Rain throughout the weekend & as I sit to type this.

Into every life a little rain must fall - especially if you live in Belgium (proverb).

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Thursday evening Parents' Evening. Fluctuations between hot and cold. I feel - or the rooms feel - clammy. Handshakes and bodies milling through the cramped corridors. Perfect conditions in which to incubate a cold.

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Friday. A trip to the Bozar to take the Creative Writing students into the 'field'. That dizzy feeling of being out in the 'real' world. I suggest as an exercise to follow someone around the galleries and take notes - but discreetly ... (no arrests, thankfully). See a good book on Eva Hesse by Briony Fer: Studiowork. It doesn't seem to show up on Amazon, though.

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Saturday. Find (finally) the CD of Where the Wild Things Are (written & performed by Karen O & The Kids) at the Mediatheque. I like songs that involve spelling.

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Sunday. No early morning swim but I do make what might be the best bread yet. The girls wolf half of it down at lunch.

In the afternoon I stumble over a step leading onto a terrace & then completely lose my footing on the slippery planks. I lie on the floor howling with pain. My ankle's badly sprained (although for a few minutes I think I've broken it). By the evening it's swollen up to the size of a tennis ball & throbs throughout the night. Yet by the morning the swelling's gone down enough for me to hobble into work. Dollops of self pity.

Driving in I remember reading in an old book on astrology the Aquarian susceptibility to i) sudden temperature changes, ii) problems with the ankles. But I don't believe in all that. Do I? (Nelly used to have a theory about cosmic debris - I forget the details).

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Advantage/disadvantage of the day job: you suddenly get thrown off track by the need to mug up on an author to supervise an essay. This past week: Hunter S. Thompson (I last read The Great Shark Hunt in ... 1986? ...) and Hemingway (someone I've always steered away from - the notable exception being A Moveable Feast, of course). However, I'm excited by the 1924 original edition of in our time. The short chapters - some barely a hundred words long - without discernible narrative either within or from one to the other. The cover's good, too. I gather Pound was behind the project. Interesting ... Suddenly I want to read Hemingway's early fiction.

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"It was in that room that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it." ('Miss Stein Instructs', A Moveable Feast)