Opening note for those who never leave the world of RSS: it seems that the effects of NaNoWriMo have given Daylight Atheism and Nic a free run over my Feed Mix…
Greetings, blog readers who still have time to do any blog reading! I’ll kick off with Katie’s visit to see me on Friday and Saturday, which I imagine was one of her first interactions with the fiendish process of buying National Rail tickets. It’s actually one of the underlying physical laws of the universe that this is impossible to get entirely right on your first go, but I think Katie deserves official salutations for managing to persuade a London Underground ticket machine to sell her a London Underground ticket to Cambridge at what was seemingly a completely made-up price. Obviously, I’ve underestimated TfL’s sprawling reach… the appearance of Cambridge on the tube map is, clearly, only a matter of time now. Anyway, Katie’s visit was lovely, and we did the essential library tour (sans the UL, which refused to let her in), watched the Sarah Jane Adventures (sshh, sshh), did formal Caius hall just for the lolz and battled across the varying terrains of Worms 3D and Peggle Nights. Oh, and don’t forget the waffles 
Actually masking deep disappointment that the candles aren’t floating in the air
An act of deep rebellion: standing on the grass!
Now… don’t hate me, but I’ve never really been much of a fan of Halloween. (Although this is apathy rather than some kind of puritanical hatred – don’t worry, you don’t have to fight for your right to party.) I am greatly impressed by the various amazing costumes on show, but still failed to join their ranks this year. However, on the freaky-scary scale (named after its inventor, Dr. Freaky Scary), watching Uther’s – *cough* – intimate encounters with a troll on Merlin surely ranks about a 9. We also went to see the ever-fantastic musical episode of Buffy at Caius FilmSoc, which always makes me wish that real life could also encompass frequent bouts of well-choreographed singing.
(Omg – you can buy the Once More, With Feeling soundtrack online? That’s almost as good!)
To continue my theme, albeit with a newly present Buffy soundtrack in the background, last night Oliver, Abi, Owen and I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, which (all but one of us agreed) was really enjoyable. It perhaps didn’t have the strongest feminist undertone in the whole entire world, and once again the Devil continues to get a really unfair press (I kid, I kid), but it was beautiful, fun and my attention didn’t lag once throughout. So naturally I don’t want to say any more about it, because praise is rather boring compared to criticism and as of last night I also have a new favourite laughable bad TV drama: ITV2’s Trinity.
Trinity‘s basic premise is as follows: Trinity college – not technically of either Oxford or Cambridge but clearly intended as an Oxbridge institution – has been forced to admit some proles alongside its usual contingent of stupid posh twats. They clash. But! Underneath is an exciting (well, not really) conspiracy involving murder most foul, secret overlords, etc etc etc. The execution of these already rather weak ideas is, however, grotesquely awful to the point of being utterly hilarious as well as not actually making any sense. (An example of dialogue, roughly: “I’m from Lewisham.” “My uncle owns Lewisham!”)
Just in case anyone has any doubts about Oxbridge, I feel compelled to reassure you of the following: graduation mortarboards are not inexplicably worn all the bloody time, grace – if said at all – is not divvied up line by line to each student so that poor people can be laughed at for not knowing Latin, champagne is drunk rather than poured over oneself, medical students are not instructed to work ‘through the night’ alone in a creepy basement with appropriately flickering lights and beds are (sadly) not of the four-poster satin-sheet variety.
But I’m not particularly worried, since Trinity seems to exist largely to confirm prejudices about ITV2 rather than Oxbridge. The biggest problem – or rather, source of much mirth – is that the characters consistently display a strange lack of ability to remember what their own personalities are supposed to be. Take Charlotte. We are repeatedly and unsubtly reminded that Charlotte is a chaste Christian girl who deeply disapproves of sex ‘n’ stuff. And by ‘unsubtly’, I mean such as through scenes like this:
[Shot of a big wooden cruifix on the wall, and the sound of an organ, cut back to Charlotte who also always wears a crucifix around her neck]Charlotte: I am a Christian, yes…
Three of her friends in unison: We’re Christians!
And yet! In the very first episode, Charlotte is so traumatised\turned-on by the sight of her dead father apparently still alive that she runs into the arms of the leader of the posh twatty boys, immediately sleeps with him and breathlessly declares – in what is surely a new triumph for realistic dialogue – “wow… is it always that good?!”. Post-coital bliss isn’t long lasting, however, as she absent-mindedly plays with the crucifix around her neck before seemingly remembering her whole identify and snapping back into pious, now-really-quite-indigent mode.
Oh… shit! I knew I forgot something!
(It’s the equivalent of me getting halfway through my own Christmation before remembering through that, wait – dammit, I knew there was something – I’m actually an atheist! And do bear in mind, any TV series that gets me going on for this long about unfair portrayal of Christians has to be pretty damn bad…)
Anyway, if after Trinity you’re desperate for some actual good storytelling, then I wholeheartedly suggest Abbi’s NaNoWriMo novel. Already it’s proving an absolute pleasure to have another instalment ready to read each morning, and the donation required for access goes entirely to children’s charity Barnardo’s. So just go and do it: donate, read and enjoy!
Most of you will probably have read my territorial description of the friendship group in a text to Sanna a couple of weeks ago. Delightfully, Sanna subsequently produced a map which arrived in my pigeon hole this afternoon:
Ye Olde Map Of Ye Olde Friendship Group(e)
The next stage is clearly the writing of some children’s stories…
It was a hot, lazy summer’s morning in the Enchanted Lands of Friendship, and not a soul was stirring, from the snow leopards of the icy peaks of Sanna and Niamh to the simple sheep of Dominic & Lucy valley, the warrior guards of Emilydom or the watchmen on the most distant lookout tower on the Outpost of Robert. But as the creatures slept, the heavy scent of smoke began to drift across the lands. A cry went up. Calamity! The Forest of Fagan was on fire! And if no-one could fetch pails of water from the Lake of Saoirse in time, the whole countryside would soon be ablaze!
Just had a wonderful weekend with Lucy, who came up to Cambridge on Friday night in time for a fabulous Pizza Express dinner. We’ve become rather brilliant at getting uni work done in each other’s company by now, so visits to the library are now much more productive than they ever are alone. On Saturday evening we also went some way to paying back my meal debt to Oliver as Lucy lead the production of some delicious pigs in blankets and leak-filled mashed potato. Finish off with Oliver and Abi’s chocolate cake and a troll-infested episode of Merlin: hurrah!
I like the tea-towel look…
The other thing bringing great joy to my life right now is Windows 7. Against all my better instincts I ran an upgrade installation on Thursday night (yes yes, the release date). But rather than consign my laptop to messy Windows oblivion all of my programs, settings and files emerged out the other end without a scratch. And Windows 7 itself! Yes, Vista had an unjustified reputation: it was always a decent advance over XP with the right hardware. But Windows 7 makes my laptop sing! Everything is so sleek and fast! And Vista features which never quite worked, like the Sidebar, are suddenly transformed – I 
it. Plus it’s only a £30 upgrade for students… do it, people! (Even Lucy thought it was pretty, and that’s high praise for an operating system.)
Jeez, how does anyone cope with the pretentious brushed metal of OS X? Whatever.
(For the purposes of historical record, and since clever tweeters have just figured it out, I want to clarify that my previous post – which did strike some people as a tad odd! – was written not by me but by (tada!) Sanna. Her own post was, of course, penned by yours truly.
There were clues. I mean, above and beyond the fact that I’m unlikely to refer to the ‘palace of my soul’ any more than Sanna typically performs cheerleading chants for the Orthodox church. The titles were also cunningly interlinked, you see, and the very alert might also notice that my post appeared at 52 minutes past the hour.
So to those who thought I was drunk, or just posting “the weirdest thing I have read in a loooong time”, or simply proving insufficiently skilful at imitation, a great big 
)
I feel like I should apologise for not blogging more often. However, I have just a short while ago returned from some excellent gaming fun (Worms, Worms! Be still my heart) with my beloved Simon, so I’m not in a very apologetic mood.
We went to the Caius bar after dinner: Chris, Simon, Eamon and I (btw, Emmanuel peeps get their laundry done for them! I know the whole waiter thing at Caius is a bit much, but come on!). The beat of the music echoed in my head on the way home. So unapologetically nineties (there again the lack of remorse – perhaps my choice of music says more than at first glance) and yet, something in it, something sticks. The beat going around and around – no, not around, over and over, the running of old-fashioned trains comes to mind, rolling smoothly forward over the rails. Convection, convolution; what’s the word? The Youth Group version of ‘Forever Young’ rocks my world atm. That nineties soaring stickiness.
Some are like water
Some are like the heat
Some are melodies
Some are the beat
Sooner or later they’ll all be gone
Why don’t they stay on?
It’s hard to get without a cause
I don’t want to perish like a fading voice
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
So many adventures couldn’t happen today
So many songs that we forgot to play
So many dreams swimming out in the blue
Let them come true
Forever young
I want to be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, forever
I wanted to work today, I really did. To get going with the writing and the reading, reading, reading which characterises Caius History (the stacks of books on my desk: part of the furniture in more ways than one); much as I complain, I do love it. Alas, ’twas not to be. All the libraries were closed! Despite being the palace of my soul, somehow following the shape of my mind, unless it’s the other way around: that the shape of my mind is affected by the rooms themselves… despite this, I was sick of the sight of my walls. So that’s how I ended up hanging out with Simon, Chris and Eamon from Emma. Eating together at hall, then le bar; later, Youtube Top Trumps with Simon. It was always going to end in Worms.
The bar music. The beat, the nineties stickiness of it. The bluey-white glow of the computer screen on Simon’s face as we played. A good night.
So many adventures couldn’t happen today
So many songs that we forgot to play
So many dreams swimming out in the blue
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
