Trying to look on the bright side

Thursday seems to be my blogging evening, since I don’t have any classes on Friday mornings and therefore have no urgent marking to do the night before. Though I do have the girlies at lunch time… but actually they’re beginning to grow on me. Last week they actually asked for more punctuation lessons; well, that’s an easy request.

Life is rather stressful at the moment and I’m not quite sure what to worry about first. There’s the Daughter 1 problem – she’s between jobs, or at least she’s temping as a secretary, but hasn’t got another archivist contract yet. And then her husband is always liable to be depressed if things go wrong, or indeed often if they don’t. Daughter 2’s aspiring-actor boyfriend is another great source of anxiety. I don’t know whether to hope that he makes it as an actor, in which case he’ll undoubtedly spirit her off down to London, or that he doesn’t, in which case he’ll be disappointed. I don’t imagine that he actually will make it, because most don’t seem to. But how long will it take him to accept this? And Daughter 2 isn’t terribly well in a sort of undefined way: tired, pale, occasionally dizzy. She’s been to the doctor and had all sorts of tests, all negative, so I suppose she’s maybe just stressed too.

And now my dad’s in hospital. He’s 86 and ill in various ways, such as having a lot of sarcomas – tumours of the muscle and such like – and arthritis, and he’s deaf and very grumpy and getting a bit confused. On Sunday evening at 8, he suddenly couldn’t get up out of his chair in the kitchen. We just couldn’t get him moved because it caused him so much pain, and – to cut a long story short – we eventually persuaded the health service to send an ambulance, and my son and I accompanied him to hospital, where he was finally admitted to a ward at about 3.30 am. He’s had various tests and these seem to indicate so far that he has a fracture of the pelvis. And it seems possible that this is a result of the cancer. Meanwhile my mum, who’s 84 and not in fantastic health, though much more able to get around and much better-tempered, is worrying about how she’ll cope if they send him home. Sigh.

And today some bright spark in our marketing department decided to hand out helium balloons with the college name on them to the students. Well, what would you do with a free helium balloon if you were 18? That’s right. I had lots of students having enormous fun talking in cartoon voices right outside the windows of the room I was trying to teach in.

Okay, yes, it was quite funny.

And it’s lovely weather for autumn and there’s still lots of colour in the garden. So life's not all bad.