Pompeii, Herculaneum and Roger McGough

We went to the British Museum exhibition about Pompeii and Herculaneum - the two cities destroyed by the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius. The presentation was excellent - they started us off with a film which alternated historical facts with footage of present-day Naples. This brought home the fact that the people who died were real people with lives not dissimilar to those we lead today.  Although I have visited both sites, there were many objects which I have never seen before, such as carbonised recognisable food. And the models of the victims, created using the moulds they left behind, were chilling. Much to be recommended.

And the latest 'face-to-face' session was stylistics, which is really the literary use of language. We looked at a Roger McGough poem http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/roger-mcgough/first-day-at-school/ which I had never read before. Stylistics is very dependent on the effect sometimes ambiguous language has on the reader. Many of the people on the course are teachers, so they know far more than I do about today's pupils. But when it came to the line 'I wish I could remember my name', all I could think was 'there's something wrong with this child'. But all the teachers were understanding and thought it was normal to be in such a panic. Now, I was timid (still am, honestly), but there was never any possibility of forgetting my name. Does this really happen?

This part of the course looks really organised - all the materials are there already, as they should be, so we can work at our own pace.

Meanwhile, back to Critical Discourse Analysis and my Boundary Mill postcard.

No MA work for the next few days

So the house is all ready for Easter visitors. And we bought a mountain of food today so I hope everyone can make it through the snow. We have collected TSH's mother who is with us for almost a week.

I have ideas about how to structure the essay but they'll have to remain ideas for a while. I think I'll structure the essay just like the course but refer to Cook, who says an advert is a good example of text which can be subjected to critical discourse analysis. And then the multimodality is important because the lexical density is so high that colour and layout are needed to make sense of it.

Last weekend TSH went to a steam rally. On the way, we visited the Black Country museum. I had never heard of it before but it is world-class - a town reconstruction just as good as Ironbridge or Beamish.

It's my eyes

Went to the opticians for check-up after last year's issues with my eyes. The pressure was high when she did the 'puff test' so she decided she wanted to put a 'probe' into my eye. I had hysterics at the very thought and agreed to go back after diazepam the next day. Well, I took 2 tablets and that meant she got the drops in after only a minor tussle. She had shown me the 'probe' and I thought I could do it. But then she produced something that looked like a tissue which she wanted to touch against my eye to put orange dye in (did I say that orange is NOT my colour? I am 'summer', which means blue, red, purple). Well, I can't keep still whilst this happens - when I go for a professional makeup I always do my own mascara. I told her it was torture and not going to happen.

But I have raised eye pressure and all the standard tests involve touching the eye. They are sadists. It is a human instinct to protect the eyes. I have to be referred and I refused to go to the local hospital where I was traumatised last year. She suggested I might find someone more sympathetic on the net (!!!).

Linguistic notes - 1. 'probe' has negative semantic prosody and sounds like something aliens use after an abduction. 'Sensor' would be better.
2. 'I would understand if it hurt' means 'I don't understand you'.
3. 'It is weaker' meant to her that the prescription was weaker as my vision had marginally improved. To me, this first sounded like bad news and then made me realise she was viewing this from the perspective of the prescription. She is a technician not someone who should deal with real people.

My optic nerve and peripheral vision are both good, so no need for total panic.