the rest of it

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, mostly because of work commitments (essays to read) but a little because of the works at the house, which have changed some of our routines.  I was thinking this morning, as I walked past the Duke of York's cinema, all boarded up, that I do look forward to some things going back to normal (hopefully) after vaccination is widespread. That's a big thought for me, because my main mode of operation is to try to stay positive in the moment and not spend my time wishing for things that aren't immediately available.  And I was thinking about how that started for me. I've mentioned before that my years in South Africa were the perfect preparation for the pandemic, but I hadn't thought of this aspect. I was so lonely there and so cut off from so many people and things I cared about. (Email was hardly a thing then. Video chats were still science fiction.) A few months in, I decided to keep a list at the back of my journal o...

On Monday they come to start destroying and rebuilding part of our house. It's a bit scary and very inconvenient, but we hope it'll give us a house more like what we hoped to get 9 years ago when house-shopping. We shall see.  I am grateful: That moving into our rented office has gone smoothly. (And it wasn't raining! To Jools for her car and Phil for his driving. For the NHS (ish) diabetes prevention programme. I've now had my last phone meeting with the counsellor and my HbA1c, which I was meant to get below 42, is down to 40. To Allison for a fun package. For the family decision to watch documentaries this week. RBG was Grover's favourite, which made me happy, especially since there was animal competition in My Octopus Teacher .  

Earlier this week, I was faced with the anniversary of my first social-media share of something related to coronavirus. It was a poster by a Chinese students' association in the UK. Faced with the discrimination at the time, the poster makers included the claim that the flu is more deadly than coronavirus. I have now deleted it from my Facebook account. It might be an accurate indication of what people were saying/thinking then, but it's not useful to have it around now. Being back at work is all-consuming. I don't make things easier for myself. I've volunteered to lead on a school project and I'm offering extra tutorials to my students. The first is because the situation for humanities subjects is properly scary now. The second is because it's just plain fulfilling. At the moment I'm teaching Semantics and English in the US, and when students get excited about either of those subjects, I get excited too. And at least some of them are excited. They're a ...