Footings

I am drinking Earl Grey tea from my bucket-sized red and white Keep Calm and Carry On mug. This mug was a joke shared with one of my team in the last job, who initially bought one for herself, and then got one for me ('ideal for a cuppa and ideal to reassure when things go tits up'...). For various reasons I ended up with one at home and one at work, and when I left my job, I emailed the Head Teacher at the school where I was based and told her I'd like her to go and find it in my office, as it was my parting gift to her. I never saw her or my office again, after I was suspended on full pay last November, so it was important to me to pass on this talisman remotely. Somehow it never ceases to be a relevant slogan...

These 18 days (between being invited for interview and the interview date) are seeming rather long, and it is hard to sustain the optimism, enthusiasm and confidence consistently at all times. 9 days to go. I am struggling with my 15 minute presentation this afternoon while L is out with her walking group. I am trying to give an engaging, coherent and impressive account of a piece of work I did with a young woman several years ago. It's awful trying to work out what will be impressive... I hope my reflections on the work, my honesty and realism about the success and shortcomings of the work, will come somewhere close. I also spend time reading books about matters closely related to the job. I would like to tell you more, but paranoia, or well-grounded caution (not entirely sure which) dictates that I cannot. Anyway, it is extremely interesting and a bit scary.

I doubt we shall see the sun today. It is entirely overcast, and very muggy. As soon as you exert yourself - as I did this morning, walking down to drop address labels in at our other house for our tenant to redirect our mail (still a few stray items trickling in where we haven't yet managed to change the address), and then to the decorator's house to drop in his final final cheque - you break out in a muck sweat. I had to keep taking off my glasses and wiping my face to prevent them falling off my nose.

In one of the fields we look across to from the front of our house there is a horse in a red coat. There are other horses in the field too, but they don't wear coats. We speak of it as the Red Horse. Its field and the field above are coloured in in patches of yellow by the buttercups.

L had a good time learning how to build dry-stone walls on Saturday, and came home exhausted! She reckons she could now have a go at building a garden wall for us out of the pile of stones outside our hoouse, that were once our kitchen wall. She uses lovely body-related words like footings, cheek-ends, heartings. The heartings are the smaller stones used to fill the space between the two layers of wall, and are what we haven't got. L is hatching plans for raiding parties up onto the moors to pick up bags full of the stones of various sizes, that work their way up out of the ground.