An icy crunch has greeted me each morning in the car park by my flat and pale winter sunlight glistening in the frosted fields as I set off for work in the early part of this week. It may only be 1st December today but winter came a few days early. My travels haven't taken me to the lake by my old office for a while but I guess it was partially frozen over.
This week is nearly done. It has been one of wonderment, memories, anxiety, small triumphs and a hesitant I told you so. Wonderment at the beauty of winter nature. Memories of 2012 when on consecutive days I had a job interview elsewhere then did my most high profile mental health crisis management effort in my time at the university. The interview failed despite private links suggesting I should have got it. I've never been offered one since. And it doesn't get much more high profile than the Vice Chancellor's office.
It would be great to suggest I have moved on from that week. But I'm still where I am doing what I can. The little triumphs come most weeks. In this case my talk at the school that I had been so apprehensive of went so well. And such helpful people. As for the I told you so moment, people may criticise my sometimes not overwhelmingly endorsing of everyone I see, but in most cases I am dead right to be wary. For all I do to champion the mentally ill some do too little to help themselves then blame anyone but themselves. Giving advice that may not be what people want to hear does not always equate to being a unsupported as some plead. Usually we learn that lesson to our cost, you have to have been burned many times to be as cynical as I am on occasion.
Yet on this cold Thursday evening I'm home and doing okay. I turned to Offenbach today, a purveyor of more comic opera than some that I listen to. Back at school I played-very badly-in the orchestra for a performance of La Belle Helene. Tonight I'm revisiting this fun work.
As it was pay day I was a little overindulgent and bought some books. I don't need either of E M Forster's A Passage to India nor Ken Hom's Complete Chinese Cookbook but in my profligacy I bought them anyway. Catch you all the weekend.
I Heard a Voice.
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