quiet desperation

Please can I hibernate?

What with the drama and tension at work in the university that has taken the name of the county of my birth, I lean toward 15th december (our early last day so that the uni can save money on lighting heating and security men and so that according to our vc we can all ‘spend more time with our families’) when I can float off on a haze of sleeping till almost midday, a gentle infusion of alcohol, reading the backlogs of paperbacks on Buddhism and er.. spending more time with my family.

For some reason I have started eating the packets of Japanese food that I bought on a trip to Hong Kong in October. Tonight its my NISSIN RETORT POUCH which my son has just heated up and which is disgusting and which I am about to pour down the sink.

I paid the ultimate price for unsafe sharing

Last night in a corner of a smokey pub in Cambridge a friend and I nuzzled up our Palm Treos together and mine accepted some apparently handy apps. I glanced up nervously, feeling guilty about this liaison in a public space, expecting to be thrown out. Back home, with the night wearing on and a failed hotsync later my trusty Palm was caught in an agonizing loop of starting up and going nowhere, and my pulse was racing. It was my moment of haste in the pub and now my digital life was potentially in ruins. Where was my Unique Tax Reference and my password for my paypall account? What was my son’s telephone number? When is the next research committee meeting? I went to bed in a mood of muted mourning knowing that I had not yet plumbed the depths of the extent of my loss. The extent of my passion for gimicry, gagetry (looking to them to stave off existential boredom) and my love of furtive free things was mirrored in the voiceless horror of my confusion. The story continues….

The last night of the Proms

I looked away, I felt sick. I was watching David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, with typewriters turning into ghastly monsters dripping foul fluid. After the end late tonight, I turned on the radio to blow away the nightmare images and I hear …. Jerusalem. Its the last night of the proms ‘as always the national anthem is the climax of the last night of the proms’, the commentator says. I can’t believe it is over already, with its horns and conductors and stamping of feet. For many years, on and off, I had marked the end of the summer with that last night and this year it just slipped by, I discovered it too late for the spell to work on me.