It's a terrible thing to wish a week away but staring down two full days of nannying, an all day group tutorial, a new job and two nights at the bar and realising diddly squat was going to be accomplished on the research front, well I really had no other option. Because I'm still resisting my former ways of chocolate as a coping mechanism.
Lying here and relishing every minute of Saturday nothingness I'm struggling even to, well, to figure out how to finish this sentence. (It was harder than it looked). I think El Bulli has frazzled my ways of thinking - that and the Please Don't Eat Your Way Through ANOTHER Dissertation pledge - has left me with nothing but slightly obscure food analogies to describe my current state of being. Point in case: if I had to be any type of food right now it would be a bloody big bucket of neopolitan ice cream - in flavours of exhausted, tired and in need of more sleep.
Monday and Tuesday I made the trek from Nappy Valley (aka Clapham Junction, Home to Many Prams and now also Home to LB) to nanny valley in Barnes, for two days of alphabetti soup and cucumber sandwich action with my three little Australian charges. Really such lovely kids but the constant attendance to screaming matches, lunch predilections and lectures from seven year olds about the etiquette of wearing rings on the wrong fingers (don't ask), well, it made the British Library last week feel like a visit to the funfair.
Wednesday was a group tutorial at school to discuss research developments, chapter structure, problems and ideas. A long day and not entirely pointless, it was reassuring to realise I'm on track and that my theories have some intellectual traction. But honestly, when you spend most of the two hours working on the presentation nutting out the semantics of the bloody title, you know you have issues. What kind I'm not entirely sure, just issues. Thankfully there's a loose sort of formula to the whole title situation and it usually reads something like this:
Title = Pretentious Grand But Brief Statement + Semi-Colon + Pretentious Convulted And Appropriately Vague-Meets-Intellectually Curious Extented Treatise.
In my experience it's all about the semi-colon: seriously.
Anyway, so that was Wednesday, which lead to a brief bout of brain fry that was thankfully ameliorated by the collection of a new handbag. It is a deeply superficial thing to love an inanimate object but I do and I am and I don't care so there. Sigh. Wednesday night I had dinner with LB and some of his lovely Kiwi mates. I don't often make the pilgrimage to zone 3 but for great Nepalese food, good company and a big fat glass of wine I'll gladly don an "I ♥ Balham" t-shirt.
And then it was Thursday. Thanks to my internship, several weeks ago I was offered a PAID working gig - miracles do happen I know - working not for the art consultancy but for the bespoke furniture company that is run by my internship boss's boyfriend. She's lovely, he's lovely and it's a great little company that is relocating from Ireland to here in London. Glorified admin and cash-in-hand but a once-weekly excuse to visit Notting Hill and a great opportunity to discover the ins and outs of all things design in London. It could definately be worse. And then that night, and again last night, I was working back behind the bar at the theatre. It was offensively quiet which meant I got to do all the crosswords in the newspapers and then work on my spider solitaire high score. Perfect.
Discovering card games on the computer at work was the day my life changed for the better. I love my mac (see previous point about being deeply superficial) but the only game it has on it is chess. And screw learning chess. Yes, I know I could probably just download card games from the internet - or better yet ask LB aka IT Support Guru to do it for me but the truth is I'm secretly relieved that mac has saved me from myself because I know I don't have the self-control to work on my dissertation when I could be playing free cell. That's what my paying bar job is for.
Which brings me to today. (Yesterday day was about the supermarket and the vacuuming and some ironing and a princess nap before work. That was enough.) Anyway, LB and I are off to explore Primrose Hill this afternoon and then, after watching Arsenal play Some Other Team at the pub, we're off to a play in Shepherd's Bush. So a well-rounded afternoon of activities lies ahead.
Tomorrow or Monday I will endeavour to write and reflect, finally, on El Bulli - if only to arrest the awful food analogies that keep peppering (see, again!) my waking thoughts. Every time I've sat down in the past 10 days to contemplate writing about it I've realised it's 11pm and I've just eaten a bowl of Special K for dinner and for some, unusual, reason that just feels sacrilegious.
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