A new experience

What a funny experience, one that was completely new. Never having had a lectureship interview, and despite it being such a temporary position, the different format of the recruitment process was quite the surprise. You have to give a presentation as well as go through the interview, and may well have to spend the day with your fellow applicants, or even two days. On other occasions that might prove to be awkward but on this occasion we all colluded. There was collusion! A conspiracy! Madness! Actually the lack of competitiveness was refreshing in the extreme, its atypicality being the most interesting part of a process that was clearly going to be unsuccessful personally from very early. Such is sometimes the way of things.

Oh, new experiences, you are to be treasured. So much of life is doing things we've done before that sometimes it becomes an endless cycle of 'déjà vu' and aimless confusion. The new experience reminds us that sometimes we get peaches instead of bicycles, and that pools can be filled with bedsheets instead of water. "It's a funny old life," as the mad weaver once said to his illusive friend, before munching on his crunchy wafer.

So, on new experiences there will be one more interruption to the Quirky Muffin in the near future, as the beloved and adored (and deluded) author takes off for the second of two week-long holidays, paid off by the nefarious earning from the last job. Yes, another holiday, a final trip! It will be an odyssey, a rail epic encompassing three countries, and specifically the cities of Marseille and Barcelona. If you see someone in loud Bermuda shorts, a dopey bucket hat, and carrying an entirely incongruous coat or backpack that will be penniless me. Please don't point me out to thieves and cheese salesmen. wonderfully, Marseille and long distance continental trains are both new experiences! Huzzah! We'll see how they compare to long distance continental coaches. The only problem with the journey is in crossing London and Paris in the same day twice, but that's potential achievement and the website called 'The Man In Seat 61' has a good guide for doing it! Hopefully I'll be able to pull off conclusion to a serial story to see the Muffin through the break, but no promises are made.

One wonderful thing about long surface journeys is the potential for reading and writing and thinking. Truly, they mostly degenerate into long periods of restlessness and passive weariness but sometimes one can get so much done! There will be more story content coming out of this holiday than out of the several weeks beforehand. It will be wonderful, and there will be a penguin themed gift of some kind. Every holiday has to have a penguin gift. Penguin gifts are automatically new experiences, and some new experiences are good. Just like penguins.

O.