First I heard from an old friend, Mark, who used to work with me at RNIB back in the old days in Liverpool. He left RNIB to work at Mencap and seems to have done very well, and also got married quite recently to Lorna. I wasn't expecting to hear from him out of the blue, but the reason is that he's returning to RNIB, to a job vastly superior to the one he left, but based at the school in north Coventry where I worked until we moved the office to Birmingham. He wanted to know a bit more about the different areas where he could live, so after passing on the bad news about public transport, I recommended Earlsdon. I don't think he's starting for a little while, but it will be nice to have the opportunity to see him a bit more, and to meet Lorna.
On Monday night I went into Birmingham to meet up with Steve and Sally from RNIB. We wandered around the German Christmas Market and had a mug of glühwein before crossing the border to France and having dinner at Cafė Rouge. The gossip from RNIB is always very tame and there's never enough scandal, but the accessibility work we started is still going strong, so that's good. Nobody has been recruited yet to join the team so Sally is completely overwhelmed with work, but she's shown what she can do to the Chief Executive and the Committee.
At school I attended one of the presentation sessions when about 10 students did their presentations. Subjects ranged from Vitamin A in GM rice, to whether a vegetarian diet can be adequate, whether we can delay the effects of aging using nutrition, how to prevent obesity in children, and the benefits of a Mediterranean diet. The quality of delivery was variable, as you'd expect, with my older compatriots being an order of magnitude better than the youngsters. Some of them were pretty good though, and I imagine the girl who brought some real garlic to her talk about the benefits of eating garlic got some extra points for that. Several of them clearly hadn't practised saying things out loud, and one poor girl was so bad that as yet another slide came up, full of impenetrable text, you could feel the whole room sighing. The applause at the end of that one was heartfelt. My fish presentation is scheduled for the last slot in the last session on the last day of term, so I expect I shall experience a huge surge of freedom when it's over!
We actually got some marks back this week. One piece of coursework from Dietetics gained me a 2:1 (very nearly a first), and the other was the Biology multiple choice from last week where I got a tremendous 84%, making me wish it counted for more than 10% of the overall mark for that module. Some of the other students had a very bad time in that exam, especially the ones who hadn't done biology recently. Stop press: today I got another score from another titchy multiple choice test, the one about the rabbit gut, and that mark was even better!
I'll just finish up today by putting on record how lovely my parents are. Of course, they're always lovely, but I'm so grateful for their encouragement and support and compliments at the moment, and especially for their phonecall on Sunday!
1 comment:
Well done Lola! And what a lovely picture of your parents!
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