dom.blog

Right, now that Owen and I have finished spending another witching hour sipping tea and chatting about stuff – mostly agreeing, sometimes not – I feel it is time to blog. Starting with some photos from Fireworks Night, which Tash will be glad to hear we observed through attendance at the council’s big public firework display! (I always forget about the duty of organising firework displays when critiquing the impotence of local councils. Silly me.) And honestly, I do wholeheartedly forgive Oliver and Abi for not wanting to go on the fairground rides, but I do now feel I am owed a roller coaster or two by Fate. Make it happen, K?

Oliver is secure in the knowledge that my enthusiasm for the rides is in a distinct minority

Pretty fireworks, though!

“Don’t you wanna know how we keep starting fires?”

And now a brief interlude from show and tell to enthuse a little bit about work. Yeah, work may always be’ work’, but it also forms the final year in which the state will be fooled into sponsoring me to read about the motivations of the All-India Muslim League, or Hegel, or the letters that John and Abigail Adams wrote to each other. And on this final point – my Special Subject is actually fun. I mean, I’m just nosy and enjoy reading people’s private letters, mmkay? Especially when they turn rather silly and fun, like when they have stupidly decided to list each others’ faults (don’t ever do this) and John notes with annoyance that Abigail has a habit of sitting with her legs crossed. Still, I guess if this is the best that you can come up with your marriage is probably sound. (No emoticons, though. It’s not true love.)

Talking of true love…

(We weren’t even drunk by this point…)

I think Simon and I are now just playing up to Sanna’s vaguely homoerotic blog post on the subject. But anyway, the above photo was part of a hugely entertaining pub ‘crawl’ (of, ahem, two pubs) embarked upon by Lucy and I with Simon, Chris, Rob and several others. (I’m in a bind now, because whilst ‘and several others’ sounds rude – sorry! – Rob objects to being lumped in with ‘That Emma Lot’ – sorry! – and a long list of names is hardly conducive to anything outside of war memorials and firing squads. Sorry.) Twas lots of fun, although it’s always somewhat risky to mix beer with rosé. (Manly rosé. We made this clear.) More photos, as the saying goes, on Facebook.

Oh, and as Lucy noted, we walked past Father Alexander (of chrismation fame) the other night. Maybe it was our Pizza Hut smell, the encroaching darkness, persistent rain or the fact that he was fully engaged in conversation at the time, but we didn’t stop to chat. If he’s reading, though – and of course, he isn’t – he’s more than welcome to stop by for tea sometime

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:

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.