Training day today with the students coming back tomorrow, and another incredibly inane session of, first, “counselling,” though in actuality a lecture on Transactional Analysis, which seems to be a theory ecompassing as many ill-defined and misused terms as possible (the term “grandiose,” it seems can actually be used to describe somebody who refuses to admit that they are wrong in a maths classroom). Then we went on to the usual bitch about management.
I sat there and designed my ideal guitar. This is a trick I use from time to time, but there was a slightly new development this time. Often I think of the pick-ups as being turned on and off by popping them on and off, that is, down and up again, but this time I went a little further, by setting them on a hydraulic platform which rises and lowers by the action of metal sliders which are a little thinner than the metal panels on telecasters, which slide backwards and forwards with the controls for the respective pick-up on them.
Later we went shopping to Mardy Hell so I could buy some shorts for the trip to Venice/Florence. On coming back I really wanted to get down to doing something and so I started reading, managing for once to read in the Lounge with Mum and M____ talking - the television wasn’t on, so this probably helped. I read a little of What a Carve Up, which I am really enjoying, though the narrative tricks are beginning to seem a little less clever and more irritating now, though that may have been the effect of not being able to follow so well when I was in the lounge. Anyway, an interesting idea while I was reading a passage about a particularly venal politician. I thought how I could pursue politics myself, trying to stand as an independent MP. I wondered about what ironical name I could have, that is, as a party that isn’t a party, but then thought of how I might not be good at it at all, and that I certainly wouldn’t enjoy it, and I thought then about a website which could organise campaigns for a variety of independent MPs with the rationale that independent MPs are a good in themselves. I followed that thought for a while and then got back to the book.