Back to school

If you think last semester was quiet you should see this one. Apart from the drunk students who still come back hollering outside my window at 4.00am (and I would happily put in the stocks all week and not feed) things have been as quiet as a bleak January afternoon in Bangor. I’ve almost not had a one to one conversation that wasn’t technically with a smartphone, in spite of the fact that I am now back to my studies.

With the new semester comes a new timetable and mostly new professors. Poetry and prose have carried over with the same suspects, but most of the students are different. I started off with two medieval English lectures taken by a cheerful woman called Sarah with a Northern English accent (eh...Macclesfield?) and then she took a seminar which was just us figuring out Saxon riddles. She gave me and a partner one about a moth that eats words. After going down the wrong track for a bit thinking it was a riddle about a solar eclipse I realised it was a bookworm.

Fun fact: Bangor has done its wrong information on its website trick again and got me to buy the wrong book for Medieval English Lit, which cost me an extra £16, but I did get a jolly email later from Sarah saying the library had now ‘sorted out the glitch’, as if that is any damn use to students who were organised and bought their books in advance of the semester beginning. I am only writing this out of a historian’s dedication to detailing the mundane hiccups of everyday life and giving my readers something to chew on. I don’t seriously expect things to be perfect any more than I wouldn’t shrink into a toxic heap of low self-esteem and echoing howls if I were given a sordid Doomsday book of my own faults. The idea, of course, is not to whinge about every single little thing: but it is for entertainment purposes only, I swear.

Well you see, there is a bit of anxiety at play because my surviving on my student grant trick can only be sustained by watching…certainly not by watching £16. It’s neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things, but I see trouble ahead reader, which is why I have started doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning my ship’s timbers to keep warm. This week I sold a Sony speaker for £50, my Panasonic indoor security camera has 11 people watching it but so far no bids. Of course, there are other options such as part-time work, the university hardship fund and even Monkey in Burkina Faso (a Chinese friend) wants to send me money. Technically, she owes me a few hundred pounds because I gave her a few hundred pounds worth of self-designed t-shirts some years back that she was confident that she could sell and never did. Long story short, those t-shirts were only worth what someone would pay for them.

But I digress. You are here because you know me but if you do not or you are in the periphery of an acquaintance welcome to my blog about a genuine foray into the unknown so far as love, career and obstacles along the way are concerned for an an underperforming 40 something. I say unknown, but it’s rather like buying a Thunderball lottery ticket. You can’t say if you’ll win half a million quid if you buy one but you can say that you have a pretty good idea. My ambition is simply to prove myself wrong about myself, when I’m probably right, which sounds like a paradox if ever there was one.

Tuesday evening was my cruise ship murder play meeting with about five of us and that was perfectly amicable and fine. We discussed the murderer. I suggested it be Captain Ibird, who is an otherwise an unseen voice that makes tannoy announcements, someone else suggested it be one of the original suspects, so I suggested we can fuse it by having that person be a ventriloquist that has Captain Ibird as his dummy who he thinks is controlling him and it seems we may go with that. Yes, it sounds complicated but the whole thing is daft and that’s kind of the spirit of it. Otherwise, I pulled back a bit in this meeting and didn't chip in as much as I normally do. I don't want too much of myself in this collaboration and having glanced at the other scripts written so far I'm liking the freshness and dynamism you get with so many writing styles.

Wednesday was a day off, Thursday started with screen writing. It was an excellent seminar by a young man I can’t tell you anything about. My only complaint is that I didn’t need to do an eight minute group exercise to think up an idea for a film. Ideas are something I don’t know what to do with, I have so many. Where I struggle is doing the boring stuff like playing the game, changing gear, ironing a shirt, remembering where I put my screwdriver set (the bottom of my Dell laptop has fallen off). And in fact as my exam and portfolio is not going to be a group exercise why the hell do professors keep getting us to do them in class? Okay, it's good to talk, but what actually happened is this. Mike (the prof) had laid out photographs from magazines on a table and asked one or two people from each group to pick two pictures and use them to inspire an idea for a film. I was in a group with three girls. One of the girls went up to the table and chose a black and white picture of three women dressed in American farmer’s dungarees walking arm in arm down a road a la Wizard of Oz, the other was some kind of fortress or monastery set up high in some inaccessible hills or mountains. To me that immediately suggests three friends escape from an asylum, about 0.8 seconds to have an idea. Could certainly spend a few more evolving it into a more interesting one, but I can see the girls would rather think up their own so I stay out the conversation and let them do it. When the groups finally air their concepts the one our team have is something about witches and Mike says with a smile ‘reminds me of Hocus Pocus’, which apparently it is more than a bit similar to in premise. So from my perspective, I’ve just wasted eight minutes of my life while the rest of my group come up with an unoriginal idea, but I owe the world thousands of hours because I came with all sorts of dubious lesson filler when I was a TEFL teacher.

In the afternoon it was creative non-fiction with Diane (as opposed to creative fiction last term). She gave us the homework assignment of ‘describing someone in the class’ and then posting it on blackboard as blog post. My wordy rough draft goes like this:

DISCLAIMER: I think this exercise is tough on me because I don’t see people outside class. So who is in my immediate field of view? Do I describe the learned viking to my left or the professor, who never said that it couldn’t be her? I can see Diane head to toe and don’t need to crane my neck to look at her so let’s go with that...

She is wearing tan Mantaray style boots with a two inch heel, navy blue stockings, a long blue linen or cotton dress that tapers inward at the waist offset by a lady’s neck scarf in lighter streaks of blue and white that hangs about her neck like a garland with the knot somewhere about the sternum and perfectly symmetrical. Some of her fair inclining almost to light brown hair, like a strangely two-toned sky,is parted, some in a single left-inclined platt with a dark blue hair band and the remainder springs forward with the bangs curling inward onto her forehead, skimming her eyebrows. It's like hair you see showcased on hair dye packets to demonstrate just how good your hair can be if you use the product inside. It’s shiny and in no way cysteine deficient with a vibrant tone that bounces light like light is bounced in a world of perfectly bounced light. On her right arm there is a very discreet tattoo that says 'Quod suus circa feles, non amo?' in italics. Apparently, this is Latin for 'What’s not to like about cats?' She has a classic silver analogue watch on her left wrist (that she later told me she stole from Help the Aged) and as far as I can tell it’s telling the right time, relatively speaking (fun fact every Bangorian should know: Bangor is proudly sixteen and a half minutes and then some behind London, though we adopt their time), and overall her style has a relatively timeless quality about it, as if this is the 2018 version of a person from 1880. I’m convinced she’s just about to wander in off the prairies, say 'hi' to grandpa in his rocking chair and maybe chirip the rustically comforting phrase ‘handy dandy’ a couple of times when talking about her plans for the summer house. She has large round eyes that could scare you half to death or revive a person half froze to death depending on how they are collaborating with her mouth.

“You are free to go into the wild...” she says to the class. There you see? Instinctively, she imagines her demesne to be the heart of a great outdoors, such as you would find in her rural homeland, which I can almost see her defending with a sawn off shot gun or that aforementioned confounding stare. She’s also wearing a dangly kind of gold ear rings that match her hair but I can’t see them properly because she’s behind a computer monitor talking to a tall girl who is about her height (though oddly,Diane is perpendicularly average) and wearing a Nasa grey tracksuit top- like she’s the 2018 version of 1986. Said girl laughs, flashes the tips of her straight white teeth, and quickly strokes her cheek, perhaps an involuntary suggestion of pleasure derived from her inaugural(?) conversation with her new professor and the hopes it engendered, though Freud and Jung have other ideas. Mind you, all the time she was speaking to that student she had one ear pressed to her an old style flip phone swearing like a trooper at her broker and telling him what tech shares to buy despite the fact he was at his sibling's wake at the time, which I thought rude (though I couldn’t help writing ‘Tencent’ in the margin of my notebook). And that’s all. I expect I lied about the tattoo. And so on. 

 

I should probably trim it down a bit. On Friday I had poetry with Catherine. I was trying to find the new room when I ran into her and we walked back in the opposite direction. She asked me how Christmas had been and said it was a shame the classes changed when you’d just got settled with each other. Later on I handed some poems I’d written in the week to her. One was a poem about me deciding not to buy an orchid in Tesco.

And that is pretty much my week, which always includes me swiping scores, possibly even hundreds of women right on POF and virtually NONE swiping me. Thank goodness they say no. I’m busy.