Console me

The past few weeks of my life have caught up with me in the form of a nasty throat and a floating exhausted feeling, and I suppose it's as well they caught up with me this weekend as next week I'm getting clobbered with 42 hours, half of them with kids. Wheeeee! Easter and all that - parents don't want the munchkins around and I suppose childhood education, like everything else in this country, is some sort of tax write-off.

The money will be good but the exhaustion won't, particularly as I have an interview coming up with The Office. And with some other schools, that won't make me work with children. Detesting brats aside, I'm just not ready for those sorts of liability issues; I've jusssst managed the fundamentals of blowing my own nose so I'm not ready for a classroom full of other people's snot, even if they are midgets.

My floating exhausted feeling has been exacerbated by the fact I've been rushing through Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. The young South African who leant it to me - I like him so I'll call him Shaggy, as in the cartoon, not the singer - gave it up after a hundred pages or so and I can see why. It's annoying, intensely annoying . . . makes my mood bad/floaty like Benjamin Biolay's Négatif, which I finally bought the other day, even though I forgot to give Mr. N's copy back. However, it's also a perfect rendition of one of those marathon dreams, a sort of feverish, circular dream that goes on and on, and so touching I cry a little in places. But I have to rush through it, hopefully finish it today, because as I wrote it puts me in a strange mood I have no time for right now.