Correction

If I could get on MSN and if I'd remembered to buy some salad dressing, my life would be perfect.

"Aren't you in Africa?"

Aww. The annoying old men got shifted to my colleague's class and I had an absolutely lovely group this morning. Taught two fairly successful lessons and got called an 'angel' by half of my students. Afterwards, went to LMH to be rapturously reunited with my, er... bike and then cycled to Tesco's to stock up on food, which made me feel unclean, but I mostly bought non-Tesco stuff, and got some of those hippie bags you're supposed to remember to take next time you go, which salves my conscience slightly. I am vaguely depressed at impending student eating habits. I just decided I couldn't bear reformed ham, or Value Weetabix, or that cheese that tastes like plastic any more, and have come home with muesli, the most enormous olives I've ever seen, 'cheese with bits' (on special offer... white Stilton with apricots... Wensleydale with cranberries....) and real Tropicana. Decadent, but I'm sure it's good for my soul. And, maybe, my body, if you think about it.

And I love having a job that makes me feel fuzzy when I think I've done it well. I love how pretty Oxford is when it's sunny. I even love my tiny, temporary room. I love the ginormous olives. I love that I felt like smiling at everyone I saw on my way home. I love that my scout put all my stuff in a nice, tidy pile. I love that Crystal Light still tastes foul and dyes your tongue weird colours. I love that I had a great time last night and wasn't intimidated by Large Groups of People like I was in February. (Even if I did stay far too long, get stupidly drunk-tired and end up collapsing into bed, lesson still unplanned, after an impromptu midnight coffee.) I love playing my music without bass riffs reverberating through the house and rather spoiling Bach. I love that my phone is full of mad pictures. I just feel rather fond of everything, and everyone, around me at the moment. Thank you.

Hell, if I could just get on bloody MSN, my life'd be perfect.

Find someone who...

Have now arrived back in Oxford, where I aim to stay for over a year. Wow. Consistency.

I got here last night after a day on Megabus, which was cheap and allowed me to read lots. In fact, the journey from London to Oxford was on a normal Oxford Tube, only cheaper. And I saw a friend from school who I hadn't seen in ages, which was a very odd coincidence, but it was cool to catch up. I had dinner with Nik, sat on the balcony shivering out of some peculiar English determination to enjoy being outside when it's sunny regardless of temperature, spilt tomato sauce down my new, clean skirt that I wanted to wear to work and then went to bed and had a bad attack of insomnia.

Today was my first day teaching, which was... interesting. I had been expecting to walk straight into a lesson plan, but they just handed me a folder and a textbook and I had to very briefly prepare a lesson to teach to a group I knew nothing about, so we had a nice game of 'Find Someone Who...' and then talked about transport, cos that unit in the textbook had lots of pictures. And aside from the fact that there were two old men who kept shouting at each other across the classroom in Italian, another old man who kept trying to flirt with me and an old lady who came up to me at the end and said she hadn't understood a word and could we do primary school things tomorrow, it went pretty well. Or at least I'm still newly qualified and naive enough to feel all warm and fuzzy when they seem to be having fun even if I doubt they learnt anything. They are a lovely group, just.... mad.

I have one lesson planned for tomorrow, but the other one caused me untold panic (they're switching the groups around again) and I had no idea what to do it on, so I gave up and came home with a textbook and meant to plan it now, except I had to faff around moving my stuff from LMH to Cardo (Rami, thank you sooooo much!), and then I started settling in, and then I discovered the ethernet cable... Though I can't get on MSN cos apparently I'm not actually on the network. Grr. (If anyone wants to help me rectify this situation...) And now I have to change into something that doesn't smell and go to Queen's, and then to the pub, but THE LESSON WILL BE PLANNED. Even if I did have no sleep and want to just curl up in bed.....

Viv, the caretaker, has lent me a kettle, some cutlery and a plate. That would never have happened in Florey.

Must also acquire breakfast for tomorrow at some point. Will have to be out of here before they start serving tomorrow. Honestly. Work is near LMH. "Near LMH!" I have never uttered those words unless preceded by an emphatic negative and possibly swearing, but the one time I can say it unironically, the boy has finals.


My old man told me one time
You never get wise, you only get older

Another turning point...

My MSN homepage told me that today's 'top picks' (whatever those are) are:

• Da Vinci code: test your knowledge
• Are you the ultimate BB fan?
• Quiz: Madonna's dizzying career

I got so distressed by the state of modern society and the subsequent possibility that I may secretly be middle-aged that I forgot why I'd opened a second window.

Home is good. I'm vaguely worried my brothers are going to give me their nasty cold germs, which I will then bring down to Oxford and spread among people who really don't want to be ill right now, but it's nice to be around familiar people and have someone to talk to during the day. I've done lots of boring, domesticated things (ironing, making rice salads, sorting out my old clothes) but it surprisingly feels quite calming: like I'm getting some sort of semblance of order back in my life after a rather hectic year. Even if I do think that I'm only getting rid of things to house yet more books. My parents have developed an alarming obsession with Frasier and my brother still plays the bass guitar REALLY LOUDLY for HOURS ON END. My mum is finally getting bored with being at home all the time and is already planning for my dad's retirement. (Buying a camper van, going round Europe, turning the dining room into a spare bedroom, getting a new sink. I think his plans involve compost heaps and vegetable patches.) I'm making good progress with my reading list, which is so organised and dedicated it's frankly terrifying and I found several pages of something I wrote over the summer on a floppy disk which pushes the word count up to 1/5 of the average novel! (It's only taken me 2 years to get that far...)

So, yes, generally feeling good about having people I know and like around me, looking forward to throwing things at happy finalists, to having a job I'm enthusiastic about and get paid more than minimum wage for, getting back to my exciting course (knowing full well my enthusiasm will evaporate in 0th week faster than you can say the word 'deadline' ) and possibly, possibly to regaining something approximating sanity.

We can hope.

I have even been head-hunted! After a fashion. This TEFL malarky is fantastic. Not only have I spent all morning being interviewed 'in case we can give you a better offer' and emailing people to get extensions on when I have to let them know about contracts, but I've also had an offer from a language school in Oxford next week. It's teaching a small group of Italian adults, just for a few hours a day, and only for next week, but it'll be great experience and give me a chance to get used to teaching again before the summer. There might even be a possibility of working for them in August and September. I actually have a skill that people want to pay me for, mostly during the summer vacation, when I'm mostly looking for work, mostly in Oxford, where I live, or wouldn't mind coming back to work in once I'm in London. (I am indebted to Daily Info. Thank you.)

I'll be back in Oxford from Monday, very responsibly living a long way down Iffley Road so as not to distract certain people from Very Important Things, and if anyone wants to meet up one afternoon/evening, well, you can call me on my shiny, new phone!

I even know how to set the alarm clock on it now.

Hmph.

Ah, crap. I think I'm falling in love with Gide all over again. He's GAY and DEAD - when will I learn? It's not going to happen!

"And the weather in Newcastle is very similar to here in Paris..."

Similar my a***. I don't recall a howling gale and torrential rainstorm in Paris. How I've missed the North-East.

I spent all of yesterday in varying types of vehicle. I took the train to Paris, and was once again amazed at how France has such clean, efficient, cheap public transport, when everybody has a car and nobody uses it. Odd.

I was meant to be meeting Rachel, who was on the TEFL course with me and is currently working in Paris teaching people who work in the Pompidou Centre, who was also looking after a lot of my stuff. Unfortunately, she'd had an extra class sprung on her and had to dash off and prepare that, so I went for lunch on my own. I found a little cafe and sat for a long time drinking a glass of white Burgundy (it appeals to my sense of irony) and reading Gide, which is really pushing the boundaries between bohemian and pretentious, and then ate a sandwich on the train to the airport.

I managed to flirt my way onto my flight with 22kg of luggage and three carry-on items, which I was very proud of, and arrived home in time for a civilised takeaway with my parents and brother. I also decided to mark my return to the UK by getting a new contract with a shiny new phone, which has the advantage of being shiny, and new and all, but which has the disadvantage of me not being to use it (possibly not the phone's fault?). But it gives me something to play with, which is fun. If anyone wants to email me their number I'd be very grateful, cos I've lost everyone's!

love, pride, deep-fried chicken

Today I have:

• bought 10 books, all of academic worth;
• got a new phone contract complete with shiny new phone;
• bought a train ticket to Paris;
• read an essay by Duras about writing, love and solitude;
• cooked an exciting meal, again involving goats' cheese;
• challenged the washing machine to a duel... and won!

I also discovered a fantastic website, of geeky interest to (perhaps) a select few.

I wonder if it's a) significant and b) worrying that my iTunes Top 25 Most Played contains Don't think twice, it's all right (Bob Dylan), I heard love is blind (Amy Winehouse) and Come on home (Franz Ferdinand). This is all coincidental, and possibly countered by the presence of Drops of Jupiter (Train), but that song is so melodramatically sentimental that I doubt it. (In a good way.)

Am now resigned to the accommodation situation for next year, and instead of bitching, I've started organising a kitchen full of nice people, which is much more productive. Though it still mings. I think it's just the suddenness of it. And the fact that I was planning to use the boy's kitchen anyway, so having one in St Aldate's is not really much of an advantage. But I will be able to knock on Catherine's door and watch her giving birth to kittens on the walk to choir, which will be just like first year. =) (And, yes, I know it would be much nicer just to be able to run across the quad five minutes before it starts, but I'm trying to be positive here.)

My return is set for next Tuesday (23rd) and I shall be in Oxford from the 5th June, so if you would like me to come and throw things at you at any point after that date, please do alert me to the fact.

"I ain't saying you treated me unkind
You could've done better, but I don't mind..."

FEEL MY WRATH!!!

Bah. I don't *want* to live in a building it's actually acceptable to charge people rent for. I don't *want* kitchens and en suite facilities. If I'd wanted decent-standard accommodation I'd have gone somewhere else, but I believe it is my right as an Oxford student to live in a poky, moth-infested attic for at least one year of my life. Everyone else got to be within staggering distance of the beer cellar, panicking distance of the library and "aargh, choir starts at 5 on Wednesdays" distance of the chapel. So why can't we?

Humph.

And gallantly, she chickened out...

Well. Total about-face regarding plans for immediate future.

I have been offered a job in Oxford over the summer. It's not ideal, but I have two more interviews for other summer school jobs, which may turn up something better, and even if they don't, this sounds fun and gives me the chance to: a) use my TEFL qualification, b) earn money, c) do something towards the vague general objective of getting a degree, and d) have fun. All things I'm not doing here, even though that was the initial plan. Truth be told, I'm not hugely happy, everything positive keeping me here largely involves seeing people from home, and if I'm not doing anything to make feeling like this worthwhile, well, I'm going to come home and meet my friends and my boyfriend out of finals, and take a job I will enjoy and that might be useful to me in the future (you can apply linguistics?), and start my project that I'm hugely excited about. So there.

And I don't care if you think I'm giving up just cos it's difficult, and you can sing the 'Brave Sir Robin' song from The Holy Grail at me all you want, but I have justified this decision as a Good Thing in the overarching scheme of my life and I will stick my fingers in my ears and hum loudly if anyone tries to change my mind.

Apologies go to anyone who wanted to come and use me as an excuse to stock up on Beaujolais.

 

"A tinkling piano in the next appartment..."

Unfortunately, I do not have an airline ticket to romantic places, wild strawberries, silk stockings, dance invitations, daffodils, or indeed any of the other things mentioned in the song.

Also, to clarify, the rum was not for me to get drunk on to numb the pain caused by the inexpert, unvaried music wafting gently down from the floor above, it was for my housemate to soak exotic fruits in to create a lovely digestif. (In chorus, "We believe you....")

Since I finished Desperate Housewives on Sunday my life has seemed rather empty. I tried to fill the void with reading, writing, lesson planning, martini, facebook, but none of it worked. However, for some reason I seem to have come over all positive and determined in the last couple of days. Firstly, I deleted Spider Solitaire from my computer. I've done this before, but this time I didn't reinstall it again 2 hours later. I did all the washing up from the dinner party last night (great fun, but they started talking engineering at the end so I retired to my literary theory book) and even went for a run. It has been a long time since I took any exercie, and I probably spent more time recovering afterwards than actually doing the whole cardiovascular thang, but I still feel virtuous. I also finally figured out how to get a photo on my profile on this thing, and spent a long time faffing about with colours and stuff. I demand you all click on the link to BBC news because I ventured into html for the first time in my life to create it, AND it worked.

I am withing finishing distance of two of the worthy books I have here and will soon actually have to do the Paper VIII reading lists in a more thorough way than, 'Ooh, a train, let's read another half a chapter of Le rouge et le noir on it!' Send linguistics books. Fast.

MAN UPSTAIRS: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE STOP PLAYING THE PIANO. OR AT LEAST LEARN A SECOND PIECE. NOW. THANKYOU.

I'm going to buy some rum.

Anyone who talked to me on Friday would have been subjected to extensive bitching about the fact that my teaching has been set back three weeks and I'd been prevented from taking another job because I was theoretically busy on Tuesdays. However, I have, in the last two days, watched so many episodes of Desperate Housewives that real life now seems like a distant memory.

I had an 8-episode binge last night, after a similarly lengthy binge of Freudian analysis of literature, and consequently took it all much too seriously. Still, overintellectualising aside, I do think there are some good moments in it, if a little too much slapstick for my liking, and the voiceovers are annoying and unnecessary - why have a dead woman giving trite summaries of things that can be equally well expressed by the writing and the acting?

This weekend my house has been invaded by rugby players who spent the whole day yesterday sitting in the living room making cockerel noises and laughing extremely loudly. They went out in the evening, came back on the earliest Métro and spent the entire morning (by which I mean early afternoon) wandering around looking hungover and half-naked.

Here is a quote from the literary theory book, which I feel is an example of why translations should be used with caution:

"The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked."

And one from Le Rouge et le Noir :

"Mme de Rênal pensait aux passions comme nous pensons à la loterie: duperie certaine et bonheur cherché par des fous."

I am eating a sandwich. On real square sandwich bread. Brown bread.

I appear to have reacquired my Northumbrian inability to cope with heat, which does not bode well, as it is only the beginning of May. Maybe I should stop walking up and down hills in the early afternoon.

It's been an odd couple of days. Strange is back. Meh. Have been assiduously planning my lessons for next week, which I got rather worried about, because I don't know these people and I've never planned a 2-hour lesson before. Also, I was presented with a map of how to find the company, which was very detailed but gave no clue as to what general area of Lyon it was, aside from my boss's helpful remark that it was 'on the way to IKEA'. I met some of my colleagues, who were all nice, particularly the biker guy who told me everyone in the company was lovely, but they're still a little odd in the way that many expats are...

I am also incapable of using the washing machine. You put stuff in the top of the drum and have to close it, which I didn't realise, and I couldn't open it again, resulting in all my clothes being locked inside until my housemates got home. Then, I took my fabulously clean clothes out to discover that my French Connection black linen trousers that make my legs actually look long (I think cos the trousers themselves are too long) had been brutally discoloured by the rather alarmingly magenta top I bought in New York. Grr.

And I didn't get the car breakdown job, as I can't work Tuesdays, which leaves me back... not quite at square one, but maybe two or three (depending on how many steps there are), and my latest potential tutee stood me up. Bastard. After my perilous walk to the park. Literature lesson was fun, and he even showed me where to get second hand books, and this morning sent me an email with various attachments for next time and some job-finding website.

Went out for dinner last night and was so impressed by the flat. It's right in the centre, in a funky old building and has three floors (so I guess not really 'flat') accessed by winding staircases and trapdoors.

If anyone would like to marry me (thus enabling me to wear the absolutely gorgeous dress in one of the many bridal wear shops around where I work) and then move into a funky multi-level appartment with me, I would be very grateful.

Bah. I'm doing that annoying post-bank-holiday timewarp thing, where you're convinced it's Monday and it actually isn't. I don't know why this would affect me, as my weeks have had no structure for quite some time, but I am still disorientated. So there.

Did spectacularly little this weekend, save buying a ticket to the Strokes in July and spending rather too long doing silly quizzes on http://www.okcupid.com which is, I know, a dating site, but I was only there for the quizzes. And there are many. (Apologies to anyone whose 2:1 chances I've just torpedoed.) I also watched L'auberge espagnole cos everyone I've met says, 'Ooh, you're sharing a flat, it must be just like L'auberge espagnole, which it isn't really. (Not so many drugs.) Anyway, immediately after watching it, I found myself weeping, for it was a beautiful portrayal of what it's like going off to a foreign country on your own, and of why it's more important to be a writer than an economist, (also of the general unfeasability of long distance relationships, but we'll gloss over that) but I've now decided it's just shameless EU propaganda (the British are ruining everyone else's fun by carrying on with Americans).

I also got incredibly excited that there is a song with my name in it on the new Franz Ferdinand album. (I also have a Franz Ferdinand ticket, courtesy of the parents.) I know this seems sad, but I have never found my name being used in any book, poem or song except for the maid in Little Women (hey, it's the kind of thing you notice when you're eight), so Well, That Was Easy is now my new favourite song.

I have an eminently manageable to-do list for today. I shall start by plucking my eyebrows.