Still don't know what courses to take. I want a bit of each. I want to study Tragedy and The American Novel and Settler Colony Literature and Literature and Censorship and oh, everything, without having to take exams and read secondary texts and overload head with tripe that random critics came up with. But since the universe does not work that way and since you can't always get what you want (lip wiggle), I shall probably end up sitting in for a lot of the courses. I shall be the girl lurking around in the last bench moping about not being able to choose an optional in time. Studying literature's a drag if you've decided you don't want to be an authority on it, but who's listening?

I've decided to be a mean parent to my kids. It's really sad when kids are treated like prodigies because they win certificates and singing contests and things. Soon enough they'll grow up and realise they're actually pretty mediocre and then they'll have an identity crisis or something, so I might as well treat them like crap from the very beginning. Be a wolfmother. Swing them around by the scruff of the neck. Take them horseriding and point and laugh if they fall off, chuck them into ponds to teach them to swim, place a jam jar with an insanely tight lid in front of them and demand they make their own sandwiches. What nice, tough, impossibly competent kids I'll have, proper gum-chewing twerps with life skills who'll understand the dignity of labour. At age ten they'll be repairing generators and computer circuits and things. Then they'll get on reality television and rough it out some more and get rich and thank me during interviews.

If I don't understand anything at the Winter School I shall think of my kids and be happy. Maybe I'll also think of my new purple shoes. Then there'll be delirious giggling.