Week-ending thoughts

Because I submitted 03 so early, as I did with 01 and 2, again I feel I am living through an undetermined piece of no man's land as I wait for the cut off date for the current TMA to pass which will bring my marks through. As with the previous submissions, it's only once I've had time to assess the submission mark and ingest the feedback I'm able to focus properly on the next chapter of the course, in this case Life Writing. Only then will I be able to properly study the new material and the target TMA and, with greater knowledge, formulate a plan for the EMA.

So today after I have blogged, I simply must get the chapter open and start making sense of some of it; the cut off day for 03 isn't until Thursday and I submitted back on the 14th of this month (Valentine's day, don't you know?) These are useful times to be used usefully and should not be wasted.

That said, I was in the city yesterday, and as is my way when I'm feeling a little hard up (all the time) and if I have the time (I try to make time!) I visit the charity shops at the unfashionable part of town and see what books are begging me to buy them. Often this appears a fruitless experience - so many people read those wretched pot-boilers and airport thrillers the likes of which I simply won't give house room. But occasionally, and this is why I don't give up, I have a fiesta of a time - you simply cannot guess how it's going to go.

The day was not going well generally. Our lunch was unsettled as we struggled to get a table in Nandos - then once seated found ourselves within bad-breath proximity of four loud teenager types whose raucous voices and weird over sized kid-like enthusiasms proceeded to drown out our conversation completely, which forced us into a resentful silence as we ate our chicken livers and spicy peas. Not quite what we had in mind. Every so often we found ourselves gurning at each other as if to say: how did this happen? Week-ends are our out catch up time; Saturday lunch always considered something of a treat, and it's never good when that part doesn't go well.

But things improved, and once we'd completed shopping proper, I treated myself to a trundle through the charity shops, leaving the management trawling the likes of Coast and Oasis - which on the face of it sounds like she's interested in geology, rather than a having a life long obsession to buy enough pairs of shoes, boots and skirts to populate the wardrobes of half the women of a small African nation. And scored a good result with some really good life writing books to help me kick start this phase of the course. A travel memoir by Jenny Diski - remember her from the CD. A travel memoir from Laurie Lee - not on the CD as he died back in the mid 1990s and a memoir by P J Kavanagh - who happens to be a poet as well as a journalist and writer of prose. So all boxes nicely ticked, and I'm sort of ready to start.