Pumped up

It hasn’t been too shabby a week. I’ve acquired a Facebook friend and maybe even a Facebook friend I will see in person from time to time, I got some decent grades on my end of term assignments and received a bit of typing work to throw into the money pot. Hell, I even put some air in my tyres. (It’s 30 PSI front, 28 back). Unfortunately I’ve been so busy with the typing that the blog is going to get less love this week just when I do have something to write about. Here it goes, anyway...

Monday and Tuesday were pleasant enough, if somewhat dull. I think I’m attending the lectures and seminars mainly to give my life routine. The half-empty: they are super simple, repetitive, GCSE level, (if that) and there is a lack of insight that is frustrating. The half-full: they are friendly, accessible, with some helpful overlap and there’s going to be plenty of scope to shine in one’s essay. This week I skipped the writer’s group meeting (a new project, we’ve finished the Cruise Murder Mystery) because I felt I was having too much creative input last semester. In my absence group members who attended came up with an idea for a play about penguins. (Shakes head). 

Then on Wednesday I had a nice moment in Diane’s non-fiction class. First she asked us to spend five minutes writing a rant down, then to pair up to ask each other a list of questions about our week 4 essays (which I was supposed to have at least drafted). I usually find this awkward but not today because Kerry, a girl sitting on the other side of the room (the desks are arranged in a horse shoe shape) pointed at me and motioned to suggest we work together. This in itself was heart warming but I was especially pleased about this because she showed me a kindness on my first day that endeared her to me, which I will explain further on. 

So first Kerry came over and sat next to me and I asked her about her essay. Like me, she hadn’t started it but she said she wanted to write warning about the dangers of drugs, which she had got into when she was around fifteen. She started telling me about herself at that age and mentioned being on the beach at Broadstairs with a guitar during her hippie phase, to which I replied I lived in Margate. Then it turned out that she does and we started nattering about it, naturally with the heightened interest of two travellers who discover they’re from the same locale but didn’t have much time to talk about it before Diane interrupted and asked us all to read out our answers, so I made some up for Kerry.

Then we continued with another exercise. Kerry showed me her rant. I had just about enough time to read this engrossing revelation about her personal life before Diane interrupted us again- blah blah blah- some stuff about the difference between a memoir and essay and so and so forth. Finally Diane buttoned it and I told Kerry that I didn’t see a rant in her rant, but her love for her mother, who she seemed unusually close to.

“That’s true, we’re best friends and we send each other presents,” she said. 

I said not only was her kindness evident in her writing but in the way she had once treated me. 

“I remember you talking to me in the corridor in the English school on the first or second day of last semester and you spoke to me like a human being, not as an older person.” 

It’s true. All she’d done was ask me if I was waiting for Michelle Harrison or doing this or doing that, I don’t recall, but it was very odd because despite the ostensibly mundane exchange of words I had an acute sense that she was talking to me- not to the outward appearance or me as a stranger.

“Had we not had this chance conversation you wouldn’t have known how that brightened up my day,” I said.

Kerry asked to read what I wrote, which was a rant about Brian Cox saying there is no other intelligent life in the galaxy (it was either going to be that or a rant about Harold Bloom worship in the light of his 'Shakespeare wrote the whole of Henry VIII' schtick).

“Can you read my writing?” I said doubtfully, my having scrawled my thoughts only for personal consumption (as Diane had said it would be). “Yeah, it’s messy but it’s like mine,” Kerry said.

Then she asked what I want to write an essay about. I said it would be me giving myself fatherly advice and guidance as a younger person, which would also include a talk about drugs. Then as the lesson drew to a close Kerry said, “Can I sit here with you next time? I like talking to you and I can’t talk to them.”

“Of course, but I don’t want to be selfish, I think you should spread yourself around and share your gift.”

Then Kerry told me that she is autistic like her brother (to me this is not obvious from her behaviour) but it manifests in different ways. For instance, she has a Peter Pan obsession and wrote 8000 words about Peter Pan the night before, just for the hell of it. We went out into the corridor and Kerry asked what my passion is. I said I had a few but I suppose ghosts was one and we talked about that and the possibility that she knew J.M. Barry in a former life. She's been obsessed with Peter Pan since she was two and is twenty now. I told her she could become a world authority and that would be her meal ticket. 

After that, I went back home and stalked her on Facebook. She has been in what looks to be a happy relationship for three years and there were lots of unicorns on her page. She misses her mum so much and so much wants to help her look after her brother that she is going to change university after this semester. Nonetheless, on Sunday evening she requested to be my friend (on FB).

I think it was also around Thursday that I came out of Smiths and ran into a student who is doing my medieval English module. He'd just bought a computer game in the shop opposite. It was nice of him to shake my hand and say hello, although I felt a bit like a school teacher thinking of things to keep the brief tete a tete going. Where was he from? Kuwait, he said. His English is excellent, considering.

For the second week running Catherine was ill (sore throat) and there was no poetry, but she had emailed us to say she would make up the classes. Then on Friday evening I got my results.

For those of you who don’t know, I had 4 assignments to do by January 12 and I gave myself 3 days for each one, which turned out to be not enough. I was handing stuff in that was rushed and not checked properly with silly typos. So that being said, my result of 80/100 on the English Lit essay is pretty good. If I understood Alex correctly that sort of mark would be up in the all time highs for a 1^st year student and somewhere in the 50s is average. That’s not bad, considering I skipped The Magic Toyshop lectures and did next to no supplementary reading.

To be honest, I think the mark is a little high and the essay probably went over the head of whoever marked it because there is a mistake in there that wasn’t picked up. I said patriarchy was an orchestrated performance, when I meant to say orchestrating. Anybody who truly understood what they were reading would have queried it.

I got 74 for the poetry, which is also way too high for the junk I turned in, 68 for the children’s story is more like it, and again there was nothing in the child lit lectures, not one syllable, that came in handy. Diane marked me down to 58 as punishment for plagiarising one of my old stories. The computer system TurnitIn found a 17% match with the Secret Party, which I won a small competition with back in 2016. In my defence, Diane didn’t tell us until week 11 that we couldn’t use an old story, which was weeks after the assignment had gone online, and by then I’d done most of the work. But okay, lesson learnt.

In terms of feedback, Catherine wrote no inline comments at all and a tiny paragraph of praise with no criticism so though it’s nice she gave me a 1^st and said my poetry is ‘self-aware without being self-obsessed’ (funny, I think it’s the other way around) I’m none the wiser about how to up my game. The Toyshop marker was mildly helpful but I think a little out of his or her depth. Laura Dryer wrote really enthusiastic feedback about my story and I was so touched I almost wrote her an email to thank her, then remembered the last time I wrote to her she ignored my email. (To praise her Charlie and the Choc Factory lecture). I find Diane’s feedback to be dumb, stubborn, annoying and helpful- possibly one of the most helpful critters of my work ever.

A brief history of the past week

It’s been an exciting week. I ate an entire litre of Gelatelli Premium chocolate ice-cream (£2 from Lidl) in around 24 hours, I declined an £85 offer for a Bosch drill twinset and I ignored a call from a private number on my mobile. University life wise things are much the same. Raisa did the lectures this week and I was pretty bored, as usual. I’ve barely said a word to anyone but sometime during the week I gave a student a lift up the hill to St. Mary’s (she was in my poetry class last semester). The highlight of the week was discovering that whoever it was that bought my book last year had left a 5 star review on Amazon. I would be willing to bet money that they wrote the review before the finished the book (it gets worse as it goes on) but still, it was a nice thought. Onwards and upwards.

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.

The Christmas Balls Up

As each year passes everything is of less incident and as it’s of less incident it seem shorter and more pointless. For that reason if I find time I’m going to write a satirical, dead-pan song called Have an extremely merry Christmas. I’ll send you a link as and when. 

On Monday last my timetable was not reflecting where I was meant to be and that was the first balls up. I missed Diane’s class on the ‘critical commentary’, which is a 500 word piece we have to submit with our 1500 word story. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve enjoyed Diane’s classes because I like being shut in a small room with a nice person for 50 minutes but in terms of actual academic take-out I’ve taken relatively little.

The problem is, in my critical commentary I’ve got to demonstrate how the story I’ve written reflects what I’ve learnt on the course. That will be a ‘story’ in itself, as it was written in 2016. Also, I went to Diane’s office later and we had a cosy chat about how I simply must be able to think of what story influenced me.

“You can bullshit but it had better be good,” Diane said.

Well it will be. Though I certainly have my influences they very seldom come from other fiction.

University is about jumping through hoops. The best I can say is that I think my story is a parable and I probably got the parable bug from the New Testament. Also, it is kind of similar to 1408 in a ‘man is enticed into a supernatural mystery’ kind of way and though 1408 is a film it’s also a short story. Bingo. Do I think the idea came from 1408? No, but it’ll do.

On Tuesday James Oxford (friend in China) persuaded me to drag myself to the 9.00 am lecture. It was worth it just to remind myself why I am increasingly skipping them. If there is any useful content in them it seems like it’s strung out to fill 50 minutes with what could be communicated in five or ten or maybe just written on the back of a till receipt. Or mimed. Or communicated in a failed telepathic experiment.

In the afternoon we presented our 10 minute pieces about Girl Gangs and Tampons. I thought the first group did a good job, the others left me in daydream territory. Ours was well received. We were in a room with a large projection screen and simply loaded YouTube and hit the lights. Laura laughed so much at my bit that she missed half the lines.

Here it is, if you’re curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPk45ieWhDs&feature=youtu.be 

It’s no masterpiece but not bad for less than three hours work. Laura again impressed me by how attentively she listened to the pieces. It's her job, I guess, but she really has something to say afterwards. I would be a bit tougher but then I think she has a gift for seeing the potential in something and that is a valid approach.

I spoke to her briefly about two children's stories I gave to her to read. She liked my story The Magic Trolley, and was clearly unimpressed with my Sleeping Beauty re-telling. Unfortunately I can't submit it because it's 1500 words and I now know the submission should be 1000.

I clean forgot about the Bangor writers meeting and in my absence they tinkered with the plot a bit. Possibly not for the better, but we’ll see. Fortunately, I am writing scene 1 where all the characters meet for a drink in the bar. I’ll give them all clever things to say and then the audience can scratch their heads for the rest of their play wondering where all the good times went.

At 8.00 I went to the Christmas Ball. After Lisa's class one of the students, Caitlin, had shown me where it was going to be held. She said, "James, I loved your performance in that video but I so wanted to punch you." 

So it turns out that a ball is just a buffet, a quiz, a boogie and an open mic. I’m afraid that I missed half of it. After the quiz the DJ turned on the music so loud- I’m talking almost Chinese nightclub deafeningly loud- that I had to run out immediately and that was the end of my evening. I even left my scarf and rain mac behind.

A few professors had turned up but they didn’t like they were enjoying themselves. Maybe it was their turn this year to show their face, or maybe some live too far away. Laura lives in Shrewsbury and said she was snowed in at the weekend and had two and a half feet of snow. No such luck here. Bone dry in the town, even if it settled on the mountains. So anyway, Catherine (poetry proffessor Catherine) had actually come dressed as some obscure female writer who wrote a novel called ‘The Fop’. As she was stood alone by the radiator I got up and chatted to her for a while. Then she asked me where I was sitting. I pointed to the full table I was sat at wondering if I should invite her but it was already crowded so I said nothing and wandered off.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a table myself by Alice, a mature student who I guess is in her late 50s. She was really impressed by my turn in the student video and kept saying I should be in the new Yes Prime Minister. And while I’m chronicling compliments, one of the other students said she’d never met anyone who had such a broad range of general knowledge, which was nice and true, I think. But my knowledge is not really deep enough to have a go at something like University Challenge. I think with a bit of study I might actually consider it.

On Wednesday only about five of us showed up to Matthew’s seminar, so we sat much closer round one table. We were talking about racism in Heart of Darkness, which I’ve not yet read. I made a suggestion that racism isn’t necessarily black and white but on a spectrum and one person can experience racist and anti-racist sentiments at the same time but nobody agreed. I even suggested that to some extent racism is natural. This raised hackles, nobody agreed. Matthew said it was all a social construct but where do social constructs come from? Don’t they come from people? I mean, isn’t everything in society natural? Anyway, I don’t mind being wrong, not at all, but what I do take exception to is the manner in which I was shouted down. Why can’t people discuss things in a calm and reasonable manner?

On Thursday there was a balls up with Alex’s lecture. We all turned up to find that the room that his lecture had been changed to had been stolen by some psychology lecturer and that Alex was nowhere to be seen. The trouble is, people had come in especially. It was re-scheduled to Friday, a lecture to which a considerably reduced number turned up, maybe to avoid the Friday train strike and get away early. One thing I did learn is my essays both equated to a 2:1, which isn't bad for a first effort. It essentially means I was a de facto 2:1 on entry into university (almost all the essential how-to of essay writing was taught to us after this essay- before it was mainly about close reading, which is a given). 

And that is all I have to say. I'll see you in January and may I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new 2018, however unconvincingly?

Fun fact: I’ve been playing Entroducing on my car stereo since I got here, I’m going to swap it for Depeche Mode’s Some Great Reward.

Heart of Darkness

The first semester is almost over and the method in my madness is slowly closing in on Bangor University, like a python on a hamster or Columbo on his next unwitting murder suspect. Or maybe like an old man with tinnitus closing in on the job centre? I’m not sure. There are just five more semesters to go after this one. After that I can’t imagine what I’ll do with my life. I quite like the idea of being a millionaire, I wonder if there are any vacancies...

On Monday I went to Raisa and Laura’s child lit lecture and played Words with Friends on my phone (if you play as well, hit me up), occasionally looking up and tuning into what they were saying and then tuning out again. Raisa singled out a passage in Philip Pullover's Northern Lights where he said we should make the most of the now and that thinking about the afterlife can distract us from that. It's a good point. A life could certainly be wasted focusing on the hereafter to the detriment of what we certainly know we have and should make the most of; that is a material existence. She described his insight as "genius", but isn't it a common humanist trope (perhaps in sympathy with her outlook)? Even believers in the afterlife (or sometimes just mindfulness) have a similar one, 'Be Here Now'. The fact is, common new age belief is that if you don't get the now right you are sent back to Earth until you do, so focusing on the now is very important. And is the average liberal atheist really attending to the here and now, anyways? Or are they worrying about Palestine and Israel? (You could waste a life trying to solve the Middle East conflict). 

I wonder if Philip has considered that if there is an afterlife, perhaps it's so well hidden to him so as not distract him from his tasks on Earth? At least perhaps, unless he thinks it's impossible for a super intelligent force to theoretically build a virtual reality in which the dramatis personae are unable to verify or even think of the super reality that underpins it. (It's catch 22 for him if he is designed to be an atheist). After all, there is a certain utility to believing that this life is your last. For one, it tests how well you behave, despite thinking that nobody is keeping score. 

Fun fact, I often think of that Michael Hutchence lyric, All you got is this moment when my mind starts to monkey around. 

The take-out from Laura was that one should be “endlessly curious” but then she always retreats to her comfort zone at the end of lectures, which is close conference with Raisa and I to mine, which is the exit.

I skipped Alex’s Heart of Darkness lecture (I know what I want to say about books I read, er, I think) on Tuesday morning and the 11.00 lecture was cancelled because the children’s author Philip Pullover delivered a lecture on Friday morning, followed by a book signing. At lunchtime I drove over to Morrison’s, parked in their 2 hour car park and then nipped over to the English school, where student reps were in a small room inviting feedback on the courses in return for a mince pie. There was a student there I see in poetry (he looks likes a Viking and, curiously, is interested in Norse mythology) who had a deck of Tarot cards. I picked one. It was the chariot.

“Glory and success are coming your way,” he said. Then the gentle and actually rather learned giant put his big Marshall headphones back on and engrossed himself happily in some pursuit at a small table he had to himself. I don’t think it was anything to do with the feedback.

I gave some verbally, but I became irrationally uncomfortable with the presence of one of the lecturers. She was hovering in the room having an entirely acceptable and blameless but to my mind inane and vapid conversation in a beautiful-creepy thick Irish accent with the students whilst I was trying to organise my thoughts on a question sheet.

Just imagine the following sentence multiplied by five:

“The North-West feels very far away, but the North-East doesn’t...”

I knew it was me and not her but I had to get out the room fast.

She called after me, “You can keep the pen.”

“No thanks,” I said. I didn’t even get a mince pie.

I enjoyed the afternoon lesson with Laura. We read each other’s homework assignments and commented on them and Laura rightly pointed out that I read out Aurelie’s story very well.

“I can’t decide if it sounded so good because of the way James read it or the way it was written. Probably both,” Laura said, diplomatically. Or maybe not. I’m simply putting the suggestion out there into the ether, where it will somehow always exist.

Later, I had my writer’s meeting. The cruise ship murder mystery so far is mostly me, partly because with the exception of Nicholas and me, personnel keep changing and Nicholas is mostly collating ideas rather than creating. Or maybe mine just keep winning? Anyway, no other writer has attended more than once, whereas I have been to all five meetings. It seems like collaboration means, I write it and everyone will turn up when they feel like it but mostly later and take the credit, but we’ll see.

In Matthew Durham’s Wednesday morning seminar we talked about Heart of Darkness, not that anybody had finished it. In these classes I would guess there are around fifteen students and it tends to be me and two others who do most of the talking. It counts for nothing. You don’t get marks for being the classroom smarty pants. Matthew is happiest when someone says something he agrees with. But then, aren’t we all?

In Diane’s seminar I said Hemingway’s story about an abortion (we had to read for homework, discussed in class) was better if you gave it all your attention, rather than the 30% I’d given it.

“Sounds like a reading problem, rather than a textual one,” Diane said, slap-downish , no right of reply (which is fair enough, the seminars go at a fair clip). So I’ll reply here. No, not necessarily, because the writer generally has a duty to make his story engaging enough to persuade the reader to pay attention. And let me tell you: Hemingway’s story is not particularly interested in wooing its reader as I try to with my pithy blog beginnings, if not the boring bits that come afterwards.

I saw Diane in the corridor after her seminar. I’ve shown her four of my stories and she said that I keep mentioning breasts and I write in my own voice and for that reason she’ll mark me down. I asked for a ball park mark on my story Tears in Hailar, which came third in an international competition with 800 entrants. She said a B minus.

Later, I did a search on my laptop and discovered that out of the fifty or so stories I’ve written only four mention breasts, and it was coincidence Diane read three of them. Second, I’ve written many stories in a voice other than my own but she hadn’t seen them. But I take her point. Sort of.

So after Diane’s class I had a date to be getting to. I went home, freshened up, drove to a cemetery in Carnaerfon, parking in front of some dodgy council flats. My date had arrived first, so she’d got the coffees and was waiting outside the church in her van. I noticed that her business was called, ‘Nature retreats’, and I said, “So it’s about getting back to nature?” She was very impressed that I realised it was about that and not spas.

“You’re the first person that’s said that,” she said. “And my ovaries are absolutely fine with that.”

But what else would it be about? She manages holiday cottages.

It was raining and the cemetery was heavily overgrown, so after a muddy mis-adventure we sat in her Citroen Berlingo, which badly needed a hoover but was warm and spacious. Radio 1 was on silent.

After an hour I had to excuse myself and take a piss in the cemetery. I came back sooner than she expected and she was having a cigarette. A nice woman with large teeth, like mine, looking like they belong to a person ten years older. Has taught in Liaoning province, China, like me. Has never stayed in one place for very long, like me. Has never been in a proper relationship, like me. Her best job was possibly selling tyres. She was very good at it. The job I probably made the least mess of was probably also when I was a salesman, which I too was very good at. She never said it but I know she’s been through a lot of heartache and sadness, buffeted by life's storms and scarred by self-harming. I was looking in a mirror. Her entire existence and that of all her forefathers had brought her to this point in time, as had mine. Here we were, two middle-aged rejects left on the shelf meeting the opposite version of our gender about to not make a mistake. Because although she was up for round two I don’t want to be somebody’s panic buy, I don’t want to mess her around and I’m in no hurry. 

I lied about the ovaries.

Poetry class on Thursday. Nothing much to say. You know what Carol’s lessons are like. Nice, pleasant, gossamer.

I had my first intimation that I do exist as a person in people’s minds in the Thursday afternoon lecture and that they may even talk about me. Andy asked me “You were a teacher, weren’t you?” He must have been told that by Laura.

Then I went to a meeting with four girls in my child lit seminar I’m working with on a story about gang girls pimping themselves out to boy gangs. (One of two topical stories given to us by Laura). They were unsure what to do, so I suggested a concept (a Newsnight parody) and then went and wrote it up in the evening. We were supposed to be collaborate on it via Google docs but only Ruth added some small bits here and there. The 'me' show again, but I wasn’t trying to trample on anyone’s human rights, just trying to get the thing done.

On Friday I’m really humbled and impressed by the fact that my essay has been marked and returned with comments. I got my students to do loads of essays in China, and very seldom marked any of them. They just piled up in my room gathering neglect, along with lots of other half-baked ideas. I’m not sure what the marks equate to, somewhere in the B spectrum, I think. The Keats one was described as highly intelligent, but poorly structured, which is essentially a perfect description of my mind. The child lit essay, which scored higher than the Keats one, was “assertive” with “sweeping statements”, which again describes me. That’s the one I had to knock out quickly and submit half-finished, though.

Friday morning was the famous author, Philip “I’m not going to teach you anything, and if I do, you have permission to reject it,” Pullover. His talk then took on a very teacherly air, which was by no means unwelcome. I would embrace his sage advice to try and emulate a paragraph of Jane Austen, save for the fact that I've already tried it. I certainly won’t reject his exhortation to read The Just So stories of Kipling, which I never did, but one of which I was exposed to in Laura’s seminar and enjoyed. I've also made a note of his admiration for Conrad's Victory. However, his remark that, “Of course, no one ever sees ghosts,” is in the reject pile, along with, “There is no other intelligent life in this galaxy,” (Brian Cox, darling of the masses and serial cuckholder in many women’s fantasies) and people who see ghosts need to “see a good psychiatrist”, (Richard Dawkins, scientist, so they say).

In the Q&A I bit my tongue whilst the students asked some pretty decent questions. Someone asked him about the mystical poet Blake, who he loves. Referring to Blake's 'four senses' Philip said, "The first is Newton’s sense, that of love being created by the neurons and electrical impulses in the brain. The second is imagination which blah blah blah, the third is poetry, which blah blah blah and the fourth -I'm not sure-, esctasy or mystery or something,” with a wave of his hand, as if the 4^th was the a curious piece of decoration. And that essentially is what materialists do. They wave away the 4th dimension and the mystery of existence- and make it go away.

  
For me, the talk was airwave filler one could happily listen to doing the washing up and turn off at any time without feeling that parting was such sweet sorrow. As I had no washing up to do, I was feeling kind of fidgety. Laura said she could listen to Philip talk all day and I can see that being the case. Philip's trusty walking schtick, in the minds of the left wing self-congratulatory Liberal elite is the ideal thinking person's companion to swipe those age-old chestnuts with. Those materialists who have never done any serious research into Near Death Experiences, ghosts, UFOS and those other marginalised exotica that can't even find a dark and unloved corner of Radio faux-intelligent to make their case in. And I bet she has ‘Philip Pullover essence’ in a squeezy bottle which she rubs on herself in the shower to ward away inconvenient truths. This is turning a bit ranty...time to say ta ra?

No wait. Saturday. Had a blast with the girls filming our “News Light” video. My Fiat Punto was christened, I mean this is the first time I’ve given anybody a ride in it, and there were five of us. Instead of turning left out of my halls car park we turned right and within half a minute you’re in country lanes and open countryside with snow capped mountains surrounding. As part of the film I played a gang member picking one of the girls up in the car and I put my foot down to pull away as fast as I could. I’ve never tested my car before in this way and I was impressed by how nippy it acutally is. It’s not really very fast. It does 0-60 in about 19 seconds, but it sounds really goooood. Grace is going to edit it in Premier Pro and, who knows, you may get to see it? 

You've hopefully read all this post. If so, thanks for giving it a fair shake. My heart gets more than a little dark sometimes, but I don't mean any harm.

Unpublishable

 ** PLEASE NOTE. THIS WEEK I HAVE CHANGED NAMES TO PSEUDONYMNS. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIGURE OUT WHO IS WHO IF YOU HAVE BEEN READING **

It’s been a mild case of three buses coming at once of late, I wonder if it’s something to do with people fearing lomesoneness at Christmas. You may recall I use the dating app ‘Plenty of Fish’? It’s been time consuming without being fruitful but I’ve had some minor success, of late. Last week I met a discus thrower and though she’s nice I don’t think she's a good fit and I've gently said as much to her. She said lots of couples have nothing in common and not to over-think things. Two, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a carer who appreciates bad jokes. Given time it might have turned into a date, a nice relationship and then a break up due to differences which were always obvious, but not necessarily because her favourite song is The Tower, by Chris de Burgh but then third... A biker approached me this week and moved with bikeresque swiftness and guile. She kept disappearing for long stretches, a numbers game I expect, but within about three days she asked if I wanted to meet for a coffee. As she’s only about twenty minutes drive away I said yes, but at this stage if she cancelled I wouldn’t mind.

We’re meeting outside a cemetery (my idea) and I’ve got to bring two coffees from a nearby McDonald’s drive-thru (her idea). She’s selected ‘Prefer not to say’ under the ‘Do you want children’ question in her profile, which I would think means ‘I don’t want to scare anyone off’ and given that we’ve hardly said much to each other the whole thing feels a bit biological clocky. I’d be very surprised if she turned out to be my soulmate.

Still, my date’s profile pics are weirdly appropriate. Women normally put pictures up that show how sorted and wonderful their live is. Them with ten friends, them with white teeth and healthy gums, them in their well appointed kitchen. Of course, the obligatory picture of their lovely children, so you know what you’re signing up for.

Her pictures are drab and sad. The main one is an underexposed one of her in front of her computer with what looks like a year's supply of rubber gloves behind her*, the second just her motorbike, number three a picture of her drinking a cocktail with nobody else in the shot. Another is her at what appears to be a rugby game from the POV of someone who appears not to be with her, i.e a few seats along. And then another picture of her drinking. Compare those with a selfie in my bathroom, then a picture of me in front of my car, me putting my arm around a random large middle-aged woman I met in a bathhouse, a selfie in another bathroom, me in a hotel room, another selfie in a bathroom, a selfie in my lounge. Both our pictures say: this person has no life and no friends.

* Or maybe boxes of printer paper. She wiles away the evenings making origami sculptures out of second hand books.
 

And now on to this week’s round up.

Monday

Raisa’s child lit lecture. Her dress was noveau medieval romance, her boots helpful pixie.

“Have you noticed the absence of the feminine in The Hobbit?” she asked. No, Raisa, because I haven’t read it, but I'll keep a look out for it if I ever do.

Tuesday

I skipped The Magic Toyshop lecture at 9.00 AM, mainly because it’s ungodly hour but also because I’m genuinely finding the lectures to be pleasant and well structured but not that thought provoking. There’s nothing in them you can’t find in a book or your own head, if you are of an enquiring mind, and that was maybe proven today.

Alex gave a lecture on Harry Potter and the Philisopher’s Stone at 11.00 and that was an interesting prospect for me because I’d written about this book for my mid-term review. It seems I’d picked up on  the core points Alex made (that I could make in the very small word count allotted to me) and I think I spotted one or two possibly deeper and more ironic ones but I won't bore you with them here. 

In my view, Alex said something a bit daft about Hogwarts, Harry Potter's school. He was making a point about how Harry Potter the novel “re-packages Britain’s past” and that Hogwarts is “19^th century”. “They have to wear silly scarves and call the teachers ‘master’. Nobody goes to school like that anymore,” Alex said. Surely he's not unfamiliar with the concept of the contemporary public boarding school, which Hogwarts is so very obviously akin to? Places like Eton, Charterhouse and even my alma mater Lord Wandsworth College, where we called the teachers ‘master’, had four boarding houses- as there are in Hogwarts- and had fancy uniforms. Plus, Hogwarts is mixed, which would not apply to a 19th century boarding school. I can only assume Alex said that because he really means places like that shouldn’t exist and that Bangor University should really be called Bangor University for Marxists.

Sorry, I’m ranting. Do you know, when he said “nobody goes to school like that anymore” it annoyed me so much that I called out (I was front row), “It’s a public boarding school.”

Raisa looked across at me and smiled.

Wednesday

Let’s get onto Wednesday, which is Matthew and Diane. Matthew's was fine. A bit of lesson filler conversation which I can't remember and Diane's was a nice class, as well, but again if I’m honest I enjoy Diane’s classes because I like her. Her humanity, her eyes, the way she enjoys people and responds so affectionately to them. And her, well I can't talk about that in polite society. She is lovely and time spent in the company of someone you like is never wasted. Her actual teaching philosophies aren’t all getting into my thick skull. I’ve picked up that I need to plan my stories and I’m fine with that but her diagram that shows you how to do this I can make neither head nor tail of and most of the other stuff we’ve done is kind of obvious and you could read in a how to write a short story book you buy off Amazon for 99 pence. I shit you not.

Also, on Wednesday another compliment from a student that took me by surprise. A totally unfamiliar face greeted me on the stairs and I wondered why, I knew it wasn't someone on our course. She said,"I just wanted to say- about the film auditions- you were my favourite and your attention to detail was really good and you should keep doing what you're doing." Then she ran off smiling and shy. 

Thursday

So having just been hard on Alex I have to say his lectures on essay writing are very good. Very meticulous, and really no student should have an excuse for not getting an A or B in an essay. Unlike with child literature, there is a much clearer sense of what is expected of us in reading, writing and thinking. Alex pretty much gives you a template for success that can be followed like a dot the dot drawing and his observations about The Road to Wigan Pier are not especially deep, so if he’s giving himself an A, hey! We should all be able to get one.

Friday

Shut up.

Saturday

Sorry, my head’s exploded. Clearing up the mess. Um, final remarks. I enjoyed this week because I had fun bantering with Lorane. It was sad trying to let down my discus lover gently and not really succeeding in quite killing it off. I came up with a plan to write a murder novel and an erotic romance and half a dozen other books. It will be my New Year’s Resolution to write an Amazon Kindle book every 6 weeks. Hold me to it.