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?