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It's been such a long time since I posted. I feel like a boxer - thrown against the ropes each day just to stagger back in time to face another. Teaching is such an all-consuming job, keeping people entertained and supplied with suitable handouts all day, every day. And then there's the marking.

The garden blooms on, unseen.

At the end of last session I decided that I would no longer teach an evening class in addition to my full-time job. Somehow I seem to be doing it again. There were no other volunteers. I do get paid extra for it and actually it's my favourite class. The marking is a killer, though. There are 29 people in the class - far too many - and if they all write something in class and also do their homework, that's 58 pieces of work to mark each week, just from this class. When you consider that each piece can take up to 15 minutes - well, it adds up. I just hope some of the students aren't too diligent.

So I teach till 9 o'clock on Tuesdays and I stayed at work on Thursday last week till 9 also, just to try to catch up a bit. And of course I bring work home too. Yes, I know: teaching's a part-time job. Ha.

Daughter 2 went down to London last week to see her actor boyfriend on The Plinth. British people will know about this - one plinth in Trafalgar Square hasn't got a statue on it, and the artist Antony Gormley has invited people to occupy it for one hour each, 24 hours a day for 100 days.

The actor boyfriend applied for, and was allocated, one of these hours. Unfortunately for him it was between 2 and 3 in the morning but astonishingly, about twenty of his friends were there to support him as he sang his own satirical songs and accompanied himself on the ukulele. Daughter 2 supplied the banner and lots of cupcakes for the spectators. I'm torn between thinking the whole thing is ridiculous and telling myself that he's young and this was a bit of an adventure. (And he has nothing much else to do because he's largely unemployed.)

As usual, last weekend was a rush, too. There was the usual dusting and tidying to do. Then Daughter 1 and her husband got home from holiday and came for a meal on Saturday. She turned 30 while they were away (what happened to that 30 years and how am I so old?) and so on Sunday they came for a birthday tea and we had a cake and sang to her.

"It's just as well we cycled over," said Son-in-Law, surveying the 30 candles burning away, "to offset that carbon footprint."

Our son came over again. I think we need to have a crisis or a birthday every weekend to bring him home. (The photo of him arriving is in the wrong order but life's not perfect.)

And then the week began again. Ten classes, each with 20 to 30 students I've never seen before, many of them called Kerry Ann or Carianne or Lee-ann or Lianne or some such confusingly similar name.

I plan to work for two more years. About 375 working days to go. I think that might be manageable.

Just about.

I apologise for any typos here. Normally I type in Word and then copy and paste but Blogger wouldn't paste tonight so, having spent ages doing the photos, I then had to retype it all on to the post. And now I must go and mark and then get up to my mother's house