Ludus ludi ludo

I had my first proper meal tonight and enjoyed it.   I didn't eat as much as I used to but that is a good thing and perhaps I can lose weight by one of the easiest ways possible, eat smaller portions off a smaller plate. I am already feeling the weight going back on.

It has been a cold and wet day and miserable for it.    Although the temperature is above freezing point it feels colder than the day before when it was below.

I have been preparing work for the masters degree as much as I can at this point.    

I have a new module coming up in January and have enquired about it at the student information zone and have been told that I am on my second choice.  If this is true it suits me fine as my first choice no longer interests me.   The wheels turn slowly and I have to watch my timetable to see for sure that I am on it and when my day of attendance will be.  

I went so far as to order the Essays of Virginia Woolf on Amazon as this is required reading.  If for any reason I have got the module wrong then I will be quite happy with the reading material anyway and these essays are supposedly some of her best writing.   I enjoyed her address to Cambridge's Newnham and Girton Colleges published later as an extended essay entitled A Room of One's Own where she spoke about the impediment to women and  writing was not having a room of their own in which to do it and like the Brontés and Austen and Eliot and all those before them, women wrote in secret in the drawing room surrounded by others with the paper camouflaged under a piece of embroidery.    Woolf's essay was written in 1928.   Women were only just beginning to get some rights and recognition.  It is hardly surprising that we are still in the quagmire of misogynism as have really only just moved into any acceptable freedom for women and we still have way to go.    Why it was only in 1975 that men only bars and rooms disappeared in the pubs of the North East (pubs, incidentally,  I was talking about only yesterday) and no doubt elsewhere.   

My module is ludic writing, from the Latin ludus, humorous,  satirical.  fun, and parody.   I am also reading Kafka and Joyce for the same module.

Sunday

I went to the André Rieu concert yesterday afternoon, courtesy of the Odeon cinema.  It wasn't as good as the summer one I went to where I cried most of the way through.  This Christmas one I didn't shed a single tear.  I didn't wait to hear all the encores and left after the first and got my train home.   It was minus 1,   dark and foggy so I had all the joys of the drive back from the station in horrible conditions.  However, as it was a Saturday I was not troubled by other vehicles which made it a bit easier. The road is narrow in places and not good to meet on-coming cars in the best of conditions.  

I went to the city early and spent over an hour in Wetherspoons before the concert which was packed out with Saturday lunchtime drinkers, nearly all men standing so I was still able to get a table with a river view.  The noise was exceptional, I had forgotten just how noisy a full pub can be.    It reminded me of drinking on a Saturday lunchtime in the 1970s in Newcastle pubs - all men and females were scarce.  It could easily have been 1975, men of all ages and backgrounds putting the world to rights,  mostly under 50.   I had plenty of opportunities for snippets of conversation and notes for my book.  I also had the poems with me for annotating for Tuesday so did those as well.  I drank only coffee.  In the 1970s I would have been drinking and it wouldn't have been coffee, in fact you didn't see coffee in pubs then.   Yesterday a few people were eating but alcohol was definitely the order of the day.  I had my sandwiches on the train. 

This morning it is raining and has clearly been raining in the night because there are lots of puddles.  It is grey and dull and I will go out for petrol later.  I have a one-to-one  tutorial with the poetry professor tomorrow morning.  

I have work to do and will rest today because I said I would not see my brother today.  He is having his knee op this week. 

Yesterday's photos again. 

Saturday

 Yesterday went well with a good turn out to the AGM in spite of the weather.   The business was attended to in 25 minutes.     The learning group members were then joined by  others who had not attended the AGM and we continued with the final session of the Norfolk Medical and Social History course.   The finishing point was the establishment of the NHS and the all party Beveridge report and it was good to hear somebody other than me pointing out that NHS was not the baby of the Labour Party but was all party  and would have been announced by Churchill had he won the election.   

We then had an hour and half  gap between the end of the talk and the group's Christmas Lunch so I went home and laid the fire ready to light when I returned and to do a few things like make the bed, put the outside light on ready for dark -it is sensory and will turn itself on when darkness falls if the switch is on but will not turn itself off when nobody is around.   It doesn't work quite as it should but is ok when I am around to turn it off.  That probably all sounds double dutch.    I don't like returning home to an all dark house so prepare it for my own comfort of welcome inside too. 

The lunch was at a pub nearer to Norwich than us and I as a committee member had objected to the venue being out of area but was voted down by the rest of the committee.  I will continue to vote against it next year.  In spite of all that I enjoyed the meal and the company and sat with a group of ladies who I have never talked to before and we got on like a house on fire.  One had been the joke writer and novelty buyer for the  Norwich cracker company,  Tom Smiths;  Norwich was the home of the Christmas cracker once upon a time.     We all judged the crackers provided at the lunch as extremely poor and pc'ness has all but stopped the fun. 

I gave three ladies a ride back to our home area who had travelled to the venue by bus in order to be able to drink so the car was a merry ride back. 

I then typed up the minutes in the evening while watching television and have just emailed them to the chairman for approval. 

I may go out this afternoon to the André Rieu Christmas concert at the cinema but have not yet decided as at the moment it is foggy and if it continues all day I will not want the 8 mile drive back from the station in the fog and dark so won't go.   It is on again tomorrow but then tomorrow is an ASLEF overtime ban day and as it is a Sunday with fewer trains anyway not the day to be expecting many trains to run.   Decisions, decisions. 

2pm

I am in Wetherspoons.  It is heaving with men.  No change in 50 years, men drinking on a Saturday afternoon.  Wives and girlfriends shopping.

Deafening noise.  I am annotating poetry.   I did my MA in Wetherspoons.  Some did it in a library 

Rituals of words

 It is very hard for me to believe that it is a full week tomorrow since I was at the hospital as it feels like only yesterday.  In fact I really cannot believe it.   The whole thing is so fresh in my mind and, of course, I am still dealing with the aftermath.   Tomorrow I have a Christmas lunch which I signed up for and paid for some weeks ago.  This is going to be a three course meal.  I cannot, nor should be, eating a three course meal at the moment.    I will have to eat what I can and feel right with.  

At the same time I volunteered to minute the AGM of our Learning Group tomorrow  to help someone out.   I will of course still be able to do this - my cold has eased and generally I am feeling a bit more normal but not fully.   I have minuted many meetings in my life but really I could have done without it this week.   I have been all over the place  with days of the week as well  and seriously all day today  thought it was Monday.  

Tonight I noticed on my phone that it said "expect snow at 9pm".   The car was frozen when I got to the station tonight  at 4.45pm.    I am not aware that it is snowing although I have not looked out. 

I went to the cinema to get me out of the house, a train ride and a walk, and saw Oppenheimer again.  I tell myself I am seeing it for creativity purposes, skills in scriptwriting, and wordcraft. 

I went to Wetherspoons for an hour for coffee to do a bit of people watching before coming home.   This week we are going through rituals of words for poetic ideas as our workshop homework so I found myself jotting down random things that came into my head whilst sitting there.  You can have a ritual that you write down a word each time you open the fridge, or you read a comment on a You Tube music video and you write a poem triggered by a comment you read (I quite like that one).    These rituals are to help with ideas and creativity and word blocks.   They are the sort of things I tend to do anyway.   I write things down in the dark of the cinema and have a book with things written all over the top of each other and when I come to read them I can't.    But occasionally from a bunch of words something usable will come through. 

I have an essay to do over the Christmas break on the workshops that we have had and I submit 12 to 15 poems and what I have learnt so far from the academic papers we have studied.    At least it will give me something to do over Christmas because for the last 5 years Christmas has been a non-event for me and this will be the 6th. 

A poem from yesterday

 As well as a sore bottom I now also have a cold.   Very annoying.  I have been sleeping badly again which is a pity because during the build up to last Friday with the light diet I had been sleeping soundly for 8 hours even the night before the thing.  Although I have continued on a light diet the sleep pattern has not continued.    I did eventually fall asleep at about 1am and then woke up at 7am which I suppose isn't too bad. 

The poems went off yesterday terrifically beyond my wildest expectation and I was congratulated by the Professor and for the variety  and quality of work. 

Here is one of them 

The Bad Harvest 

I longed for the sunshine to come back one day to give happiness and lift my heart.

The dog rose grew amongst the cart wheels and the  nettles and the rusty plough.

The skittles and  the chains were  out of place as I walked  by and called

for Father to come back and  set the blackthorn free around me 

and drive the wheel along to bring the wheat in, the ever blowing corn 

to bushel home and keep the foot to ground and the love to Mother.

Not much did anybody see how  the stubble trapped and scraped  the ankles 

as the children ran to see the fox who ducked in stealth right down to knee

and the hares ahead out-run the travellers and  the lurcher

pursued without portfolio by the quadbike and the gun.  

Everyday that year it rained and smash and grab got the harvest in 

with wheat and hillsides flat to wind and rain and a clever man played pick-up 

with the  harvester and sheared  it  without a sheaf or horse or man. 

Still Mother said the rosary and as the beads flowed through her fingers

she whispered let the hagberg be good and  we’ll eat Hovis everyday.

And the man said  no it's not enough and the rosary and God didn’t save us. 

The Professor pointed out that only Rachel could write a poem like that and they should look to things they know well and think of writing something from their own life experiences too.

(Hagberg is a test carried out on wheat to see if it is good enough for milling which is what you want to achieve when growing wheat).

Generation Z

 I don't look at many blogs these days.  Blogland  seems to have entered a kind of mature phase like a river and is ebbing along very slowly as we make our way to the sea.     I am happy with it this way and my reading list is slimmed down. 

I went to see Wish yesterday afternoon as mentioned in the previous post.   It was a disappointing Disney animation to celebrate 100 years with nothing particularly memorable in songs which is the part I was thinking might keep me interested.   I watched a small child of about 3 or 4 with her mum and she was spellbound on the edge of her seat from start to finish so if it works for children that is all that really matters.    

After that I vacated yet again to Wetherspoons for a coffee and to go through the final annotation of the poems for this afternoon.   I am still not particularly relaxed about annotating the work of others which is partly due to my lacking in the necessary skills to do it and I feel a bit like I am forcing myself to highlight words and comment on rhythms almost for the sake of it.  I also still don't quite go with the principle of it at all.  If one listens to the class discussion and the professor then one gets a good critique of ones work anyway.    I sometimes do the annotating while the class discussion is going on by jotting notes on the relevant work guided by the professor's comments.    (I notice that others also do this).  But then of course the poet her/himself is also doing this.  (At the end of class we all hand our annotatation notes to the relevant poet in case you are confused).      I am always polite and each week I include how much I like the work and the storytelling.  I notice that a few put things like this on my poems and it does make a difference.   Not everybody does it.  The younger ones straight from undergraduate courses who are au fait with all the correct poetry speak I suppose tend not to.  They are very politically correct in their input all through class and are frequently raising issues of gender and binary and non-binary as for them it is the topic of their age.  But they are controlled  in what they say one way or the other.     The professor says at the beginning that if any issues come up in the poems that anyone is  uncomfortable with we can exit class for that segment and no questions will be asked.  This has happened once so far.  (It was not with one of my poems I hasten to add).   It seems slightly odd to me but then I am of a very different generation where one would not have been handled, protected (?) in this way.   

As I have already mentioned I am reading today.  I haven't written anything controversial so I don't envisage anyone leaving the classroom at any point. 

Rear and milder

 It is milder this morning thank goodness.  My house was extremely cold over the weekend and I moved the chair nearer to the woodburner. 

I went to see my brother and SIL at the weekend and they told me their non-news of the past three weeks that I have missed.   It seems that when it comes to it neither of them ever have much to say except that my SIL continues to be her cousins carer and my brother is having his knee done on December 5th.  I didn't say a word about my hospital experience.  I yawned a fair bit and left before it got dark.   My brother has a quick knee op coming up in 10 days because he asked for a cancellation slot and got one.  Apparently people are always withdrawing for one reason or another.   He is under strict instructions from me and wife to make sure he does the exercises as he is told to do.  

I am continuing with the light diet.   I am about as boring as my brother today as I have little or no news except that my bottom is still sore and I put nappy rash cream on it and that will be regarded as far too much information by some and I may go to the cinema later to see Wish, the new Disney animation for Christmas and their 100 birthday party.