It’s been a very busy week. But one reason for this is that it’s been the last week of teaching; I do not have to stand up in front of students and sound intelligent again until about the 28th September. I need some head-space, so this is a good thing. But then again I do miss them when they’re not around. Here we line up for our ceremonial end-of-term photograph; this little clump is about a fifth of the whole, this time round.
Didn’t a creature looking like this once erupt out of John Hurt’s stomach? The end may be nigh.
Although the photos don’t reflect this I have spent all the working week in Manchester thus far. Today’s fun was one of those events which someone else decided was terribly important. No offence to John, this speaker, who did a good job (and here makes his BIG point) but the detached look on the faces of one or two of my colleagues probably reflected my own, all things considered.
OK, maybe I didn’t take the picture on May Day. But that’s when I’m posting it, so it still seems appropriate. Let’s hope spring is here to stay now.
Went with other family members for my first ever ‘Escape Room’ experience. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, which is fair enough, but here are the preliminaries… To oil rusty brains on a Sunday morning, we were given some toys and puzzles to play with. Not that it helped us escape in the 1-hour time limit. Another fifteen minutes, perhaps.
I guess by now the Rubik’s Cube is a very familiar icon. I did solve it once, you know. At school; I have witnesses. Only once, though. (I knew how to do two-thirds of it; one time, the remaining third just magically fell into place.)
The football season is nearly over. Competitions are being resolved, trophies awarded. I forewent the possible pleasures of a hike today to go and see someone actually win something, in this case the Westmorland Senior Cup (competition 34 of my season), and congratulations to Appleby for taking the trophy with a 3-1 win over Kendal County. Their three dozen rather drunk but enjoyably boisterous travelling fans enjoyed the win just as much as the players did. At this level of football almost every game is a local rivalry: one reason why they’re worth supporting.
The defining feature of the day… and the last couple, to be honest…. rain. Persistent, grey, cold. But what the hell, it’s the weekend.
Always get a window seat… Last possible view of Tromsø after take-off, as a second or two later we were enfolded in the cloud stealing in from bottom right. Farvel indeed… until next time.
At 69ºN, the world’s northernmost city provides boats, sea, birds, snow…. all that jazz. My last day in Tromsø. Hopefully, not the last of all, though as of yet I do not know when I will be back…
One reason I have come back to Tromsø is to make an educational video, and the filming for that took all day. It ended with this alien apparatus hovering a couple of feet from my face, as Mark and Per-Frank look on. I think their intentions were benign. These are weird things, but effective — I’ve seen the rushes…
Being 42 