’s poems. I can’t think of a nicer way to spend a day, most especially since I had a teapot full of my favourite tea, and cake was provided at extremely regular intervals.

Madingley Hall is exceptionally good at cake. I packed all of my dungarees, which was an inspired sartorial choice, I can tell you, because I would be having trouble fastening my trousers now if I had been wearing them. If I was a full time student I would probably need to be lifted off the grounds with a small crane by the end of two or three years. It is the happiest of existences, the company of lots of people who think it matters where you put a comma, dinners provided by a smiling chap in a waistcoat, decent Merlot at the bar, and repeated helpings of truly superb cake. I bake cakes myself but have never achieved anything even close to the superlatively good quality of the cakes at Madingley.

In fact I am in awe of their catering department. One or two students were disparaging about the food, but I am sufficiently unsophisticated to think that any three course dinner cooked by somebody else is pretty good, especially when it comes beautifully presented with swirls of what used to be called sauce when I was a child, but I understand is now called Jus. I have enjoyed every minute, and if anybody’s roast pork was tough, it wasn’t mine.

We ate in the library today. I had discovered the library a couple of hours earlier, and had occupied a very excited tea break milling around staring happily at the shelves and not being in Windermere Library. They had Margaret Atwood’s other books, the ones that aren’t the Handmaid’s Tale, they had Eden’s diaries, and countless others that made me long for a couple of weeks with nothing in particular to do. There was not a single large-print Western or dust-jacket picture of a lady in a crinoline staring longingly out of a mullioned window, anywhere to be seen.

Not that I can cast aspersions. I have got Robert Galbraith’s new novel sitting enticingly on my bookshelf, waiting for an especially happy day when I can open it and sigh into its pages.

We occupied the entire day in cheerful activity, being eating, drinking tea and contemplating poetry, and I had no inclination whatsoever to go home, but of course all good things etc, and suddenly I was desperate to flee. I have had an entire week of sociability, which regular readers will know is far from being my best feature, and suddenly I felt as though I had become drained of all energy with the effort.

In fact I managed reasonably well, although there was a sticky moment when somebody was rhapsodising about the importance of understanding your sun-sign in conjunction with some other rhubarb, and was misfortunate enough to catch me at a distracted moment to ask me what I thought. Regrettably my social censorship department was not paying attention, and I said absently that I thought it was utter twaddle.

I realised almost straight away that you should not say things like that to fundamentalist believers, so I tried to help. I encouraged her to justify her opinions then by asking which of the four fundamental forces she thought were influencing astrology, being the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. I know this because this is how it was explained to me that astrology was rubbish, but to my surprise she did not grasp the point and feel pleased at having her understanding expanded. She just didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the week.

We said our goodbyes. The dog had a hasty emptying in the car park, and I occupied an embarrassing ten minutes trying to squeeze the camper van out of its now too-small parking space,  until in the end we trundled away down the drive, tooting the horn in farewell.

I had to stop at a petrol station to put fuel in the tank, and to pull myself together. I put loud music on the music thing, and chugged off to Kettering, which is where I am now.

I am going to spend the night with Lucy before departing for home in the morning.

The next time I write to you I will probably be on the taxi rank.