Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water

It’s going to take me a while to find my worker’s sea-legs again.  Not least among my holiday achievements was resetting my hours of rising and sleeping to something like their natural rhythm, which means sleeping all morning and staying up all evening.  It was blissful while it lasted, and now I am back to running on coffee.

There’s at least one bright side for me to admire, however: for the first time in my ten or more years of employment at Concrete University my employment agreement is now both fulltime and continuing.  In fact I’ve been working fulltime for much of the last three years, but on those papery devils known as employment variations, layered over a part-time core.  The change, which I thought would never come despite my latent skills in union activism, will make, I hope, this year rather easier.  That feeling that my hours and the salary that comes with them could suddenly change has gone, which makes extended and repetitive tasks, like marking (to which my labours today were largely devoted) far easier.

Even so, I came home at day’s end feeling like a coiled spring and pining somewhat for the company of Señor Mojito and the many caipirinhas he has pressed into my hand this holiday season.  By way of diversion, I’m listening to early PJ Harvey, the turn of the century’s eclectic answer to Blake’s youth pined away with desire and all those other characters, bent by circumstance, that spring from the canon’s loopier texts and Miss Harvey’s songbook.