Thyrsis of his own will went away

The garden environs and dreaming Brutalist towers of Concrete University do not magically open to accommodate students in the late summer as once I might have imagined. No, that process of accommodation is long, arcane and multi-faceted. Its administration has consumed both me and my colleagues for the last fortnight. Indeed, in pushing paper towards the end of last week I may even have described myself as going a bit mental. As you know, with psychochemistries such as mine, that is not necessarily a metaphor.

However, I am nothing if not resilient, apparently, and seem to have resiled this afternoon. My new responsibility is teaching the group of exchange students whom I mentioned here, and who were on first meeting bright, organised and charming. It occurred to me, following our first session today, that I may have been expecting some variant of this, this or this. I am deeply unimpressed by the capacity of my unconscious for conjuring the stereotypical and the bizarre.