Did I get everything done? I never got round to making that list, so I don’t know. Registration starts at 12, so if I aim to leave home about 10, I should have ample time. Does that mean there is no lunch provided? I had better check the programme. It’s not the sort of place that does casual buffets; proper, two course sit down lunches with waitresses (though they’re probably called something like ‘servers’, I suspect). Long wooden tables in the centre of the hall, long benches which are tricky to negotiate in skirts, unless you sit at the end. Gothic arched windows – Victorian gothic, it’s fun to tease the Americans and Australians who get terribly breathless and starry eyed about the ‘sense of history’, and when you point out that it’s not really old, just a 150-year old pastiche, they don’t seem to get the point. ‘Hey’, I tell them, ‘my house is older than this - older than your countries!’ No sense of chronological perspective, these people.
Oh, and only one ladies’ loo. After all, what are women doing in a place of learning?
And on Saturday and Sunday, University of Wolverhampton, Telford campus. That should be an interesting contrast. Bet the ladies’ loos are spot on.
What else to say this morning? Nothing much that’s suitable for general consumption. Finally sent out the agenda and finance report for next Monday’s PC meeting at 9:30 last night. I hope they appreciate my efforts. But if I could focus more in the daytime when I should be getting on with my work, and didn’t spend so much time off on my flights of fancy, I wouldn’t have to work in the evenings. When Hubby works from home, he manages to maintain a clear distinction between work and non-work, a clear boundary.
I didn’t say goodbye to him this morning. I hovered around the breakfast table, told him, I’ll be back on Sunday evening, not sure when, I’ll give you a call. He didn’t look up from his breakfast, his paper. I thought, should I go round the table, give him a hug, there as he sits over his Shredded wheat and the Times? Do I want to? Not particularly, in fact, not at all. What should I say? I’d been muttering something inconsequential, about checking the route from Oxford to Telford last night on Multimap, it was as he’d said, M40, M6, M54, so no need to check the route back, because obviously that would be M6 too, and once I’m on the M6 I can find my way home. I forgot to remind him to feed the fish. What else should I say? ‘Bye, then’? But that might make him feel he was required to respond, a brusque ‘Bye’, interrupting his train of thought without requiring him to look up. Or was he secretly longing for me to throw my arms around him, kiss him, tell him I’ll miss him? Well, that would be a lie anyway. Is he distancing himself, just as I have, steeling himself, waiting for the announcement I’m too timid to make? Or is he just too bound up in his own concerns to even notice that something is a little awry with our marriage? Who knows?
Physically he may be there, but metaphorically he is back in the attic.