September sunshine

I do so love driving to work early on a September morning when there's a white haze across the Levels and the sun's shining through, making the cobwebs all showy like a field full of lacy handkerchiefs. There's something amazing about this time of year, the low sun yellow but the leaves not yet turning - apart from the horse chestnut which is now half tawny. A friend at the poetry group last night described it as the 'fifth season', apparently a Chinese phrase. I drove past maize fields too, spiky red tops in ranks, almost harvest time. And into a village swathed in mist, the lollipop lady standing out in her Hi-vis jacket to shepherd infants across the road.
I'm so lucky that I enjoy driving to work. Changed the CD too, it's been laid-back jazz for a couple of weeks but I switched to dub/beat today, Dreadzone.
The other tutor at college, and a new class of teenagers. They seem older than the AS-level group on Fridays, but they're not. Eleven of them in jeans, and one with funky 3/4-length trousers. They have personalities. They talk back to the tutor.
Today he had them working with compressed charcoal and white emulsion and water, showing them how to wet the charcoal (it only works with the compressed variety) and how this particular emulsion is rich in chalk so they blend well. Messy stuff. He loves making these prissy well-dressed teens all messy. Suspect he spent the early 80's as an anarchist punk.
So I took a sitting pose on an upholstered chair (both legs curled up beneath me, one arm nonchalantly drooping off the chair-back) for half an hour. Which extended to the whole of the first half. Fortunately I'd chosen a pose that was quite comfortable for me.
In the break we booked up a couple more dates and he mentioned, again, that we were going on contract - once they'd worked out how many hours were needed and divided them between the 3 of us. There are other models looking for work, he said, but it's easier to stick with 3, except for the odd times which we can't cover. I, for example, can't do Mondays or Thurs afternoons.
So it looks like I'll be doing about 5 hours a week, Thurs and Fri mornings - unless the part-time Foundation starts up (some problem with numbers and whether it will actually run) in which case I get Tues mornings too, at least some of the time. At the moment I go to the gym on Tuesdays, a much-needed return to routine after about a year of being a slacker.
So, the the second half. Same pose, they haven't all finished, in fact all of them would benefit from continuing this painting... Ow. What is comfortable for an hour really starts to hurt after two. I filled my musing time usefully by more planning for my 'poetry for personal growth' course, starting October. Looking forward to it.