Over zealous bonking and the problems it causes. (Plus the best 12th Night ever!)

Monday September 22^nd.

Up with the larks as usual and now in the dark for the first time really. I walked Callie and then Laura and I went swimming. Much as I love the pool it isn’t Warnbro’s Aqua Jetty, that is for sure. In fact for a relatively modern building it is a bit scruffy in places. We did our usual 100 lengths and then zoomed home for breakfast. We hit Uni at about 8.45 and went our separate ways. I had a pile of post and papers waiting in my broom cupboard office, one of which was a request to go and see the H of D later on in the afternoon. Gulp.

Using the Uni-net I e-mailed my personal tutees to invite them for their first meetings during the week and then looked over the rest of my stuff. There were lists of the tutorials I had said I could give and times that I will be giving them. I don’t seem to have any lectures but I guess they must be using the resources they have in a way that gets maximum return and they know I will be able to cope with tutorials. I have worked out that I can probably spend three afternoons at XXX & Y this year, which will please Mrs Briggs.

They have changed the key codes to some of the offices and resource areas, which is a bit mad. Change the codes and then send a note to everyone with the new codes on! That hardly seems secure to me! I am just a very tiny cog in a large machine so I will keep my head down and mouth shut. (This is hard for me to do, but I will manage. I managed last year with no problems.)

I found a list of my new personal tutees for this year, nine of them. All women apart from two, wonder what happened to balancing the gender mix in things? I e-mailed all of those too and invited them to a group meeting next week and then we can do individual meets after that initial get to know you session.

My supervisor won’t be around until late October, so I have been instructed to carry on as we have been doing especially with the palimpsests. She didn’t give a reason why. I suppose I don’t warrant one, being the small cog.

There was also a letter from Felice! A letter! That is most unusual. She’s also going to be late back as she is doing something with the Undergraduates who have found placements in France for the year. I think she is visiting some of them as part of her work in the French Department. She also extolled the virtues of a guy called Alain, who she had met and slept with, but then it went a bit mad, as she thought she was pregnant by him. They had a huge row, split up and then she discovered she wasn’t pregnant after all. How can you fit all this into 9 week’s vacation? Her letter is the distillation of her love affair in four sides of paper. Maybe she wrote it down as an act of catharsis? She certainly seems to be over him now. (I thought I used to be promiscuous!)

Met up with Laura and Mandy for lunch. She e-mailed me almost immediately back and was gushing about being back and what she’d done on her vacation and how she was single again but happy. (Is this a trait I am witnessing?) Laura turned up with Marie, one of the students from her Maths course who had also been dumped over the summer vacation! She was a mixture of down in the dumps but full of enthusiasm. I couldn’t help but smile at the human emotions on display so far this morning and it was only 12.30!

My meeting with H of D was pretty much as expected. He appears all vague and wishy-washy but he is very incisive and cuts to the chase immediately. The Department (he loves the passive voice, though) is very pleased to have me on board in a teaching capacity as well as a Research one and it has been following our progress with interest. It thinks our use of the science bods to help locate the palimpsests was a very clever idea and is sorry that what we have uncovered so far doesn’t seem to be anything near as interesting as the Paston Letters. I was told getting myself familiar with that particular cache would be a useful thing to do, especially in light of my tutorial commitments and putting together a detailed description and analysis of the work done by the science bods could be very useful too. I think this was the longest meeting I have had with him since I began my Master’s three years ago, when we talked about my ambitions and how he liked having Cantabrians in the department.

I tidied up about four o’clock and found a slim blonde woman waiting for me as I was trying to fit a quart into my pint pot office.

We whizzed up to XXX & Y and went to see Mrs B. She was delighted that I had managed to get three afternoons free so we sorted out the times and the details of all that. She then said that she could offer Laura a full day and a half in Repro if Laura was available too. She has studied her timetable and was able to fit in exactly with my three afternoons (Monday, Wednesday and Thursday). We were both told that we could add to our hours during the vacations, like I had done so in the past if we wished; I simply had to OK it with her, Laura with her line manager in Repro. We could take our extra hours as salary or as time off in lieu; again that was negotiable at the time, we didn’t have to make a decision straight away.

After our meal we wandered down to Dom’s where Laura was greeted like a long lost relative and then we began the gritty negotiation of hours. She is going to cut down her hours at the restaurant because of the job offer with me. She’ll do Tuesdays and Thursdays and will also do any Saturday we aren’t away in Cumbria or Arran (or where ever). Dom seemed pleased and disappointed. She gets lots of tips from the customers and is well liked by the rest of the staff but she has decided that working at XXX & Y and waitressing and studying in what will be her finals year needs a better balance. Dominic understood entirely. Which was good.

Back home we sat and chatted about what she was going to do after her finals. She is still undecided but her Maths tutor is seriously of the opinion she should do a Masters if she gets the results in her finals. She is not sure and wonders if she ought to start to enter the workplace somehow. She has booked herself a preliminary meeting with the careers service at the Uni for later in the week.

I told her she could have a career as my permanent lover if she liked. She said she would have to sample the good first. So we did; across our sofa in the lounge and again in the shower after I had taken Callie for her last walk.

Tuesday Sept 23^rd.

Routines are what make life easy except when Callie goes rabbit chasing on your routine walk. She hasn’t done this before and was a real nuisance. She did come back immediately but you could almost see her thinking, “Why haven’t you shot it, Mum?” I am taking her picking up this weekend at Wentworth so she had better not disgrace me then!

Sarah, at the pool, is all ready for Thursday’s Quiz and meal at the pub. The Scampis only turned out once over the summer so we will have to head round there and defend our reputation. Laura will be coming too but she says she’s only going to be the team mascot as her brain is full of wool unless there are maths questions. We will be fielding two teams again this week.

University life is already back to normal after being there only one day. I used the morning to meet and greet my new 2^nd years as they must now be called. They were all enthused with the joys of the new term and raring (in varying degrees of enthusiasm) to go. Half an hour each obviously over ran a little bit and I had to complete my last two after lunch. They were quite happy with that arrangement.

Laura lunched with Marie again today and I went to a working lunch thing with the faculty, which was a different event. They didn’t do this last year (or if they did I wasn’t invited). It was a good way to see exactly who was who in the huge department we have here.

I took a first look at the casket and contents again this afternoon and did a count of all the papers we’d found and how many we had actually dealt with. There was still a good three quarters of them waiting to be examined. The task may stretch beyond three years.

We drove back to home and after the meal Loll got ready for her first night back at the restaurant and I Skyped lots of people whom I owed a letter or e-mail. Gran has now got the system and I was able to interrupt her sewing coven for a gossip. One of them asked me to show them my little house so I took the tablet from room to room acting like a room guide for the National Trust! They seemed to like what they saw. They thought it was sweet that I had photographs of the family (including Gran) in frames on the shelves in the lounge. Showed them the newest one, baby Sophie, which got Gran berating her grandson for not having got round to sending her one yet. I had to explain (and save his sorry ass) that I had taken that picture and had it framed myself.

Laura had a surprise waiting outside the restaurant… Me. I had driven down to collect her and we sat in the car back on the front garden and talked about her working at XXX & Y. She is really looking forward to it but is a bit upset she is leaving Dominic short staffed. I told her he had managed throughout the summer well enough, so he couldn’t be too short staffed. She’d not thought of that.

We both walked Callie on the shorter walk tonight and then splashed about in the shower again afterwards. Loll said she thought she needed another sample of the goods again when we tumbled into bed, so we messed up the sheets and got ourselves all sweaty again.

Wednesday September 24^th.

12^th Night; Crucible Theatre.

One word, Brilliant.

I have seen this a few times in my short life. Laura was a first-timer and what a show for your first time. Even Mum, ex-Head Of English, said it was the best production of it she has seen.

It was the Feste who made the difference, he even had a piano to accompany the songs, which he played himself! Often they can be the weak point of a production being fey or wishy-washy, these actually added to the performance, probably in a way that Waggledagger had originally intended. (Although without a piano!)

Laura thought the girl/boy crossing dressing theme was handled really well and said it spoke volumes for Shakespeare’s attitude to homosexuality (I think she may have brought her own agenda to the criticism).

The Malvolio’s come-uppance was doing really well, in that although he is a prat of the first order you did feel sympathy for the poor man and wonder at Maria and the rests’ wickedness in their plotting!

As you can probably tell, I loved it. It is so good we may come and see it again. I certainly going to sing its praises about the town. It goes on tour after its preview here so the rest of the UK will get a chance to marvel at its delights too.

The rest of the day was swimmingly good. We started our work at XXX & Y at 1pm as our Uni lunches start at 12, this means our hours will be even more than we had arranged and when we turned up at the appointed hour Mrs B was surprised and pleased and just told us to log our time as usual with Elaine and that if we worked until 6pm we’d add a fifth more time to our week just with those three hours extra.

Being in different departments means when working here it is sort of like at Uni where we meet and part and meet and part but at least here we are in the same building and have more chance for contact. I round-robined the Quiz team(s) to make sure we were all OK and fired up for tomorrow night.

Back home we had our meal and then quizzed each other for a while with a couple of the quiz books from my shelves to get our minds in gear for tomorrow. This could  have been a mistake as, while I swept through the questions Laura asked me getting only one wrong out of fifty, Laura gave up when she got her tenth wrong answer and her eyes started to fill. I tried to comfort her but she was a bit upset and blubbery and said she was stupid and I had always been much cleverer than she was. This led her to say that she thought she must be a burden to me, not having been to the theatre or classical concerts before she and I were a couple. She must be dragging me down and I would surely think her intellectually my inferior. Oh Shit!

How do you counter an argument like that?

I think I got her to see that I went to those things because I always had done, even as a child, so it was second nature to me and part of what made up my life and behaviour. Just because she hadn’t didn’t mean I thought she was dumb or anything, in fact it gave me so much pleasure being able to take her to see things together. I got a thrill out of the fact she was seeing most of the things with fresh unjaundiced eyes, for the first time. I sort of wished when we went to a show I could go with the same awe and wonder that she had. I tended to be the cynical old fart who compares what she has seen with what has gone before and tries to give it a value judgement based on that comparison. That has to be the wrong way to do it.

I got her to stop crying and just held her for what seemed like ages. Eventually I said, we are different, that’s all. You are so much cleverer than me in many things. I turned to the Maths and sciences pages in the quiz book and asked her to ask me some of those. She did and I honestly got half wrong, not because I was pretending to make her feel better, but because I genuinely didn’t know. I dropped Maths after GCSE and Physics because I didn’t find them interesting and they were hard work.

I think I got her to see that we complemented each other like two halves of one person, what I was good at she didn’t need to be and what she was good at I didn’t need to be. Plus, more importantly than all that, I loved her because of who she was, sweet, gorgeous, funny, clever and caring Laura. Not a Victoria clone but a woman who could be as sharp witted and spiky as I could; who found pleasure in sharing activities with me; who could astound me with her mathematical ability and make my jaw drop with her looks and figure (and unbridled sexuality).

I got her to see that she was putting herself down if she thought I was the superior one and she was the inferior. I mean, what sort of superior creature lets any old Tom, Dick or Harry fuck her when she was drunk, for example? That didn’t show any intelligence; it showed an unbelievable level of stupidity.

She came round to my way of thinking and I got her to smile again. She asked how drunk I was at the moment. I said I was sober. She thought this was a pity as she really wanted to fuck me, to give the climax to beat all climaxes. I had to remind her we were off to the theatre and needed to get a shift on.

I promised we would continue where we had left off after the play. I’ve mentioned the play already. After the play Mum went off to Holmesfield and we rushed back to my little house for the climax to beat all climaxes.

Thursday September 25^th.

The only snag with a climax to beat all climaxes is they can leave you a little sore. I had to be extra careful drying myself after swimming this morning. Back home Laura loving applied some talc to my delicate area and that led to more of the same from last night. She decided fingers might just exacerbate the situation so she used her tongue instead. Naturally I had to repay the favour and we were almost late for Uni.

XXX & Y this afternoon saw a bit of banter emerge between the two factions of The Scampi Tails who’d be quizzing tonight with our second string claiming they were going to win. They bloody did too! The beat us by one point. One measley point.

We still were 1 and 2 in the quiz, much to the disappointment of the other teams who thought they might have seen the last of us when we missed the last two monthly quizzes. Laura was quite cheered by the whole thing and was able to hold her own with us all and was the hopeless case she claimed she’d be. I told her there was more inside her head than she realised and the secret to success was having speedy recall.

The next monthly girly meal is set for two weeks on Wednesday, which should be fun. Loll and I have missed the last two of these as well. It will be at Sandi’s place. She always does something quite unusual so we can’t wait. As we all trooped out of the pub after the evening Chrissie asked if I was OK, I seemed to be walking awkwardly, Laura giggled at the reference but I just laughed it off saying I had been overdoing the pelvic floor exercises.

Callie was surprised by being shooed out into the back paddock instead of a full proper walk but she performed anyway. I had to restrain my energetic young siren from inflicting further damage to my labial regions instead I administered a serious amount of attention to hers instead.