The Final Third
There are now precisely four weeks to go until the end of teaching term at Maynooth University. Since the FIFA World Cup starts today it seems apt to borrow a sporting cliché and describe this as the final third. Miraculously, given that I’m having to fit 12 weeks of teaching into 11 week term for the first years, I’m almost on schedule with both my modules but I have this weekend come down with something which may affect the rest of term. I don’t think it’s Covid-19 – at least the antigen test I did yesterday was negative – but whatever it is I hope it doesn’t get worse. All the teaching staff in the Department of Theoretical Physics already have very heavy teaching loads already so we simply don’t have any spare staff to cover my lectures if I can’t deliver them. I don’t know what I’ll do in that case. I suppose I could recycle some of last year’s videos, or record some new ones from my sick bed. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. It may be just a cold.
Anyway, what was until last week an unusually mild autumn has turned into something much more wintry. The sudden cold snap has set off my arthritis, which is an additional complication on top of whatever bug I’ve got.
Outside temperatures have plummeted so I have mobilized my bird feeders to take care of the feathered friends in the garden. Fortunately there is ready-made food at this time of the year in the form of berries on the Cotoneaster bushes. I watched a song thrush for about ten minutes tucking in yesterday. Pigeons like them too. The birds usually don’t strip all the berries so there’ll be food of that form for a while but some of the smaller birds can’t eat them so I’ve put out seed and peanuts too.
UPDATE: Monday 21st November. It appears it was just a cold, or something else very mild, as I felt much better this morning and went to work as normal.
In the Dark 
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