What a day.

Husband up at 5.00 am to go to France, hence didn’t get much sleep after that or before it even.

Just enrolled on an MA at the age of 56.My heart racing, words and bits of my past writing rolling around in my head, the bits I liked most, almost comforting me, to allay my terror of what might lie ahead. There’s a nervous tension gripping my stomach- perhaps I might finally lose some of the weight that’s crept on since I started this writing malarkey. I get my train tickets, recheck the timetable and pray to God that someone will walk through the cemetery with me after class in the dark to get to the station. I send my homework, ‘A special place’, to yet another friend for comment. Get the reply, tweak it again, change a few words, double space it etc etc and send it to print. Fuck. The printer’s out of ink. Phone around, someone is in and will happily do it for me. Panic over. Go and sit in garden. My heart still racing. I’ve taken my blood pressure tablet. Should I take another? I am, after all, in extremis. What if I die of a heart attack brought on by this stress? Before I’ve got any assignment done? ‘What a wimp ‘they’ll put on my gravestone. No. I’m not having that. Get a grip, woman.

I’m here, early. There are fewer of us than last time. Anyone wimped out, I wonder? The lecturer starts the seminar, refers to loads of books, including his own. He shows us his blog and we listen to some of the great music he’s sourced from all over the world. Did we know it? No, we shake our heads dumbly. Is he some kind of God, this guy? How many lives would I need to live before I could approach anything like the books he’s read or the music he’s heard? He then says ‘Writing makes you fat’ and tugs at his non- existent spare tyre. Hang on – that was MY idea and he’s pinched it! Listen pal, I can outdo you there- I know what’s lurking under my patterned smock. I remember, years ago, slumped exhausted in bed worn down by my two toddlers, I wrote ‘I’m a desperate housewife’ on a piece of paper. And then the bloody Americans pinched it and made it into a series – MY idea! Must look into copyright laws.... 

We read our pieces aloud. I was hoping that somebody would just write about their holiday or something. But they didn’t. It was all good, bloody good. Reminiscences of special places and three, including mine, featured a large oak tree. I imagine an outbreak of Dutch oak disease, should it ever happen, would decimate a whole crop of future budding writers.

We’ve all read our 500 word stories. He leans back, scans us all and says ‘Why are you all here?’This is the best group I have ever come across!’ I think back to the last writing course where pupils didn’t do their homework because ‘I couldn’t think of anything to write’. Even the teacher said he could not write himself but only critique the work of others. There I was a big fish in a small pond. Here I’m a minnow, and a small one at that.

Luckily another pupil walks back with me and even takes me to the station. She thinks I’ve got a doctorate or something. I’m astounded. ‘Why on earth do you think that?’ ‘Because of the things you said about Lucretius and German writers in Monday’s lesson’. Dammit. My husband was right. I told him I mentioned Lucretius ‘ De Rerum Natura’ because I remembered Lucretius was before his time describing the atom like Derrida mentioning, in 1967,“cybernetics “ in his work which we were looking at on Monday. He replied ‘Well that’s marked you down as a pretentious git’. I hastily told her that my degree in French and German was back in 1979, and that I have huge gaps in my knowledge of English lit. I admitted in class that I’ve never read Woolf. I explained that engaging brain before mouth was not my strong point. Oh God. There’s usually one pain in the neck, know- all in an adult class and it had better not be me. Perhaps I’ll do what I did in the recent Spanish GCSE class. On the other side of the card where you write your name – (age group weakness I suppose) I wrote ‘Be quiet’ as a reminder to myself.

I get to the station with seconds to spare and have to sprint up the stairs. Heaving and puffing I collapse in my seat. There is a young black guy with a hoodie and a young woman in my carriage.  Noises in the corridor.A big Indian guy and his slender girlfriend. They are grappling on the floor and he is hitting her as she screams. We three get up, look at each other and the girl asks ‘should we do something’. ‘Yes’ I reply, open the door and with my best schoolmarm voice say ‘What’s going on here?’ The Indian guy, his glasses askew, stares at me and I see he’s drunk or on drugs. The black guy holds me gently back and says ‘Don’t get involved’. The girl in the carriage with us has brought in the guard who’s even bigger that the Indian and tells him. ‘You’re not having a domestic here in my train’. He tells them to move to different parts of the train. They obey. The stench of violence hangs in the air. These two people could not resolve their differences in 500 words. This was life in the raw. Ugly. Horrible. Shocking.

The black guy tells us he lost his 15 year old friend, stabbed to death while trying to break up a fight. I thank him for restraining me. We all get off at Basingstoke. I stick with the black guy- I feel safe and don’t know where the Indians are. I ask the guard which platform I need. He gets off the train and does not get back on until he’s shown me where to go. I reach my destination, get in my car and reflect on the duality of nature, good and bad, yin and yang and Hermann Hesse’s equivalent, Geist and Leben. 

Back home. Safe. What a day! What a night! Trauma doesn’t get much better than this.