Overwork and freezing your butt off on the Education Campus

Setting up the blog is all very well, but finding the time to actually blog is another!

Since I set up the blog I have managed to hand in a chapter of the magnum opus, the first data chapter. And it was approved, thank goodness. I had considered putting a note on it saying “Please be gentle with your response, Senate House is twelve stories high and I know how to get out onto the roof!” If she’d shaken her head over the way I’d laid out the data for discussion the twelfth floor of Senate House was a distinct possibility. It took me weeks to work out a way of setting it out that retained its integrity but was easy to signpost in the discussion.

But since then most of my time has gone on cutting out a section of that chapter and turning it into a paper for the 14th Conference on Learning which takes place here this week. All set and ready, just have to make some printouts of the data. However I’ve been given the second last slot of the day on the final day .. how many people will arrive to hear my deathless words? Poor Jo has the last slot that afternoon. We’ve agreed she’ll attend mine then we’ll leg it down the corridor to her room and I’ll attend hers. If nobody else arrives we’ll go out for a drink!

If we haven’t frozen to death in the meanwhile, that is. Not only is a cold front due to come sweeping through tomorrow, but the Education Campus must be the coldest place in Jhb anyway. I was there on Wednesday for the presentations of the Masters proposals and you could have hung meat to mature in our seminar room and it would have been just fine. If it wasn’t for being asked to chair one of the sessions I’d have left at tea time I was so cold. I also thought long and hard about the very elderly corduroy coat that lives in my car boot for emergency purposes, but decided that if I was to chair I'd better look at least moderately respectable and not like a poor relative that's wandered in by mistake.

My sense of duty and dress code have now got me a streaming cold and I feel truly miserable. The conference starts tomorrow and to hell with looking smart and respectable, I'm wearing the padded jacket I wear when we go camping in the bush. I'm also putting into my car a small rug and taking Stromboli in case it's really bad. (Stromboli is a bear who, like the volcano, has a fire in his tummy. He has a half-size hot water bottle inside him. If the others are nice to me I'll let them hold him for a while.)

Jo says she attended a writing course there a few years ago and the chap giving it, all the way from Florida in the USA, was astounded by the cold. He kept saying “This is inhuman!” Being American he couldn’t understand why there was no central heating! And while I’m not a great supporter of American-style keep-the-room-at-23C heating there’s no doubt but that the buildings on Ed Campus were designed by an idiot. They have a huge triple-story atrium that runs down the middle. Yes, there are windows and doors at the ends to keep out the wind, but the atrium has no heating at all, so the heaters in the seminar rooms on either side struggle to make a dent in the chill blast that invades them at the start and end of each session. That’s if the heaters work. They’re old and starting to fall apart, the one in the room I was in on Wednesday wasn’t working and apparently hasn’t all winter. The powers that be on the organizing end of the conference stood shaking their heads and muttering about how they hoped maintenance would get it done before next week. Fat chance! That’s why I’m taking Stromboli!