Virtual reality...

After some discussion with various people whose opinions I value highly, a consensus has been reached that the content of this blog has gone steeply downhill since its inception. While this isn't entirely my fault - finals are a lot less exciting than Africa and TEFL, and I can only do the best I can with the material I've got - I accept the general sentiment behind the criticism and will try to do better.

The war essays are finished. Hurrah. Admittedly, by the end they were written in the shortest, clippedest sentences you can imagine (to get rid of any 'and's), I was forced to cut out the exciting quotation about pregnancy and trench warfare, and I only got 4 hours sleep the night before they were handed in, but they got in on time and were mostly coherent. The extended essay, too, was eventually finished, reining in the excessive word count through judicious deletion of anything that gave it interest and character and the demotion of a paraphrase of Tanzania's cultural policy to an impressive-looking appendix. Thankyou to everyone who was concerned enough about me sleeping through the deadline to hammer mercilessly on my door on Friday morning as I requested. I'm so sorry that my paranoia had me up, dressed and on my way to Exam Schools before anyone else emerged.

I had a lovely, relaxing afternoon post hand-in, although, to return to dullsville, for me a lovely, relaxing afternoon entailed a wander through the Covered Market, a trip to Boswells, Debenham's cookshop and Robert Dyas in search of a mother's day present (and for wistful gazing at the Le Creuset stuff), a brief sniff in Culpeper and an extravagant purchase of various foodstuffs from M & S. I did go and sit in the Parks with Catherine and Jen and had a picnic, which was fun, though unfortunately we failed to liaise with Jo. In the afternoon, I went to sleep, woke up grouchy, inveigled Catherine into sharing a bottle of Cava with me, visited the funky Luminox thing on Broad Street and then went to the pub, drank some more wine, and ended up so ill I didn't get any sleep on Friday night either. Cue extremely disgruntled Hamster on Saturday morning! (Was actually rather annoyed at my body - it used to be able to take much more of a battering than that! I am henceforth giving up wine in pubs, and other cheap wine, as it always seems to make me feel vile.)

The weekend was hearty and outdoorsy. I dragged Jo and Catherine to the Perch, which was really nice, and I would like to go back and eat there at some point. It was lovely to sit by the log fire and read the papers (shame they only had the Torygraph though) and it's retained lots of its character and charm, while doubtless improving vastly (good food, art, nice loos, drinks that didn't send anyone into anaphylactic shock...). It's just a bit of a shame, given its location, that you now feel a bit self-conscious turning up all rosy-cheeked having tramped there along the towpath. We had to navigate our way back along the river to civilisation with my torch (prescience, thy name is Hannah Roberson) which I found disproportionately exciting, and then Catherine and I got fish and chips in Jericho. At least, she got fish and chips, I had a rather phallic sausage. We wanted to give our leftover chips to a homeless person, but couldn't find a single one on the way home.

On Sunday, I went out with the Oxford Conservation Volunteers, which was AMAZING fun. Everyone was really friendly, and aside from having lunch in a hailstorm, the weather was pretty pleasant. I dug some tree stumps out of a path and fixed some wire to a fence to keep sheep out. Fantastic sense of achievement, met lots of cool people, arms ache like nothing else! Beginning to understand why gardeners get so much back trouble. Want to go back next week, but the girl I tutor needs me to go on Sunday. Then I'm away, then term starts and it's choir on Sundays again... *sigh* Ooh, yes, and two of the people I met there had been to our Messiah concert in the Sheldonian!! Oxford is such a small place...

Slumped on the sofa in the evening and watched The Emperor's New Groove and had a wee rant about the presentation of women ("What about Mulan?" - "Well, the army was ultimately a way for her to meet a nice man, and she only did it for her father anyway!") and how hypocritical it was for the film to imply that it's bad for rich people to screw over poor people in the pursuit of more stuff, when the CEO of Disney could probably pay a living wage to all the people stitching llama toys in the third world and still be a millionaire several times over. Ahem.

Then I had to help Nik take his car to the garage, cos the petrol cap was stuck, but it's all mended now, and then I went home and drew up a revision timetable and wrote notes about French-lexifier pidgins and creoles. Which was so traumatic it catapulted me back to the Covered Market, and I spent all evening therapeutically chopping onions and grating cheese. Still felt pretty good about it, until I looked on Oxam this morning and had to go back to 2002 to find a practice question I could actually answer on it. Enthusiasm rather dampened now, hence why have done minimal work and spent most of the morning online, despite a promising early start. Besides, you know, my arm's still kinda stiff... Don't want to injure myself doing past papers...

Revision is boring. Really boring. I want to curl up in bed with my book about the Black Death instead. Why did I not make coherent notes in second year? What can I do about my awful handwriting?