'Tis almost time!

My imperfect health, encouraging feelings of justified resentment that this is all happening (and indeed has all happened) during a very important holiday before the long, long slog to the next period of escape, has now engendered in me a feeling of such overwhelming irritation that I am disinclined to continue this absurd state of affairs for a day longer!

I therefore let it me known that tomorrow, Sunday, has to be the last day of snuffles or any associated discomfort so that I can live the true irony of being perfectly well when I start the new term!

Having completed my reading of that perennial favourite beloved of so many, “Varney the Vampyre” I have turned to something a little different. 

“Fallen Angels” by Michael Flynn (and others) is a tale of the future in which the use of “inappropriate” technology is banned and the Greens have virtually destroyed the planet by terminal conservation, halting the natural greenhouse effect and thereby encouraging the advance of the glaciers of the next Ice Age.  The only centre of technology is found in the augmented space stations which now sent out spacecraft to scoop nitrogen from the atmosphere of earth to keep themselves going.

The action heats up (pun intended) when two pilots of an atmosphere skimming craft are shot down and land on a glacier.  The only people who can help them are those who still believe in science – old sci-fi fans.

There are some interesting takes on the disastrous effect of right thinking political attitudes, but the novel has settled down into a fairly run of the mill adventure story with the suspension of disbelief aspect of the story being an attempt to find and fire up a rocket to get the two Angels back to their station in space.

I really will have to read something of literary value next or I will soon have completely lost the hard won critical faculties that I thought I possessed that should be telling me to read something else! Though the simple, unalloyed delight one gets when reading trash is something difficulty to resist.  And, as it is the tail end of the holiday I think I have a right, if not a positive duty to indulge myself to the full.

Especially as the two-volume Modern Art book should arrive on Monday and I will take that as the start of my attempt to write a reference book for the course that I am teaching in art.  If nothing else it will give me the opportunity to justify looking at art books and buying more!

As if to add injury to illness I have now developed muscular pain in my right leg.  This is now bordering on absurdity!

I have done my best, but on a Sunday evening, half watching Barça play Español with a computer facilitated balanced English commentary and a highly biased in-house commentary, I find it impossible to ignore the fact that tomorrow is a Monday and one on which I will have to get up at some ungodly hour in the profound darkness and set off on an overcrowded main road full of disgruntled workers including teachers who will have faces full of woe as they finally go to their places of inadequate remuneration.

In short, tomorrow is the start of the next term and one which stretches on and on into the distant future of lighter mornings.

Day by day.