Crocked

My friend the Vinyard Owner was having problems with his broadband so I couldn\’t do anything yesterday. Sunday… well, shall we move swiftly on from the subject of the grading? Vinyard Owner finds it a bit hilarious that a middle-aged woman was not very good at doing a jump-kick above her head (I can do it fine at head-height) and crocked her left arm badly failing to break a black breaker-board (I hit it wrongly with an outward knife-hand strike and caught my forearm instead). He\’s far too decent to laugh and as he and his wife and daughter were feeding me royally, providing me with bed and bath and we were setting the world to rights over his whisky, I couldn\’t really argue the point.
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Driving is an ordeal with a crocked left arm as it\’s inexplicably hard to change down from third to second, something you do far more often than you may think.
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I\’m now in Oxford, staying in a JCR room at my old college, Wadham. It\’s a much nicer room than last time, next to the building where I lived as a fresher, and has the unheard of luxury of a loo and shower on the same landing. Amazing! When I was a student, the nearest loo was across a quad, through a passage and down some stairs. The showers were two quads away. Like everyone else I learned to pee in the washbasin.
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Wierdly, the historic college has changed more than the people, building a complete new quad where I once lived in squalor with my boyfriend. Hideous cruelty to students still goes on. At 8 oclock this morning, the ghastly noise of a fire alarm going WAAGH WAAGH! got me out of bed and outside, along with a bunch of feebly blinking undergrads in various states of pyjama, dressing gown or tightly wrapped duvet. It was a drill, of course. The only compensation was the very fit young men standing around, moaning gently. And if I stood at exactly the right angle I could just avoid seeing all the very pretty young women.