Curriculum vitae

Ahoy there fretmarketeers. Have I not been pathetic? Excuses are as follows: I have been sick, and busy, and then busy, and then sick. This term has been a little like a rough transatlantic crossing on a plague ship.

Cage fighting? Sport of wimps. Try caretaking someone having a florid psychotic episode while you're running a high fever and can barely stand. Yes, it's exam term, and because one of my roles is to be on emergency call, I have been called out for oodles of emergencies. I have spent interminable days sitting in small, stuffy rooms void of phones with students who've missed their exams, and I've had early morning phone calls, and late night phone calls, and students who go missing, and students who don't turn up for their exams, but are later found eating breakfast, or fast asleep, or hiding under their desk. It's all too exhausting to relate, really it is. I am very, very tired.

What else? It has rained, it has been shiny, the starlings are still hammering on the inside of their bedroom window boxes and waking me up at 3am; an immature spoonbill has just flown off through the fog at Paxton Pits (my email has just told me) and I just can't keep the bloody house tidy.

There are bad things. One of my dearest friends is deeply unhappy at the moment, which is a special agony, because when all's said and done, you must crawl out of the hole on your own. And of course I'm still soaked in grief for my dad. It feels now as if every cell of my body is resonating with a very deep noise, a kind of dirge in infrasound. And I've realised that this isn't ever going to go away, that this low sound is not a stranger; it's a grief that will grow old with me. Part, now, of who I am. Which settles it. Oh, and all the goshawk eggs died at pip.

But there are good things. Cambridge is impossibly lush, and hot, and green. I have seen my niece bounce about, laughing her head off, on a spacehopper. I'm busy, and I'm working, and am still in a blisteringly good mood from the unexpected way a recent weekend worked out. I even sang in the shower yesterday, which hasn't happened for years. No, of course I can't talk about it here. It's not that kind of blog. And I've just learned, just now, that two of the very nicest people I know may well soon become parents. So: huzzah, bring on the scalextric. I'm already plotting to teach the future small person how to make bows and arrows.