Published 'Psychopoetica' 1995
It was so deadly boring, I wished I was using someone else's brain. The course attendants were in fact even more silent than deadly, since there had been a decided lack of an ice-breaking ceremony from the tutor: such silence seeming to kill off any possible serendipities of social sound.
Most courses I had previously attended, the initial games of introduction and counter-introduction, although certainly irritating, did serve a purpose: to allow words to trip across the room, joining each to each in jokes and in every permutation of potential relationship.
Today, the tutor did not seem all there. In turn, he (or was it she?) showed no evidence of knowing whether anybody else was in the room. He eventually embarked upon a dose of droning and melted mutter which was an attempt, supposedly, to by-pass words, to side-step an already side-lined sense, to syphon nonsense from his emptily bloated mind.
Then, a girl in her late to late teens piped up from the back of the classroom who, to my mind, was the only decently attractive individual present - purely from the visual standpoint. She had nothing in her blouse except bounce. Her voice, however, wielded a commonsense that made me cringe and wince, together with a sense of humour worthy of my next door neighbour's onion patch.
Her banter was as forgettable as Mr Unwin's. So, I buried my head in the pretence of note-taking - my memory of which makes what then ensued in the shape of spoken words feel like silence in retrospect.
The tutor was teaching us the use of the word processor. I say 'tutor' for want of remembering his name. I need to recall his name simply by trying not to recall it, hoping that it will accidentally drop back into my mind. Bingo! I only needed to look back at the previous paragraph of processed print to pounce upon his name. Mr Unwin. No need to worry. Perhaps I can use a similar technique to dig out the girl's name. No, it's not there. I'll call her Donna for convenience, although I'm sure that's not her correct name. It probably wasn't even the name with which she introduced herself during the now entirely forgotten ice-breaking ceremony at the beginning of the course.
It was a pity that Donna had nothing in her bonce but rebound. And that's where we started. Borrow my brain for a second, turn back to the first paragraph and - Bingo! (Life's full of might-have-beens, what-ifs, wishful thinking and Donnas.)