Phew! Remind me...

My classmates and tutors, just before we left Antarctica. I looked at the stats a moment ago and have 0 followers. I suppose that's good really... well, I don't know what to make of it! I guess it means I can write what I like.

Here is one thing I want to remember:

Three of us were ladies of a certain age and we had one tutor who has never been heard to say anything negative or disparaging. We three were sitting in a Hagglunds eating chocolate and he climbed in to drive us to wherever we were going just then. "Wonderful!" He said, "Chicks and chocolate! What more could a man want?!"

I'm practising the positive slant - quietly, you understand. No Pollyannas here...

Yes, please remind me, little blog, how AWFUL it has been writing to deadlines, trying to be scrupulous with references, reading to order, skimming precious books to find things out, wrecking the natural process of curiosity...

DON'T LET ME DO IT AGAIN!!!

What's the positive spin on that? I've found out what I disliked about science, that I'd forgotten in the time since 1967, which was when I last had to do any. Well, maybe not what I dislike about it, but the fact that I do dislike it and am not at all interested in pursuing science as it is currently set up.

Just as, when I did my Music 'O' level, I could barely listen to Bach's E major violin concerto for a few years - like my God-daughter slamming down the shutter of the aeroplane window in disgust at the sight of an oxbow lake - it will be a while before I can hear of the 'convergence', where the Southern Ocean sweeps round the bottoms of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans... or of the individual beauty of snowflakes. Ho hum. I like the stories. I just can't stand what people insist on as rigour. Rigor Mortis maybe; the dead hand of categorisation, the coffin-lid nailing-down of academic discourse.

Pah! The sticky mesh of it as it grabs at my ankles!  Let them not...

More positive, indeed, is that I return to Louis Macneice. Most positive, now, let me not forget that I have played my violin in the Discovery Hut AND in the Canterbury Museum. On both occasions I had wonderful people with me, encouraging, warm, willing to let me go where I was taken... long, long term ambitions were fulfilled. Completion, satisfaction, communication took place...

What more could a girl possibly want?!