woolymonkey | Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (Reply)

Please send bike-hastening and dead-poet-appeasing vibes at 8pm tonight.

I have an Unreal University tutorial from 7-9 over at Hills Rd College, while the teen monkeys big school concert kicks off at 7 at West Rd concert hall. The orchestra will be on and off stage all night, but I've had lots of chances to hear them. The thing I don't want to miss is Rauchestra, in which monkeys wear suits and play electric guitars and trumpet, and perform rock, blues, and the Africancan. (Since you ask, it's the tune of the can-can, but with African rhythms--get them to hum it for you some time.) This will be the first act after ~~half time~~ the interval.

My UU colleague, who's down to teach the Dalai Lama, has kindly agreed to take the 8-9 slot. So at 7 I start my slot on learning to read poems by writing one. (They do some jotting and scribbling about animals; we look at Yeats' Squirrel at Kyle-Na-No and try to imagine how he'd have planned it if he'd been using spider diagrams.* Then I give them Larkin's The Mower with all the line/stanza breaks taken out and they try to put some in before we look at how Larkin did it.) At about 7.55, I leap on my bike and pedal furiously across town pursued by the vengeful ghosts of Yeats and Larkin. Will I make it in time?

*Yes, I realise he probably didn't, but I was dead proud of the Norwich student who said that, if he had, it would have had a bubble for "Colonial oppression". Cos it would.

It would also be helpful if you could wish for nobody to break a string, and for Spider to refrain from chewing gum on stage in front of the Headteacher like he did last year.