Turning on the Bath tap....

This is my poor mutt at home after our first week at BathSpa University for induction and introductory seminars. I think she is a bit…..err…weary. If I had been a nicer person I would have stolen a baby buggy at Kings Cross, softly popped her in it and pushed her home instead of making her guide me..

Induction..what can I say? A marvellous literal (for me) and literary blur with a requisite tally of confident, young men in glasses and small, glowing, pretty young women in short skirts and biker boots. Others older, cautious, smiling from behind wine glasses, shifting from foot to foot as we orbit slowly around the various beaming lecturers as they hold forth on the course.

There are some lovely people in this crew and obviously some brilliant and talented. They may not be the same people. Life’s like that but I can’t wait to read all of their work!

I did make a couple of serious miscalculations that might well have had me in hospital and it is probably about time I sat myself down and gave myself a good talking to. ‘Tanvir, you are MORE then half blind in daylight and you are COMPLETELY night blind….and I don’t mean cutesy ‘things are a bit washed out’ night blind. I mean ‘bugger if that wasn’t a hippo I just prodded with my cane on the way to the bog’ kind of night blind. ‘ (There are witness to this very comment, that very hippo and the self same bog.)

‘You have to be more careful. You have to think ahead and plan torches and sighted help. Damn your ridiculous pride and recklessness!’

Of course one thinks..ahh..but she has a guide dog. But problem is a guide dog cannot guide in a totally new area without help. She is a dog not a sat nav and neither does she have the light-engulfing pupils of the cat. Plus she is also only 18 months old and fresh out of school but she huffed and puffed and pulled my arm off and still managed to guide me to and from the right seminar rooms after only being shown them once!

We are staying in a remarkably beautiful cottage in a village called Newton St Loe, owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

The view from my boudoir dontchaknow!

We are being hosted by the writer and fellow student JA who has been showing us the maze of campus, taking us out to local pubs and generally spoiling us rotten. She has been essential in our reconnaissance and for that we thank her wholeheartedly!

So now we are home for a couple of days with several tonnes of homework (sodding forgot about the homework...hmm) and a bag and half of washing. Wonder what Grace is dreaming about...? I bet it isn't literary criticism....