Speculation, Fact and Fiction

And today, I was lecturing to thirty two students on a cultural visit to England from Singapore, from the Innova Junior College, to be precise. They're doing A Level English, the set texts being The Tempest, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale, and their tutor emailed me oh, way back, asking if I could meet them and talk about fantasy worlds, and how the writer goes about building them etc, etc, with particular reference to their texts where relevant.

Y'know, it was great fun. The day's long been blocked out of the diary and so my brain has had it firmly tagged as irrelevant to all the increasingly fraught calculations re books and Xmas and all the other things that are currently colliding. So it hasn't been an added stressor, happily.

I spent last weekend revisiting the texts as mentioned above, and making the notes for the talk, and y'know, that was good as well, because it forced me right out of Book Mode to stretch some entirely different intellectual muscles.

So today, I got to leave the house and all the stress therein. I got to go to Oxford and see one of my favourite cities in the sunshine. And I talked about the fun and the challenge and the interesting quirks of world building, picking up stuff that relates to their texts and that was really stimulating. The students were interested and engaged and the tutors were lovely, friendly people.

Then, I took the opportunity to grab a sandwich lunch with a pal who I haven't seen in far too long and we had a cheery chat mostly about Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures and that was great.

Consequently, the stress levels have significantly receded. Which is good, because we were heading for that point where the likelihood of me imploding to leave a Jules-shaped void in the universe means sensible folk start calculating how long it will take to reach minimum safe distance.

I offer no guarantees as to tomorrow, next week or thereafter, given everything on-going when the normal diary resumes. But at the moment, I've had a really good day and I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

Oh, and the tutors gave me an engraved perspex thank-you momento type thingy. I shall attempt to photograph it at some point. What a lovely surprise!