En deze week in deze week de week die is geweest

A ridiculously busy week in which updates have hardly been possible. So today will feature one big mega-update in which I will attempt to remember what actually happened. In retrospect, it seems like I’ve been spending quite a bit of time doing dancing stuff. In fact, I’ve been doing dancing stuff seven evenings in a row, with today the first night off!

Tuesday evening: dancing
Country basics turned out not to be as massively busy as step. I think we had about 15 new people, and maybe some 20 existing members who were there to help the newbies out. So in total that makes 35, which is more than step but not as many as we expected. N.W. did a good job standing in for B.W. Afterwards he said he thought he was rambling on a bit too much but I didn’t see any problems and I think the class went well.

Towards the end of country basics I spotted L.G., the new dem teacher, standing outside the room, so I welcomed her in and introduced her to R.K., L.F. and J.F. Her class was good, although it was clear she was sussing us out and adjusting to us. Her class wasn’t as techniquey as R.K. had liked, but she did do some technique implicitly, and for a getting-to-know-us class you can’t really plan to do much technique anyway.

Wednesday morning: D.W.
Wednesday morning I had a meeting with D.W., who was my unofficial third supervisor last year. She has arranged for me to speak at a conference in Shetland in May, so we had planned to discuss a bit about what I was going to say there. But D.W. had another surprise for me: the journal Northern Studies, which my first supervisor from last year A.K. is chief editor for, is having an essay writing competition, and D.W. had thought it was a good idea if I would enter. The deadline was 30 September (Friday) but I could get a couple of weeks’ extension because writing a prize-winning essay in two days is, well, slightly unfeasible.

Wednesday afternoon: Research group
Wednesday at three was the first meeting of the Language in Context research group. The only research group that is remotely relevant to what I’m doing, so it seems. W.B. and M.W. went as well, so our office was very well represented. It was just an introductory meeting trying to find out who could do a presentation when, and about what. I got myself appointed co-convenor, or whatever the job title is, which means that I can do mailing list maintenance and get to update the website. I’ll be doing a dry-run of the Shetland paper somewhere in the second semester.

Random observation: V.P. is pretty cute.

Wednesday evening: Dunedin
The research group and a wee chat with W.B. and M.W. afterwards took a bit longer than anticipated, and there was no time for dinner to be able to make it to J.H.’s technique class at Dunedin. I wasn’t particularly interested in the class anyway: New Scotland is for classes, Dunedin is for social dancing. That seems like a good division. So the social dancing was pretty good. I don’t remember all the dances or all the partners. I know we did Midnight oil (with the girl I think is M.G., but I thought M.G. was in Cork so that doesn’t really add up...) and Irish rover. I thought I did Irish rover with C.B. and it was a good dance that I wanted to have put on the Beginners’ Dance program – but checking the Green Book it wasn’t the Irish rover I did with C.B.

Pub with the Dunedin crowd was nice. Some interesting gossip from D. & I.L., but mainly I was doing New Scotland gossip with the other NS’ers. Got a lift home from J.S., which was nice.

Thursday day: work
I started writing my potentially prize-winning essay on Thursday, alternating with preparing for an EL1 lecture on English phonology. How am I going to teach English phonology if I have no idea what I’m doing? The lecture was rather comprehensible though, which was a good thing for my confidence.

Thursday evening: ISC and dancing
The weekly tea and coffee afternoons at the ISC still need a bit of getting used to. I just don’t know many people there yet. Some of them seem to know me though, which is kind of weird. I felt a bit lost anyway, but I had to stay to the end cause I was going to beginners’ highland which is in the Chaplaincy so there would be no point in going back home from George Square campus and back again.

Highland was good. I felt a bit lost there as well. It was a beginners class but I kind of knew the stuff already from having done it in country dances and at Bob dems and the like, so I was drifting somewhere in the middle. I’m sure S.A. is going to make it more difficult soon and I will feel like a true beginner.

Beginners’ country was rather packed. I did help a bit where needed but I also took a rest after the highland cause especially my toes did not really want to co-operate anymore. I called the Dunedin Festival Dance at Social, which was semi-disastrous but everyone seemed to get through it in the end. Wild geese is actually quite fun if you do it socially instead of for a dem.

Friday day: lecture and tutorial
The Friday lecture was even easier than the Thursday one. We (or: they?) slowly seem to be going on from the ‘how your speech organs work’ to ‘how language works’ which I find infinitely more interesting. I saw M.O. just before the class. She is now a fresher doing EL1, with a matric number starting with 93... She’s in L.C.’s tutorial who finds her an interesting person...

My tutorial got off to a slow start but there were a couple of keenies so we got the discussion going and we only just managed to get everything done in time. Now I know what a tutorial is like I can go to next week’s a bit better prepared. Observations from the tutorial: people seem to find it normal that someone called Monica goes by the name of Siobhan; and April needs to make more work of the concept of the language having primacy over nonsensical English spelling rules.

Friday evening: committee meeting
Read the minutes which will appear here at some point... R.K. and A.I.’s way of dealing with last week events shows that they really did not understand what the problem was. T.T. seemed very pissed off at this, but I think we’re just letting the matter rest. The anticipated call from H.S., enquiring whether we still needed her, came earlier than expected. And we did say we needed her.

We will be clearing out the McEwan Hall cupboard on Wednesday afternoon. Then we will discover whether New Scotland still has that half mile of clingfilm.