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.

Mini-rant

Urgh. "Alternative careers." What does that even mean? It makes it sound like there's something strange about you, something wrong with you if you don't want to be an investment banker. I feel as if the Careers Service are somehow judging me for wanting a job I enjoy; or a job that also gives me time to write and sing and cook and maintain some semblance of funtional human relationships outside work; or a job that fits in with my principles. It's like an 'alternative lifestyle' is always something that society doesn't really approve of, even if it makes you happy.

Bah.

Green living, Hamster-style

According to a list of tips on how to save the environment which I read on the back of a toilet door in Magdalen, recycling two glass bottles will save enough energy to boil the kettle for five cups of tea or coffee.

Which means that if I drink two bottles of wine a day, I can justify the amount of hot beverages I consume.

Why?

Meh. This term I have made a concerted effort to be healthy. Yet, despite taking more exercise, getting to bed at a decent time, eating lots of fresh fruit and veg and drinking nothing but herbal tea, I once again find myself beginning second week surrounded by vitamin C, zinc, echinea, Kleenex balsam and an inability to concentrate cos my head's all stuffed up. What more can I do??!!!!!

Last night my friends and I had a dinner party. We ended up talking about property prices.

Help.

Hee hee!

Lost Earl Grey - distraught.

Me: Hello! How are you?

Aged relative: Fine, thank you. How are you?

Me: Fine. Has Daddy arrived at your house yet?

Aged relative: Not yet. He rang to say he'd be late. We're expecting him any minute.

Me: Okay... [slowly] It's just that he said that he and Grandpa would either get here around 4 so we can meet before choir practice, or come straight to evensong at 6.30. I don't mind either way but I'd just like to know.

Aged relative: Right. What time is evensong?

Me: 6.30.

Aged relative: So it'll finish around 7.30.

Me: Usually around 7.

Aged relative: I see.

[Pause]

Aged relative: But you have a practice, don't you?

Me: Yes.

Aged relative: What time?

Me: 5.

Aged relative: So if they're coming before evensong, they'll need to get there about 4.

Me: Yes.

Aged relative: So maybe they'd better come at 6.30.

Me: Maybe.

Aged relative: Do you know which they're going to do?

Me: No...

[Sounds of me banging my head against the wall in frustration.]

Me: Do you think you could ask Daddy to ring me when he gets to yours, please?

Aged relative: Yes, of course. What on?

Me: Err, my phone. He'll have the number.

Aged relative: Okay. What do you want him to tell you?

.......


I probably shouldn't mock the elderly, but my Granny is otherwise perfectly mentally sound and has always been like this to some extent.

I have made about 2.5l of butternut squash soup, dyeing parts of the kitchen orange (sorry).

I want these shoes.

My teapot arrives in a few hours.

I have mislaid the box of Earl Grey I'm convinced I had last term.

Sally gave Sybil a good trim and she looks much healthier now. I might get some coriander, mint and/or chives to keep her company on my windowsill.

I know what I'm going to write about for my seminar tomorrow.

I woke up at a sensible time this morning. I would have got in the shower during Thought for the Day as I usually did last term, but they were talking to Sebastian Faulks about WW1 veterans afterwards so I had a little more of a doze and listened to that, as I'm sure it counts as work. Though he didn't say anything massively insightful. The recordings of the veterans were more interesting. There are only 4 surviving WW1 veterans alive today. Which, given as they must be over 100, is pretty amazing.

Today has been a good day for M&S Food special offers.

Vindicated

Just found this on the BBC Food website. It made me want to jump up and down, waving my arms and shouting, 'Yes, yes, you morons! This is what I've been saying all along!'

Fresh is best

Often foods marketed at slimmers are not very nutritious. One so-called 'slimming' chicken and sweetcorn flavour packet soup mix contained no sweetcorn and only one per cent chicken, water and glucose syrup being the first two ingredients. Okay, so it's less than 60 calories a serving but where's the goodness in it?

The healthiest food you can buy probably doesn't come with a label. Fresh ingredients won't list their nutrients, additives (or absence of) or boast that they're good for you. But if you buy organic broccoli from a farmers' market you know that it has been grown without pesticides and that it's packed with nutrients. It might even have been picked that very morning.

So, beware of the claims of labels. Look for the Government-approved traffic light rating - if there is one - and look even more carefully where there isn't.

Where possible, prepare foods yourself. You'll know exactly what you're eating and nothing with a 'healthy choice' label emblazoned on it is likely to be as virtuous - or as delicious.

In which the hamster escapes the tyranny of language policy and mulitlingual nation states by going to Brussels

I went back into Oxford on Thursday (for some reason I said in my last post I went to Brussels the next day - it wasn't true) to get my boots reheeled and then had to hang around and wait for them, which was a fantastic piece of work-avoidance. I ended up traipsing round the cooking sections in both Boswells and Debenhams and fantasising about, at some point in the future, having a large, well-equipped kitchen where I could make soup and jam and all those other things. Sigh. I bought a hand blender for a tenner and made stilton soup, as Nik's mum had kindly given me approximately 200g of strong stilton on the verge of going mouldy that went out of date about two days afterwards. There was an exciting Mozart concert on Radio 3 and I sat and listened to it and pondered at what point I had turned into the kind of person who rated buying a kitchen gadget as the high point of their day. Then I listened to Choral Evensong and packed and then got up early on Friday and went to Brussels.

Firstly, the Eurostar is fantastic. Even including the Oxford Tube journey, getting the tube to Waterloo and checking in and waiting for the Eurostar, I still got from Oxford to Brussels in the same time as it takes to get from Oxford to Newcastle. Madness! Even more madly, I got in before Livvy and waited around, reading, in the station (my bag being too heavy to permit much window-shopping) and then met her off the train. Heehee. We went back to her house and drank a pint of tea in the new mugs I'd got her and then went to the supermarket to get olives and pizza and salad and wine and came back and made dinner. Then we drank a pint of coffee and stayed up until 3 a.m. talking, amongst other things, about how annoying it is having a boyfriend who doesn't appreciate Radio 4.

We had made such great plans for Saturday, but, after the exuberant conversational exertions of the night before, overslept rather dramatically, so (with further encouragement from the rain) decided against the lengthy but scenic walk into the centre of Brussels. We fare-dodged on the tram and took a perfunctory look at the Grande Place, then went and had coffee (which came with free chocolate mousse!!) in a pretty shopping arcade with lots of funky small boutiques with beautiful shoes and bags and gloves and suchlike. Livvy then urgently needed my opinion on a pair of boots, so we went to Zara, lost each other in the seething mass of undignified humanity that was trying on jumpers and leaving them in untidy piles so no-one can find a V-neck, proceeded to H&M and forgot to go to the musical instruments museum. We had lunch in an earthy, whole-foody type place, though my eyes proved bigger than my stomach and I ate my tuna and wheat salad on the train the next day, and were torn between excitement that someone had left an English newspaper and disappointment that it was the Daily Mail. We read it anyway and felt dirty and angry afterwards. Hissss. My personal favourite article was: 'Why joining the EU has led to the loss of civil liberties, the decline of British values and a glut of immigrants taking our jobs!' Livvy enjoyed the expose about Lembit Opik and the Cheeky Girl's sex life.

Having abandoned any hope of being cultured and touristy, we carried on looking at shoes until it was time for live jazz at an exciting bar. We sat upstairs and had coffee, and then Livvy had another coffee and I had a cocktail (cos I was tired and needed the sugar rush) until we got too hungry and restless to be assuaged by free peanuts and went to the supermarket and bought chicken for dinner. We ate it with the world's finest chips and, as Nik had requested any present "as long as it's worth millions" and had only agreed to me bringing beer on condition that the bottle was encrusted with diamonds and rubies, I spent the evening sticking nail decorations onto a beer bottle to create said effect on my shoestring budget. (He had also stipulated it was to be brewed with liquid gold, but the only beer claiming to have anything to do with gold had a nasty plastic top, while the one I chose had a funky wooden cork and had already been approved of by Jon and Rob.) Then we watched 'Coupling' on YouTube (which was annoying cos the clips only last 10 mins and we had to keep changing them), cackled extensively, and then, again, talked until far too late about philosophy and politics and history and linguistics and literature and culture, or at least insofar as they relate to sex. Oh, and we tried to decide what we'd take on Desert Island Discs. I entered into the spirit of this rather too enthusiastically, imagining I really was going to be abandoned on a desert island and therefore choosing a wide variety of long things with good tunes so I wouldn't get bored, until I remembered it was really a sort of musical 'This is Your Life' and Livvy suggested I follow the more general tactic of choosing either my favourite things* or things that reminded me of certain points in my life. Ahem. Yes. Of course. We both agreed choosing one book was the hardest part of the whole endeavour. Livvy wanted to take a piano and limitless supply of music. I can't decide if my luxury would be unlimited paper and pens or an espresso machine.

Ooh, ooh, yesterday I bought a stovetop espresso maker with 2 porcelain cups and saucers with a pretty pattern on them for an extremely bargainous price in the Boswells sale AND made successful espresso (minor spillage incident, probably design flaw, kitchen otherwise unscathed). On the strength of this, the cafetiere and the new teapot, I am going for the title of Aldate's hot beverage queen HT07. Must now resist utterly pointless urge to buy more mugs and a mug tree in complete denial of proximity to overdraft even before paying battels.

On Sunday, we again overslept, though less dramatically, and went for a brief wander through the market (fresh vegetables! cheese!) and had a brief but chocolatey pain au chocolat to curb my hunger cravings. I wish I weren't grouchy and prone to dizziness until I've had breakfast. It seems very indelicate. Then I got the train home, and again it was fast, clean, cheap, efficient, environmentally friendly and pleasant. I was sitting next to someone from SOAS, but I decided against plunging into conversation with him as 'Ooh, I nearly went there for my degree but decided I'd rather do linguistics than Chinese and went to Oxford instead, and then I nearly went there again for postgrad, but then I decided I wanted to do literature, and then I thought this would be damaging to my writing, so I've decided not to do postgrad, at least not yet, but I have no interest or aptitude for anything else, so... - what do you think I should do with my life?' was not an opening gambit conducive to other people's high estimation of my sanity.

I got home and felt tired so I went to sleep in the afternoon, woke up grouchy and was too bored to cook and sent Nik out in the rain to get a kebab with our meagre cash. Classy. I was speaking to my mother while he was out and told her he'd gone to get a take-away. She asked me what we were having. "Err... I don't know - it's a surprise!" I said. Then we watched excessive amounts of 'Coupling' and yesterday I finished a book and started another and we went for dinner with Rami and people in the evening. Yay.

Gaah, I have a seminar in two days and I've read one book and 50 pages of another out of the whole reading list. Where did the vac go??? Why am I in bed, writing this, instead of working??? I keep telling myself I need a break, in a calm-before-the-storm sort of way, heedless of the fact that the storm would be calmer if the calm was a bit stormier. Balance. Moderation. Being sensible. New Year's Resolution anyone? My tutor sent me an email asking if I could come to a meeting on Thursday about teaching arrangements. I replied, saying I would be in said seminar. I received this:

Do you mean that teaching is already beginning this coming Thursday, in Oth Week, before term has begun??

I was tempted to reply simply by saying 'Yes'. I haven't yet come up with a more elaborate response, so it's still sitting in my drafts folder.

Anyway, I'm hungry. I will go and have some soup and read like a wee beastie, as Catherine would have said in first year, until Nik gets home. Which will be in about two hours. Hmm.


*"These are a few of..."

Happy New Year!!!

Gaah. They've changed blogger again. It's no longer beta, whatever that means, which I'm not entirely unhappy about, cos it was faffy and annoying, but I can't find any new cool stuff on this thingy, whatever it may be.

My camera is playing up. It keeps freezing up and not responding when you press the buttons. Suggestions, anyone?

I'm now back in Oxford, theoretically working. I went to my Auntie Margaret's for lunch on Saturday, which was great - we had yummy pie and I got given a teapot. My cousin has a new car - a swanky BMW with all sorts of hi-tech thingummies including self-dipping headlights (which nobody can figure out how they work*, but they do) as a wedding present from his fiancee's father. Eek.

I went down to London for New Year's Eve, and managed to get the bus to where I was supposed to be all by myself. Nik and I were at a party with one of his friends from school and his uni friends. I had a great time, managing not to get horrendously drunk and was compos mentis enough the next morning to fry eggs for everyone who was up. Hurrah. Here are some highlights from the evening when enthusiasm for Jenga waned, and certain people among us decided to instead play 'How many Jenga bricks can you fit in your mouth?', thus proving the victorious Nik's claim that 'everything is a competition if you want it to be.'
All the other photos on Facebook were a result of flagrant camera abuse by other people. Nik is a hero for making chilli at 1 a.m.

We went back to Surrey afterwards and sheltered under a blanket in front of 'Jeeves and Wooster'. I want to live in the 1930s. Lots of jazz and men in suits. Mmmm, Stephen Fry. Mmm. Too much Jeeves led to an after-dinner departure back to Oxford, and now I'm back in Nik's room where my stuff takes up half the floor space. This is supposed to be a comment on the size of his room, not on the amount of stuff I have. However, I do have more stuff. I wanted to buy some stuff in the sales, so I started in New Look, thinking I'd then move on to some real bargains, and pick up some lovely, well-cut, non-boring-high-street-chain-store clothes elsewhere, but no other clothes in Oxford fit me at all. Particularly jeans. I'm just too short. So I resigned myself to this and went and bought lots of tights to go with my two skirts from New Look. Hmm.

Off to Brussels tomorrow, yayayayayayay.

Am just going to listen to Just a Minute and then go and do something useful like post my brother's birthday card and get my boots reheeled. And make some soup with the enormous quantity of Stilton Nik's mum kindly gave me.

"Hey Churchill, are you the First Lord of the Admiralty and war-time Prime Minister who kept the Nazis from our shores?"

"Oh yes."

"Were you invested as a Knight of the Garter, bestowed with a Nobel Prize for Literature and voted the greatest Briton of all time?"

"Oh yes, yes, yes, yes."

"And are you pleased to have those achievements commemorated by a talking, nodding insurance dog?"

"Errr... no."

*Oh lord, my first thought on typing that sentence was 'I'm sure I've written a syntax essay arguing why this is an impossible sentence'. Am now filled with vague uncomfortable twitchy feeling.

Heedless of the wind and weather

I came to my room with the intention of writing another section of my extended essay, but have spent most of the time faffing about putting photos on facebook. (This is always irritating cos for some reason I can't do it on Firefox and have to use Explorer.) However, festive pictures should now be there for your delectation.

Got home today after a week traipsing round England in what seems, in retrospect, like an extended wine-tasting. It started in London (after a prolific bout of work on the East Coast main line) for an exciting AV reunion, where there was much ooh-ing over Nat's new flat and Wellers's engagement (congratulations!!) and I thought how much we've grown up since we all met at the airport four years ago, untravelled and fresh out of school. We went out for a lovely meal in Chiswick and caught up and reminisced lots and pouted in lots of photos, and then unfortunately I had to leave cos it was Nik's birthday the next day and I was going to stay with him. However, due to the combined incompetence of my timekeeping, late-evening holiday period tube services, London Victoria's ticket machine provision and the slow man in front of me in the queue, I succeeded in missing the train and dragging Nik out to fetch me from Epsom at 1 a.m. in the freezing fog (I can't deal with these harsh southern climes) with the remnants of a cold. Oops.

Still, his birthday was fun - he beat me and his sisters resoundingly (twice) at his new Friends trivia DVD game (surprise, surprise) and we had a nice meal and a very competitive game of Trivial Pursuits. (Snowflakes have 6 sides. I knew that, but did they listen...?) On Christmas Eve his mum was giving a huge party which was really cool, but I had to leave after a couple of hours (and spent those gripped by train paranoia) and go to my grandparents' where we had a very traditional Christmas (turkey, flaming puddings, board games, carols). Nik came up on Boxing Day and coped admirably with my mad relatives and their perishingly cold house.

Took my brothers to London yesterday (though Davy would like it to be known that he is an adult and capable of taking care of himself) which, despite more train madness (sodding Virgin, bunch of incompetents), ended up being fun. Charlie is just young enough for it still to be rewarding when you take him to something he enjoys, even if he is old enough for you to take to Avenue Q. Which was, overall, excellent. The second half seemed like a desperate attempt to cobble together a coherent plot from the various amusing songs and characters and consequently the ending felt rather unsatisfactory, and the tunes weren't very memorable (which, considering that the words were, was disappointing) but, overall, excellent.

Back from Warwickshire in the car today, hate car journeys, esp in the back, esp with bony boys with their iPods turned up too loud. Ah well.

Soooo much work to do. Depressing. Just want to lie comatose and eat chocolate. Grr.

Still, can get a bargainous ticket to London for New Year. Carrot.

Ooh, ooh, just one more...

"Oh, come on, it's not like men have never used sex to get what they want?"
"How can we use sex to get what we want? Sex is what we want!"

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

"You think my wiles are masculine?"

"They're blue... to match your... lips, when they're cold..."

I'm supposed to be working... Shh... Don't tell anyone... I'm lying on the sofa watching Frasier, MSNing Liv, sipping red wine and giggling out loud. I was meant to be reading some articles that I printed out (I'm halfway through my print quota already???!!) but I can do it on the train on Tuesday. Along with reading all the books on francophonie... and planning the damn essay... and writing an introduction... and the 12 WW1 novels (why? why? why would I do that to myself?)... You can bet this will be the one time I don't get stuck for 3 hours in Doncaster...

Gaah, sodding Windows keeps trying to restart my computer. No, I want to install updates when I'm finished, thankyou.

I have Bod-madness. I've been in that (or Rhodes House, queen of libraries) since Monday, from as soon as I can drag myself there until the tetchy librarian comes round and wrenches the books from under my pale, nervous grasp. (Is anyone else worried that the abyss below is going to swallow their books at the end of the day? I always have to expressly tell the librarians I want to see the books again tomorrow - no, I don't want to restart my sodding computer - and they all think I'm neurotic and irritating, but I just can't trust the this-side-goes-back-to-the-stack-this-side-goes-back-to-the-shelf' system.) I am suffering with the almost total lack of literature on Togo (i.e. on half my essay) except for the absurdly technical of articles in French and the thing that sounds like it's exactly what I want, but it's in German. But, there we go....

"... whose ancestors were once heard to remark, 'Oh, that's a nice wooden horse, sure I'll sign for it!'"

NO! COMPUTER! NO! STOP IT!

"I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with a guy whose favourite T-shirt reads 'Seattle Hooter inspector'."

Sorry, I will cease the Frasier-quoting.

Nik is in Manchester using big manly chemist machines, which is great because it meant I got to do my 'you're leaving me alone' eyes and make him walk all the way to Jericho to watch political documentaries! The U.S. vs John Lennon was very interesting, if rather obvious parallels. 'America has this mad president. He's curtailing civil liberties and fighting this mad war in some faraway country in the name of democracy, but it's messy and not working... hmm... Just what are we alluding to? What?!' And they kept going on about how John Lennon could make a really serious point because he was a brilliant artist, but the film itself was just a lot of old interviews and concert footage interspersed with people talking. But it made me think. We don't really have anyone like that. If the world is, as I sometimes think, doomed, there isn't really anyone who (shut up windows) has the same influence. Lennon was such a threat to the establishment because he was so famous the press jumped on anything he did. Who do we have now? Paris Hilton?

"Why is it so easy to love your family but so hard to like them?"
"Ah, Daphne, that's one of the questions that makes life so rich... and psychiatrists richer."

I've bought a cardigan. Another one. It's big and pinky-purpley and warm and snuggly and I love it and it was in the sale but I think it's mumsy and makes me look like I'm 35.

"Isn't it sad when bad things happen to good sentences?"

Ack, I have to be a soprano again tomorrow. I've been croaky all week. That doesn't bode well. Especially for the Messiah on Saturday. I got an email from someone at Oxford Phil saying Nik could have a free ticket if he agreed to sell CDs. I very nearly replied thus:

Yes, that would be fine. He hates classical music and would be thrilled not to have to part with beer money for the concert. Does he need to wear a shirt?

"She deserves a doctor... or a lawyer... someone for whom a T-shirt is an undergarment."

All right, Bill Gates, you win!

xx

Yesterday I harangued Nik for being boring and doing nothing but watch TV and dragged him to the University Parks in a boring, middle-aged couple sort of way, and I took lots of photos of leafless trees and geese. Here are some of them.

Carols, ice-cream and postcolonial language policy

Ow. I don't think I was designed to sing soprano. Not judging by the pain, and the hoarseness, and the coughing, and the croaking.

Had my arm twisted into helping out St John's for their staff carol service, as their entire soprano section has gone ski-ing, which was presented to me as general carol-type shenanigans, with a couple of choir items... except these turned out to include Jesus Christ the Apple Tree (which is lovely, but those top Gs come out of flippin' nowhere) and I Saw Three Ships (which is all pitched about half an octave above my comfort zone).

And, to top it all off, during We Three Kings, some people traipsed up to the crib with a (fake) gold crown, some frankincense and some myrrh, which was hugely exciting, as I've never seen that before, but smokey and had me hacking away!

But it was fun, and I'm doing it again next week.

Afterwards I raced to Cafe Opium to celebrate Holly's birthday, ate a funky chicken dish with mangoes in, then sat around in G & D's having peculiar conversations. When we finally dragged our weary selves away, Zhenia's bike key snapped off in the lock, which happened to me over the summer and is really irritating, and we all faffed around trying to snap it, wondering how to get the bike over the top of the sign, asking the nice man in G & D's for a pair of pliars, only to find (when he appeared, bearing said useful implement) that it actually came away quite easily in James's hands...

Entertained me, anyway!

Otherwise, have done extremely little - theoretically I'm working like a Trojan (that warrior race well-known for their vicious use of OLIS stack requests and violent assaults on unsuspecting reading rooms) but due to residual term-fatigue, have been less productive than I'd like. Though I have discovered the wonderful Rhodes House, which is by no means least among the libraries of Oxford. Massively impressive and exciting building, rotunda, huuuge wooden staircase, pictures of venerable people, calls its toilets 'cloakrooms', friendly, smiley staff... That chemistry guy Nik was talking about probably took pictures of it. I should try and find them.

Though I am tired. So not now.

I will just listen to the end of Choral Evensong (from Newcastle), and then I will sleep.

Sod Facebook.

Oh dear. Oh deary me. Deary, deary, deary me.

I've been sucked in by YouTube.

I thought it was just a conduit for amateur porn, other people's children's school plays and things that weren't funny enough to get on You've Been Framed.

How wrong, how wrong I was.

Monty Python sketches... Rowan Atkinson's Welcome to Hell... French and Saunders' Titanic... All the bits of Father Ted that Catherine and Paul have been quoting for the past three years...

It's all here, in tantalisingly short and watchable snippets - "Oh, just one more before I go to sleep!" I said, two hours ago. TWO HOURS!!!!

My soul is damned for ever. Damned.

I know I should feel Christmassy, but....

The brain fog lifted at the weekend and the return to normal life would have been blissful, had it not been accompanied by a massive backlog of work. Consequently, we have two days left till the end of term, and I still have two essays to write. Which means I have to spend my last Christmas dinner with Symbolist poetry nagging annoyingly at me. (Oxford has surpassed itself, and achieved what it has been attempting for three years: this year, Christmas comes before Advent.) Fortunately, Nik will be there, and has an interview tomorrow morning, so with any luck he'll drag me home in time for him to get an early night, and therefore I'll be able to tease my inchoate thoughts on Mallarme into something resembling a structured argument of 2000 words, unimpeded by hangover and tiredness.

I had thought Christmas would be doubly exciting and magical, having been away last year and missed out on carols, mulled wine, tinsel and the like last year, but aside from the choir festivities, it feels rather like a party for the first and second years. The theme is 'Oscars' and there are Queen's 'Academy Awards', where you vote for the fittest people, the lewdest public display of affaction, the best sportspeople etc, and when I got it in my pidge I immediately thought, "Ooh, that'll be so-and-so... oh no, he's left..." It really just made me feel old. And boring. And like I've done nothing but work all term. Socially, I feel like I've left already.

Have decided to put postgrad plans on hold, partly cos I don't know whether I want to do literature or linguistics, and partly cos the AHRC form scares me. In a way, I'm really just postponing the decision, which is rather cowardly and probably ultimately unproductive, but it is possible that another term, finals and results will indicate if I have a strong inclination or ability for one or the other.

Annoyingly, while I'm quite happy to wander through life without any fixed purpose (so long as I don't actually starve), I would quite like to know, materially, what I'm going to be doing next September, when the student loan and subsidised accommodation are no more. I'm twitchy like that. I thought about doing something dictionary-related (and got all enthused by meeting a real-life lexicographer last week) but then I would either have to stay in Oxford or move to Glasgow, neither of which I really want to do. Applying for any corporate graduate scheme makes me want to gnaw my arm off, so I'm really down to scouring Guardian jobs for something that takes my fancy, probably something arts or heritage related. There was a gorgeous job at English Heritage, but unfortunately they probably aren't looking for someone to start in several months time. Same goes for anything else I'd have to apply for on a job-by-job basis. Dammit.

I made roast dinner for the first time ever on Saturday, and didn't poison anyone, which made it in my eyes a triumph. I know feel ready to take on knitting, parents' evenings and all the other trappings of domesticity. Emboldened by last week's success, Nik and I have now decided to make chicken in beer, which I had on Christmas Eve last year and remember being nice, and appealed to him for... some reason... can't work out what...

Conversation in the linguists' kitchen a while ago:

"How is it lunchtime already?"
"How is it sixth week already?"
"How is it fourth year?"

"It is dainty to be sick..."

"... if you have leisure and convenience for it." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Bah. I don't like being ill. It makes me cross. I feel all frustrated and useless. However, as my brain is a fog and I feel like I might fall asleep at any given moment, I have little choice but to... wallow indulgently in my fate, retreat to bed with excess Blackadder, get people to do things for me and keep whining on about how it might be something really serious.

Not much has happened lately. Nik had a particularly comic bout of manflu last week, but in my current state I can't really mock him for that. We went and saw 'The Blue Room' which was really good in places, though not in others, and aside from the full frontal nudity wasn't as shocking as it claimed to be. I wanted to be scandalised, dammit. I did a timed essay in French, where I tried to situate feminism in the context of 19th century human rights discourse, but really just ended up with polemical ranting. Though I managed to write the right amount of words in the right amount of time, which was hugely empowering (till the brain fog kicked in). Choir has been much improved of late. This might be because Tom now gives everyone tea before Sunday rehearsals.

I battled the brain fog on Monday and Tuesday to write an essay which my tutor said was "good" and led to an actual, interesting discussion, where I made suggestions and comments and allsorts. Hurrah. Then I went to buy some vegetables, and now I'm trying to file things, but not very successful. In fact, I just have a pile of files (miles of files) on my carpet as well as a pile of paper on my desk. So, probably not a productive endeavour as yet. Ah well.

Last night someone left a mysterious offering of Lockets and chocolates outside my door, with a note attached to it written in orange highlighter. I wonder who that could have been...

Symbolism hurts. I'm going to go and make a pasta bake.

"They wished you'd accepted the blame for the farm
But with the sea at your feet and the phoney false alarm
And the child of a hoodlum wrapped up in your arms"

Poetry, or just plain bollocks?

Frenetic

Yesterday, I woke up with a hangover, and a sinking feeling that I had rambled somewhat in front of my tutor the night before. I couldn't decide whether to go to lectures or to go back to bed, and regretted choosing the former when existentialism and phenomenology did not combine well with the residual wine fog in my brain. So I skipped Gide.

Last week I was mostly writing essays. Some of them seemed okay. But they tried to kill me, which wasn't nice. Having recovered from the tension headaches and the sleep deprivation, I now feel I should be all organised and planning-in-advance-y to avoid situation repeating, but instead I spent all of yesterday afternoon engaged in girly faffage.

After years of traipsing up the SCR stairs to sing grace, before being banished to the OTR with some salmon and a stale bread roll, it was finally my turn to go to the All Saints' gaudy which very nearly made up for all the phonetics revision I did in first year! The food was excellent and the wine plentiful, which was just as well because I spent most of the time discussing porn films and legalising prostitution with the chaplain, who was very keen to stress that nowhere in the New Testament is sex before marriage forbidden. Then we all went outside, shivered, came back in and I got to sit at high table where a combination of relief and wine meant I talked far, far too much and fomented discord within the Modern Languages faculty. Oops.

Afterwards, some of us went to the MCR and drank a bottle of wine, which we then had to finish in Pippa and Zhenia's room because we got kicked out, and we had a great evening, even if I did get end up singing (to the accompaniment of my very out of practice and uncoordinated guitar playing). Ooh, and Zhenia treated us to a beautiful Russian song, and she can actually play the guitar properly, and it was lovely. Then I brought Sally home in the dead of night down some dark alleys (sorry) and woke up at 6.30 in the morning, gasping for water. I drank about half a litre, then was just dropping off to sleep when I needed the loo, so I abandoned the lie-in and bounced rather feverishly round my room until it was time for some nice calming Sartre.

And now Livvy's here! Hurrah! Rob abandoned her to watch the football, so we had a gloriously girly evening in the kitchen, eating enormous quantities of Belgian chocolate and shepherd's pie, enjoying the spectacle of Catherine's rather anxious baking, enjoying the results of said baking, and then conducting a washing up marathon. And there are shopping/choir/formal/Scrabble plans. Hurrah!

This made me and Holly giggle/cringe.

I'm not sure I like Norton. It's like one of those malign servants who deluded their slightly dopey masters by saying they'd 'take care of everything' and then spread evil without them noticing. I don't really know what it's doing, but it says it's fixing my computer and I'm too ignorant to know if it's telling me the truth, and I daren't disbelieve it, in case I get casinos and porn everywhere. It's sort of malevolently too good to be true.

Ooh, no, my basil plant's all droopy and spotty.

My nutritional intake today (barring my usual healthy breakfast) has thus far consisted of a cafetiere of strong, black coffee and half a chocolate orange.

Previous to this I was so tired I fell asleep on my books.

Yesterday, I wrote an essay.

On Thursday, I wrote an essay until 3 a.m.

Today, I have to write another essay.


Please, please, please can I sleep now????

Procrastination rocks!

I've visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

"Neil is an actor, comedian and and master of improvisation who was once responsible for the shortest ever run of a Beckett play, when he improvised the opening line, 'Hello, Godot, what are you doing here?'"

Musing...

I think I might become addicted to cocaine.

Then I wouldn't need to sleep.

It would make life easier.

In some ways.

I've had more bike locks than you've had hot meals...

Well, perhaps I haven't. But sometimes it feels like it. I'm on my fourth since June.

Actually, the latest thing to have gone wrong with my bike, is the rusty chain. While this has, I admit, been a problem roughly since I got the thing in first year, recently it has started to make clunking noises and threaten to snap if I go uphill. Or even flat. Or indeed anything other than quite steeply downhill. I did buy some oil, but I promptly left it in the changing rooms at New Look and couldn't go back to claim it till Tuesday. And it comes in a spray can and has one of those funny, tiny plastic straws that I don't know where to put and... meh. I just can't be bothered. So, I've been walking everywhere, which is good to do once in a while cos it uses different muscles, and enables you to carry an umbrella and hence not get soaked in the rain.

Incidentally, we were promised rain and floods of Biblical proportions on Monday, and none have materialised.

This is brought to you from the computer room, which I feel bad using for non-work things, except that a vast proportion of people seem to be checking Facebook, so perhaps I'm being too harsh on myself. I did say earlier that my twitchiness and disinclination to work were solely a result of my anxiety about getting my extended essay form in and promised myself (and Holly, who is my conscience incarnate) that after taking that fateful piece of paper to Wellington Square, I would sit in the library (or the OTR, which is cosier) with my old friend Mr Carnie and get reacquainted with the advantages of X-bar theory. However, I am still feeling restless and scared of syntax, and totally unmotivated by the fact that my tute is in less than 48 hours and I've read about 10 pages on the (rather complicated) subject, so clearly that was just an excuse to play Tetris.

But, hey, how cool does, "Language planning and language policy: a comparative study of East Africa and Togo" sound?!

Oxford is much the same as it ever was - busy and meteorologically dubious - except for the fact that I have a kitchen, and only know about 4 people. In fact, I spend a lot of my time sitting in said kitchen with other linguists, bemoaning the fact that I have so much work and know so few people. I have been to the pub a total of twice, and drunk two halves of Kronenbourg. (And a lot of wine at Liz's party on Saturday.)

I've also been struck by the urge to do an MA in something other than linguistics. After a suggestion of African Literature from my tutor, I browsed the SOAS website and am now sooooo tempted by the Anthropology of Food. I did want to do French, and have switched to an option in WW1 literature (which will doubtless be a far cry from A-Level Eng Lit with Ms Clare, but probably fun nonetheless) instead of Semantics, on the basis that Semantics fills me with fear and panic. And I love literature and I don't want to stop studying it. And I love linguistics (most of the time) and don't want to stop studying that either. Aargh! It's like UCAS all over again. So, yes, my tutor suggested African Literature or African Studies, which sounds exciting, but rather like the sort of thing my parents would think was mad... The more I think about it, and the more I think about other options, the more attractive an option I find academia, but, meh - host of choices, little time to decide. I suppose whatever I choose I'll have some regrets, and if I do do linguistics (as I've planned for, what, a year?) it's not like I'll never read a book again, and if I do something literary, it's not like I can't learn Swahili on the side, but I was so lucky to find a degree that allowed me to do both, it's rather a shock having to choose now.

Bah.

Making hot drinks, Hannah-style

1. Infuse caffeinated substance in hot water.
2. Leave to brew for twice as long as anyone else would.
3. Do not adulterate with milk or sugar. Slices of lemon are acceptable in Earl Grey.

Jesus, this essay malarky is a lot tougher than I remember it. I don't have the stamina I had in first and second year, either. I worked till 12 last night, and it's totally knocked me out today!

I am not a fresher and I don't want their evil flu.

Some photos from home...

Si j'ai toujours raison
Je suis pas un mec sympa

Too right, my friend, too right......

YES!! WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!!!!

Firstly, everyone should eat Tyrrells crisps. Not least because they are delicious, for I agree this is an important incentive to purchase foodstuffs, but also because they stopped Tesco marching all over them, just because they're a big supermarket and Tyrrells are an independent producer.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1875532,00.html
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1874707,00.html

I've been at home for a couple of days now. It's still at the stage where it's wonderfully relaxing to be looked after and have all my books around me, but I can feel the 'I'm a grown-up, I can do my own damn laundry' complex simmering away inside somewhere. I suppose the most irritating thing is the excitement of having a decent-sized kitchen, sufficient equipment and someone else to pay for the ingredients, only to remember that my dad has very rigid (carnivorous-British hybrid) ideas of what constitutes a meal, my mum is on the Atkins diet and my brother is twelve, and fussy. So far I have made a vat of ratatouille.

However, as I feel increasingly demographically abnormal (drastically lowering average age of Radio 4 listener, too many operas on iTunes, shopping at markets), it is nice to know that there is some reason for it, whether genetic or due to the mad atmosphere I grew up in.

I've almost finished Qu'est-ce que la litterature? which is a relief as it's taken me the entire summer. I've been rather academically disillusioned since I found out I couldn't do my project, and now don't even know exactly what papers I'm doing this term, and I don't seem to get on with Sartre. My mum asked me earlier, 'Was there a Betty Muriel?' After leaving me baffled for a while, she explained this was his wife in a Monty Python sketch. 'Umm, well, Beauvoir, kind of... never mind...'

Nik interrupted a very interesting debate on The World Tonight (last night) about Richard Branson's pledge to research ways of cutting carbon emissions and corporate social responsibility and whether we should all be taxed for the bad things we do to the environment, when he rang me up to tell me he was researching hydrogen fuels. I've already forgotten what this entails, but I think it's something along the lines of combining water and sand in order to create something other than sludge and thereby to power cars. This requires reading 1920s research papers and buying silicone from catalogues. I didn't even know you could do that, but the project sounds very useful and topical, and I approve. And it means no more people saying, 'Ooh, your boyfriend's working with diamonds, lucky you!' and me having to explain that these aren't the interesting sort that you can, like, wear, and see with the naked eye and stuff.

Dammit, after the end of the Leeds Piano Competition, which I was listening to, I skipped forwards five minutes to see why there was an extra hour and a half of Performance on 3 which hadn't been there when I'd caught the end live, and have now found some interesting choral music, which I'm having to listen to in order to find out what it is. And I foolishly told my mother to wake me up at a sensible time tomorrow morning so I could have a vaguely productive day. I must get back into a routine of working, or I'll never get anything like enough reading done before term starts. This apathy doesn't sit well with the smiley version of me that has to tell all my parents' friends I intend to do this MA. Maybe I should become a teacher instead. They get paid. Students don't. And I'd also be morally obliged to read the Guardian, drink lots of wine and be cynical and irritable - which is fun. Except I don't want to teach French. And you generally need two languages and ich habe fast alle mein Deutsch vergessen.

Hopefully when L'Invitee wings its way to me in the next few days, I should get some enthusiasm back.

"That's not the can-do attitude that created the giraffe!"

Interestingly, if you type 'rejection' into predictive text, it comes up as 'selection'. This made me giggle. And, also, it made me almost send a message saying the opposite of what I meant.

I'm feeling very grown-up tonight, as I've just had an email from Mslexia saying one of my poems got shortlisted - last 60 apparently! Obviously, they didn't want to publish me, but I wasn't really expecting them to, and I'm not feeling disappointed, just, as I said, grown-up.

I'm addicted to Radio 4. It makes me happy.

I've spent all day trying valiantly to read the book about literary theory which I've had on the go since the beginning of second year, but I've finally cracked and looked up 'postmodernism' on Uncyclopedia.

"Recently, postmodernism has fallen out of favour with authors, because they like to eat."

Hehehehehe.

I think I may be unsuited to a future in academia.

Must... take... incomprehensible... theorising... seriously...


PS - In a similar vein, I have also discovered Encyclopedia Dramatica.

"Watch out! A GIANT MONGOOSE!"

Well, given my laziness, I don't get to write a timely, irate post about the Facebook feed thingummiwhatsit (though the following is still included for sheer comedic value) cos they've gone and changed it. I signed in and asked it not to tell everyone I've ever sat next to in lectures or stumbled into in the beer cellar whenever I join another pretentious group in an attempt to prove I'm too cool for the whole malarky, but this didn't really bother me: I don't really do anything of note on facebook and the only thing I'd be ashamed of is people seeing how much time I waste online. So really, they've done me a favour by threatening to reveal the extent of this to the world and making me waste it in the jasperfforde.com forums instead. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way of stopping it telling me pointless information about other people. "So-and-so has added someone you don't know as a friend." "X has joined 'We hate the news feed!" "Y is unpacking." "Mr Thingy likes toast." Yes, you can call me a reclusive, self-involved intellectual snob if you like - it's actually something I'm proud of - but I don't really care. I think I shall be spending less time on Facebook in future. In fact, I'm convinced this was all just a publicity stunt and I'm already playing into their hands by even writing about it. Bah.

Big Brother

At the start of September, Big Brother took over Facebook, and as part of the world's backlash against Steve Irwin's death, decided to inform everyone on Facebook of their friends' every move.

Current owner and operator of Facebook

For example, the average user can now know with a simple view of their Facebook homepage that:

• Their best friend opted to join the "I hate Oscar Wilde" group and declined their invitation to their newly created "Gru Lovers" group at 8:15 pm (when they said they wouldn't be home)
• Megan T removed "fuzzy socks" from her interests at 10:37 pm
• James B replied to a post in the "I'm a closeted terrorist" group at 6:28 pm
• Lisa H complained about her history professor in a note posted at 3:35 pm (ironically during her history class)
• At least 5 of their friends are in constant relationship flux (signifying extreme Borderline Personality Disorder) going from "Single" to "It's Complicated" to "Broken up" within 15 minutes
• little Kate P from that high school down the street from them will be attending an event nearby at 11 pm tomorrow night

The aim of this exercise is uncertain, but it seems to be a ploy mainly to make everyone extremely paranoid and piss them off in equal measures.

- from Uncyclopedia

I think I'm in love with Jasper Fforde. Giggle-out-loud-in-public-places in love. Much to the mortification of the boy, who has read the beginning of The Big Over Easy and is somewhat baffled. I keep reading passages aloud for the edification of thoes around me, but, alas, I seem to be a lone crusader.

"But all of this was scant comfort to Mr Wolff, who went to his casket unavenged, and parboiled."

"'First name?'
'Otto,' he replied, then added by way of explanation: ' Palindrome as well. My sister's name is Hannah. Father liked word games. He was fourteen times world Scrabble champion. When he died we buried him at Queenzieburn to make use of the triple word score.'"

I like the Nursery Crime books, because they're much more independent. The Thursday Next series, while fantastically clever and entertaining, reference so many works of great literature that the novels themselves cannot possibly stand out in comparison, whereas these are convincing detective stories in their own right. The man is a genius, writing books which combine my love of satire, wacky humour, word games and references to the English literary canon.

And now, back to the cryptic crossword!