To Leeds for my first PhD supervision.
Managed to dodge my train fare as far as Manchester and pinch a sandwich and a croissant from Sainsbury's. I arrived at my department facing a door. I asked the secretary "How do I get in here?" "Er... just push it." It had a keypad next to it and I thought you had to be taken into a windowless room, covered in honey and buggered with the neck of a lute, before the secret code that grants unlimited access to the School of Music at the University of Leeds would be revealed. I paid the first instalment of my fees (less my Scholarship, it comes to 744 pounds), my fingers anxiously hovering over the keypad as I waited to see if I had that enough credit on my card.
Afterwards I went to The Angel. I love that pub. People come and sit next to you and it's assumed that the conversation is collective rather than private. "This woman wolf-whistled at me the other day." "Was it her rape alarm?" Someone told of a wronged wife throwing a kettle of boiling water over a husband who went with a prossie.
In the station, a chemically painted woman clasped a man to her. I could see her face resting on his shoulder during their embrace. She looked like she was bearing it, watching herself. I started mentally sneering at them for their lack of authenticity before realising that we all do this in the various contexts in which we need to present ourselves.
A young woman on the train back was carrying a folder saying "a toolkit for Arts Award advisers" on its spine. She's a teacher and had come back from York after doing a course, the content of which sounded to me like another chapter in the way that meaningless documentary evidence is substituted for competence or the desire to do something. But at least her eyelashes were natural, unlike the performing girlfriend on Leeds station.
