Not so different...

Yesterday I had my first Open University tutorial, which was good fun and the two hours went past really quickly; my tutor is lovely - light hearted, funny, interesting - she is going to be great to work with over the next 9 months.

As usual, from a group of  15 there were 4 or 5 who were more vocal than others (er, yes I was one of them!); there were only 2 that I found a little irritating - one man who is a sergeant major in the army and liked the sound of his own voice a bit too much; and one South African lady who Knew A Lot.  It didn't help that we had a really annoying, aggressive S.A. lady in my 1st year tutorial group so of course there was an instant link when I heard the accent. But anyway they are a nice crowd and I'm looking forward to the rest of the course.

I got my first assignment finished and submitted this afternoon; I had already written it during the week but waited until after the tutorial to 'tweak' bits; in the end decided it was ok as it was, so off it went into techno never-never land - everything is submitted via the website these days.   It isn't due until 10th November so I am a wee bit ahead, as planned.

After that I watched an OU video about chimps and bonobos, which are our closest ancestors.  Wow, those bonobos are scary how like us are they are, down to walking around upright some of the time, to having sex face-to-face which has got to be pretty rare in the animal kingdom.

Apparently in the bonobo world, the females dominate, and sex is the answer to everything, kind of "make love not war". When male bonobos feel aggressive or pissed off, they just come back to camp, have a quickie and it 'calms them down' and everyone's happy again. 

I wonder what they do if they come back and find that Mrs Bonobo has popped out to the shops, or has a headache....