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."