Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 August 2004 22:47:00
Today was a very very good day indeed. Working backwards:
This evening I got home and found my essay had been returned from my tutor, with my best mark so far for this module. Very pleased about that.
After work I went up to town this evening for August's piece of culture (I know, two bits of culture in one week - I'm going to need to lie down with a bag of chips or something to recover). And it was very good too - when I'm a bit less tired I'll see if I can find a link. I went to one of my fave galleries (The National Portrait Gallery) where they had an exhibition called "Off the Beaten Track - Three Centuries of Women Travellers", which consisted of lots of photos and portraits and other bits and bobs from various intrepid women who travelled all over the place from Britain (mostly it seemed along with their slave-trader or diplomat husbands, though some went alone). Particularly the Victorian ones seemed to do lots of watercolour painting - I guess most of them didn't go to school but had governesses teaching them to sew and paint when they were little gels, anyway the results were pretty good I thought. Also they had some portraits of people from overseas who had travelled to Britain rather than from it - some released slaves, as well as some obviously very gifted women from India, one of whom was the first to ever study law at Oxford (though she needed to obtain special dispensation in order to be allowed to take her exams). My two favourites: watching a video installation of Penelope Chetwode (Lady Betjeman) crossing a river on an inflated upturned buffalo (they'd sewn up all the orifices, including the eyes, and it appeared to make a rather good raft. We found it rather amusing to speculate on who first came up with the idea of inflating a buffalo to get across the river, as it's certainly not something that would immediately spring to my mind); and a beautiful photograph of a beautiful woman: Dame Rose Macauley who travelled round the Med and the Middle East. The picture shows a beautiful elderly woman with perfect skin and an incredible sense of serenity, she was obviously stunning as a younger woman. She wrote travel books and novels - I really want to get hold of one which according to the exhibition guide has the wonderful opening line: "'Take my camel, dear,' said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." She sounded a hoot.
And then earlier today, at work, we found out that they've interviewed and appointed someone to take over my colleague's job (she is retiring at the end of September). And the person they appointed is the person I really hoped they would appoint - he's about to qualify, is a lovely guy, very funny but also very bright and hard-working. I knew they'd appoint one of the soon-to-qualify students, but going on the people I trained with not so long back, the students fall into two categories: those you know will be good health visitors and those you know are thick as two short planks. I was dreading getting one of the latter to work with, but T. will be really good to work with. He popped into the office to tell us, and he seemed really nervous about our reaction, wanting to be reassured that we were pleased that he was appointed too, which I thought was rather sweet. I guess because a male health visitor is still quite unusual, and I know that elsewhere this year he's had a few problems with other people making assumptions about him because of that, he couldn't assume we'd be pleased, but actually we're delighted about it. And it will be good to have a guy working with us - nursing is such a female work environment, health visiting even more so, and our team meetings sometimes get so shrill and bitchy it's painful. A couple of meetings ago it got so bad I ended up sitting there literally with my hands over my ears, with T. sitting opposite laughing at me. I think we're going to get on just fine.