Woken by a powerful, disturbing dream, in which I have had to organise some sort of awayday for graduate students, arrive at the venue to unpack everything and take over the room from the previous group punctually at half past six ready for dinner – only for the leader of that group, unmistakeably Prof. Pat Porter of the University of Birmingham, to say “Thanks for the food, Nev, we’ll see you at six thirty tomorrow morning.” I am positive that I haven’t misbooked this session, but there’s nothing I can do; A. is now berating me for letting everyone down – I have no idea what she’s doing here – and so I rush downstairs to catch up with everyone to apologise, and can’t find anyone. The strangest thing is that the logo for the Porter group is a dove of peace, which doesn’t seem very Realist at all…
I can reconstruct elements of this – that is, identify things from the day before that are probably being worked through: meeting about an edited volume, recommending one of Pat’s articles to a student in a consultation yesterday, sense that I’m not actually on top of anything and probably deserve to be shouted at. I feel absolutely dreadful; tired, aching all over, swollen throat, thick head and headache as if I’m thoroughly hung over despite it being several days since I had any alcohol. Very much the symptoms that come out at the moment whenever I get run down, and the obvious explanation is two long, quite hard days at work at the end of a couple of weeks in which I’ve been barely clinging on by my fingernails, getting by on caffeine, cake and adrenalin. And more cake. I can very much empathise with my stressed and exhausted final-year students and their pile-ups of deadlines, and in normal circumstances I would be firing myself up for one final seminar (rescheduled from Friday) without a strong expectation that anyone will actually turn up.
Except that these are not normal circumstances. Shower, shave, hasty breakfast being yelled at by cats who want to go outside in the rain, and then into the car to drive to my parents’ house on the other side of the country… This is one of the times when writing a journal entry to be published in thirty years’ time if ever is an awful lot easier than writing one for immediate public consumption. In the interests of privacy in this culture of obsessive over-exposure, let’s just say that there has been a sudden crisis, and I have to be on hand to keep an eye on my father while A. accompanies my mother elsewhere. At this point in the day, my colleagues are maintaining excellent work/life balance with respect to email hygiene, so I don’t actually have official endorsement for taking a day’s leave of absence; I’ve emailed my students to say that the seminar this morning is cancelled, and I’m trusting that the few who might have turned up on a cold, damp Wednesday in the final week of term in the midst of coursework deadlines probably like me enough to put up with this. It’s not that they need the class for their assessments, and I’ll be happy to give them extra sessions on the reception and influence of Roman political thought next term – and do more baking, as they’ll be missing out on the surplus chocolate & raspberry brownies I made for my Thucydides class.
The drive eastwards on the A303 is as fun as ever; a bit less traffic than usual, compensated for by the sleet (at the end of March!) and extensive puddles. Neither of us is filled with delight at the excursion – three and a bit hours there on a good run, that gets extended because of a road closure that sends us off to experience Guildford’s one-way system. This does produce a new view across the Surrey Hills before we descend into the valley of the River Mole, which compensates for the inevitable argument over styles of navigation – “Stop looking at the map and your phone and help me find the right road” versus “Looking at the map and the phone is how we find the right road”…
Finally reaching our destination, there’s time for a brief family chat before A. heads off with my mother; my father and I have lunch, and the problem of conversation is solved by him wanting to know the background to stories in the press about the crisis of universities; two hours later… My mother had prepared a list of tasks for me, on the basis that I could usefully be put to work, most of which were then rendered impossible by the miserable weather, but we headed off to a garden centre to collect compost and vermiculite. I then set about repairing the porch light, requiring a brief trip into the centre of town to buy a couple of screwdrivers and some screws, as finding anything serviceable in the innumerable boxes and drawers labelled ‘Miscellaneous Bits’ and ‘Stuff?’ was clearly likely to take hours. Cup of tea, chat about my father’s competitive rowing days, which gave me a chance to ask about the prevalence of pewter tankards in pubs in Ye Olden Dayes, given the number he’d accumulated as rowing trophies; I can’t remember why I had wanted to ask about this, but now I feel slightly better informed.
A. and mother return just before six, having had a reasonably positive day. Given the three and a half hours journey ahead of us, I would have been all in favour of setting off immediately, but A. wants to set her up on Instagram so she can view videos of her granddaughter’s (my niece’s) football team. Given that my mother doesn’t remember any of her passwords, may or may not have a working email and can’t get the fingerprint recognition software to recognise her fingerprint (actually thumbprint), and her iPad refuses to contemplate installing the software until it’s been updated, this is a laborious and not entirely successful operation, which we then squabble about for the first twenty minutes of the drive.
Weather and traffic could be worse, and the road is no longer closed, but around Basingstoke the sky to the west is suddenly illuminated by dramatic lightning; the lightning maps website confirms that there’s a band of thunderstorms running from the Dorset coast to just north of Chippenham, right across our path. By the time we get to the area the lightning has cleared, but we hit torrential rain instead, and the final twenty miles are slow and nerve-racking with the start of flooding.
At home, the cats are predictably furious that we’ve been out all day, and are scarcely mollified by a plate of chicken and a new catnip toy (perhaps that realise that it’s just a freebie from my parents’ cat’s cat litter). Despite the late hour and the prospect of the usual 5.30 start tomorrow, we have a drink to wind down. I now have email approval for bunking off, and one email from a student in the cancelled class – and another barrowload of stuff I am going to have to deal with at some point, but not now. It has been a very long day…
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