The course has begun!

Having taken my first “allsorts” selection of drugs first thing in the morning, I am beginning to wonder if the cure is going to be worse than the illness.  I have convinced myself that the swelling in the lower leg has gone down a little but the general feeling of unwellness has increased since the drugs hit my unprepared stomach.

The prospect of another two weeks of feeling like shit is not an alluring one and, because I look well even when I am not, I cannot relax into a comforting wash of sympathy from colleagues!  It’s a hard old life.

John Wilkins has written to me informing me that an old college lecturer and tutor of mine was giving a talk to his local chapel group following the publication of his latest book.  M Wynn Thomas “In the Shadow of the Pulpit” - Literature and Nonconformist Wales has been described as “anecdotal” and “an easy read” as well as “authoritative” and “exhaustive”.  I remember Wynn as a frighteningly knowledgeable lecturer and an intimidatingly responsive tutor.  The things that he saw in books I would have given my eye-teeth to have discovered by myself before he made his insights blindingly obvious!  A good man and I must go to Amazon and buy his book!

The rest of the day was just about as bad as the start with my missing lunch yet again and relying on my appetite returning with the evening.  Which it did and I made a sort of broth with a chicken leg and numerous fresh vegetables to give a lining to my stomach to prepare it for the receipt of the next antibiotic!

I enjoyed the meal as far as my jaded appetite allowed and I think that the pill is now safely embedded and doing its work.  I have to admit that it really does feel as though there is a battle going on in my leg as the antibiotic forces for good get down to destroying the bad.  Toni tells me that the swelling looks less and I confidently expect the weekend to be better than the last two and I further expect to feel some real progress.

As the pupils have now been back in school for somewhat under a month the examination season will start on Monday!  One wag in our department suggested that the kids should be tested on what they did on their holidays, which would have just as much educational relevance as what they have been taught so far!

The one advantage of teaching the number of “credits” that I do is that they are not examined in the frenetic way that the EAFL elements are.  Thank God!  This means that I miss out on the seconds, fourths and first year sixth – though I have classes in all those years, classes with a bewildering variety of titles and a depressing amount of marking.

My colleagues in Britain will, at this trying time of the year, be looking forward with growing impatience to the slowly approaching half-term holiday of a week’s glorious freedom.  We have nothing like that to anticipate with only the odd day to keep us going until some horrifically late time in the year before we can make our escape.

Now, given the microclimate of chemical antagonism at present dominating in my body, is probably not the right and proper time to think about just how long there is in teaching terms before release.

Let me instead dwell on the wonders of a regularly occurring weekend which allows some semblance of sanity to obtain!