Youth's sweet-scented manuscript

The subject line is, generally speaking, not something that applies in any way to marking undergrad essays. I'm currently wading through Honours offerings, which are lengthy and irritating. Being muzzy from painkillers, antihistamines and heat doesn't help. Today was not productive.

Yesterday was also somewhat exhausting, with a three-hour exam invigilation. Generally I enjoy invigilating, for reasons not entirely unconnected to sublimated maternal instincts, but it's too hot at the moment. I whiled away the torpid hours in random statistical analysis, with varied results, thusly:

• Number of scripts I have to mark: 105. (Clearly the question I set was too easy, twice as many people wrote on that question as on the other one in the section. Memo to self, be meaner next year).
• Number of students who had neglected to bring the correct text for the open book exam, and who considered it my invigilatory duties to conjure copies of Tennyson and Hardy out of thin air: 12.
• Number of times I had to swop books between disorganised students who were sharing copies: 16.
• Number of times the head invigilator, who is an eccentric professor of note, disrupted the exam with needless fussy announcements: 8.
• Number of students wearing ruffled peasant-style skirts, the latest silly fashion: 5.
• Number of students who apparently think that sparkly sequinned tops are an appropriate exam dress code: 2.
• Number of students raising their hands to request a quick interpretation of the essay question: 1. (There's always one who tries it. It's a natural law. I am evolving interesting variations on "Sorry, I can't do that, you're on your own.")

I finished reading the book club book about satanism and academics, which was, in fact, Maureen Duffy's Alchemy. This was a detective novel featuring a lesbian lawyer investigator, and the plot (as I can reveal without being too spoilery, since it becomes obvious early on) is in fact about wicca, rather than satanism, coming up against a rather nastily fundamentalist Christian institution. The contemporary story was cut with excerpts from a Renaissance text about a young female doctor suspected of witchcraft, although at times the connection between the two is rather tenuous. It was a fun read, by and large, but it was also a forceful reminder of the fact that, basically, I hate, loathe and detest reading stories about people being persecuted for their religion or politics. Books with that focus make me all prickly and uncomfortable, and very, very frustrated: it's all so stupid and futile and prejudiced, and I read with the increasingly sinking feeling that it's all going to go horribly, inescapably wrong. Possibly this says that, literary taste wise, I tend to imitate the action of the ostrich and stick to fluffy escapism. Bring it on, say I.

I have, by dint of nagging the Evil Landlord severely, managed to have orders issued that have caused the Army of Reconstruction to move their pile of gravel, defunct half-bricks, rubble and planks off the severely traumatised lawn and onto the bricked area in the corner. I note, however, that the Army have celebrated this Great Step Forward by taking a Great Leap Sideways, viz. starting an new and exciting gravel pile on a hitherto green and virgin patch of lawn outside the garden wall. I bang my head against the wall and scream. Tomorrow, I shall hunt me down an agent of the AoR and have me a lovely, invigorating rant.