Life without chocolate!

Disaster!  

No one brought in chocolate today – though chocolate brownies did appear for lunch and mid afternoon, though that was by luck and not intention.  I have therefore taken to the bowl over boiling water and made another batch of my incomparable chocolates.  As I only have one purpose made mould for the sweets I have pressed into service the plastic trays from other bought sweets and just hope that the plastic has not become an integral part of the delight.  I have not yet had the courage to try and prise them out, so all is to see.

Tomorrow is a short day, thank god.  Though it is also a full one.  All my teaching periods of the day are one after the other, so I am not exactly relaxed by the end of the morning after teaching five periods on the trot.  However there is the “afternoon” to recover.

Tomorrow should also be the day on which my second tutor marked assignment is returned leaving only the longer literature essay and the examination to go before I start the next course.  I read through the examination preparation booklet this evening and the more is reassured, the more disturbed I felt.  I suppose that is because each examination I have taken has been presented as a sort of underhand trick, with questions specifically designed to trap the unwary.  The OU is, of course, above such dubious academic skulduggery and they take a Peter Brook like approach to examinations going out of their way to show that they have nothing up their academic sleeves!  This is so foreign to what I am used that I find it disconcerting to say the least!

Perhaps the most unsettling element in the whole experience is the time allowed for the exam.  There are three hours allocated, though they say that the exam can be completed in two.  As my previous approach to examination is to start writing at the beginning and go on writing until the end, I am going to find this unnatural expansiveness that I shouldn’t use very odd.  I do have time to get used to the vagaries of the OU’s approach to what should be a time of stress and grief, as the exam itself is not for another couple of months.  Time enough to worry about such things after the next essay has safely been electronically delivered to my tutor!

I am at present on the Third Floor to escape the appalling quality of television presentation of the Barça – Milan Champions League game.  The sullen silence from downstairs indicates that Barça are still a goal adrift.  A goal scored, I might add, as soon as I left the room!  Make of that what you will.

I am still assiduously add the discs of “The All-Baroque Box” to my insatiable hard drive.  The quality of the recordings that I have sampled so far is very encouraging and I am waiting to get to the dreaded Brandenburg Concertos to find out if these recordings will be the ones which finally get me to like this music that I know so well.  It is very odd, but these Concertos have always left me cold.  The version on Archiv is of Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert (on authentic instruments) from a 1982 DGG recording.  I live in hope.  Though it is not lively!

Amazon, a shameless organization if ever there was one, is now bombarding me with unmissable box set offers of CD form all sorts of companies.  None of which I can possibly pass by.  I can’t help feeling that I am, single-bank-accountedly keeping these music purveyors going and they are taking shameless advantage of me by repackaging old recordings and gulling me into forking out vast sums of money for stuff that I have already got!  Philips are a canny company and they are now producing “Limited Edition” box sets which I suspect are previous box sets with the discs put in a different order!  I trust that this is a grave slander and I must check and it if turns out to be untrue I will be delighted to withdraw my animadversions and throw money at a company which has taken a fair amount of my hard earned cash over the years!

I have just been told that Barça lost 2-0 against Milan.  O dear!  It may just be a result for you, but I have to live with the consequences far closer to home!  At least La Liga seems safe.  Please god!