Daphne Bennett

Last Friday, I volunteered at the library for a couple of hours and did some sketch, got a book from the Charity shop.

Sorted out some wallpaper, attended a workshop and getting off FB.

I have stopped looking at Facebook over the weekend.

My inlaw helped us with wallpapering and I had made everyone roast duck dinner. I have written a list of things to do before end of this week to move forward with my home improvement plan.

I have completed one passport form for the kids (one more to go).

I enjoyed my study day today and contributed my part in Week 3’s discussion. I am going to rewrite that and tighten my argument later. I have attended an academic workshop on UoY’s website – it may be my 4th one? Today’s topic is Academic Grammar and Vocabulary and I have really enjoyed the format and participate more actively than before. There are two session next Wednesday – Applying Critical Thinking to Writing and Reading More Effectively, In today’s session I have learnt to pay attention to academic vocabs that are preferrable to language that are vague and open to reinterpretation, and to pay attention to how to write better by keeping a personal glossary. In terms of grammar, I have learnt the term norminalisation and careful wording to avoid absolute certainty.

I have started looking at some MS certification as Seb Moore recommended.

I read a page in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse this morning, it goes like this:

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something, and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk ‘some nonsense’ to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, in the phrase he made, in the ardour of youth in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter Southampton, Kidderminister Oxford. Cambridge – all had to be deprecated and consealed under the phrase ‘talking nonsense’, because in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his feelings who could not say, This is what I like – this is what I am, and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

Talking enough nonsense, I must move on into another week.

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