The leg-ache has gone: the stiffness in my right calf caused by severe cramping during my last tennis match has now dissipated. The resulting bruise is still there, rather like my sense of guilt over how, once the opposing team got me back on my feet after I’d been rolling round on the ground screaming in agony, I then, rather ungratefully, went on to beat their team-mate in the deciding tie-break.
Even better: the face-ache has gone too. I no longer look like a lop-sided hamster. The dentist did what dentists do; not enjoyable, but helpful. It seems there was an inflamed nerve, which has now calmed down a bit, and we’ll see in a couple of weeks what’s to be done. The tooth showed no outward signs of the chaos within, and the dentist can’t explain why a nerve should get itself worked up like that, but there we are.
So: last week’s coursework was more or less a continuation of what had been started: in nearly all classes we went on talking about those words for different character traits and our own personal connotations, feelings, value judgements of certain behaviours. The rest of the worksheet is about fame, and attitudes of the famous towards being famous. My contention is that those attitudes have changed since the nineties: Robbie Williams was maybe the last of the artists whose fame lasted because he could actually entertain people with his singing. Nowadays it is possible, nay necessary, to become famous before you’ve actually achieved anything, so all the celebs are terribly polite about fans and would never dream of moaning about what a nuisance they can be, because they know that they’re dependent on being popular rather than being good.
