2013 and 376 with a cheeky appearance from 804

My brother is visiting from Delft. While it is arguable that giving crockery to someone who lives somewhere famous for pottery is a bit mental, I nevertheless popped in to the London Graphics Centre to grab a couple of these cheeky wee espresso cups for him.

The orange is a lot gentler than the orange of the back of my iPhone (No, I still haven’t got my head around the new camera yet. Shut up.) which you can see reflected, but I started with that and then I was swithering about what to match it with.

I enjoyed a lovely conversation with the chap who was working there. He asked if he could help me, and I said that I just needed to stare at the colours for a while. He suggested that this was a nice thing to do, and I told him it wasn’t really, since there was an element of anxiety involved, I wasn’t even sure how many to buy. In the end I chose a green with his help. I was gravitating towards greens I liked, but they didn’t resonate with the eggy custard colour. As it happens, this is a green my brother likes, so that’s NICE.

Although my visit to the shop was brief, my chat with the guy working there covered a remarkable amount of ground. We talked a bit about blogging, and I am aware that I haven’t been blogging much lately, and in fact I have not been writing much at all, which is annoying. I resolved to write something, this, in fact. So here it is.

This time last year I started a journey of trying to support my writing by joining a course. I looked into doing an MA at City, which is only five minutes walk from here. Ten grand. Ten THOUSAND pounds. It’s not even on during the day. Ker CHING.

I have an MA already so don’t ‘need’ an MA, it’s just that I wanted the content and the support. However, the course is very dense and I reckoned I’d be setting myself up to fail, since there wasn’t a part time option. There was an option of taking non certificated courses, taught by the same teachers, and they were considerably cheaper, at £200 odd a term, and added together you could mirror the quantity of hours and it’d come in at a fraction. This, then, became my plan, but I was still a bit worried about my own wellness on an evening course where first of all I have the energy issue, and secondly the trigger issue – evening courses = strip lighting = migraine.

I then discovered there was a community college nearby where the courses are £120 a term, and with concessions, £20. I thought why not do *any* course and see how that went before committing to the bigger bucks. So I did a history course in the autumn term last year, and indeed found myself in trouble with the strip lights, as well as some other things. I did find a subsidised yoga class, so it was mixed news. One rather exciting thing was that there was a writing course there, only held in the summer term, but I looked forward to it all academic year, only to discover that they had no real intention of running it. I have been attempting to get a gaggle of would be students to force the issue. It’s a drag.

Anyway, so I *might* get to go on a course this term or I might not. I don’t feel like I need instruction as such, but I know my own relationship with structure and group, and I know I’d feel supported and encouraged and I’d get some writing done even if I felt ill and even if I was distracted by other things. My illness might not like a deadline, but my inclination as a person does.