Monday, September 17

 

 

The morning started with pouring rain, and the news that the rain would probably continue all day. Irma suggested that I might stay at home and work until she drove to Stoa at 9:30. I did.

I read what a student had told me constituted the final draft of her thesis. “Oh no it doesn’t”, I thought when I had finished it. If asked to describe it in one word, the word thin might well have come to mind.

I drive to Stoa with Irma and continue reading until Sami appears. I meet with Sami so that he can show me how best to use Treamer to get some Job’d workers for the festival weekend in ten days time. This takes an hour or so, and by the end I understand both how to do it, and what I need to check before I book the workers.

I walk to the metro and pause under a shelter in Tallinnin aukio to dry myself and take some photographs. I capture the gloom of the morning as a mother walks past with a buggy in the pouring rain.

In the afternoon I will attend a Media team meeting that will finish early in order to break out the champagne to celebrate Mats’ fiftieth birthday. Once we have done this we will swap rooms so that Mats can chair the first MA team meeting of the year.

This will feature a passionate and healthy argument about the purpose of tertiary education in an era when the government (or some members of the government) would like to see it as state-funded training for business.

At 17:30 I will prepare for a Skype meeting with Scott. He will announce that he will arrive thirty minutes late, and so I will use the time to continue working on my draft paper for Mats Bergman. Scott will then announce that he cannot make tonight’s meeting at all, and so I will wrap up today’s version of my draft, spot that the rain has stopped, and race out of the building.

I will arrive home just before the rain restarts and celebrate by ironing as many sheets as I can find.