Just for Jenny

Well, it's been a while. I knew this would happen. After a few days of daily updates, it just ground to an unexpected halt. But not for long, as in typing these words, I am already updating.

I suppose the focus of the weeks has been the end of exams. Even though I finished exams on Wednesday, every night we have had at least a small party. Most nights, this party has stretched on until 6AM of 7AM, usually with the daily watching of the Harris Hawks and then a cold walk back to bed. But Saturday night was Koji's leaving party. Despite Emma's best attempts to organise something especially memorable, Shun took the initiative and booked Nandos. Not that it wasn't fun, I really enjoyed it, and discovered my stomach cannot handle what it used to be able to handle. So smaller portions from now on. But what was special was what happened after the party. I drove a few people back to Froebel, and we had some brief games with the metal detector, discovering that the ground in Froebel, despite being concrete, has layers of metal underneath. When Emma set the detector off, Kaori astutely asserted that it had become a fat detector, and the size of Emma's behind was then set to fervent debate.

But while everyone else went home, Carlos and Emma and I stayed in the car, and we chatted for hours beyond Emma's usual bedtime. We spoke about everything, and it was one of those chats which you really appreciate and feel you learn something about the other people in the discussion.

I am also still amazed by the proportion of people who believe that I am going to get with Emma. Allow me to emphasise the platonic nature of our relationship.

The past few nights since the late-night-sit-in-the-car-chat have been mainly Carlos and Jenny here watching the Hawks, but they seem to appreciate my limited guitar/songwriting ability with constant requests for my song, Who Ate All My Chinese Pork Steaks?, words by Jo, my flat rep who left the lyric sheet lying around for someone to turn unexpectedly into a song. It's just an Am G F E sequence for the verse and then A F#m for the chorus, like Runaway, but still cool.



And bottle slicing has begun again. Since I showed Carlos how to slice an old chocolate milk bottle with a knife, his waterlust has been incredible, and we have been doing daily bottle executions. It is bringing back floods of memories, and some surprising new techniques.

Today I'm going to take a chance that has an unlikely positive outcome, but hey, it's worth a try. I also had this crazy dream last night. It's one of those you remember for a while, but it is still weird. There was some kind of explosion in London that destroyed the centre, and the rest of the city was falling apart and being consumed by lava. You know, that old dream. But the striking part was that the military, sent in to control and evacuate people started striking out against civilians. I had to go and wrap up an injured girl who'd been jabbed in the neck with a gun by an angry soldier for smashing some glass. I think it was the same girl who was shot in my last vivid soldier based dream. She's really unlucky. She had some kind of card in this dream, a secret card that had high powered audio for signalling hidden away. Not that any of this is relevant.

Carlos is doing his stand up comedy later, and I'm driving him into Richmond for it, and I'm hoping it goes well for him. It must be pretty nerveracking to do that, but he's the kind of guy who can. And I salute that. Slay 'em.

That's a summary of the past few days, here's Linda with the weather.