Free at last to transform her life

When I asked him how business had been in the last several months, my physiotherapist said that, since the economic down turn, he had been seeing a predominance of two kinds of clients: the first the worker who knows she is in danger of losing her job, who puts hours and hours in at the office, working long into the night and into weekends at the computer so that she might not be fired, and the second, the one who has already been fired who, free at last to transform her life and so finally to become that fit, slim, healthy person she has always dreamed of being, begins to develop the sort of injuries that hitherto he has only seen in the professional athlete who, keen to win at all costs, trains too hard and for far too long.

Window of porn

All the time the teacher was talking to her as she sat at the computer in the class there was a video going of a full on sex scene close up, he told us afterwards in the canteen. You couldn’t see the faces, only the genitals, he said. The man was black and the woman white – or should he say the male bits of body were black and the woman bits white. Anyone would have been able to see it as the student was talking to the teacher, he said, only nobody else was looking for some reason. The teacher, who had pulled up a chair to sit alongside the student, kept talking to the student and the whole time behind the shoulder of this student, unbeknownst to either of them (or so it seemed), the genitals were going.

It was strange that this student could get porn when so many sites had been blocked at the college, he then said. If he wanted to go on YouTube he couldn’t. Even his hotmail was blocked on some days, and once or twice Google. In the end the teacher had got up and walked away without saying a thing and the student had then turned to the screen and closed the window of porn before opening up Word to make a start on the acquisitions report, he had to assume, that they’d been told they had to finish by the end of the week.

Ant on the moon

She told me that she had always wanted to write to someone in Australia. Even when she was only ten years old and of course still in Russia she had been entranced by the image of Australia on the map, by this large, pink country all by itself at the bottom of the world with water all around it (and for this she made scooping motions with her hands). Europe was many coloured, but Australia was pink. All the children in the class had been invited to write to a child in another country and her teacher had asked her who she would like to write to, but when she had said a child in Australia the teacher had laughed. She might as well have asked to write to an ant on the moon – or so I thought she said as she swayed on her heels in her long pink dress.