Half Way Through

Third assignment for 20th Century Literature returned and marked and passed. I gained much satisfaction from studying Poetry of the 1930s and I had promised my Step-Dad that I'd give him my collection of Robin Skelton's Poetry of the Thirties, but now I am keeping it and intend to do some Poetry Reading Out Loud.

I am surprised that I'm still in there with this OU course because my usually ordered life is chaotic at the moment and I'm grabbing isolated days to do intensive study and then having to leave it alone for days and days at a time. I prefer a couple of hours study at a time on a regular basis with space to contemplate. My mind can only absorb so much and I have to go back to the beginning every time rather than pick things up where I left off.

The fourth assignment is a four thousand word essay on Virginia Woolf's Orlando and her Modernism, Feminism and other -isms. I swotted all day yesterday, didn't make one single note and won't be free to get back to it for a week. There have been many essays with limits of two thousand words and I've wished there'd been more, but for this one I wish we had less.

The weekend was good. But since national newspapers have been renaming my town Notting Hill On Sea its impossible to get a table for a meal in either of our two Trendy Eating Places as they are full of Trendy People From Cities wearing Boden and Oasis. So Saturday night four of us trawled around for food and ended up eating in one of our eight Ethnic Eating Places instead.

We did two lunchtime bike rides into the countryside and even had problems parking our bikes in pub car parks because the monster 4x4s and horses took up all the spaces. This is great for our local economy but not so good if you live here and patronise these places all year round only to be firmly turned away - and not politely either. On Saturday evening we asked to sit in the courtyard at the first Trendy Eating Place and order at once (this was at seven o'clock)

'No! We have sixty bookings'.

'But nobody's here yet. We can order now before the bookings start coming in'.

'No. We're not taking any more bookings'.

There was no sign of the owner. This was a young Front Of House person we'd never seen before. I wonder if the owner would have turned us away and cash in his till?

You'll want us and our pennies on a miserable Tuesday evening in February. A wet Monday lunchtime in November.