To Twirl

Life is like a sequence of twirls through the eddies of time. At the beginning we're sure and steady and at the end a little dizzy and wobbly on our feet but we twirl all the same in homage to our grand and stately world's dance around the Sun. The only question is perhaps whether we choose to twirl around events in an an accepted manner and do all the traditional things or strike out and do something different. I unwittingly chose option B but they both have merits. We continue to twirl anyway in order to maintain movement and avoid the ultimate boredom of being static in a world forever moving.

This semester my main twirling occurs on Tuesdays, when I give both my lectures in Llanbadarn and then collapse in a heap in the Arts Centre on my return from that fabled barren second campus, feebly crying out for food while the waitresses deftly step around and carry on their essential duties and chatting about boys. Well, it's never that bad but over-twirling can cause distress on top of a few hours of bus travel. And the waitresses are actually very nice. Especially the Mystery Blonde.

A Twirl is also a chocolate bar, but we dare not pursue that further as dwelling on the sugary chocolate... lovely chocolate... available in the chocolate vending machine downstairs is a sure path to sugar-reduction failure. Cut back on sugar people, it wrecks your skin makes all your special diets worthless. Except there is a chocolate machine downstairs...

Anyway, to twirl is one of those things we all do instinctively. In the most literal sense I used to twirl around lampposts walking home downhill from university in the rain (go watch 'Singing in the Rain' too) when here at Aberystwyth the first time and it was always exhilarating. Somehow it never felt so good in Nottingham, if only because it never blasted rained there. For rain you have to be here, in Aberystwyth, the sodden jewel of the Ceredigion coast. This town as home to thousands of bedraggled students every day, sends them out soaked to lectures and then home drenched in the evenings, only for them emerge again and return sozzled and inundated in the early hours. Aberystwyth fulfils a vital service, propagating colds and influenzas and occasional pneumonias the year round, and ensures the survival of the fittest in the best way as we watch the most inebriated get swept off to Ireland in the early morning tide. They often laugh as they go, or swear. Swearing is bad.

So, maybe it's good to twirl, figuratively dancing around our problems as we try to comprehend them, spinning madly around the little pockets of foamy time, looping around lampposts and twirling partners in dance. There's nothing wrong with a twirl at all, unless it's chocolate.

Oh blast you, chocolate machine!

O.


PS Ha ha! The pretentiousness is ramping up!
PPS Cancelling birthday this year. I don't want to be 35. I already look like a turnip.
PPPS Insert random message here. It can be about ibises if you like.