public exposure

So, I wander into the library this morning to return a monumental pile of 15 books, the invariable result of combining the happy academic five-month, 30 book limit with my disorganised tendency to forget I have them and, panic-stricken, renew great swathes of them all at once. Apart from the shooting pains in my shoulder from the weight of the carrier bag, I am conscious of a happy, superior glow, on account of the fact that the combined metaphorical weight of these tomes is equally dragging, covering as it does such joyous subjects as structuralism, semiotics, postmodernism, feminism and the more pretentious upper reaches of folklore. As the last bit of Saussure, Barthes or Calvino slides into the gaping maw of the book return slot, I feel smugly academic, peacably at one with my environment - for once, the Genuine Academic Article.

Then the d8 falls out of the bottom of the carrier bag and, with impeccable timing, bounces gracefully down several stairs with a loud "tick tick tick", as of an unexploded bomb, to lie on the landing like a plastic pastel octahedron of Incriminatory Geek Doom in a girly shade of green. A circle of students stops to peer at it, curiously. It is a bizarre object which clearly has no place in the Halls of Learning.

Chastened, I scurry down the steps, snatch it up, and shuffle off, clutching around me the tattered remnants of my thoroughly blown cover.