Last of the Oxford Term

(I was trying to play off Last of the Summer Wine, but I'm not sure it worked...)

I was active with my camera the last couple of weeks, trying to capture a sense of Oxford in the cold depths of December. Tomorrow I leave for Amsterdam (and Havanah!) and I won't see Oxford again until January. So long, city! It hasn't snowed yet but you're still beautiful.

Ooh artistic ooh!!

My best friend from school came to visit! She loved our dining hall and dressed for the occasion.

You can see more of the hall here.

The next set of pictures I took one evening walking back to where I was staying (not in my college - they kicked me out and I'm currently staying at a friend's room while she's going back home to Italy). I really love the light in these; evening light in winter can make for some very stark, eerie shots.

And these last ones I just took today, my last day in Oxford. Other than the first one, which is of Hertford College, they were all taken in Radcliffe Square at night.

All photos are unedited because I'm lazy.

Update

Good Lord, it's been a while. I blame univeristy. Meanwhile, here's a selection of what I've been up to:

• Saw a rowboat burned because my college did well in the boat race. There was white wine and a lot of smoke. 
• Messed around in Christ Church and took goofy photos with my friends. Christ Church is definitely the grandest Oxford college and is known colloquially as "the Harry Potter college", since a lot of HP scenes were filmed there for the series.
• Went to a 90's themed party. Since I am terrible at costumes and only had half an hour to make mine, I went as the dissolution of the USSR. I did this by making a sign that I stuck to my front with the hammer and sickle drawn on it, and "USSR" in big letter with a crossing-out. I also stuck red stars to my shoulders. Funnily enough (or maybe not so funnily, my college leans heavily left-wing) people loved my minimal-effort costume. After that I went clubbing (fun!) and after leaving at 4 a.m. we got burgers from a kebab van where the owner asked me if I was Pakistani... ???? (I mean, my grandfather is from Peshawar and that side of the family is Anglo-Indian so it's not a totally unfounded assumption, but I didn't think it really showed, at all.)
• Saw a friend who came back to Oxford for her graduation ceremony and ate delicious Lebanese food at Elham's Lebanese Deli, which I recommend for anyone ever visiting Oxford. Yummy, nice place, and you get a DIY plate for £5. 
• Watched the production of Pentecost that was running at the Oxford Playhouse. I really liked it - the cast was good and the set was fantastic - although I got severe genre whiplash when it changed from a discussion about the nature of art and history in society in the first half, to a hostage drama in the second half. Still a very enjoyable play, and OH MY GOD THE CLIMAX WHAT WHAT.
• Fallen in love with Oxford's second-hand bookshops. You can often tell what bookshops former students offload their old books to - at the Oxfam Bookshop on St Giles I found a Syriac primer in the Foreign Languages section which can only have come from a Byzantinist - but I love them so much. There's so much variety! From Oxford second-hand bookshops I have so far this term acquired: Persepolis, The Dumas Club, Mr Fox, An Instance of the Fingerpost, Select Letters of Cicero (for my course, not my own pleasure...), The Seville Communion, Penguin Lost, Turkish Gambit, Seeking Whom He May Devour. Also Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook and Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the discount store.
• Read so many books about Alexander the Great and his Successors and decided to root for Seleucus. I'm not sure why.

I would say I'll be back with regularity, but Oxford is nuts and I never have any time - and it's finals this year, which makes everything a million times worse. I do like Oxford and I'm glad I study here, but in a lot of ways I'll be glad when it is over. If nothing else, working my first 9 to 5 will be a piece of cake after this.

"Thou Mine Inheritance, Now and Always..."

Yesterday a dear friend of mine had her confirmation. The service was at our college chapel, which is an absolutely beautiful building where I attended a memorable Christmas service last year. This was, obviously, a private service so everyone there was her family or friends. While this is the first time I've been to a confirmation, I can say I found the service lovely; my friend gave a testimony about her journey, which was both interesting and a nice way to personalise the service, and the college choir sang. I love our college choir - they're a definite asset to the place! Afterwards we had dinner in hall, at which I found out that one of the other attendees was from the same part of Devon as me, was actually neighbours with a family I'm friends with, and we have at least fifteen mutual friends & acquaintances! Devon is such a big county that I never expect to meet people from my part of it, much less people who know the same people I do. We worked out that we had, if not actually talked to each other before meeting at Oxford, at least been in the same room a couple of times. Funny how that goes.

Unlike my friend, I am not religious. I was raised in an irreligious family, and you'd have to go back to my great-grandparents' generation to find genuine religious feeling on either side of the family (my mother's parents were raised Catholic, but have been lapsed for a very long time) and barring various superstitions regarding the saints - my mum always told us to pray to Saint Anthony whenever we lost something - religion has never been a part of my life, really. I went to a CofE school for a couple of years as a child, but all I took away from that was a deep resentment at being forced to pray before lunch. I was hungry! I didn't want to thank God for what he had given me, I wanted to eat!

Sometimes, I do think it would be nice to have a faith, but I think I was raised secular enough that belief in God... I'm not wired that way. I appreciate a lot of things about religion - I love visiting churches and cathedrals (and other religious buildings, but since I'm European and mostly travel in Europe, churches are overwhelmingly what I find) and I'm awestruck by the fierce love and dedication that went into constructing such amazing buildings. I also love a lot of religious music - hymns, psalms, carols, you name it. The few times I've attended a church service, I never fail to get a rush of overwhelming emotion when the singing starts. In that way, while I appreciate the ideas and sentiment behind sects like the Quakers, the closest thing I get to religious awe and passion has only ever been at very "high-church" services. Actually, I remember visiting a Serbian Orthodox cathedral (Saborna Crkva Rođenja Presvete Bogorodice in Sarajevo) and being so overwhelmed by it all that I left reeling, head spinning, almost unsure where my body was. I was visiting with a friend who said the feeling, leaving that cathedral, was like we had been "crushed by God", and we had to go for a strong cup of Bosnian coffee to get over the experience. So yes, religious grandeur definitely does it for me.

And because I might as well, here's the hymn I quoted from in the title. It's my friend's favourite hymn, and we sung it in her confirmation. I hadn't heard it before but I think it's beautiful.

And Life Goes On...

Since I last posted, I've come back to university, and promptly not done most of my work for the past week and a half. I didn't have to hand in any essays until comparatively late, and without that initial jolt when you sit down to write your first essay of the term it's hard to get back into the swing of things. But next week I might actually go to my lectures (ha... ha...).

I voted! And want to curl up in despair. It's inevitably going to be another hung parliament, and the results are even more uncertain than last time, so who knows how long it'll take to get a parliament together. The act of voting was, as with most "adult" things, suitably anticlimatic. It was identical procedure to when I voted in the European elections, so. Soon the tortuous waiting starts, and I pray for five years of Milliband, because fuck Cameron.

After the gale-force wind of the last three days, in which I greatly suffered riding my bike directly into the wind, it was rather sunny today, and typically I didn't have enough time to wander around Oxford in the sun, although it did remind me of how much I love my city. However! There was a Jewish fair in Broad Street for Lag B'Omer, and at one of the stalls you could make challah for 50p. When I was young my parents sometimes bought challah from the bakery for a special treat (I might as well mention now that I'm not Jewish in any way, I just really love challah), but I haven't eaten it for years. So I made some there - and got praised on my plaiting skills! It didn't survive the cycle home too well...

...Yeah. But I managed to sort-of straighten it out on the baking tray, and it came out looking all right! The plaits got lost as it rose, which is a shame, but while it's not the best bread in the world, it's recognisably challah. I was given a recipe, so maybe I'll try again once I'm back in Devon (no point baking here; I have none of the implements or ingredients). Hooray for challah!

I'm now off to the pub to meet up with the fellow Oxford interns for my summer internship in the US (!!!). Hopefully I will recognise them from their Facebook profiles, because I've never actually met any of them before.

Right, Then.

In the last week I have:

• begun tutoring my younger brother in Latin, because there's no way he'll learn it all in time to pass his exam if he keeps on just teaching himself.
• had an appointment at the optician's, where I found out that my sore eyes are caused by meibomian gland dysfunction. Hurray!
• missed out on meeting up with my friends because of said optician's appointment.
• played my mandolin for the first time in MONTHS and now have a blister on my thumb because I didn't use a plectrum.
• rewatched a significant part of the first two seasons of The Shield because I have a problem.
• bought wool for knitting a scarf, the pattern of which is hideously complicated and will probably be the death of me.
• spent today with my best friend and talked absolute rubbish for most of it, but I always have a good time with her.
• bought a fountain pen!

I'm off to Bristol tomorrow for a few days; my whole family is staying at the house of my mum's friend who is out of town. I think we all (especially my dad, who's been working on the same manuscript for work since before Christmas, and my brother, who has major exams this summer) need the break, and I love Bristol. I'll be taking my camera, and will try to get some photos!

(Not that it matters, because no one actually reads this blog lol)

Welcome to the Sticks

So, today I had to go to Exeter for the afternoon, for an information day I was helping out at. As I live the other end of the county, this involved catching a bus two hours before the event started. I didn't think this would be a problem, and cheerfully walked to the bus stop and waited for the bus to come.

It didn't come. I waited a while.

Eventually, I went back home - "The bus didn't arrive!" I snapped at my dad. "And the next one isn't for two hours!" Country life, my friends. Sigh. This is actually a lot better than some of my friends living in villages, who only get two buses a day to the nearest town. Anyway, I phoned the event organiser, who assured me that it would be OK for me to arrive later than planned (since I was mostly needed for the later events anyway), so that was fine. However, what was weird was the fact that the number of the bus route - the route which has gone between my town and Exeter since before I moved here aged 11 - wasn't on the list of bus routes by the bus stop. When I looked up that timetable online, it was listed as running at the times I thought, but the name of the bus stop in my town was wrong. Also, when I'd been standing at the bus stop earlier I'd noticed another route, almost identical to the one I usually took but a few minutes earlier each time. It seemed too weird for there to be two identical routes, and I got the horrible feeling that my usual bus had been redirected or something, and there was another bus to replace it (with a timetable which, by the way, I couldn't find online!).

Anyway, I walked to the tourist office, got a full bus timetable for the whole county, and looked up my usual bus route. It wasn't there - the service had been cancelled (and of course no one bothered to mention anything, and most people didn't even know). However, we did indeed have the bus route I referred to earlier, which for some bizarre reason had at least 5 different routes all grouped under the same number. When I eventually worked out that yes, there was a bus going from my town to Exeter, it was a relief, but I was also full of rage because it had been such a long and stupid chase to find out what the hell had happened to my bus.

Two hours after I'd initially gone to the bus stop, I walked back and caught the next bus. It was a long, unpleasant two hours journey across the county, traversing winding country lanes in an old, stuffy, rickety bus - the only good part was that I sat on the upper deck and got to see everything from above. Other than that, it was a long and shitty journey and the amount of time I spent running all over town to work out what was going on was not worth it. About the only good thing that happened was that after the event was over I had time to go to the local Boston's for a cup of tea (I love Boston's tea - it's loose leaf, just the way I like it!). Other than that - gah.