Wednesday 31st May 2023, 6.55pm (day 4,297)

I wasn’t participating, just documenting. And out celebrating having finished the end of the latest bout of marking.
I wasn’t participating, just documenting. And out celebrating having finished the end of the latest bout of marking.
No comments to add to this one. Just a portrait of a friend.
Another photo of a pack member — in a sense. Mark is one of the colleagues with whom I work most closely. We were recording a podcast this morning, hence the microphone.
This amount of light, sunshine and relative warmth at 5pm are definite signs of spring. The equinox is past us, the nights are only getting longer. Not that Gus looks all that happy about it.
I think I might finally have provoked the students into some independent thinking. They were talking about something, anyway.
This week Clare has also been away, and remains there until the weekend. Back home I did nothing other than work at home and was close to having to put up something lousy on here, until later on, I looked over to the wife’s empty side of the bed and saw Frida Kahlo looking at me. Well, sort of.
It’s not actually the case that I came all the way back to St Helena simply to give a 15-minute presentation at this event, but it did, at least, strongly influence the timing of my visit. So let’s depict it as today’s post. My fellow speaker Pedro was here as a ‘digital nomad’ or ‘anywhere worker’, of the sort that the island would like to attract more of, once the new cable comes on line — an event that seems to have been forever just around the corner, but is apparently due to happen in March.
After booking the second set of flights to and from St Helena, and a couple of airport hotels, the travel budget was well and truly spent: there is literally £5 left of the £5,000 we were granted back in 2021 to do this project. So over the next two weeks I am crashing with these two good individuals, Mr. Gareth Drabble and Moonlight the cat, to whom I must defer. The guitar case is representative of both of them too: Gareth plays. Moonlight sleeps in it sometimes.
It’s the last class of the semester, and the done thing among students now is “get a photo of themselves with the lecturer” at this point. I acknowledge this but it did require leaving at least 20 minutes at the end of the session so the ceremony could take place: what you see here is the queue after at least half of them had already had their time. I was feeling like a cardboard cut-out of myself by this point, although not an unhappy one. Here I said, ‘right, I’m taking a photo of all you lot while you wait to take a photo of me’… and this is the result.
Spent the whole day entertaining some visitors from Norway, so they should feature on the daily post. Johannes ponders his beer, Anita brings more, and Catherine seems happy that her luggage — thought lost in the system — has been found. They and their colleagues reminded me that Norway is a place I have not been to lately, despite it remaining the third-most featured country on this blog (after England and Australia); its last appearance was 26th April 2018, as I departed Tromsø airport for the last time (so far). If I made a good impression today, perhaps I will get an invite back…