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We are just about to head into reading week, which is a fancy name for half-term. When I look back over the week three events stand out. One was when I bumped into one of the lecturers- Irish, about 30- who was dressed in a red woollen coat and red woolly hat in a picket line two or three people strong outside the entrance to Main Arts. She stopped me and asked me if I knew what she was doing outside and I asked was it because it was a nice day (it was one of the loveliest mornings I’ve seen in a long time, the air was so fresh and clean and the sun so bright, see pic above) and she said no the wicked Vice Chancellor had tied her pension to the stock market, which means she might be 10K worse off (or 10K richer?) one day. I said well that’s fine but none of my professors are striking. And she said blah blah blah and I said blah blah blah? What does that mean? No I didn’t because she didn’t actually say blah blah blah, I said what do you want me to do about it? Just read this leaflet and familiarize yourself with it and be aware, she said, as if there was a pension purloiner on the loose. Later in my poetry class Catherine Rullins said she was sure we supported the professors although she wasn’t personally striking because she belonged to a different union. Why is she so sure? Maybe I support the nasty vice chancellor, eh? I’m sure he has his reasons. Maybe I, a 42 year old with no pension and no money and nothing but a large collection of toilet rolls to my name and 3 laptops that all have something wrong with them don’t care to be stopped by young wealthy professors whining about their ickle pensions. Okay, I’ll shut up. I mean what is it with politicos? Why do they always assume you’re on their side? Okay, I could have been more sympathetic. I will practice sympathetic nods.

As for the guy in the wheelchair outside Morrisons with his dog. Guilt trips me every time. Spare any change? He says. I avoid eye contact. Thank you sir, he says. Every time. One of these days I will pluck up the courage to say, whatever happened to disability benefit? Or can you walk?

Event 2. Bumping into Kerrie in Morrisons on Thursday. James, she says. Kerrie, I says. They’ve run out Cox apples, I think I’ll get a bunch of bananas. Are you going home for reading week? She says her mum is coming down for 2 days. Do I want to go out for dinner with them? So that might be happening. I then gave her a run down of everything in my basket and then left her. I put my shopping in the back of my car and unlocked (and so on)…

Event 3. So I was talking to Kerrie on Facebook messenger a day or two later who said that she is into COS play and BDSM. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what COS play is but she explained it to me.

cosplay is where people dress up as their favourite characters etc for comic con or other geek conventions like that, and petplay is a little bit more on the 18+ side of dress up, its a type of BDSM

The latter is leather and whips, master and servant and so on. Apparently she has tried ‘Vanilla relationships’ but has been doing BDSM for 5 years because of the layers of trust and understanding you can build up through it. This girl is only 20 and she already way ahead of me. I feel that sometimes with the students. I may have some advantages over them, but they are part of a new generation with 21^st century compliant teeth savvy in all sorts of cultural and technological embellishments that our generation was not and I just feel so old. She thinks I’m cool because I’m published, but does she know I have sold one copy of my ‘published’ book? I don’t think so…

You know what’s funny? Well I think it is. So Kerrie gave me an excellent little pep talk about how I should be pleased with myself because I’m at university, whereas she knows someone who is 48 and spends his days ‘literally shitting himself’ and waiting for his son to clean it up, eating pizzas, snorting cocaine, chain smoking and complaining about life’ and that’s not me. (I expect mirth at this point). I’m at uni and I’ve got plans and I’m published and I just find it funny because I need to be compared to somebody in that situation to look relatively good. But it was a lovely pep talk, which I would have just copied and pasted but I fear that would be breaching privacy laws.

There is a 4^th event, come to think of it. My discus thrower has been in sporadic touch with me for the last three months attempting to engage me in conversation (which she is not very good at, I think she has learning difficulties) and today she said she’s up for a no strings attached relationship (in so many words). Now don’t get excited. I’m not that attracted to her and I told her that she would only get hurt, it’s not fair etc and she said ‘nah’, let’s just meet and so we might in a couple of weeks in Llandudno and we might not, I don’t know. I’ve looked at all her Facebook pics and it’s really just her breasts that are keeping this finely poised. So I said maybe there might be some intimacy, maybe not, but whatever happens it wouldn’t be long term and she said fine. But I didn’t come out with the you deserve one who will love and cherish you and want to keep you forever because I know she is struggling as badly as I am and neither of us really have that option.

She told me that since we’ve been in touch she had one date with a guy with no front teeth who never put his hand in his pocket. I felt for her, I really did. I gave her a pep talk. Shortly after that she made her offer.

Always look at the shoes

I really don’t feel like writing this week. My minds feel sluggish and soggy, but here it goes. 1500 words of filler coming right up.

Monday was okay. I don’t remember it being a bad day. Quite liked Raisa’s lecture on medieval lit, which she alternates with Sarah.

On Tuesday I slept through the morning lecture (in my bed)- still medieval lit- and discovered in the afternoon seminar that I didn’t miss anything important. It was about how to translate Middle English and the seminar I attended later covered the same topic. There’s really not much to it. Read it aloud, modernize the spelling, beware of false friends, look up words you don’t know. I found our friendly professor’s effusive praise at how we took a middle age recipe in our stride a little over the top but better that, I suppose, than attacking us with a cricket bat.

In the writer’s meeting it was just me, Bethany, Nicholas and a girl friend(?) he’d brought along (who was mostly a spectator). Reminder. Bethany is a slim, graceful brunette who I think wrote quite a smart scene for the last play- a contretemps between Jack and Rose of Titanic fame. Nicholas, who I sometimes mistakenly call Nick (there’s another Nicholas in our group, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned him), means ‘follower of Jesus’ and he does have the long hair to match- though has no Christian impulses I’m aware of.

We usually have our meetings in the big lecture theatre in the English college but today we were in one of the old classrooms in what used to be called Top College but is now called Main Arts. We sat three abreast with Nicholas sat opposite like a producer, taking notes and overseeing the proceedings. My cunning plan to dodge the onus of coming up with more or less the entire scheme for the next play was thwarted. The penguin idea seemed to have done a runner, but they had another one about a factory that was making steel but decides to make soap. Bethany liked that idea and I would at least be content to write my bits for anything so I kept quiet but there were only two of us and Nicholas kept asking me what I thought. “And?” I asked. “It’s a steel factory that decides to make soap, but what else?” That is as far as they had got. I said I wasn’t feeling it, Nicholas said we could drum up some others. So I said how about we do something called ‘six degrees of separation’ about six likeable people in a university who all have dark secrets based on societal taboos? And I gave various examples of what I meant with characters and scenarios. We’re now running with that idea.

I don’t have anything on a Wednesday but Laura Dryer and Catherine Rullens were each doing a reading of their new works at 6.30 in the evening so I decided to pop along to Pontio to (sort of) support that. A quick reminder. Pontio is a modern building on the side of the hill the main university is built on opened by an MP a few years ago. It’s a kind of arts centre the public have access to but you don’t really see them in much with a cinema, restaurant, bar, cafe, lecture halls, student union and various spaces students can hang out and study in. I pass through it practically every morning to get to my lectures and seminars on the hill and almost always take its many flights of stairs up to level 5, where I hope for an unimpeded exit out into the fresh air to get my breath back.

The readings were held in PL2. Catherine was launching a spineless volume of poetry in honour of her departed Russian husband, Laura’s had a story long listed on a short long list for a prestigious £30,000 prize and read it for us. It was a somewhat surreal experience, because if I had to guess what Laura might write a short story about it would very likely be one about a refugee called Abdul. And in fairness it’s the sort of thing certain prize panels on certain types of left leaning awards are looking for. She said after the reading that it gives her refugee a voice, although IF I heard right – a hypothetical person- she has no personal experience or even secondary experience of refugees from Afghanistan. Generally I’m wary of the muddying of reality with inevitably flawed speculation and personal agenda in fiction, especially if the whole point of the story is it’s giving someone a voice. However, I think you have to go with the flow as well so watch this space, because my story about my struggle for acceptance in war torn Zambia- called I’m sorry for all the things that are true will wipe the floor next year. 

Catherine’s poems were sad utterances, like a distraught bag lady trying to find some buttons she’d dropped. The joyous empathy on Diane’s face was the most priceless thing in the room.

Fun fact: Laura and Catherine were both wearing black and white sneakers. Catherine’s were Nike with white swoosh and whit base. Laura’s were more plimsoll with white toecap and bits of gold glitter.

I bought a copy of Catherine’s book for a fiver and whilst I was talking to her Alex Weaver came up to me and warmly congratulated me on my score of 80 on my English assignment. Apparently it was the highest, not ever, a third year student has managed an 87. I had to go and spoil it by pointing out I’d made a mistake which wasn’t spotted. He said oh come on the marker had a 100 essays to mark but he’d also said he’d double checked the essay so...I don’t know. I don’t think it was anything to do with that.

I asked Alex who I could see about the bibliography issues that kept the mark down. He said the first thing to do was book a meeting with so and so and I was really hoping he wouldn’t say that because I had a brief chat with so and so about my Keats essay and so and so wasn’t really able to say anything about it.

Somebody asked Catherine if she would sign their copy of her poems. Then I thought I’d ask her to sign my copy of her novel, which I felt kind of awkward about because she’d picked up some things to leave. Then someone else- the American guy who said he liked my poem- asked her to sign his book and by this time she had already lots of bags in her hands which she didn’t want help with. Laura said she should have brought some stuff to sell.

Thursday is another tough one. A 9.00 AM start with the film studies module and a double period but on the other hand an easy peasy course and a nice guy running it. In the afternoon prose class Diane gave us a couple of great pointers about places we can submit story ideas to. I’ll let you know if anything comes of that.

On Friday I noticed this in the poetry seminar. There was one female professor, eight female students and three male students including me. Six of the women were wearing black and white trainers, two were wearing Doc Martin boots, one had a pair of plimsoll shoes which were sort of grey with black flecks, if I recollect. The men were all different. Blue trainers, black plimsolls with brown toecap, my brown M&S shoes.

And that just leaves Saturday and Sunday, a lot of which were spent feeling sorry for myself. On Saturday night I drove to Tesco, passing students in fancy dress costume again and generally looking like they were having a good time, a reminder that I have turned up for university twenty years late. When I got to Tesco it was closed. I drove back again.

I’m now playing a Bohren & Der Club of Gore CD in the car, Black Earth, which is really desolate bleak music for losers to lose themselves in out night. It makes the speakers vibrate no matter how low I turn it down and no other CD has done this. It must have some incredibly low bass notes...

I’ll leave you with a conversation I had on POF.

Date: 14.2.18, 1.40AM

Username: curiousgirl76, age 41

Profile Pic(s): Professional black and white model shot of a very young woman, cut off at head, probably not a 41 year old

Her/him: I’m looking (This is a response to my tag, which says ‘Not looking, not not looking’)

Me: So I see

Her/him: Shame Your Not

Me: I am

I’m just not hitting on people

Her/him: Ok

Me: Don’t take this the wrong way but I think you’re a man

Impersonating a woman

Her/him: (Pastes same photo) All Real Very real and very filth

Me: And why only one picture?

Her/him: My choice who I show

(Repeats) My choice who I show

Me: Well your profile screams FAKE. My guess is you are a man trying to cheat other men out of money.

Her/him: Get lost I’m not your loss

Me: I’m already lost thank you

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.