Musings

Ack, for the first time in four days I've checked my Webmail and only had two new emails, both from organisations I'm actually part of. Success.

For those of you not privileged enough to be on 'the List', here is the story in full.

On Friday, one of the vice-chancellors sent round an email to all the finalists in the university (in batches) asking them to complete some 'Course Experience Survey'. They left all the email addresses visible. Most people ignored this. My group didn't. Shortly afterwards, somebody commented, rather aptly, 'Oops. I bet she thought no-one would reply all. The rain today's rather depressing, isn't it.'

This did not anger me too much. I even thought it was rather witty (I was very bored), but it soon unleashed the madness that is 'the list' and more or less every time I checked my email from then on I had an average of three pages of new emails from bored, immature people who think it's really funny to regularly email 863 people. Frequent reference was made to a 'legend' named Hugo, the word 'banter' was used a lot and everyone signed off with 'way-oo', from which you can probably guess much about the calibre of the content and the main perpetrators.

Furthermore, when someone sent an email saying 'this is really annoying', 'please take me off this list' or 'dear lord, do you people have no life?' (the irony of replying all to say so notwithstanding) they were either mocked resoundingly by these humorous individuals for not seeing the funny side of having to sift through 47 emails entirely devoid of interest in order to read important communiques from their friends, family, tutors or JCR, or (and someone has now set up an anonymous email address entirely for the purpose) somebody simply hits 'reply all', often more than once, and thereby sends them another email, presumably as punishment for being so boring and fusty.

Resistance, clearly, futile. I tried blacklisting the addresses in Webmail (after carefully filtering through and removing people I actually like) but I still seemed to be getting loads. Fortunately someone has now threatened to complain to the proctors if anyone does it again, and things have been quiet for the last few hours. There was a suggestion that it was all a social experiment and in the Mail tomorrow there will be an expose about how stupid/cruel/bored Oxford students are.

In other news, my take-away paper seems to have coalesced into three questions I can answer (albeit with lots of reading) but I think I've spotted the flaw in this paper. Normally, I can manage quite a lot of reading in one go, but when it's full of people being blown apart, losing limbs, becoming alienated from their loved ones and being used as cannon fodder by insensitive, incompetent military and political leaders, it's rather difficult to concentrate for any sustained period of time, without a) getting horribly depressed and upset, or b) concluding that in comparison to all that, Finals really aren't that bad after all, and there are far more important things I could be doing. (While, in the scheme of things, this is probably true, I still wish I could harness my drive and enthusiasm and just force myself to work for the next four months, safe in the knowledge that I will never again have to read anything with a pencil poised over the page, unless I really want to.)

Had a rather exciting few days. On Friday I cycled up to Keble with Harriet and some of her friends who didn't realise I was at Queen's cos they'd never seen me before! We went to see 'Utopia Limited', cos loads of people from choir were in it, which was highly amusing (though not flawless), deeply cynical and desperately topical.

I also bought a pestle and mortar. It's yellow.

Nik and I went to Wokingham on Saturday, which is perfectly unobjectionable. It has nice bits, a Waitrose, a New Look, plenty of pubs, a market, and I've been looking at all sorts of exciting things I could do with myself: learning Italian/German, salsa, going round Berkshire planting trees... I still actually need a job, mind, or my dreams of worthy work experience, buying kitchen gadgets and soft furnishings and going to China will remain sadly unrealised.

Yesterday I spent lots of time in the Bod reading about masculinity and war. It was mostly about the public school system, the role of team sports and the Victorians, which I didn't need to read as it isn't really relevant to France, but it was so interesting I couldn't bear to skip straight to the useful chapters!! At lunchtime, Sally and I planning things we're going to do after Finals. Later, I went to DNA who were having a closing down sale.

I now feel that sort of guilt, where I'm all sad and nostalgic and furious that a small, independent retailer is closing down due to rent increases, and then remember that I never actually bought anything there. I mean, aside from a small moment of weakness in the New Look sale, all the clothes I've bought in the last few months have been from charity shops or Bonnie (sale), so my not supporting them stems more from a general unwillingness to pay upwards of £5 for a pair of jeans, rather than a marked preference for Topshop, and despite my attraction to cheap clothes I've resisted the lure of Primark. So, while I know my clothes-shopping habits leave room for improvment, I don't feel massively personally responsible for the creeping homogenisation of town centres, but I am slightly ashamed of the glee with which I still descended on the £8 skirts and £5 tops, when outwardly I would profess a preference for DNA continuing to exist, representing diversity, creativity and fairly priced goods.

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Interesting fact:
In 1884, Eton had 28 classics teachers and no scientists. (This was indirectlly a contributing factor to the outbreak of the First World War.)