i hate this time of year - not like me is it i'm usually so full of vigour and hope

This time of year is bad because it's almost but not quite the end of teaching, so I am already in the mindset of I've sorted out their excursions for the end of the semester, which most of them don't come to anyway, and I have basically written them off - and in one of the subjects I teach they've submitted all their assessment work anyway, so if they're still coming to class it's wonderful but why? And one feels like one ought to say 'oh by the way there is no reason for you to be here except to learn and/or discuss things' and see how many of them are crushed in the dash for the door. And I am also in the mindset of 'at last, I can practically taste the opportunity to do the other things I've only been able to do little bits and pieces of in the last few months' like finish off that 'short history' I've been working on for most of the year on and off and which I will have all the material accumulated for over the next 48 hours, which just feels splendid, and much to my astonishment it's come out quite interesting, if a bit scattershot. And I have my course rewrite to finish off and so on.

Last night I stumbled in to the Inner City Sound launch, tail end of, anyway, after the speeches and so on, just loud new wave music of my youth playing and the usual gang of 24 carat gold celebs - pride of place to Clare Moore, Dave Graney, Chris Walsh, Steve Miller in various parts of the room, also David Chesworth, Mick Harvey, Julian Wu, Fiona Kranenbroek, Mark Louttit, I think Mark Ferrie... a lot of the old new wavers seem to have grown cowboy moustaches and/or grey stubble to stop people stopping them in the street and say 'weren't you the boy that used to live next door?' (although come to think of it M. Harvey looks much the same as ever). So there were a lot of men five years older than me who looked ten years older than me and vaguely familiar but I possibly last saw them onstage at the Seaview in 1983 or alternatively they were just white middle aged men and I was expecting people to be familiar.

The conversations were dead interesting but I feel I would be betraying confidences relating them here. I did have a brief chat with Clinton W who these days, with his long hair and moustache, looks like a slightly younger version of Superman from the Jimmy Corrigan comic.

Came home and - embarrassingly - fell asleep watching The Simpsons. And it was one I hadn't seen before.