Medium Delirium

Managed to wake up before 6am again this morning – it seems to be becoming easier.

It’s 4 days out to Chinese New Year. At work, my colleague (and newfound lunch buddy), X, has erected an impressive display of Chinese New Year decoration at her desk, replete with an array of cookies and other goodies. She calls it her ‘CNY Live Station’, and there are, amongst other things, two lion heads (one of them pinched from her form class), a tray of freshly made bread pudding contributed by a PE colleague, a small army of teacups and teapots -each housing a different variety of chinese teas – and a chinese drum that looks suspiciously like the skin of some small animal stretched over a barrel. When the time comes for me to leave this school I shall tell her quite frankly that her enthusiasm and indefatigable zest for life is one of the best things about the job.

Showed up 30 minutes early for a meeting by mistake, and spent it all in a discussion with my Vice-Principal about where to get good cake. Her taste is very good, and pretty expensive.

Early reunion dinner with the in-laws. When the soup course came, the milky white broth looked unquestionably like some manner of pork bone or collagen broth. As he was making quick work of his portion, my brother-in-law, a marine biologist and general fish enthusiast who abstains from sharks’ fin soup on principle and in solidarity, asked my father-in-law what the soup was. Without missing a beat, my father-in-law replied that it was shark cataract soup. It was actually shark cartilage, but in the moments before the error was corrected all blood drained from my brother-in-law’s face as he pondered the terrifying notion of not just hunting sharks, but hunting BLIND sharks.

Later in the evening my father-in-law recounted the colonoscopy he did last week, which ‘was very good’ because he ‘didn’t feel it at all’! This, understandably, left everyone very confused, since one would expect there to be at least some hint of a sensation. Finally he got to the bit where he ‘woke up and it was over’, and it turned out that he was under general anaesthetic all along.

Spent most of this morning thinking it was Thursday.