Department meeting

Isn't it odd how holidays can drive so much from one's brain? Or is it merely a case of the over-stacked shelf that Blipper Sally once helpfully used as a metaphor for the aging memory? Anyway, I'd got up a tad late, having indulged in two parallel online conversations with different people; I'd put a loaf in the machine for lunch; I'd washed up; I'd put on a washing of all the towels in the house. I was away from my phone when Himself appeared with his, saying that I should be in Walker's cafe ...

And it all came back - the arrangement made before our holiday that the living remnants of the English Department in Dunoon Grammar would meet for coffee. I'd been looking forward to it - but it had fallen off the shelf and vanished into limbo. I've never changed clothes so quickly, and Himself dropped me off to avoid the faff of parking in the crowded car park. There were four of us; we'd thought a further two at least would be coming but they hadn't, so there we were: the department I'd joined when I returned to teaching in 1983 after the childbearing years.

In some ways it was as if we were still at some department meeting that had been suspended in some limbo in which no-one had left for promotion. After the first greetings, and the mockery of my inability to remember something, we just ... talked. And at the end, when we dispersed having arranged another date, we noted that we'd not talked about bodily ailments at all; not really talked about the past. It was strange: you'd have thought there were classes waiting for us and we'd pick up the same easy threads at the next interval or whatever. What did we discuss? Cocktails, for one; what we were doing in the immediate future; other cafes in town; the colleagues who were no longer with us. We coerced an unknown chap at the next table into taking a photo because my arm wasn't long enough for a selfie. We all wandered out together - I heard someone who seemed too old to be an FP but probably wasn't say "That's a gang of teachers" - and parted casually in the car park. And the words of one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs came to mind: we are so lightly here; it is in love that we are made, in love we disappear...


The thing about colleagues always was the ease of conversation among people who were coming from the same place, faced the same problems at the same time, who understood why Thursday afternoon was so bad. People who knew each other well enough to be surprised at nothing. People who would tell you what came after the words "Once I am sure there's nothing going on ..."


 And the rest of the day? Lunch (the warm granary loaf with seeds in it, smoked salmon ...); a walk up Glen Massan where the ruination of Storm Eowyn is all too apparent; the heartbreaking excitement of the Calcutta Cup match; the Italian exercises I'd not got round to doing when I should. And now midnight has struck, and it's my #2 son's birthday, though he didn't arrive till mid-afternoon back 47 years ago. Currently he's en route to Bangkok - I hope he gets that glass of champagne somewhere along the route ...

Cheers, Ewan!