The outsider, or 9 weeks

Hurray, the clocks are turning back. I’ve decided to write this in an hour, then it’s like I didn’t have to write a blog this weekend.

On Monday I drove to Menai bridge, Anglesey (my nearest NHS dentist) at lunch time to go for my first dental appointment. I don’t recollect ever having met a dentist who asked me so many questions. In my relatively short appointment he asked me what I thought of North Wales, what I was studying, what I wanted to be, whether I would settle in Wales once my studies were over. He was not Welsh himself. He’s Indian and says he used to work in London. He had a limp handshake. Just as I was leaving he asked if I’d climbed Snowdonia yet. And as I drove out the car park he shouted through the window, asking whether I’d considered taking Welsh lessons. Okay, I made the last bit up. But only the last.

He also put my mind at ease over my teeth. I was convinced I had bad gum recession on the top layer, he says no, I just have big teeth. Actually, I’ve looked at a photograph of myself at 32 and there has definitely been some recession. Maybe because the surgery doesn’t offer gum grafts and I'm on an HC2 he didn’t see the point in flogging that horse.

Mundane fact, the car park ticket was a pound. That's the first time I've paid anything to park anywhere but I do have a £40 parking permit I need to buy for the uni.

We had a visit from a guest speaker at 1.00 - Kevin Crossley-Holland- so instead of driving back to my campus I drove directly to Alun and took the risk. I would guess students are not supposed to nab parking spaces reserved for professors and admin staff but I was able to park opposite the class room.

The gentleman giving the talk was born in 1941 and name-dropped a great many writers he’s had dealings with, including Auden and Seamus Heaney. He had a tennis ball sized area of sweat under his arm that expanded to the size of a dinner plate as the talk progressed. In the Q & A somebody (FYI the girl who said ‘I don’t even know what metaphysics is, mate’) asked him why she should continue to write when the room was full of writers. He was unable to answer because he’s partially deaf and didn’t hear her and then she rephrased the question slightly. But essentially she wanted advice about writing. He rambled on for a while when he probably should have kept it simple, finally losing his way and saying she should ask somebody else.

My advice? Write something good and suck up to the right people. And if you can only do one of those make sure it’s the latter. Of course, what he didn’t mention was that being in Oxford he would have avenues open to him that are not open to students in Bangor. But when it comes down to it he was there to flog his book on Norse Myths. I enjoyed him reciting things in Anglo Saxon.

Tuesday

Tuesday was horrible. Probably the nicest thing about it was the first lecture given by a lovely lady in leather boots and retro floral dress on Ozymandias. She did invite participation from us and to be honest I don't think I was at my best. For once, or maybe twice, the insights from other students were better than mine. After the lecture I heard two girls talking about Kevin Crossley-Holland's talk the day before.

Girl 1: "I switched off."

Girl 2: "He was very intelligent but not very coherent."

After Raisa's child lit lecture I went up to and asked her about something she'd been saying in that lecture and ones previous. She often makes the point that children's stories have some very grizzly things in them that you'd think were not suitable for children. For instance, Foxe's Book of Martyrs was apparently read to children. I haven't read it but suffice to say you wouldn't want to be a matryr in the 1500s and presumably Foxe went into all the unpleasant details of the executions.

But the thing is, life was different in the past and you can hardly compare our literature with theirs without looking at the conditions they were living in.I said to her that in the past the grim reality of life was much more in children's faces so it's hardly surprising they have harsh things in them. Whereas today in the UK, many children tend to be sheltered from many of the harsher aspects of reality. She said something like, "Well actually you are wrong because my daughter is worried about the people in Syria." Now, her child may well have drawn a little drawing of the poor children in Syria at primary school but that is quite superficial. She is hardly going to be traumatised or exposed in the same way as a child living in a war zone or a developing country. But there was no time to discuss this, only time to be told I was wrong, and blind me with some academic terminology which I confess went over my head.

But that was really nothing compared to Laura's seminar later. I just wanted to crawl into my flat and stab myself. Rather than the usual one period semina Laura conflated her two classes today, so that we had to all do a 2 period seminar. It was moved to the J P Theatre and on the stage there were things like balls of string, pine cones, chairs and sheets and throws in different colours. Her brainwave was that we were all going to split into groups and make a den. Then we were going to sit in our den and write a poem or story- either individually or together- about a den.

Only, she didn’t put us in groups. Now, I always find it painfully embarrassing when we’re asked to form groups because I’m an outsider. Or clinically depressed. Or a coward. Take your pick. All the students know each other and have formed their cliques. And as soon as she said okay, off you go, they immediately went off into their groups with nary a second glance. So I went for a long piss and came back. Laura said, “Do you not have a group?”

I said, "No."

She said well why don’t you be the “Invader?” So I ran with that idea and spent my time writing my piece from the POV of an outsider. Then Laura asked all the students to read their pieces. Every student, except me.

As for the other pieces, the best one conceptually was a poem/rap made up from den passwords. That as spoken by the only other mature student, a woman. She is probably a mother and finds it easier to work with the children but is probably also normal, which I patently am not.

When I got back home I was so tired and depressed I didn't bother with salsa. I don't know if I will again.

Wednesday was a little better. Nobody had done Matthew Durham's homework and he didn't seem to mind. I had a nice chat with Dianne in the corridor after our seminar.

By Thursday the week is almost over. Poetry with Carol in the morning was as relaxed as ever. It's so relaxed that there is no seminar next week. She's having a cataract operation and needs to recover. The afternoon lecture with Alex was about how to research an essay question.

Now,I’m not going to lie to you. Every time the weekend comes round I become rather despondent. It always takes a big chunk out of it. Then I climb back in the saddle and get on with my existence. There are two schools of thought about this situation. One is that at my age it's highly unlikely that I'll be able to turn things around. That's my school, in case you haven't heard of it. And I might write a book that expands on this theory, called You are miserable and always will be. The other theory is the 'elephant tied to a twig' theory. It posits that if an elephant is always chained to a log it will become accustomed to being restrained and will not realise it is not restrained if you tie it to a twig. In other words, my mind is conditioned by assumptions but I can re-program my mind. I can think more positively, behave more positively, and develop new habits.

I have drawn up a ten point plan- and this feels like it will be about the millionth that I have in my life- to improve. Not to make a massive difference but to make an appreciable and valuable one. I don't have time to type it out because the clock says I have 3 minutes. But suffice to say, I'm going to give myself 2 months to do things I have never done before. Because simply by repeating the past formula nothing can be improved. After 2 months, regardless of how good a stab I've made at it I am going to resort to plan B if I don't see a change. And plan B involves a visit to the doctor.

St Mary's Village

I live in the 'The Quad', which is the first accommodation block on campus. My car is bottom right, my window second from top left. The yellow car is the rustiest.

It's a five minute climb to get to here. Sometimes I climb three times a day. I still have a beer gut. I don't drink beer.

Not a church but a concert room used by bands and such like.

I walk through those side doors in the middle to pick up my mail. It's a reception area with a couple of computers, vending machines, sofas and an award on the wall saying that it won the 'Accommodation Of The Year 2016' prize from 'What Uni?' magazine.

Apparently dust from Hurricane Orphelia caused this strange phenomenon.

When I come out my 'studio' this is what I see.

And this what someone would see if they were looking up at me, minus me. It looks very bare now but on the day I moved in there was a barbecue here. I didn't attend.

I'm standing next to the gym here but I didn't photograph it. It's to the right.

I only ever come here to do my laundry. The convenience store is a rip off.

I love all the Welsh you see everywhere in Wales. It's not like you see Scottish in Scotland is it?

There is a very friendly girl who works in this cafe/shop and her Saturday afternoons are pretty quiet. A sad waste of friendliness.

Just for once why not write 'Have a bad week!'

It's a corridor. The corridor is white. My flat is just before that corridor door.

Maintenance have refused to remove the bar stool. I kept stubbing my toe on it and it got in the way of the drawers so I've put it by the window, where it has no function. 

I spend alot of time here.

This is the bay window that inspired by poem about wind blowing in the trees. And there's my car!

It's a nice kitchen but the fridge has no light and that is just mean.

Where my day begins with me trying to figure out which way is cold or hot.

I bet you don't have two Sonicare toothbrushes.

Back to Barlows. There is actually one student in this room. A Chinese guy. I didn't photo the other rooms. Pool table, laundrette etc. Yawn.

I was hoping I'd be put in one of these buildings but on balance mine is that bit more convenient.

But I am missing a view of the town down in the valley below...

Cherry Cola and some other business

Storm Orphelia blew away my words but Brian has blown them back again. I’m back and I think this format works for me. A long post at the weekend, a short one during the week.

So we start with Tuesday, which again came after half a night of sleep. It was a drag, so I beg your indulgence until Wednesday arrives. The 9.00 am lecture was Ben Jonson’s Penshurst- this time with Alex. He gave us his Marxist-feminist interpretation of it and in fairness, I think it was accurate. I would only question his repeated suggestion that ‘ripe’ (used to describe girls coming of age) means ‘promiscuous’. Even in the context it apparently means ‘ready to be taken’ but if ‘ripe’ was a term for promiscuous at the time- as ‘fit’ is now for sexually attractive- then fair dos. I just wonder if he was reading something that wasn’t there.

The child lit lecture at 11.00 was not that interesting. Probably not on grounds of content, simply because I’m just itching to get on and write about things and less interested in being given suggestions about what to think. Thankfully, two weeks running they’ve ended these a little early.

Part of what made Tuesday a slightly shitty day was its little niggles. These tend not to be easily recollected once negotiated, any more than a map of Britain records every twist and turn of the ever turning coastline, but they are the squiggly stuff our little plot of life is rounded in. So here is one example. In the afternoon I picked up my new second hand laptop from the delivery office. My 10 or 11 year old Compaq is fine and I’m using it now to type this and watch DVDs but it’s a bit slow feeding my YouTube addiction and loading Blackboard and the Dell will now take some of its workload.

When I opened the box there was no way of getting the laptop out without dozens of bits of shredded magazine used to pad out the box going everywhere, which I then spent a long time hand hoovering up and then the laptop didn’t work anyway. In hindsight, I’m glad about this. A typical week is full of blessings that come wrapped in unattractive packaging. But I was little down about it at the time. I took the laptop to IT to borrow a screwdriver, but there was a Chinese student having his laptop seen to and an IT guy with tunnel vision fixing it and after 10 minutes I had to go.

I was on my way to Laura Dryer’s writing children’s stories seminar at 5.00. Because I missed her seminar in week two and joined the 5 and not the 4 o’clock seminar when I returned in week three I was excused the first task of writing a fairy tale with another student. On Tuesday the entire seminar simply consisted of students reading out their stories, so I was just a spectator. In all honesty, the stories were not very engaging. To me, at least. Laura seemed really enthusiastic and interested and I thought that was a valid approach. She was seeing what these young writers could be and getting excited about it. But I would have constructively ripped the stories to shreds. But not as many as were in the box my laptop came in.

At the end of class Laura gave me my I’m not tired story back. Now, in my email I had asked her what she thought of it as a concept, because I knew the verse was rough and not ready but she kind of critted it as if I were presenting it to her as something complete. I’d told her I’d written it in an afternoon (okay, an afternoon and an evening) and that I was looking for a kind of analysis of it on that basis. A sort of, think this is heading in the right direction? How’s this for a children’s story concept? In pop parlance, it was nothing but a demo. And though I say so myself, reasonably good.

However, in contrast to the volcanic enthusiasm she gave to the students, I noted a distinct coolness in her manner. I could be disheartened by that, but I could also take it as a compliment that she acknowledges I am not one of them. I have life experience and I should be further down the road in my development as a writer, so she’s not going to give me the kid-glove treatment. True, she did say she liked the story but my overall feeling was I probably should have held it back. My bad. Anyway, I’m working on new ideas: My universe for a day and Mum and Dad are kidnapped by aliens.

After Laura’s class I hotfooted it to the IT department, but as suspected they were closed for the day. The building was still open as a study centre and a guy on reception lent me his penknife so I could open my laptop and try and fix it myself. I came pretty close, it was just a loose hard drive, but a piece of the hard drive connector got stuck and I couldn’t get it loose. There was a nice moment wrapped in the unattractive packaging, though. The guy who leant me his penknife saying it was the only useful thing that came out of his relationship with his ex, and he and the lady on reception with him trying to be as helpful as possible. I don’t get much actual contact with human beings, see, so things like this resonate and get stashed away somewhere.

In the evening I walked the walk of shame to salsa. Once again, I was without a permanent partner and when I got back I checked Plenty of Fish (a dating app) and saw that the instructor is on there. That was mildly embarrassing. There’s no chemistry between us- though both 42- but I’m sure we could both do without seeing that the other one of us knows we’re on POF.

Wednesday was a little brighter but still had some clouds, as I pulled my turning-up-to-class-without having-done-my-homework trick. God, it’s just like my teenage years all over again. Only now I’m 42. However, I now have a system in place that will hopefully ensure this never happens again: I’m going to write it down.

Every time we were told what we had to do for the following week I somehow thought I’d remember it or it would be on ‘Blackboard’, a place online where they stick all that pertains to our course. Timetable, notices, course materials. In fact, when Matthew Durham gave us the assignment last week I asked, “Will that be on Blackboard?” and he said, “Yes,” so I didn’t write it down and then I couldn’t find it on Blackboard. This week he claimed he never said that, which he probably didn’t. He probably thought I was asking him if he wears Doc Martins. As for Diane’s writing class, I simply forgot. I have no excuse at all, except that I am a scatter brain, which is a folkloric term for a brain that is not wired to deal with methodical behaviour.

Of course, writing things down seems like an elementary concept. But I was procrastinating and overwhelmed on that score because I hadn’t made up my mind where to write things down. Now I’ve decided to do a quick summary of a lesson in my diary and write down assignments therein.

So these cock ups- which my wife would be happy to explain (if I had one)- worked out okay but only just. I speed read the poem in Matthew Durham’s class, and in Diane’s class I improvised. She had asked us to read a story called Hitting trees with sticks. Normally, I would shoot my mouth off in the class. I would have read it and had loads to say about it. But today it was really frustrating because I had to stay silent and look stupid. What is piquant is that’s exactly what happened last week. I had to stay silent through The North West Passage and the humiliation of doing that was one that burned so much that I thought, I’ll never turn up to this class again having not read a story.

All I knew about Hitting trees with sticks was that it was about dementia. A story about a person who forgets things. How very apt. Still, I didn’t do too bad, all things considered.

“Why does the narrator view herself as a ten year old girl?” Diane asked.

Nobody answered. There was a pregnant pause and a door closed somewhere.

“It’s a tough leap to get to, but it’s there,” Diane added, as the classroom sounded like a morgue.

“Could it be that she’s so worried about being just like her mother? She mentions, ‘Am I like my grandmother?’” asked a perceptive, Merlinesque boy who does virtually all the answering on texts we’re supposed to have read. It was 90% him on The Northwest Passage last week, which of course I hadn’t read.

“Yeah,” Diane said, in her well-done-for-trying voice. Then her eyes slid across the room to me.

Somehow, my hand had crept up. The fact is, I love to be involved in discussion, even when I have no idea what I’m talking about.

“Is it to do with the way memory works, as well?” I asked.

Diane beamed at me. “Very good. Very good. She is actually conflating two memories,” Diane replied.

But I wasn’t by any means off the hook. Diane later asked us all to tell her what we thought the saddest part of the story was. Oh dear, I quickly scanned pages of the copy of the story the person next to me had but it was no good. She was coming round the table too quickly.

“I know it’s been said, but it has to be her not knowing her daughter,” I ventured, echoing what another student had said.

“Yeah. That’s okay, we can repeat bits,” Diane chirped. Phew. Off the hook.

Diane noted that one of the good things about this story was that it doesn’t tell you to be sad but shows you by relating events in an unmelodramatic way. I think I’ve already achieved this with my story Tears in Hailar. Available from Amazon, folks, and probably the second best story in the collection, though it came third. I’m familiar with the concept of being told to be sad, I find it annoying and I appreciate that events should speak for themselves. This would be an example of something I understand innately but if I am to be a good little degree student and play the game I must pretend I’m learning something on this course. So I’ll file that one away.

Diane also asked us if there was anything we didn’t like about the story. Had I read it, I probably would have torn it to shreds, though not as many as I found in that box my laptop was delivered in.

After Diane’s class I went to the IT department (third time lucky) and they showed me that the connector wouldn’t come unstuck because I’d being trying to remove it horizontally, rather than vertically. More contact with humans and the Dell is now alive and well.

Poetry on Thursday with Catherine Rullens is the easiest class in the week. She is in the sunset of her life and the lessons have a very relaxed, sunset quality to them. She gives us really simple tasks and really simple poems. We read out our Cinquains this week, we made some observations and it was all pretty la de da. No big arguments. Never any haughty sense from Catherine that she is an authority, though she is very well versed in all things poetry.

After class, I asked one of the students if he had had a chance to look at Hour of Writes. I’m not keen on the website overall, but I feel duty bound to give budding writers a heads up on it because it’s a good one to get started on. He hadn’t looked at it but I ended up stalking him as far as ASDA whilst I sold its virtues and he is maybe only the second student I’ve had any kind of a conversation with since I’ve been here.

In the afternoon, I went to Alex Weaver's lecture on close reading extracts from The Road to Wigan Pier. Just before the lecture began one of the students who was in the morning poetry seminar called my name and came down the stairs to me.

“Hey James. The poem you presented in class, it was so sick. I really loved it, man.”

I was touched. I think more by him calling me by my name and making a point of coming up to me when he had already sat down than by his opinion of my poem. Oddly, I had noticed something about this young American (or Canadian) boy for the first time in our poetry class, which is that he wears a woolly hat to class, though it is not cold inside or out.

In the Wigan Pier lecture Alex said two or three times that he thinks Winston Eliot (his name temporarily escapes me) is (ah, it’s George Orwell) “really really clever” because he used the phrase “I suppose” to give his slightly fictionalised memoir the imprimatur of verity. Quite honestly, I think that is overstating the case and then some. It’s a stock phrase, there are probably hacks up and down the country who if have used it, but Alex is very very certain that somebody who uses ‘I suppose’ is a literary clever cloggs.

After the lecture I went back to my room, so I’d already been back home twice- think down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill- but there was a poetry recital in Pontio with Avner Pariat and Rhys Trimble in the evening. That would mean another down hill, up hill, down hill, up hill. It wasn’t compulsory but Catherine Rullens said we should go, it promised to be entertaining evening. I didn’t want to go. I looked at some of Trimble’s work. I still didn’t want to go. But I decided I would because it was the right thing to do. I’m on a poetry course. Poets need support. And Catherine might see me there and think I was a serious student.

In the event, the poetry was worse than I thought. The room was packed and I didn’t need to be there. Catherine didn’t turn up.

Before the professional, guest poets read three poets from a student writer’s group called ‘Words Aloud’ read a poem each and said please come along to their group which is starting again in November. The first effort was by a mature student who had written a sestina in praise of Bangor University. It wasn't at all bad metrically but she described Bangor's ‘college on the hill’ as rescuing students from ‘the depths of ignorance’, and I grrrr at the well worn suggestion that those who don’t go to university are ignorant, those who go are not. University is also a great place to ignore things, in my view. Then a girl in yellow read a poem that was not conceptually uninteresting but nonetheless my hippocampus has redacted any notes it took. Finally a boy read a poem about a homeless man that for what it's worth I recollect most vividly, perhaps because he was last up, and he thought so sad he practically cried as he read it. Everybody clapped. But not very enthusiastically.

Then the Rhys Trimble came on. Now, I must remind you that I have tinnitus because it’s at times like these that this disability is at its worse. He prepared the stage by placing a shoebox of printed poems in it, with many more scattered around the floor. He carried a staff and wore clothing most charity shops these days would reject. Black slip on shoes, red trousers and a tatty blue suit top. Quite the itinerant poet.

First he began with banging his staff on the floor very loudly and then he screamed in Welsh at the top of his voice. I mean ear-jarringly, voice hoarse-ingly loud. I seriously considered leaving the room. It was an awful experience. Most of the poems were in English and sometimes he spoke softly, but the screaming and raging was part of his act, as was the picking poems up off the floor at random and generally acting like some especially demented version of King Lear. I was so pleased when it was over, although unfortunately later there was a reprise.

The Indian gentleman, by contrast, was very moderately spoken and a pleasure to listen to. He had a very sharp and ‘meta’ sense of humour, noting bleakly that he was the third choice for that evening, the other two having dropped out. And he spoke constantly in erudite and funny terms. I'm not being polite, he was a rare speaker. Sadly his poetry was only adequate, nowhere near as clever as his natural speech. In essence, I would rather he had just stood there speaking to us for a while. He’d probably make a better stand up comedian than poet.

The take out from the evening? I have a ‘Words Aloud’ leaflet and I’m thinking of joining the group. It says that I would be joining ‘like minded’ people. What do they mean? Do they know me? Do they know what sort of mind I have? I fear not.

On Saturday I went to The Castle and sat on my own drinking a pint of Stella and watching Southampton. It was uneventful until the 85th minute when a substitute had a real point to prove to his manager about being left on the bench. Typically, that’s how I felt last night. Very depressed about being left on the bench. Week in, week out.

I still managed to drag myself to Tesco late evening. It’s all about the Cherry Cola. 50 pence for 2 litres.

Postcards from Bangor

 Lectures have been cancelled today due to high winds. (It's still safe to shop though). So I've uploaded some pictures instead...

The central carpark never seems to be that full. You can see the 1st World War memorial entrance, Pontio (white) and Main Arts (looks like a cathedral) in the background.

You are now entering a posh university. Ignore the car wheel on the lawn.

This picture doesn't really do Pontio justice but anyway, this is about half way up and in the distance is a nice restaurant. You have to bring your own friends to dine with.

This is the view you get of the town once you reach the top of Pontio, bottom of Main Arts. My village is hidden in those trees in the ridge on the other side. It's a 15 minute walk tops.

And if you look to the left you can gaze out across the bay. You can just about see yacht masts and mountains in the distance.

Main Arts is all very Harry Potter.

Only in period films do students actually use areas like this.

Pontio has a restaurant and cafe, so does Main Arts. The cafe is used by the plebs the fancy restaurant seems to be a hang out for professors and random dignitaries. Like many institutions, university is a gravy train.

I just caught a picture of a waiter wheeling a trolley full of plates. It was like something out of Titanic, and in fairness Main Arts was built at the same time.

I saw a Chinese student come out of here with a wad of toilet paper in his hand. Either he brought it with him, expecting none to be provided (as would be the case in China) or he was delighted to find it is provided and is stocking up.

I really think this toilet should be Grade 1 listed.Not the toilet brush, though.

A good education is one route to heaven.

Why are the lights on? Nobody knows. Or cares.

 

The reading room alleged to be haunted. 

The fancy reading room above it that is not alleged to be haunted.

My child literature lectures are in the room bottom left. Built 1910, like Main Arts.

Traffic tends to be light around the top of Main Arts.

In my view you can't call Bangor a shit hole when it keeps doing things like this.

The Music School, which I have no involvement with but I thought I'd take a picture anyway.

More Main Arts porn.

Not going to make quadrangle of the month, is it?

I wonder if that noticeboard was there when the Titanic struck the iceberg. I wonder if notices about Titanic were placed on the board.

Don't you hate it when doors that were once meant to be used as an entrance now have a no entry sign on them? And don't you think the windows look like a ship's portholes? Okay, enough.

Hope you enjoyed. I'll upload some pics of my village later in the week.

Normal service

Back by popular demand, an account of my actual life in Bangor. I didn't post for over a week, partly because I got busy, mostly because I thought nobody was reading it, but also because I was moaning about everything and being big-headed. Hence yesterday's upbeat but dry student guide to Bangor. But it turns out my blog does have a fanbase that would rather it were conducted in my usual style. I.e, my mum and her partner. So I will now attempt to remember the last week or so, and complain about it. I also fear that my head is about to swell to a dangerous size.

Last weekend was uneventful. A quiet late night trip to Tesco, driving up a narrow back alley on the way back I had to drive through a crowd of students in fancy and tantalising dress outside a pub and then more revellers as I turned right into the pedestrianised high street where cars can drive but you sort of think- can they? For a brief moment two very different worlds collided. The lonely old man with his shopping and the drunk students all peering inside his window and behaving as if the apperance of a random car was somehow part of the evening's entertainment.

On Sunday I exchanged a few sentences with a GP on Plenty of Fish. That's unusual, as most of the women on POF can't spell and write things like "don't know what to put" or "just ask" in the 'about me' section. (Not that I mind. My perhaps slightly mis-placed priority is a fine pair of breasts, not closely followed by a good heart, other attributes being negotiable). Also unusual was that she'd written that she was looking for fun. I imagine her as a recent divorcee who's just gone through a difficult marriage. She soon lost interest in me but I'm 3-1 up on Scrabble. (Or Words With Friends, for those in the know).

On Monday I was a bit depressed because Dr. Diane Cloche sent me feedback on a 'Conflict Questionnaire' I'd filled in suggesting I hadn't taken it entirely seriously. And so I went to bed feeling uncomfortable about that and it was all nothing by Tuesday when Diane wrote back to my email of apology to say no need to be sorry, blah blah blah. 

Actually, on this occasion I really don't think it was my fault. Long story short, it was a slap-dash questionnaire copied off a website that asks questions which you cannot answer unless you plot out the whole film first. This is something I later pointed out in class to Diane and she completely agreed and said it was a "very very good point". So why did she give us the assignment! Go figure. As a former and by no means perfect teacher myself, I think I know when a course component is half-baked, rather than simply beyond my understanding. Nothing to be mad about Diane with, though. A mere bagatelle.

Tuesdays are a killer because I have to drag myself to a lecture at 9.00. And boy was I tired. I didn't get to sleep til gone 4.00am, in part because of the incessant trickle of students coming back from the pub. However, the lecture was with the affable Michael Durrant talking about Ben Jonson's To Penshurst.

I also felt inspired by Tuesday morning's child lit lecture. Not by the content, more by the 'children's stories are really hard to write and it's all but impossible to remember how a child thinks' spiel. I guess there is a lot of truth in it, but that kind of thing is like red rag to a bull to me. So in the afternoon I went and wrote a children's story written in verse called I'm not tired. Then in the afternoon I had a seminar with Laura. She gave us all a sweet and told us to write about what we were doing when we first tasted a sweet like it. I absolutely could not remember. I don't have much of a taste memory. Then she gave us another sweet and said imagine that the sweet changes something, and gave us about three minutes to write down a little story about what it changes. Whilst doing that I was simultaneously scribbling another children's story idea and a poem about Emma, which was really my focus, as I didn't want to lose the thread of it whilst inspiration was striking.

Laura asked a few of the students to read their responses and then ran out of time. The ones I heard were rambling and unengaging pieces of prose that did indeed seem like they would appeal more to adults, probably in their late 70s, if anybody at all. I read mine to Laura after class and she liked it, remarking it was like Roald Dahl or Spike Milligan. It goes:

I eat the sweet and suddenly 
Mummy doesn't love me anymore
Oh, it's such a bore
Now she shouts and screams at me
She was so sweet
Five minutes before
But I ate the sweet 
That made her sour
The sweet I'll eat no more 

Laura also gave us a picture of some different coloured lines. What did we see? The whole idea is that because we're adults we cannot see the picture as a child would. Various students put forward their suggestions about what it made them think of and then I said, "Hair."
"That's exactly what my six year old daughter said," said Laura.
Bingo. More proof that I've never really grown up.

In the evening I went to the salsa class but unfortunately there was one couple and two men. "You'll have to dance on your own," the instructor said. I started dancing. 
"You look like how I feel," the other man said. He was right. I stopped and started making my excuses.
"You'll have to bring a girlfriend next week," the instructor said, who'd put posters up all over town saying no partner is necessary. Anyway, everyone knows that you go to salsa class to find a girlfriend.

On Wednesday I had Diane's class and that is my favourite class of the week so that was fine. We were given a 1000 word short story assignment that has to be guided by that flaming conflict questionnaire. I came up with the entire plot in 2 minutes in the class. My imagination is really flying this week. It's about a young German who finds Hitler at a cocktail party in Patagonia in post-war Argentina.

Matthew Durham was on a field trip to Stratford so his class was postponed.

In Catherine Rullen's poetry class on Thursday I wrote an unsolicited poem in the margin of a sheet of cinquains we were looking at.

The structure of these poems is two syllables, four syllables, six syllables, eight syllables, two syllables. Here is one of them, called Snow:

Look up...
From bleakening hills*
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind....look up, and scent
The snow!

* This is actually 5 syllables, but hey.

And my invention went thus:

Can I
Write a poem
In the misty margin
To inspire you to be annoyed
Why not?

My mischevious point was anybody can write some of the crap we're studying at the moment. It's stuff you can write in one minute that nobody cares about. The poet's name, incidentally, was Adelaide Crapsey.

Carol asked us to write one for homework based on something we've seen outside a window. I've got a tentative one lined up.

Leaves shake

Through a window

See the trees throttled then

As the wind wakes the trees I too

Am stirred

After the Thursday afternoon Writing, Thinking and Reading lecture I asked Alex Weaver about our first assignment. He said it would go up on 'blackboard' just after midnight. In fact, nothing appeared until 1.30 am and then it was just a sample assignment. I saw Matthew Durham about it on Friday, when we had our re-scheduled class and he said we'd go and see Alex about it after class.

At any rate, Alex was unaware the assignment had not appeared on the system. He said he's have up by 1.30 so I went to the library and looked at some of Catheine Rullen's poetry and I've taken out a collection of hers called Hex. Alex still didn't have the essay up by gone 2.00 so I went to nudge him a bit later and he was just getting it done. I've said it before but if you've just joined this blog Alex is a lovely man. I'm very glad to have him as a lecturer whose door I can knock on. And the same goes, really, for my the other lecturers, bar one that seems a bit neurotic. A young, Irish woman. 

That just leaves this weekend. I took my car out for a ride yesterday. Just over the Menai bridge and back over the other one. The car is squeaking, why I cannot say, but I think it may be leaves that have fallen through the cowling and got stuck in the radiator.

Today I went out to pick up a DVD I'd ordered about Hitler's alleged escape to Argentina. I've not seen the documentary yet, but I've seen some bits and bobs on YouTube and as far as I'm concerned there is a pretty high likelihood he didn't die in his bunker for the simple reason that you have witnesses. There was only ever one (arguably dubious) witness who claimed to have seen Adolf Hitler's body, a loyal Nazi. And if you've got salt-of-the-earth witnesses like Argentinian cleaning ladies and carpenters- simple and honest types that have no agenda and stood arm's length away from him and knew who he was purported to be, then I don't see the big mystery. Who the hell were they looking at if it wasn't Hitler? Did there just happen to be some other guy about whom they were told to maintain the strictest secrecy and just happened to look exactly like Hitler?

One thing we do know is Argentina and Spain were havens for Nazis after the war. There's also declassified FBI documents saying how and where he came to Argentina by u-boat. But the powers that be would have us think that he died in Berlin and as long as there are powerful interests that would have that be the official story I don't suppose the truth will be in any hurry to emerge.

I watched half of the Southampton match in the pub with a glass of blackcurrant cider and then went home and listened to the other half on the radio. After that, I did my laundry. There was a Chinese woman outside smoking and wearing strange yellow socks. She was roughly my age- perhaps a little younger- and who knows, maybe I should have talked to her. She must be a mature student, which makes her even more of an oddball than I am, and could well be lonely. Imagine being lonely and far away from home and an eligible Englishman walking up to you and talking to you in your mother tongue?