The gods of Birthday Week have been really kind. I celebrated the fairly nothing birthday of 48 in the style I wanted to, I have had gifts fairly lavished upon me and I while I have had so much work to do that meeting people for coffee has had to be put off, I've got a few of those lined up for next week, so we go from birthday week to birthday fortnight, just like that, in the merest, merest blink of an eye. A terrible beauty is born! 48 is really OK. I am middle-aged but I don't feel it, except in the sense of carrying the heavy and invisible burden of detailed knowledge about things that existed and happened five decades ago. Late at night on the evening of my actual birthday I made a $10 ebay purchase of a book my parents gave me 38 years ago which I lavished deep attention on. It's mildly MR James-ish creepy folktales illustrated by Jan Pienkowski who is best remembered for Meg and Mog but also did a wonderful line (literally) in Arthur Rackhamesque illustrations updated for the 60s and 70s, which appeared in children's novels of the kind I had a bottomless appetite for - spooky adventure stories, Neolithic SF, time travel, supernatural victoriana. I'm looking forward to getting it in the mail.
In an hour my department will have our regular Zoom friday afternoon tea and quiz. It might be the last, I understand. I hear from people who work elsewhere that the return to their workplaces is still shrouded in the mists of totally off the table for now and cant even begin to imagine it; when I was at work yesterday, to do things I can't do at home then leave immediately, I got the distinct but still puzzling impression that I'm expected to be going in there for substantial amounts of time irrespective of whether or not I really need to. I'm just going to wait till I'm actually explicitly told, Go To Work Now. Meanwhile afternoon tea today will feature the delivery to me by email of a homemade birthday card decorated with a picture the team has decided is a fair representation of my interests (can't wait to see THAT of course) and also a quiz, not the standard Age trivia but a custom one somebody's googled, again, chosen specifically to embody my workplace official interests. This year I think we've had hamsters, art, WWII (sigh), food. I'm a bit worried it might be a too-esoterically hard Jane Austen quiz and all my whining that the Age quizzes don't have any questions about Jane Austen will come back to bite me. The natural and unabating joyousness of a work-from-home festival of Laura's Birthday is likely to have something of a pall cast on it by the fact that the first thing we'll do in that call is start a discussion about the Brereton Report. I still don't know what I think its implications are for us. I've booked myself in for the amazing service provided for free by The Ethics Centre, a phone conversation with a counsellor experienced in teaching others frameworks for ethical decision-making. If it's useful personally I might suggest we get someone in to workshop the problems with us as a group. Chatham House rules.
Pompey is flopped on the balcony playing with his fluorescent yellow toy mouse, and I have been stroking Chanticleer, beside me on the couch, so assiduously that the side chops of fluff on his head are all smoothed and sleekly flattened, with the result that he has acquired the ephemeral appearance of being a normal-looking cat. It's uncanny!
1 comment:
Happy birthday Laura! We were celebrating daughter's birthday on the 4th because she was too busy around the 24th of November when her birthday is. She has just about finished her first year as a fully fledged teacher teaching year 7s, 11s and 12s at Balwyn High. She is a really gun sewer these days, nearly in your league I reckon :) Glad your birthday was a good one.
Post a Comment