It is wonderful to have spent bonus time here in Aberystwyth, a marvel I could never have predicted. If only it could go on forever more with extra innings for wandering along the prom and cliffs! The only unfortunate aspect is the being stuck on Llanbadarn between lectures, feeling ever so slightly homeless. Now, Llanbadarn campus is lovely but it's also ever so slightly remote. It's possible that there are gulags closer to this place than the main campus. The manic travelling of Tuesdays does however make a layover in Llanbadarn more tolerable, especially with a lecture theatre all to oneself for two hours between lectures. It allows for a certain amount of relaxation after more than hour of hiking on top of two hours of bus time. Scoff though you may, but travelling is rather more tiring than anything else in the world, even if you can distract yourself with the working of examples for later in the day.
Having a lot of solitary time can work to your advantage of disadvantage. In recent times I've thought a lot about 'Star Trek', for my nerdiness is without bounds, and there aren't many people to talk to on buses or in the middle of the night after a trip to the theatre or cinema, or while eating lunch al fresco while batting away criminal seagulls with a laser loaded baseball bat. I miss Star Trek, but how can you make any more when the essence of the show has been run into the ground by more than four hundred (Deep Space Nine doesn't count) episodes already of a ship flying through space and encountering problems? Perhaps the answer is to embrace the weird? When Star Trek The Next Generation finished, it ended with the intimation that the larger adventure was only just beginning and then Star Trek fizzled into Voyager and Enterprise, which were mostly the same show over and over. A new Trek show should perhaps go to the really strange places in the galaxy, where humanoid life is rare, and first contacts are more difficult than shaking hands and having cups of tea. Maybe the next one should be odd with a generous portion of crazy mixed in. Maybe the grander adventure is ready to kick in? Maybe?
As the two hour gap gets close to finishing and I prepare to face the ordeal of explaining the Spearman rank correlation coefficient (it's a number that says stuff) to undergraduate economists, this blog must wind down to a conclusion, hodge podge as it was. Rain showers continue to roll in and roll out, and moods continue to rise up and cast themselves down. Lectures line themselves up to be written, as well as practicals and example sheets, marking accumulates somewhere deep in the bowels of the central office, and the world spins on its axis. Out there the vastness of the universe, defying understanding in its very existence, continues to move on. Stars, planets, nebulae, black holes and all kinds of things we don't even know about yet are waiting. We don't know everything, and maybe we never will. That's all part of the fun, and that's the more meaningful thing we can think about on the bus. Aren't Tuesdays wonderful?
O.
More 'Wordspace' soon, and coming sometime soon the return of 'Triangles'.
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