Today the Open University’s 60 point Level Two A215 07J Creative Writing course gets underway and there is much excitement. The Cafe is groaning under the weight of ‘hellos’, tutor queries, course queries, location queries, book questions etc from new students. While the A215 ‘Survivors’ conference is dotted with wistful posts from students of the two previous course presentations saying how much they envy new students today. That has to be good!
Our tutor was rather inconvenienced by a house move just before the course started but, now she has internet access, she’s been able to set up the conferences and things are taking shape. According to the message ‘history’, six students have now read our Tutor’s Welcome message and all of them are female – hopefully there will be some male students to balance the mix soon. I wonder how big our tutor group will be? About twenty seems to be the rough estimate going on previous form.
I’ve booked my helicopter and train tickets to attend the A215 tutorial in Truro on October 13th but it turns out that it’s actually a Day School. These are much longer than the two hour or so tutorials – ours is scheduled to last from 11am until 4pm which is unfortunate because I have to catch a 3.30pm train 
So I shall have to leave before the Day School ends …
In our tutor’s letter she says “All you need to bring to the day school is your copy of ‘Creative Writing’ – hereafter known as the ‘big red book’! – and writing materials, of course” Ouch! I have a 33lb luggage allowance on the helicopter and that means packing a book that weighs … wait a minute, let me check …. just under three and a half pounds … which is a tenth of my total allowance! I may have to negotiate an exclusion from that particular requirement.
Our main desktop computer has also developed a slightly worrying ‘tick’ or ‘rattle’ which I suspect may be due to an accumulation of dust and crud inside the case. It’s just passed its third birthday and the other day, when I rebooted after a visit to Second Life, beeped alarmingly and complained that the CPU was overheated So I think a spring clean is in order … thank goodness I have a new laptop but it has NO programs on it that I use regularly so I can also see an extended session of installing and configuring looming on the horizon….
Now off to read some of my Big Red Book 
