That's it for Week 2

Nick Dymond has a good end of Induction post. Funny title! He's made a start on Gaddis's Now We Know and is considering finishing it and moving on to Young and Kent over the weekend. I admire his enthusiasm. No, scratch that. I'm in awe of his energy because mine is almost utterly spent. Friday, Yay! My son kindly infected me with conjunctivitus recently which is bad enough at normal times but having spent the week staring gummy-eyed at a computer screen my right eye feels mightily raw.

I think it might be payback. When I was 18 I was a fresh Master Corporal in the Canadian Forces. One of my privates came to me and asked what he could do to prevent him from falling asleep on sentry again. I'd given him a serious bollocking over it once already and decided to take an alternate reproach, I mean approach: humour. I told him he should unroll a cigarette and take a pinch of tobacco. Then when his eyelids felt droopy he should peel back an eyelid and pop a piece of the tobacco in there. The next morning he's eyes were so redrimmed, goopy and enrusted with yellowy discharge that he had to go on sick parade. I was probably lucky that either the medical officer had a sense of humour or the private never explained what happened this way: 'My section commander told me to!' It would not have gone down well for me, I fear.

I've always been a believer in learning from one's mistakes. That time I learned that one should never take for granted the gullibility (sometimes plain stupidity, but let's be charitable) of those for whom you are in a position of power. It never occurred to me for even a fraction of a second that he would take me seriously. I thuoght he would take from the ludicrousness of my advice the bigger lesson that one stays awake when one is tired--assuming one has tried the obvious (caffeine in large quantities)--by sheer force of will. But he didn't. It made me a better NCO and, I think, a better teacher too. The thing is if this is payback, if there is some Karmic effect which is revisiting upon me my sins of the past, then I am worried because the other thing I advised him was to bury his bayonet hilt down in the lip of his trench so when his head drooped it would stab him in the chin. So now I'm a little nervous, is my jaw going to get sliced off on the way home?

See you next week!