Mother's Day, Schmother's Day

Mothering Sunday brought bearers of gifts. My daughter gave hyacinths and chocolate popcorn, my mother a china cup and saucer with 'Mother's Day' on it, my chap brought rack of lamb.

It seemed like an ordeal to get through. My Aunt is deaf as a post, and my mother more anal than an anal thing. My chap was carrying an injury and winced a lot, but bravely steamed the asparagus... there's only so much empathy to go round. I'm knackered. My girl child is totally obliging and cooperative, a problem in itself, because I exist on pins waiting for her to turn into a hard core emo 666 pain in the arse.

Speaking of which my boy child managed to surpass himself with a three word text 'happy mother's day' all the way from the land down under. Champion.

Hey ho. There are 10 weeks to go before The Brief's wedding. She is looking svelte and honed. I felt amoebic next to her. In desperation I have left my number on the Curves answer machine. Thirty minutes, three times per week, exercise and healthy eating plan for ladies only. They are going to have their work cut out if I am to lose 4.2lbs per week. I WILL get into that mauve (menopausal mauve?) Maxmara silk hanky dress....

Off to bed now with Roland Barthes. I give it 30 seconds before I'm unconscious. Have to get a good night's sleep in, am squeezing in an hour's tennis with the gals from the Tennis Club at 9am. May need to find my wellies as deep snow is forecast and I can hear the weather raging outside. That will do my rosacea no good at all.

Ha,

I'm back, and I've so much to tell, don't go away. I'm going to put you on hold until later. I didn't think it could get any worse. But it could and it did.

I have now been at University for 18 months. Well, nearly two years to be precise. Second year seems to finish in May. Second year, I can hardly believe it. Surreal. It's dire. So many automatons, so many zombies going through the motions because they have nothing better to do.

I am adrift in a sea of inertia.

45 started on the course. 17 are left. Of those, possibly 3 or 4 know why they are there. I think that includes me. But I'm not really sure anymore.

It's Saturday and my chap is waiting to take me out. He survived Leap Year Proposal day unscathed and is feeling over confident. I like him, he amuses me. Thank God something does.

Ciao for now.

Hard core emo

The email stayed anchored to the lining of my pocket. Today was not the day to send ripples across the bay of learning. The bay was already being battered by a force 9 gale.

By process of elimination I find myself in an Emotional Literacy class. Process of elimination is of course politespeak for 'university cutbacks'. Emotional Literacy, hard core EMO. It is the worst case of the Emperor's clothes I have ever encountered.The last session involved a large sheet of white paper and a crayon with which one mapped out significant events from birth, to date. My piece of paper was acres too small. My life has been a magnificent catalogue of trauma and accidents, adventure and angst. For the other students wet behind the ears from their experiences at school, passing their driving test seemed to be the most onerous task so far.

Getting these young people to engage seems a step too far for the long suffering lecturer. He lost the plot, this man of reason, instructing a particularly irritating teenager, with the most amazing medusa mop and mascara-ed lashes, to 'piss off out of his lesson'. Hard core emo indeed. She was particularly grating, but this episode now completes a run of tantrums from each of my university tutors.

What is happening? Who is to blame, the students suffering from amnesiac blanks of learning, discipline and motivation, or the tutors; overwhelmed by their new roles as babysitters for children entirely unsuited to university life?

And what do I care, tomorrow I see my adonis, the youngest of my harem, and strictly between you and I, my current favourite. We met in the law library, he had just celebrated his 21st birthday, his affrontery won him a date. I asked him whether I was his 'Mrs Robinson fantasy'?
'Who's Mrs Robinson' was his whispered response! Reader I married him...

Let's start at the very beginning...

I have been dying to do this for ever. What could be more indulgent than delving deep into one's psyche and then hanging it out to dry in front of potentially zillions of fellow egoists? Had this been invented centuries ago the need for Confession would be obsolete. The worry of course is the theory of 'me me me', if there are so many people participating and tap-tapping away, who is actually reading this stuff?

Who cares? And anyhow, I have an excuse. My Lecturer told me to. Oh Captain! My Captain! He will be known from now on as Mr Keating. Mr Keating is a sweetheart, and bears no resemblance at all to Mrs Doubtfire. Mr Keating is my Miss Jean Brodie, without the menace. He is the reason I am reading for a degree, and quite possibly following recent events the only reason I am still hanging by a thread from the ivory towers of a suburban concrete campus. This daily account will log my journey on the Big Dipper of Academe, whooshing through the next three years of study, the highs, the lows, the absurd and the mundane, the profound and the puerile. What larks privileged reader, what larks.

Already deep into our second semester, I found myself relieved to be returning today after a reading week that melted into a blob of procrastination and long lie-ins. I strode across the park, heading for my first lecture, a little spring in my step, 'nil desperandum', my mantra. In my pocket, an email, creased into four. This slip of paper the key to the future of me. Sent to me by the Course Director, its content acutely personal, a loaded weapon or a paper plane. Time for the only Mature Student in The Village to make a decision....