Monthly Archives: November 2013

19/11: Tick

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NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

First formal presentation – all five minutes of it, in front of senior mentor, current mentor and two course members not from my group – checked off the list. I thought I’d plunge into a tall glass of v&t when I got home but in fact I decided to bury myself in Christmas gift wrapping. Mad: I’d usually be doing this about a month from now, with the carols going and the mulled wine mulling, but it’s my absolute favourite and most comforting thing to do each year and it just seemed like a nice way of wrapping myself up in a bit of cosiness. A virtual “PHEW”.

So, back to the red robins and gift tags. In mid-November. With the air con blowing. Funny things it’s making me do, this course.

15/11: TBM

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NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

Singapore loves its acronyms. Today I’m reminded of one of my favourites.

On my Fine Art college degree at Humberside Polytechnic (probably now called something like Hull University) there was a course known as ‘TBM,’ or Time-Based Media, something that I think is still studied today. No one really knew what it was but from our relaxed seats in the college canteen it seemed to be to do with cameras, lights, fiddly bits of kit and dark rooms, and was studied by earnest and slightly angry young men wearing corduroy trousers and goatees all darting about in an intellectual rush, unable to stop and have a cuppa with us because their subject was obviously far more superior than ours. So we came up with another phrase to match the course acronym: ‘Too Busy, Mate’.

Now I find myself back at college and, thanks to a proposal due in on Sunday at 5pm, I’m a little bit TBM myself, today…

13/11: Lunch lessons

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NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

SmallMonkey gets off the bus in tears:

‘I’ve been borrowing money,’ he confesses, ‘because I’m so hungry. There’s a note in the book.’

If you know SM then you’ll know how this could tug at a person’s heartstrings: you can play the piano on his ribs. His food fads are legendary and clearly come from the maternal side (although my waistline sadly shows how I’ve fast got over all that). He’s already been banned from buying snacks in the canteen because this is precisely how his diet ends up: all Oreo, no sandwich. So it’s not a crying matter but still, it’s not really OK.

There is indeed a note in the book, as well as the lunchbox containing one and a half wilting specimens. There has been a class meeting about the proffering of coins and the polite note asks: could we please pay the money back? SM is contrite.

After emptying the pocket money pig, counting out the required cash (it’s not a lot, between you and me, but that’s not the point), drawing up a new lunch menu, sharing a bit of fresh apple and finally talking about how it is the duplicity of the secret canteen-snack habit that is the NotOK thing, I tell him a story:

Mum used to tell me and my sister, with a rather wistful pride, of how she threw her sandwiches in the hedge on the two-mile walk home from school. I’m not saying it’s OK, I tell him: I just want him to know I can see where he gets it from.

12/11: Ghosts

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NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

Depends how I’m feeling. Sometimes they have gone. Sometimes both our mums pop down and pay me a visit. During the run on Sunday, just as I spot the halfway mark and feel a bit smug, Drop The Pilot starts up on my iPod and it is all of a sudden Mum who is cheering me on, not the person on the side with the loudspeaker.

Today at college the lecturer said that his mother ‘…ended up going to live in Ipoh where she attended a Catholic convent school.’

There is only one such school that I can think of; I’ve seen it. It’s the same one Mr PC’s lovely mum went to. An instant prickle behind the eyes. At the end I ask the lecturer what year his mum was there and we are ten years apart but still; it’s a nice little spiritual loop.

I am probably lacking in sleep; whatever. I like these happy visits.