Blimey… what a completely crazy, emotional and turbulent week. Unsurprisingly I am slightly behind on work after it all, and should really be spending these precious hours working out what the hell I’m going to write about Thomas Aquinas tomorrow. But I’ve already been strangely disconnected from the online world recently – save Twitter! – and it’s better to blog now while the memories are still snowy fresh.
The most important thing, of course, is that Lucy and I are back together 
And I know what you’re all thinking (
) but surprisingly often in life the crazy, silly, ‘wrong’ things are actually the very best things of all, and so it is with this. (She’s probably better at blogging about it than me 
) And this means, of course, that my blog can now return to its rightful mode of bland non-emotion, ‘breathless narrative’ (to borrow a phrase from certain marking criteria) and little illustrative pictures. Which is surely a very good thing too.
A long day
So yes, these little pictures down the side? Snapshots from snow day! (Well, until my poor little phone gave out.) But not like everyone else’s happy-super-funtime snow day, but the day that begins with the realisation that you are trapped in a village, and need to get to Birmingham, and then London, and then Cambridge somehow. Granted, it’s the nicest village to be trapped in given that I was at Lucy’s for the night, and initially I thought I would just wait it out. But then the news seemed to suggest that the snow was fast heading up the country, and if I waited I could get even more trapped as the West Midlands became a blizzard. So, in what with hindsight proved to be a minor miracle of timing, I set off just after lunch for what became a (bearable, if tiring) six hour trek. Some choice moments:
- As I walked to Cofton’s bus stop, a man standing in his driveway cheerfully wished me a merry Christmas. Aw, friendly ‘community’. This was so going to be the last I felt of it as I headed off towards a string of cities.
- Which is unfair, actually, because there was a quite lovely Icelandic woman who sat next to me on the train back to London and told me about real snow. Our chats were intermittent affairs, as I also had my head buried in Aquinas, but quite welcome.
- Walking from Euston to King’s Cross was so utterly strange. One, because of the relative lack of people. Two, because those people that were about were carefully trudging rather than busily bustling. And three, because the snow had become hidden puddles leaving me with wet feet.
- King’s Cross. The train is ‘on time’, but it apparently leaves in a few minutes and there is still no platform number. A crowd gathers. Then, suddenly, a murmur as the platform is finally announced. The crowd surges. People start to walk, then jog, and then it actually develops into an all out race down the station. “This is so silly and overtly competitive” I think as I break into a run and fight my way almost to the front. This train may be stopping at an unfathomable number of crazy places, but it’s the only train there is, and I will get a seat. As indeed I do. Yay!
Oh, and finally! The evening of Friday’s Caius formal, wine and Caroline in a hoodie (hehe) has almost been buried admidst all of this, so here’s a group photo:
Matt, Caroline shamelessly advertising, Andrew and Sona
(I reserve the right to retain the embarrassing hoodie photos until some such as time as when a News of the World exclusive could make me some money.)
I can’t let the question of ‘how?’ put me off for too long, else I’ll be too scared of doing it at all. But still, knowing what to say is impossible. And I can’t be my normal blogging self, because that doesn’t exist at the moment anyway. So here goes…
First of all, I couldn’t be more grateful for all my family and friends. Every single one of you has been fantastic 
even though I’m not sure I really deserve it, so thank you. I seem to have a ridiculous urge to keep talking to people – anyone – because thoughts only really hit me when I’m alone. And in particular, I have to publicly thank Abbi. Through the joys of life experience, she’s the person who has most understood and articulated everything that I feel. I can’t thank her enough.
So yeah. I was about to say ‘the hardest thing is…’ but the truth is there are loads of them. In the spirit of honest if perhaps unbearably awful writing, then, the hardest things include the sudden total lack of communication, not saying a proper goodbye, imagining how she’ll be, not being able to provide any comfort, fearing her hatred, and the long, long wait for something you know might never come. When could you ever say anything else to her again? Not now, obviously, not after two days. But two days suddenly feels like a lot longer than it did before.
I just wanted to say, simply and openly to avoid silly gossip, that Lucy and I have broken up. Eating ice cream
So I’ve finally joined Twitter, and at about the same time as Lucy and Abbi. It was Tash who finally pushed me over the edge, convincing me that this was one more social loop which I really didn’t want to be left out of, and it really is rather fun. The description of it being ‘like ESP’ works best – you can just pop on and get a warm sense of various friends connected like fellow drinkers in some virtual café. Nice, clean, simple and quick. And, of course, I felt the need to join up all the technological dots: now I can text Twitter, which updates Twitter itself, when then feeds through to my Facebook status before that finally gets over to this very site. (Die-hard RSS consumers: there’s a whole site here, y’know!) So if you ever see ‘Current status: Dominic has been stabbed and is slowly dying in a darkened alley’, for example, make sure to marvel at the wonder of interconnected open formats. And my ability to text when dying, of course.
I have loads of adminy-type things to do tonight, but I can’t really find the energy, so instead I’m listening to Sugababes remixes (quiet, you) and wondering when my Spider Solitaire addiction will ever end. This afternoon I was rushing to complete an essay by the deadline and decided to quickly check the dinner menu just to reassure myself that I wasn’t going to miss out on anything. What do I see? Garlic bread, pasta with meat balls and chocolate fudge brownies. I’m sorry, Aristotle, but nothing can ever beat that – if I escape stabbing and die instead on death row, that’s a high candidate for my final meal – so I got a move on and made it to second hall. Success!
(The eternal questions of second hall, incidentally, are:
(a) how subtly can I eat the bread before grace?
(b) is anyone ever going to notice that a substantial section of us fail to say Amen?)
Please imagine old staircase smell
I have a number of things (feelings! real feelings!) which I would somewhat like to blog, if only because that’s what these sort of blogs are supposedly for. The trouble is that these various ideas belong to a general bundle of thought in which some vital explanatory ideas, on which others depend for their sense and meaning, can’t really be blogged. Instead, by way of distraction, I will share a photo of a cool staircase at Caius where my supervisor’s office is. (I have to stoop to get through her door… it’s unbelievably cool.)
Now onto actual things! Tash came to Cambridge to stay over yesterday, and got a taste of all the exciting stalwarts of everyday life such as the University Library, dinner in hall and the infamously undersized Sainsbury’s. But we also went to see Milk in the evening at the Picturehouse, which was well worth seeing. The obvious question I had afterwards, especially with Obama so fresh in everyone’s minds, is the possibility of an openly gay President. Call it optimism, but it’s something I can’t imagine would be impossible within my lifetime. And – since these things happen in little steps – I’d like to draw people’s attention to Homophobia Aware. It’s a small project which Tash drew to my attention, based in QPCS, to fight homophobia in school. This is surely an awesome idea, and I can’t wait to see what they manage to achieve.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
