I have lived in the south west of the country for a long time now, long enough to consider it my home, but, as a transplanted northerner, one thing I do often miss about where I come from is people’s unsugarcoated habit of, on the whole, but with some exceptions, saying what they actually mean. Today on the way to the car park after buying a cauliflower and some strawberries from the farm shop I bumped into Sheila from the arts college, and said hello. They’re a bit weird there, all into their yoga, which is great by me, but it’s never simple yoga, always got to be yoga with some extra element, yoga and darts, yoga done while wearing nothing but an anorak, or something like that. Toni, who works with Sheila, had asked me if I wanted to teach on their stonemasonry course a couple of months back and I hadn’t been able to make it to any of the two dates Toni had proposed to chat about it, and – though I’m not bothered – I never heard anything more. Anyway, it transpires, from a couple of things Sheila said, that I had my chance, and because I wasn’t able to jump at the opportunity, I’ve been replaced. I didn’t fully realise this until after I’d left the farm shop, due to a habit Sheila has – just like quite a few people you meet connected with the art college – of making a piece of negative information sound like a positive one. ‘It’s a very exciting time up there!’ she told me. ‘There are a lot of ideas being floated around.’ This after I’d gleaned from some other convoluted pseudo-enthusiastic things she’d said that the course would now not be co-taught by Grant Hope and me, but by Grant and Judith Sitwell, from Topsham, instead. ‘You should talk to Toni,’ she said. ‘It’s a very exciting time. I know she’s aware of you.’ Fuck that, I thought, but didn’t say it; I just politely said goodbye and wished her a nice weekend – which makes me wonder, now I think about it: am I now also a person who doesn’t say what she actually means?