Quotations

These have been sitting in my drafts folder on Gmail for ages (for want of a better place to put them) so I thought I'd share:

The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate. ~Diogenes the Cynic

Seethe, seethe, seethe...

Being the peculiar person I am, I have been following with alternate amusement and distress the furore about weekly/fortnightly bin collections. (Yes. The processes at work in the evolution of French vocabulary are really that dull.) And, apparently*, ASDA have now decided to allow shoppers to leave their excess packaging at the shops, and then pass it on to the suppliers.

Ohhhh. So it's the suppliers' fault is it. Never mind that supermarkets insist on farmers using a certain type of packaging and making them pay for it themselves. Never mind that most fruit and veg is pre-packaged because it makes it easier for the person on the checkout to scan a barcode than to weigh loose apricots in a paper bag, and because it encourages the consumers to buy more.

Nope, must be those pesky suppliers, who, as we all know, have for years been exploiting those poor supermarkets and forcing them to comply with their ridiculous demands...


I think I might go and live on an island somewhere and keep goats.

*Though I can't actually find a more reliable source than the Mail or the Evening Standard, so it might all be b*llocks.

Progress report!

• Full 24 hour periods since I started revision: 1 1/4.
• Mornings wasted faffing online: 1.
• Elaborate meals cooked from scratch: 1.
• Different colour felt-tip pens used: 7.
• Topics that have scared me so much I've postponed them till tomorrow: 1.
• Year I had to go back to before I found a past paper question I could answer: 2002.
• Past paper questions answered: 0.
• Afternoon naps embarked on without setting an alarm: 1.

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?

Things I am not going to do again in a hurry, No. 43.

Sit on one of those purple chairs in the SSL in a red skirt.

Yuck.

Never have two colours clashed more.

Tip of the week!

Here's Granny Hannah's tip of the week... Descale your kettles, people!

In a fit of boredom I looked inside my kettle last night, realised how mingy it actually was, and asked google how best to rectify this state of affairs. It was really very simple, and has drastically improved the speed at which I can make tea or coffee! All you do is:

• Boil 500ml of water in your kettle.
• Squeeze a lemon. Pour the juice into the boiled water.
• Let it sit for 15 mins.
• Pour it away and rinse the kettle several times.
• Sit back and enjoy the sense of achievement and the speedy hot beverages.

Also, if anyone can tell me when exactly I started looking forward to mundane household tasks as a break from work, I'd be much obliged. Roll on Friday lunchtime!

1 975 words, free to good home....

Ahem

A new group has appeared on Facebook called 'F**k House of Lords Reform'. (It has a horrid sidebar ad that flashes red and orange extremely rapidly at me, but that's by the by.) Completely ignoring the complex political implications of the reform, although 'The Now Show' pointed out to me that the Lords have to pass it first, I thought it worth drawing attention to the fact that among the 'related groups' are:

• Petition to revoke the independence of the United States of America
• I WENT TO A PROPER BRITISH BOARDING SCHOOL
• I always wear sunglasses because the sun never sets on the British Empire

Ahem.

Things I should not have said to my tutor, Part 4 793

"Well, I recently read this thing that compared childbirth to trench warfare... in that although the climax was going to be ghastly and painful, the waiting was so unbearable that you began to long for the end, although you knew it would be horrible. I sort of feel like that about finals."

And aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh again...

I'm going out with someone who thinks it's amusing and cool to drink beer through a strawberry bootlace.

Aaaaaaaaaargh!!

Whittard's do student discounts? Why did nobody tell me this in October? How much money could I have saved?!!!

Aargh!

I tend to google unfamiliar French phrases in translations to see if I can get a better feel for them with more contextual examples (or, if I'm translating into French and torn between two things, to see which is more common and which is closer to what I'm trying to say). However, having typed in one from this week's translation (the one that's due in in a few hours), practically the whole of the first page is links to discussion forums about the difficulties of translating this particular phrase of this particular translation, and how lots of French people and professional translators have no idea what it's about.

I kid you not!!!

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

And, once again, a trivial observation turns into a major eco-rant...

I really want to get into bed with a hot water bottle and 'The Now Show' on listen again, but I feel bound to have another 'ethical-food' bore moment beforehand. Inspired by hazily listening to the CEO of Sainsbury's arguing with some person-who-did-something-supporting-farmers one morning (that classic 'Today Programme' trick of picking two people with polar opposite view and getting them to shout unconstructively at each other for a few minutes until John Humphries tells them they've run out of time), I bought some milk at the farmer's market. I did balk at the price, but kept staunchly reminding myself that milk is pretty much the absolute worst culprit as far as unsound products go, and shelled out for some yoghurt as well, cos I bought some earlier this term and it was divine. Anyway, to cut this (extremely dull) long story short, the milk, too, was excellent: I just made some sinful hot chocolate with it and sneaked a gulp before microwaving it, and this is what milk has always really tasted like all along!!! Just, you sort of forget. It's all creamy, and doesn't taste all watery, and it's a totally different colour, and... Ack! It's amazing. Reminds me of when we used to get it on the doorstep in glass bottles. And when it used to go warm in the summer, and the birds used to peck through the foil tops. Ooh, and collecting all the tops for school... Can't remember why that was.

I like 'rediscovering' food. I've been doing it steadily since starting weaning myself off supermarkets over the summer. Like the first time I had chicken and avocadoes from the market. All the debate about local vs organic vs mass-produced (and hence efficient) food that that Economist article* sparked off has ignored the vitally important fact that food produced in small quantities and not transported halfway across the country and back often tastes better. Supermarket food is designed to look uniform and hence pretty on the shelves, to not get bruised during transit, to be easy to pick, to last for a long time after it's been picked... Consquently, it tastes, well, bland and I defy anyone to eat a home-grown tomato and not agree with me. Food production involves lots of complex economics that I don't understand. (Climate change involves lots of complex science that I don't understand either, yet I still feel entitled to an opinion on it, but I'll talk about that another time.) I can't say whether FairTrade is really helping poor farmers or in fact taking trade away from the very poorest countries and into those whose governments the West approves of. It may well be more cost- and energy-efficient to transport food in big trucks and have people make one weekly trip to the supermarket, rather than have lots of individual farmers driving around in four wheel drives and lots of well-meaning leftie shoppers making lots more trips to lots of different shops. Intensive farming could be a better use of limited space and the best way to feed a growing population. I'm not even entirely convinced by organic food. However, none of this can change the fact that local food is nicer to eat (and, if this is to be believed, good-tasting food is better for us) and, more wishy-washy liberally, that we as a society are extremely alienated from our food and how it is produced, and this can only be a bad thing, given the rising obesity rates, yadda, yadda...

Incidentally, look up 'balk' on oed.com. It's got so many different meanings!

I keep being tempted to write incessantly about food and the environment and stuff on here. In fact I keep doing so. I've been spending hours recently reading about such things online. Mostly cos the books I've been battling with have been gung-ho militaristic isn't-the-mission-civilatrice-great tracts which are making me jump up and down with rage.

I suppose if I really cared, I'd go out and plant some trees rather than sitting with my computer on all day.

I did spend rather a lot of time when I was about 17 reading all this eco stuff and crusading passionately for the environment, which meant moaning at my beleaguered parents for choosing to live in the middle of nowhere because it meant I was miles away from my friends and H&M... I mean, because it made us dependent on our car, and haranguing them to go back to using the milkman and not getting the milk from Tesco. That one always baffled me, as in Oxford you could easily forget that food and where it comes from is important, but when you've got a prize winning herd of dairy cows less than a mile from your fridge, you'd think people would care more... Anyway, when I was a bookish, unsociable teenager, I used to spend hours angsting over how we were destroying the planet, but this was rather a peculiar thing to bang on about (unless you were preparing for a Modern Languages oral), so I suppressed the Swampy side of me, and spent first year eating Tesco Value Wheat Biscuits for breakfast and lunch so I'd have enough money to spend on 3 for £10 wines at the weekend, and suchlike.

And now, suddenly, the environment debate has exploded into the British media! It's become a trendy, acceptable thing to talk about, and, dear Lord, I'm revelling in it. I'm sure the pain of limiting my facebook time to when I'm in my pyjamas has been made much easier by the fact that I can tell myself it's okay, nay, good, to 'stay in touch with the world' by reading the papers and then channel all my internet time-wasting time into that, when really, I'm smugly massaging my own ego, knowing I've been saying all this for years and everyone else is only just beginning to catch on...

However, this blog is supposed to be for keeping in touch with friends, and, much as I'd love for everybody to think the same as me, this is rather selfish and unfair. I don't want to alienate everyone I know by turning into some mad holier-than-thou hippy; nor, if I want to share my eco-ranting with other mad hippies, do I want them, as relative strangers, to be able to read all the personal (or frivolous) things I write on here. Therefore, I shall start a new blog for talking about food and things, so anyone who's interested can read it, but that those who aren't won't have to be bored by it! Details to follow...

And now, to bed with 'The Now Show'!

*which I can't link to cos it's subscriber-only

Ah.

My mother has just left.

She took one look at my mattress and said, "Well, it's no wonder you haven't been sleeping well."

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.

-------------------

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.)

Minor irritations

Friday was the last News Quiz in the series. *sigh* I feel rather bereft. Also, Sandi Toksvig was ill and someone else was running it. Meh.

Yesterday, Nik bought a Times to read on the train to Wokingham. The outside two pages of the 'Body and Soul' (my favourite section) were missing, so I was deprived of the sex problem page.

All these things that I've done...

I finished my extended essay!!!!!!!!!

Well, sort of. I have finished the first draft, which needs to be teased away from anti-neocolonial polemic and directed firmly back towards the actual question (which was something about language policy, wasn't it?) and I have to go through and reference everything properly so I don't get sentenced to death by firing squad for plagiarism. I also need to make 1 655 words disappear, and format it properly, and find out what that tribe in northern Nigeria that I wanted to talk about was. I felt briefly joyful, until I remembered the amount of work I had left to do on it. And, indeed, the amount of work I have left to do.

Went to see Spamalot last Monday, which was really, really cool. On Tuesday I went to EMS dinner and I had an absolutely riotous time, there was lots of pennying going on, and I went to the beer cellar afterwards, and then went to Babylove with a friendly medic, and didn't feel rubbish the next morning! And danced! When did I last do that?! I feel young and spontaneous and healthy again! On Wednesday, I went to see Hot Fuzz which was also good fun! I want to ride around in a police car with a swan. Otherwise I have been buried in my room with four dictionaries and a book called 'Gender', which is not about social stereotyping, but about grammar.

Ooh, iTunes just gave me one of my favourite songs. I like it when that happens.

I got the questions for my take-away paper. They're VILE!

My kitchen is full of revelling footballers eating scones.

Nik has manflu again and spent all morning skulking around my room spreading germs and stopping me achieving anything meaningful, without actually being a fun distraction. I've been dutifully making lemsips and trying to be helpful, and now he's left, without even taking the vitamin C that I offered him. Ungrateful swine! He has to go to Wokingham tomorrow to talk about becoming an actuary. I'm currently trying to decide if this is something I want to be a party to.

I'm also trying to decide if I want to be a speech therapist and if I'd actually be any good at it if did. Part of me has always thought I should do something really useful with my life. And all of the useful things I've done have been really rewarding. Part of me thinks I'm really rubbish at anything that requires good interpersonal skills and being practical and that I'm motivated more by self-flagellating white-middle-class guilt than any sort of innate aptitude.

Like most of my sudden epiphanies about my career I'll probably change my mind in a couple of weeks and go back to Plan B* of temping and seeing what happens.

Argh, help, I can't stop footnoting things!!

Best put some make-up on and go to choir methinks...

*I call it Plan B because I feel like there should be a Plan A that is preferable to data entry. Yet, there is no Plan A.

Warning: polemic ahead

Oh hurrah. That 'political-correctness-gone-mad!' idea that competitive sport is 'bad' for children, teaches them to be aggressive and is divisive, has now been debunked and schools are going to bring back team games in PE. Hockey, netball, football and cricket will once again be inflicted on generations of schoolchildren in the hope that it will teach them to 'co-operate'.

I'm sure I don't just speak for myself when I recall the hideous torment that was double games on a Wednesday afternoon. No other aspect of the school curriculum created such a divide between those who were good at it and those who weren't. For the first few weeks of secondary school, we were split into groups based on alphabetical order, or birthdays, or something random, and then at half term, once the PE teachers had got to know us, the year group was summarily split into two large sections, the sporty ones, and the not sporty ones. And thus we were condemned to years of half-heartedly running around in pleated skirts and shiny gym knickers unsuited to the northern drizzle, in the hope of winning some game we weren't really very enthusiastic about. (We didn't have any showers, and we usually wore our PE kits all day, so the motivation to exert yourself physically was minimal.)

Once a year, they brought out the 'fitness records' or whatever they were. Basically, you had to do all kinds of mind-numbing exercises and then measure our heart rates to prove that the people in the sporty group were fitter than the rest of us. Did anyone else have to do bleep tests? When you had to run back and forth across the gym, wheezing and aching, terrified your body was going to give out, but too scared to stop in case people laughed at you and classed you with the 'fat girls'? I suppose the furtive glances I shared with my friends ('I'll give up now if you will') could have been a form of co-operation. And then, those of us who were soon to be berated for being unfit and told to take more exercise, had to sit around and wait while the healthier among us finished.

And then, when we were in Year 10, something amazing happened. The drudgery of team sports was limited to half of each term and the rest of the time we went to the leisure centre in town. There, we were allowed to do six weeks of aerobics, of line-dancing, of self-defence, we could use the gym if we wanted. For the first time, I felt like I was enjoying physical activity (aside, I suppose, from all the time I spent running around outside as a child). It seemed to have a purpose: it felt like it was doing me some good and might, in the case of self-defence, be helpful at some point, or, in the case of line-dancing, allowed me for the first time to feel like I wasn't completely useless at anything involving more than a basic degree of co-ordination. Gone was the huge division between sporty and non sporty. PE became, dare I say it, fun.

And, looking back on my experience of sport in school, I can reflect that it wasn't all boring and punishing. While playing tennis 8 to a court seemed counter-productive (prioritising technique over actually running around and burning off calories), playing rounders in the summer always evoked enthusiasm for running around outdoors in even the most sedentary and high-minded of us; Swedish netball, usually reserved for an end-of-term treat, was often far more energetic and competitive than the usual variety, for the sole reason that we weren't supposed to take it so seriously; the country dances we learned for the first year Christmas party had a tangible purpose; trampolining was positively enjoyable.

Ultimately, those who have an interest in and talent for sport will pursue this outside of structured school PE lessons. They will join teams and clubs, have specialist coaching, train in their spare time and meet like-minded people. School PE should be as fun and inclusive as possible, less about refining your backhand or improving your footwork, and more about encouraging young people to take pleasure in exercise and find ways that they can look after their health on their own. It is only seven years after stopping school games that I am beginning to address the need to do this, so scarred was I by the experience. I bought a mini-trampoline and went salsa dancing. I hope to go again next week. The enforced discrimination and ritual humiliation of school PE had, on me and probably on many others, the exact opposite of the intended effect. Give primary school children an hour to run around playing games. Have school gardens that pupils are responsible for the upkeep of. Introduce aerobics, dancing and martial arts in place of hockey and rugby. Play rounders and quik cricket instead of tennis and athletics. Do not condemn the children who most need physical exercise at school to years of feeling inadequate and excluded.

Snow, power cuts and choir debauchery

Wow, updating for the second time in two days. It's snowing again!! In fact, I touch-typed all that cos I was looking out of my window ("at the only snow") and didn't make a single mistake. Ach, snow is lovely. At least before it gets all slushy and grey from the cars. It really makes me miss the countryside, actually. Not least cos we always used to get days off school when it snowed really badly. But also because you're not allowed to walk on the grass much here, and it's no fun if you can't go tearing around fields chucking snowballs. And because there are more trees, and snow on trees is one of the most beautiful things in the world, and because the snow doesn't get all trampled and driven through, and because snow makes everyone so childish and excitable. Helen had an email from her tutor saying, 'I don't care if your essays are late, if it means you get the chance to go outside and play in the snow.' Wow. All my tutor said to me was, 'Lots of excellent analysis, but I fear you have completely lost sight of the question you chose! Even the conclusion makes no reference to it...'

Oops.

I had a reprieve on my language essay. I thought I was going to have to get it in today, and as I haven't started it, this would have put a damper on the snow excitement somewhat, but I have till Monday! Hurrah! So I went to choir dinner with a clear conscience (and two pairs of tights, because it was cold). Great fun - everyone looked lovely and was pleasantly drunk. Goat's cheese tart featured on the menu, which pleased me muchly. Ditto the chocolate pots; sin in a coffee cup. Owen came up to me as we were going into hall and asked my permission to read from his hamster book ('by popular request'), assuring me it wasn't a personal reference. I wonder how he found out Catherine called me that...

I left before things got too riotous (the Irish one rolled in at 4.30, after a debauched evening of spin the bottle and drinking games involving the removal of clothing, though she claims she treated such activities with the contempt they deserve) and came home, took my make-up off and drank a glass of milk before going to bed. When did I get so grown-up? I've rediscovered the joys of writing in fountain pen and even had two people tell me this week that I'm going to make a fantastic mother! The power was off when I got back, which was enormously exciting. I had to go to bed by candlelight, feeling fabulously old-fashioned, particularly after having brought my shopping home wrapped in a paper parcel! I've made a resolution to stop using carrier bags (except for clothes shopping, somehow it seems wrong to put new clothes in a Tesco bag for life, though I don't know why this should be so) which I'm doing quite well at. When I set out to go food-shopping I usually remember, but when calling in for odd things on the way back from tutes and suchlike I keep realising I've forgotten them, and many's the time I've come back from Sainsbury's with cans of chickpeas cradled in my arms! Anyway, I was in Whittard's buying some tea (it momentarily having slipped my mind that while I have nine different varieties of tea, I have completely run out of coffee) and completely confused the shop assistant when I asked her to wrap them up! I did reflect that living in the days of candles and parcels of shopping might be quite fun, except for the fact that I wouldn't have been able to go to Oxford, or travel to Africa, or write, or do any of the other things that I enjoy...

I found a Saturday Jumbo crossword on the Times website. I am making very good progress. I am making less good progress with work.

Ooh, and Gaelle, thankyou for leaving my first comment in MONTHS! Was v excited! Also, you're being very persuasive about the whole going-to-China thing. What would be a good time of year for a visit?

Oxford in the snow

The chief nourisher in life's feast...

Hello all.

I was supposed to be watching 'A very long engagement' with my seminar group tonight but it was only going to be two of us, so we've postponed it and now I have an evening I didn't have before. The good part of my brain is saying 'do some work, then you won't have a mad essay dash tomorrow like you did last week'. The other part is saying, 'ooh, internet, bet you can have fun on that.'

I haven't really done much this term. Not as much work as I should be doing and too much cooking. Nothing seems to motivate me except shepherd's pie. I know this is a valuable life skill, but I'm competent enough to keep myself alive and healthy, and I have the entire rest of my life to make soup... I can hardly go to a job interview and say, 'Look, I know I got a third, but my risotto is really, really good.'

We came second in the Turf quiz last Tuesday, winning the princely sum of three pounds, largely thanks to the classical music round, much to the chagrin of the absent Catherine. I finally succeeded in writing something for one of my seminars and my tutor was suitably appreciative. Livvy was here at the weekend, though she was preoccupied with Rob and I was preoccupied with cottage pie and the Translation of Doom so we didn't see much of each other. Everyone else went out for lunch, but I'd eaten, so I joined them afterwards and drank more lapsang souchong than you could shake a stick at.

I've had a major insomniac patch over the last couple of weeks. Never sure how confessional I should get on here as I have absolutely no idea who's reading, but, meh, let's just say that insomnia always makes me feel sad and anxious, even when there's no real underlying cause. (Oh, and almost comically irritable in the morning. I've always been incapable of functioning without muesli, but this was epic.) And I always seem to be so tired that I can't concentrate on anything or take an interest in anything, which means I get more anxious that I'm not achieving anything and then can't sleep because of that, and then I find myself getting so worried about the insomnia itself that it just makes itself worse... It's such a disturbing experience, too, not being able to sleep, particularly after several nights. Your body knows you're tired and it knows you need sleep, and it seems strange that your body would do something that's going to be bad for it - yet for some reason you're still awake, fretting...

Have now substituted redbush tea and bananas for anything remotely enjoyable after about 4 p.m. Here's hoping.