Five-year-olds are cheerful, energetic, and enthusiastic. They enjoy planning, and spend a great deal of time discussing who will do what. They especially enjoy dramatic play […] Five-year-olds are more sensitive to the needs and feelings of others around them. It is less difficult for them to wait for a turn or to share toys and material. “Best friends” become very important.
This also seems like an appropriate time to mourn the imminent demise of GeoCities, on which this site originated. I know GeoCities sites had a tendency to be incredibly (some might say universally) naff and poorly designed, but I’m also quite fond of the days when people actually tried to hand-build their own websites rather than merely populate Facebook or the ultra-simple Twitter. (I realise this makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I’m allowed a little bit of fondness 
) And now that we have services with the ease and flexibility of WordPress I’m not sure that I would have even bothered learning how to create my own site had I come along a couple of years later than I did. So thank you, GeoCities, for being alluring enough to start me up yet rubbish enough to move me on at the right time!
My GeoCities banner
Yes, I am alive! A little worried about the short-term viability of this blog though, to be honest, because practically the only thing going on at the moment is revision, or talking about revision, or thinking about revision, or panicking about revision, etc. And one unfortunate side effect of spending your days immersed in notes, essay and past exam papers is a tendency to start to reformulate your entire life in the style of essay questions. So:
- Account for the success of Peggle in the friendship group.
- ‘Rambling for the first few lines in something which can only be described as drivel’. How fair is this as an assessment of Nic’s blogging style?
- Which was more important to the success of SexFest: sex or alcohol?
- How significant has chocolate fudge cake been for Dominic during the period 1989-2009?
- ‘I just assumed they were a couple’. Which couple?
I worry about me 
They sailed away
Pussy said to the Owl “You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long we have tarried;
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
I thought I’d write a post based around thoughts rather than events for once, which I realise can sometimes just be an excuse to be morose. I’m not, though. I do feel what I always feel the night before going back to Cambridge: a sense of impending dislocation and readjustment, not because I enjoy the term any less, but just because all of my routines and friendships have to be reorientated again. And then there’s the highly stressful thought of upcoming exams. So the superposition of dislocation and stress does create some melancholy, but it’s not primary melancholy but instead a secondary artefact of two separate emotions, if you see what I mean. (I’m sure you don’t, since I’m conceiving of emotions as waves in the A-Level Physics sense, which is neither a particularly normal or rhetorically helpful thing to do. But I’m going to run with just a little bit further, because I’m about to say that I’m focusing this melancholy wave onto the screen of nostalgia.)
My response is to focus this melancholy wave onto the screen of nostalgia. Well, not quite nostalgia. I’m not longing for the past exactly, but through the miracle of fastidious archiving I am in closer contact with it than might be wise. My e-mails, for example, go back to at least 2002. (You can mock this attention to holding on to data, but consider that at least I’ve never had to ask you for your phone number twice.) And obviously lots of snippets from the past are dreadfully boring, but they’re still captivatingly addictive to explore. Witness, for example, this slightly bizarre missive to the Labour party (why?!) from 2004. (I was 15 and should have been doing other things – deal with it.)
But will Labour ever return to the idea of real equality? Of taxing the rich to help the poor? Of stopping corporations have too much power? Public ownership? Are you still even socialist?
And then there are the things that never change. From almost exactly two years ago:
Sorry – I have tried to fiddle my calendar but in my one or two free days I really really do need to work. Scary how the Easter holidays disappear so fast
(One day, the exam cycle really will end and I shall be free! Might be dead by then, of course…)
Oh, and to all of those people who became entangled in my e-mail archives over the years and have never managed to escape… thank you 
So much to talk about! I shall start with Peggle ‘n’ Pizza, a rather grand tournament held on Easter Sunday to find the one true Peggle master. For posterity’s sake, let the record state that the winners of the group stages were Oliver and Saoirse, with Dominic and Amber coming second. Tense semi-finals then saw Oliver and Amber triumph, and in the grand final Oliver emerged victorious with a score of 19,045 to 11,850. (See, this is way more exciting than football!) Oliver thus went home with the ceremonial Easter bunny ears. Hurrah! But will he be able to defend them in the future from eager young upstarts? We shall see…
(And it was a lovely experience too, frequently interspersed with moments of surreal confusion for me at the sight of unlikely Peggle couples. I shall try and get around to putting more photos up on Facebook shortly, but in the meantime a small selection follows. Oh, and mega-thanks to Joshua for applying his sporting expertise and devising a system for scoring!)
The pitch
A match of mixed emotions…
Hard at work
Friendships come and go, but Peggle victory lasts forever
Triumph!
The next day Lucy and I embarked on another ‘pick a random Tube station’ adventure, which was a brave thing to do in the face of planned engineering works and wholly unplanned person-under-a-train disruption. Nonetheless, we made it to Langdon Park on the DLR before realising that, in the nicest possible way, there isn’t really a hell of a lot there. (Sorry.) But that’s fine, y’know, because we ended up back on the other side of London and at Westfield – a place that delights and offends in almost equal measure. (You think ‘delights’ is a bit strong for a shopping centre? Then you haven’t seen the milkshakes…) In the evening we finally made it to the fabulous Lexi to see Religulous. I enjoyed the film, sure, but then I was fairly likely to? This doesn’t stop me recognising that the arguments are deployed in a pretty shallow way, although I sympathise with the problem of challenging absurdity intelligently. But I would like to see a film that I could take religious people to that could actually make an impact – the cinematic equivalent of Ebon Musings with added sparkle. (Give it a browse – if nothing else then for the Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists, an essay which so starkly demonstrates the difference between belief and faith it’s, erm, a revelation 
)
In the meantime, however, I’m more than happy to play Scrabble and watch Twiglet Twilight with one of my favourite theists. Now – how much right do I have to pass judgement based solely on the film? It’s cheesy, without a doubt, and I’ve heard it discussed in feminist terms for so long that I can’t not be slightly irritated by Bella’s unconditional devotion. Having said all that, one has to respect an injection of the dark and deadly into teenage romance, since ‘getting killed’ is a far more pressing and interesting dilemma than ‘getting dumped’. So I don’t know. Ho hum. Sanna’s family also invited me along to Pub Rock, a wonderful merger of ‘play’ and ‘pub gig where you get to sing along to the joy that is the final counnntdowwwwn!’ which I enjoyed muchly. By the end the lines between fantasy and reality were so blurry that we all fled to avoid an ambiguous Q&A in which it would be terribly unclear whether we would be questioning actors or band members, or – for that matter – whether ‘we’ were an audience or just drinkers down the pub. (In fact, some part of me is slightly worried that I still haven’t closed all of the mental brackets.)
You lucky people, you
If we weren’t in the show starting right away
We’d be in the audience too
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
