[wt : 4]

This is the current state of my office floor:

I’m a little stuck, honestly. A little overwhelmed by all the things I need to do, to write, to prepare, to learn for the coming year.

Only a little. I haven’t taken to my bed. I’m not lying in a darkened room for days on end, hand on clammy forehead, gazing heavenwards with a martyred expression, off my bodiced tits on laudanum. I’m not — quite — in hiding. I’ve managed to trudge through some chores, eking out gradual progress towards being able to survive the term. Just not enough, not fast enough.

It’s nearly fucking September, for crying out loud.

Not lying in a darkened room, but still. Displacing a bit. Should I write this lecture about communications protocols, or order a box of dodgy op amps from Aliexpress? Hmm, let’s see.

Yes, chances are I’ll never get around to using those knock-off MCP6002s, but that’s for the best since they probably won’t work anyway.

That lecture already features C-3PO, the Ferrero Rocher ambassador and a game of Simon Says, btw. There might be video evidence at some point. Assuming I live through this one, that is:

First week of term. First year undergraduates. Twice. God help me.

It’s that time again. Civic duty done. Perhaps with a little more optimism than on most other occasions in recent years. Also a little more vindictiveness.

I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much after so many disappointments. But I really want to see the whole cavalcade of useless suppurating shitbags who have been posing as a government lately get utterly destroyed, humiliated, trampled in the electoral dust.

Merely losing is not enough. I want the Tory party in ruins, unsalvageable. I want every last one of those soulless preening narcissists a laughingstock, unable to show their performatively cruel and incompetent faces in public without being pelted with rotten vegetables. Not just the current dismal crop of last ditch nonentities, the alumni too, big and small. Every fatuous, entitled, smirking bastard who ever held a junior ministerial position in the department of fucking paperclips should be unemployable forever.

But okay, that’s unrealistic.

Losing is not enough, but it’ll do.

Surely that’s not too much to ask?

Surely?

Here’s looking at you, Fredric.

The details are a bit icky, but retinal reattachment surgery turns out to be surprisingly un-harrowing, at least in the moment. And the Moorfields experience was pretty much exemplary of the NHS at its best. The recovery process is very tiresome though. I am currently half-blind and will remain so for weeks. Left eye is not entirely sightless, but what it sees is a blurry, wavering, sloshy mess that actively detracts from the vision on the right. And I have to maintain head posture reasonably carefully for awhile, which is especially annoying at night.

Still, it certainly beats the alternative.