A mixed week.
On Monday I went on a tour of Bristol’s Georgian House Museum, kindly organised and delivered by a colleague. The tour was excellent, in spite of the low-level sense of peril throughout prompted by the staff warning that if any more than four of us stood in the same room at once the floorboards may collapse.
On Wednesday I spent half the day in a state of medium dampness, having diligently looked up the weather forecast when I woke up to see heavy rain and then stupidly forgotten to do anything sensible about it like packing an umbrella. Whilst running between meetings on campus in that rain I stopped to check on a student who slipped and fell on a metal grate in front of me. She’d hit the ground hard and a little while into talking to me burst into tears. I think she was alright in the end, though it did leave me convinced that the day was a miserable one.
On Saturday we drove to Yeovil to attend a Yeovil Literary Festival event that Soph had been gifted tickets to. I would not say I enjoy driving and this was compounded by the route to Yeovil not being one I’m familiar with but as it turned out the drive was the most successful part of the trip, given the event was in fact taking place on an entirely different day. When I eventually managed to get out of Soph why, whilst we were sat in a coffee shop in Yeovil, she was staring at an email on her phone and shaking her head in horrified silence, we reached an out of court settlement that sees me paid an undisclosed sum (one lunch) in compensation. Still, Yeovil is nice and with the free time we suddenly had to explore we did a bit of shopping and wandering around before heading home, no more cultured than when we left.
Today started out better, given there was no need to drive anywhere for something that wasn’t in fact happening. We went to get some food in our local park around lunch time (shout out to Clarence Park Cafe, who boast a menu you would assume physically impossible to deliver out of a small hut). Unfortunately the afternoon ended up decidedly horrible, when on our walk home we found a cat that had been struck by a car on the side of the road, a two minutes walk from our front door. Having to pick up someone’s beautiful cat, carry them down the road and then drive them to the vet is a pretty shit way to end a weekend. We were supposed to spend the rest of the day working through a long to-do list of tasks but after leaving the vets neither of us wanted to do any of that, so we went somewhere else for a walk instead.
Here’s hoping next week will be better.