Almost there!

The only blemish on a delightful day is, of course, the teaching which intrudes yet again on time which should be spent in the pool or on the Third Floor with a good book to hand.

As a second best my teaching load, for various reasons, is not unbearable today and, to cap it all, the last lesson I teach is consumed by a film in our very own auditorium and then it is my early finish.  All in all not a day to resent too much, though the weather looks unstable and I will spend my time on the hill looking fretfully towards the sea and hoping that the reasonable weather continues so that I can throw myself in the pool without too much of a calorific shock to my system.

My Amazon compulsion has not yet managed to get me my next book, but this may be a good thing, as it will not distract me from the gargantuan task of filling in the form for the opera.  There are a few other administration related tasks which I have been putting off which can also benefit from my undivided attention this weekend.

This Sunday is one of those family events with which I have little sympathy: a first communion for a young girl in the Roman rite.  Luckily I can’t go to this ceremony or the related jolifications and, speaking as an Anglican Atheist I can feel all my Low Church upbringing revolting from the enslavement of a young soul to the tawdry blandishment of the so-called church of the Whore of the Seven Hills.  But enough of balanced commentary!

An unprejudiced view of my shower curtain would seem to suggest that far from being a mere scrap of IKEA’s best, it is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest – indeed there are some SSSIs which have far less flora and fauna than the folds of my curtain.

As a “kill-or-cure” approach to the item I have bought a “trust in pink” container of cleaning granules to try and get rid of those stubborn stains which mere boiling doesn’t touch.

I was going to use the tried and test form of long soaking as my approach to the problem when I discovered that we have no bucket.

This is astonishing.  What is life without a bucket!  How can normal life go on in all its complexity without a bucket?

This situation will be rectified today!  Never let it be said that such anomalies can be tolerated in a civilized society.

I have at last started to listen to Sir John on The Machine after downloading the CDs into the memory but tragedy; the voice track seems strangely muted and totally unsatisfactory.  I am obviously doing something wrong somewhere along the line, but I’m buggered if I know where.  Surely it can’t be something added to the CD to make sure that they are not properly loaded up on a computer in iTunes.  Surely not!  That would be too cruel.  This is something about which I will have to take advice from Those Who Understand These Things – or “kids” as they are sometimes known.

For reasons which have been largely unexplained one of the buildings of the school has been without electricity all day.  Did we close the school?  Did we buggery! 

The only concession to the fact that nothing was working properly was that we had a procession of waifs from one building trudging to the oldest building in the school (which still had electricity) to get their fixes of coffee – poor addicts. 

How different are these wretches from we tea drinkers.  They are slaves to their beverage whereas we imbibe, sip and appreciate the bouquet of the most delicate of brews.  And we can give up whenever we want to, but we choose not to stop drinking he most sophisticated drink in the world.  So there.

My sole occupancy of the pool has now been shattered by the appearance of a strident group of women (one of whom in my myopic state I took to be a man in a bikini) with a small naked child. 

At least they had the good grace to confine themselves to the shallow end pool for the proto-humans allowing me to complete my leisurely circuits of the pool until they started smoking at which point I huffed myself away from them all.

Now, as the traditional start to the weekend, out to dinner.