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This is it — the final push. Finish work at two, home, nap and then the final surface unit. Tomorrow there are three or four questions that I need to revise. After that it's just the exam.

And then of course it's the groups...

Two and a half units of the surfaces left to go. Did I miss these units the first time round? I don't remember anything about them. I have a marked TMA, so I must have done them [I can't remember getting someone else to do it for me] ... have I finally lost the ability to remember anything at all?

The smart money is on the surfaces being the place where the marks hang low. I'm not so sure, that might just be me.

Tomorrow is the first day of getting sober for the exam, I'm not looking forward to that but it has to be done—I have a real shot at this one, a shot that I probably shouldn't have. I need a me that I haven't needed for a long time: un-pissed, focused and rested.

There's a chance he might turn up to my exam.

We were sitting in our new hut eating eel stew. The stew was quite nice, although as I'm a vegetarian ceoliac I was a wee bit unsure about it. I could see that the other mes were having similar difficulties, still needs must. Least of our worries so to speak.

"Why is it that zero point nine nine recurring and one are the same number?"

"They're both rational, right?"

"And there can be no irrational number between them, yes?"

"So they must be the same as two different rationals always have an irrational in between."

"I've never seen a proof of that."

All our heads went down, we were thinking. Our spoons [where did they come from!?] flopped into our bowls.

"Lets do a triangle argument, say we have two rationals, one bigger than the other, they're repeating decimals that differ at some point in the mantissa." [We knew what we meant.]

"So at some point we have something like 1234 as opposed to 4321."

"Change the 1 to a to a 2 and the it's bigger than the first but still smaller than the second."

"Then you can change everything that follows up or down as you like..."

"So you have an irrational between the two numbers."

"Very well done boys, but how does that help?"

There are changes afoot at my work-work. So us old timers are remembering what once-was.

I was talking to one of the 'big' supervisors yesterday. We've known each other for what seems like ever, I was the janny when her kids were at school.

I always have a chess board set up on the counter, at the window, of my office. Anyone can have a game. It's surprising how many want one. She noticed this.

"Neil taught my kids to play chess".

Actually I didn't. I always insisted that they, the kids, taught each other the game. If you can't teach it to others you don't know it properly. I would try to impart some of the subtle things but the basics? That was down to some other kid.

It worked.

It worked in so many ways that I'm surprised that I thought of it. I suspect that, like many things in my life, I just lucked in to the right approach.

Often I despair. I feel like I've wasted my life. That I've been useless and pointless.

But I don't feel that when I'm playing games, and there are are people, on this planet, having fun playing games because they saw me having fun playing games.

Always a board.

I've just watched a doumentary about why I should be getting angry because, I, having done the right thing, am being ripped-of by pretend-poor bearded-foriegners who've schemed.

I'm supposed to be angry that everybody who isn't the same as me is sponging off me. I don't see that.

I see a of of people making money out of other peoples' children dying

I see a lot of people saying that what they believe is so special that I can't question it

I see a lot of people who believe they are so special that nobody can question them

I see a lot of people suffering

I see what we've always had, terrified humans and an expoiting class.

We can't do much about the shit heads, but let's be nice to each other.

[forgot to mention. We will win. That isn't aspirational, that's a truth. Good people like us will prevail. We will inherit this earth.]

We'd all been badly scared by the, whatever they were.

I don't scare easily. And when I do you wouldn't know to look at me. Now I saw signs of a fear in us that you would see too. We were actually trembling.

"I take it that that's never happened before?"

Heads were shacken [a word which means a bit more than shaken], hands got flicked, shoulders rolled, eye contact was avoided.

"This might be a good thing, a moving forwards, a change." This sounded like crap.

"What about Berkeley?"

"What about him?"

"Remember how Johnson refuted him?"

"The kicking the stone bit?"

"Yes, we can't do that here...", I shrugged, "...no stones. Feet." I waggled one.

"Oh, come on boys! We've always been materialists. Just because we've dropped into a world that doesn't make any sense doesn't mean we have to change our philosophy. This place might be mad but it obeys rules.

"The rules here might be off-any-planet but we should be used to that. We've done enough maths to realize that what is utter nonsense often isn't.

"By the way, does anyone else see us sitting in a tent around a pot?"

We had all been resisting saying that.

I read a number theory unit in the bath today, and I suspect that it will be bedtime reading tonight.

I don't suppose that this is too dire—it is maths.

For now it's back to the fractals...

"There's a reason why three is bigger than one. It's because two is a number between them, such that the distance between one and three is greater than the distance between one and two."

"Why doesn't four work in the same way?"

"Because it isn't between"

"Aren't we arguing in some kind of circle? We seem to be trying to prove greater and between by assuming that they exist."

It's an odd thing to actually talk, out loud, to yourself, or yourselves in this case. It isn't the same as thinking inside your head.

This conversation is a good example of why it isn't; I suppose that I knew all of the above but I certainly would never have put it in those terms. We weren't finished.

"If we fix a point, say zero then one is less that two, which is between one and three."

"Which rather plays into our current predicament, where is our fixed point?"

This was apt. It had been something of a farce getting back to 'our place', we weren't even sure that it was 'our' place. There had been panic and angst on the journey.

I watched a couple of numbers roll away in the far distance, I suddenly felt very tired.

"Do we sleep here?"

"Only after we've eaten eel stew."

"When do we eat?"

"After we've caught something."

We got to meet them, well some of them, from what the other mes say they aren't countable. Whatever that means here.

They were all puddle-glums who don't look like us, and who don't think like us.

It was the strangest thing: google translate your thoughts. They were listening, never mind dancing, to the beat of a different instrument, never mind a drum.

"What do you know about this place?"

"It is mostly left inclined, until."

"How many of you are there?"

"One and three."

There was much like that.

"See. It makes potential sense, they, the others, may have seen something that we don't. Do they hear what we say in the sense that we say it?"

We were back in our place, where our legs could dangle.

"It's not that you can't get any sense out of them, it's that you can't understand the sensible things that they say..."

"What do they think about us?"

"How would we know?"

"So in a sense it, whatever this is, is what we decide that it is?"

"No!", I looked at me, "well, maybe. But you know that you are being a stupid shithead there. You can be clever, or you can be realistic."

Once upon a time I almost had it.

I want a polished wooden floor, a matress, a mass of books piled round the walls and nothing else at all. I want order and mess. I want purity and chaos.

When I was younger than I am now I lived in a shared house where things were a bit basic. I had a huge [5000+] collection of science fiction books and little else.

There was a wardrobe where I stored nothing, mostly it was just me and the books. But there were carpets and curtains between me and the sky, there were things that got in the way. It wasn't what I wanted.

Now I exist in a space where all is mess; unit texts scattered everywhere, PT3 forms, maths books, computer books, laptops, devices, the detrius/kibble of an OU life...

I want to sit on an endless floor with a single, white, sheet of A4 between my legs, with the sharpest of sharp-black pens and just think.

Tonight I realized that without the feeling of mess I wouldn't be doing this.

I was toddling along, when, big wall—a proof I didn't 'get'.

Maths is hard [for me], I pretend that it isn't but it is. Too often I just charge through, I should stop and think, see that I don't understand, mash the symbols.

I have a feeling of of utter uselesness.

Does any of the above remind you of you and your subject?

I was sitting in my annexe [it's the Munich exchange ceilidh] listening to 'the dancing', doing topology, when a teacher came into my office. I was a wee bit surprised to see her, she hadn't struck me as the ceilidh type and she was a maths teacher.

[I should explain that my office isn't really my office, it's just the place I sit when I'm in the annexe. It's someone else's office really.]

She had left her memory stick in the main school and was going away for the weekend. Strange how often we forget our memory sticks. So we toddled over to the main school.

"You could store stuff on drop-box."

"The school system doesn't let you." Odd, I don't much do it but it works for me. Then I do have admin rights—geekiness must have its privileges I suppose.

I'd heard sirens in the distance as we walked, you don't listen though, do you? We retrieved the memory stick and exited the school to see the sight of five fire engines lined up in the playground and firemen milling around everywhere.

"See, I've arranged some firemen for you Jo."

"We've had a report of smoke coming from the building", one of them said.

Not again I thought. When it gets cold the boilers come on at night and what seems to be a plume of smoke rises from the school. We get a couple of reports every year. This was the first time that I'd been on hand to see the response, a pretty impressive one I'll admit. [If the building is open they come in and tell you.]

Then I started to have second thoughts—it wasn't that cold, the pumps might come on but the boilers shouldn't, and I didn't see steam where it should be. A worry developed. Could it...?

I had a sense that the building wasn't burning, after all I'd just been in there, it would have told me, wouldn't it? But still...

While logic was beginning to cut into my mystical another fireman appeared and said that someone was burning waste in a garden behind the school.

Panic over, back to topology and Scottish country dancing for me then.