It was the best of times, it was . . .

Breaking a cardinal rule of Creative Writing, I shall start with the weather.

It has not been good.  It has rained.  Rained!  And August is still with us.  Just.  There is an end of summer feel and there is a distinct chill in the air.  Well, chill is perhaps putting things a little too strongly, but it did merit a thin sheet on the bed last night.  All of these things are not significant, but what I saw at the poolside yesterday surely is.

Along the side of the pool under a cloud filled sky and perched malevolently on flimsy loungers, the hags of the area ignored the less than equitable temperatures and sat there busily smoking as their version of the unlovely ladies who surrounded the guillotine knitting.

As I made my way up and down the pool, my ears carefully stoppered and the music pumping through the bones of my cheeks with my head underwater for a lot of the time, I was at least spared the penetrating cackle of those carcinogenic cows.  They did however, even in the open air, manage to channel their opprobrious exhalations so that each in-breath I took was polluted with their noxious nicotine!

Even my relentless up-and-down approach to swimming failed to move them as the doggedly ignored the obvious inclement weather and stayed there as if defying the end of summer.  It comes, my dears!  You can no more hold it back with your reeking breath than you can get me back into a classroom!

September looms in the very near distance and with it the culling of the juvenile population of the area.  We retired people cannot wait for the shops and streets be returned to the people who have bloody well paid for them.  The penetrating voices of the little emperors will be consigned to the classes where my ex-colleagues will have to do what they can with kids who have been solidly and relentlessly indulged for the last two months.  God help them and god bless them.  The teachers I mean!

The last OU essay of this course drags on and it is now about half way through the drafting stage.  I have decided to change the title to suit myself and write as if there is no word limit as I know what I want to say and I also know that I am very good at editing – when I have to.

I am ashamed to admit (which, of course, I am anything but) that I have bought another watch.  It is a long time since I have been struck by a timepiece – and that, surely is justification alone for buying it.

This one is by the well-known watch designer Kenneth Cole of New York.  Yes, and neither had I until this afternoon.  Anyway, it is brown metallic with a face which looks as though the watch is set in a disk of glass with only the central circle of the watch face of solid colour and with the numeral indicators radiating like spokes encased in glass bound by the metal rim.  And it is luminous and waterproof.  Elegant and original – though a little more expensive than an impulse buy should be.  So sue me!

Like a plague carrier Paul B. breathed the words “Candy Crush” into my shell-like before he left and, like a fool, I explored a little and have now become addicted to a game which plays on one’s desire to cheat and actually offers “help” but at a price in real money to allow the inexpert player to bend the rules and have a little extra to get to the next level.  The game is of generally mindless imbecility, the graphics are of Captain Pugwash sophistication and there is no reward.  What more can you ask!  I have even neglected my beloved patience.

One of the fiendish elements in “Candy Crush” is that you are only allowed a certain number of lives before the game stops you while offering the opportunity to buy (with real money) a full set of lives or to go on line and ask friends for lives.  I am not quite sure about that because it asks for you to do so on Facebook – a social media I spurn as I would a rabid dog.  After a certain number of minutes the lives are restored, but they are restored one by one and over hours.  I can well imagine a person thinking that eighty-nine pence a small price to ask for the ability to continue to indulge an addiction!  I, however, am made of sterner stuff.

Tomorrow a tutorial with the dreaded Elluminate (if it works) and a draft to finish so that I have time to tart it up with accurate references and construct a bibliography to impress.

Then revision starts leading up to the examination on the 10^th of October.  This time I am not going to be able to rely on well-established personal knowledge and I am going to have to do a certain amount of hard learning.