No more eggs or yoghurts, please.

Hello. Remember me? Jesus. That was a bit of a mental week and a half.

Tonight I left work 'early' - quarter to six - after arriving 'late'. That'd be quarter past seven. I've been doing similar for the last week. Then arriving home, eating a spartan/weird tea of oatcakes/blue cheese/Twirl Bites (Bedders has been away, hence any kind of food-regularity has gone out of the window) and marking like a machine. 

I've been begging Di, HR Manager and Queen Of The School (I Heart Di) for an hour's cover here and there for my non-exam classes (which amount to the princely sum of two hours a week) to sort out a myriad of issues it'd be wholly unprofessional to go into on here.

essays

I've been gritting my teeth a lot, ignoring bellyaches and having Actual Dreams About Controlled Assessment. Scratch that - Nightmares. Oh dear.

But hey. Stuff is sorted. Ish.

All that, and I've rented out my house in Leeds, been to Newcastle, saw Don Williams (his voice is a total parody of a country singer's - like honey and cigarette smoke - "Sing it again, that's real purdy..."), been to Manchester to meet up with Richard and company (farmer by day, wedding chauffer by night), eaten a really, really bad Chinese and got a BUS back to Leeds instead of the train - I almost wept - had a medical for my new job (fighting fit, huzzah) and fretting about my total lack of inclination to go running. But tonight, though, I welcomed back some normality.

Hello, normal life. I've missed you.

I've been for a slightly better run. I've voted. OK, so I don't do it every day but it still makes me feel like me. I've read (yesterday's) paper and a bit of Private Eye. I've embraced my seventeen year old by spotifying some Skunk Anansie after hearing it on my new radio station of choice, Absolute90s ("She's a LESBIAN, you know," I remember people saying knowingly at school. Oh, the scandal). 

And Bedders if off to Brussels on Sunday while I see out the rest of the school year. Yikes.

I think I'm a bit fraught; I think he is too. I got upset over his note for the milkman this morning.

"Could you change the order to one pint of skimmed Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday? No more eggs or yoghurts, please."

A bloody note for the bloody milkman. Sob.

Anyway, I'm blethering. I was thinking about literary references to missing someone. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop. 

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Ah, Bisto. Heavenly. I dug out my old lecture book to find the notes that accompanied it. Oo, Elizabeth Bishop - "sceptical and stoic" - "language increasingly restrained and emotional intensity behind it intensifies" - "Influenced by surrealism in Paris, but didn't succumb entirely to the dream world - too much of a New England Yankee-woman for that!" - "Philsophy in Bishop's writing ISN'T metaphysical - if it exists, it's empirical". You, like, learn stuff at University, don't you? And have time to think about stuff, hmm? I kind of wish I had hours to go through all of my old notes. Maybe I will. Maybe that'll be a Bedders-is-in-Brussels-and-I-live-on-my-own project. Along with making that wedding album, writing some stuff down, doing an online course on the iGCSE and IB and emptying the house of all my possessions...why aye. Not a bother.

I shall cheer up soon. I promise.