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.

The blame game

I wonder if it is actually possible for me to write an entertaining blog without finding fault or engaging in a bit of casual character assassination. Of course, nothing is ‘perfect’ – whatever that means– and it’s a mug’s game expecting it to be. As soon as one realises that, there’s not a lot more to say…

...unless one can somehow say it better, which I will try.

My problem, beneath all the literary subterfuge, can really be illustrated by a Google search, which currently returns:

No results found for "how to make sure you have sex on tap everyday"

and one or two others, involving cuddles, a social life, my sense of gaudy, guilty personal inadequacy. I admit it.

Okay, back in the saddle.

Monday

Enjoyed Laura’s child lit lecture and dropped a line to tell her so. She didn’t reply. She may have thought I was winding her up, but it touched on themes that interested me, like the child ‘falling out of love’ with the parent and the novel, Charlie and the chocolate factory. She also did a make up lecture on ‘Junk’ later on, which I think I’m supposed to have read. I was worried about my shopping thawing out, so I sat in the coldest part of the room I could find. Goodbye Monday, it was nice knowing you.

Tuesday

The most memorable thing about today was probably the writers meeting in the evening. It didn’t start auspiciously because the two writers who turned up last week were absent and this week there were three new ones. Oooo, change, I don’t like it. We were working on the murder mystery idea again and it was slightly too many cooksy but it doesn’t matter. It’ll be written by students for students and I expect the audience will be very indulgent with whatever’s served up.

So far the fundamental structure of our play is mostly based on my reportedly dark inspirations. The setting is a slowly sinking cruise ship and starts with a twenty year old girl who openly admits that she went to prison for murder and served four years as a juvenile. She then retires to her cabin with her rich eighty year old husband who wants to play a game of ‘stab me with the knife’. Unfortunately the game goes wrong and he is stabbed. Realising that the finger will be pointed at her she comes up with an alibi. However, somebody knows the alibi isn’t true and that person is murdered. Is it her? We don’t know. After that the self-appointed detective is pushed overboard and the murder suspect, returns disguised as him, wearing his clothes. I’m not sure how, I guess she got involved in some kind of sex game and they swapped.

Nathan included ideas from the others about the murdered all being entertainers and character ideas. A girl called Sian has this thing about there being lots of complete idiots.

I wanted the play to be set in various locations around the ship but I was out-voted. Sian wants it all set in one room and to me that doesn’t make a lot of sense. For instance, we now have to convey the cabin stabbing through audio and are missing out on the visual comedy, as we will be by not showing the deck scene visually. You obviously have certain creative possibilities by making it audio only and one room only but I don’t think we actually need them.

Am I right? I don’t know. Do I want to be? Not particularly, it’s all good. When I submit my own play I will have total control over that, if it's accepted and that is the one that I wouldn’t want to see compromised by ideas I don’t agree with. And when my play fails you can be sure I’ll find someone else to blame.

Today I discovered that Nicholas has been at Bangor seven years and is not even a student any more. It explains why he seemed so mature for eighteen or nineteen, he must actually be in his mid-twenties. I ended Tuesday wiser for that reason, if none other that will consciously stay with me.

Wednesday

Good ole Wednesday. I’ve mentioned before that the university has a left wing bias. I don’t really detail all the ways it manifests in my blog, I guess because I’ve got better things to do, but I’ll include an anecdote today.

It’s hard to summarise my own politics. I’ve always been a bit of both spectrums, certainly not inclined to accept the whole left wing package. And it’s not an emotive subject for me. No party promises me a girlfriend in its manifesto, so why should it be? So anyway, Matthew Durham has asked us before if we think women still get a raw deal in publishing and today he asked us if we considered ourselves feminists. I said, “No, but then I don’t consider myself a masculinist either.” (We were discussing The Magic Toyshop, which I happened to like, so much so that I’ve bought Carter’s first book). Matthew said that feminism just means equality for women and if that’s the case then yes, I’m a feminist. But honestly, who would say, ‘no I don’t believe in equality for women’? So really, the question must mean something more. Perhaps it means, ‘do you believe that consciousness is created by the brain?’ No, I believe it is facilitated by it and funnily enough, most career feminists probably don’t. (Discuss).

Anyway, Matthew said the English language is biased in favour of men. We walk into a room and say ‘hello guys’ and we could be saying hello to men exclusively, or to men and women. The word man exists independent of woman, but the word woman defines woman by her not being a man. That seems reasonable and I agree we need to look at the language we use. I’ve never liked the word ‘slut’. Why do we honour men for promiscuity but berate women for it? I say ‘we’ actually meaning other men, because I’ve never done that. But to me it was ironic that Matthew was arguing that words shouldn’t be biased and the very word- which is supposed to be about fairness- is about women. Fairness cannot just be about women and therefore I’d rather be called a fairest. Interestingly, on my weekendly browse of women’s dating profiles I came across one woman saying that she was ‘decidedly not a feminist’. Why is that, I wonder? (Discuss).

And of course, on Wednesday I went to spiritualist church looking for clues about getting my life on track. Preferably an electrified one. It was chucking it down and I figured I had a decent chance of a reading, due to low attendance. How right I was. I think there were about seven people, and they were all old. Two fell asleep. We had to sing hymns and without an organ so everyone sang their own tune. The medium described herself as ‘moderately awful’, and I agree and yet...and yet...was she? I got my reading and it’s hard to say if it was made up or what it was. She said that when I came to Bangor I had higher expectations and that is true. That is the one thing I can say which I in no way fed to her. No earth shattering revelations, just that I will start to put a small social life together at some point. Dots will connect.

On the way back I drove into a traffic island. It was the weather and my steamed up windows. Could hardly see where I was going.

Thursday

Catherine presented a poem of mine in class, I think because she thought it rather good and assumed the others would think so, but I don’t think they did particularly. It was a reply to Philip Larkin’s Auerbach. I would paste here but when I submit my portfolio Turnit In will find anything on the web and shout, “Plagiarism!” Of course, I can prove it’s mine, but for the sake of simplicity...

Friday

I met a discus thrower on online dating. Probably nothing will come of it but you never know.

Saturday

Depressed all day. Cheered up a bit in the evening. A bit, mind. I definitely know how to unsteam my windows, now. Fear not. They were as clear as the cold air on the way to Morrisons.

Sunday

And so to Sunday. Not an especially eventful week. I should say thanks to James and Lorane for keeping me cyber company, because otherwise it’s mostly me talking to myself.