And Summer seems to have finally arrived!

It’ll probably have buggered off again by tomorrow, so we all leapt at the opportunity to go and study on the lawns out in the sunshine.

And, yes, by study I might well mean ‘sit on the grass, with books nearby but mostly being ignored, and drinking pimms’, but we can’t have everything, can we?

(It’s certainly a lovely change from Friday, when we decided that ice-cream was required and proceeded to skip through a downpour to G&Ds. I’d forgotten how horrible soaked jeans are…)

Today I did also manage to write an essay on the portrayal of God in the book of Job. Tomorrow I will write another one on the Cappadocian fathers. Yay. And I somehow managed to get 65% on the beginning of term collection which I probably shouldn’t have passed at all. Always nice when things like that happen.

In truly unexpected news, my beloved Fishy (…who might more sensibly be referred to as my best friend, and I’m can’t really remember where the ‘Fishy’ name came from, but nevermind) has finished her exams and got herself a full-time job. Which is frankly terrifying because I’d more or less forgotten about the normal passage of time and if she’d finished Uni, then she’s one step closer to being grown up, which means I might be one step closer to being a grown up and that’s just not right.

And now I wish to sleep.

Holy crap, it’s fourth week.

(For those wondering, yes, the curse of 4th Week is completely and without a doubt still an active threat.)

So I’ve been busy writing essays (four down! Eight to go!) and not sleeping and doing other suitably Oxford-y things.

I now have a supervisor for my extended essay - I even have a title. It’s ‘Through the Eyes of Men: A Critical Dialogue with the Book of Proverbs’, in case you’re interested. Right now I should be handing in my proposal - the essay title and idea has to be approved by the faculty, hence the need for a proposal - but I’m not sure if I need my college tutor to sign something or not. Fortunately, I have a tute in a little bit, so I can ask him then.

(Oh my god, I’m about to commit myself to 10,000 words of feminist critique of the book of Proverbs. *flails*)

We also had another Parents’ Lunch, so I got to see my mum and dad again. The lunch was expertly timed - the day before my mum’s birthday, so I could just give her her present and avoid the dreaded postal system. And luckily my dad gave me an idea of what to get her, so that solved that problem as well.

And Alan turned 21 on Tuesday, so we ate cake and drank champagne. Alan had insisted that we didn’t need to buy him any presents, so I didn’t buy him a present. I instead wrote him a 3000 word story about his draconic alter-ego who discovered finance and started up the least-friendly lending library in the world. (I’m aware that that is quite an odd thing to do, but in my defense, I only did this because other people said I should. Peer pressure for the win!) 

What else has happened in the past few weeks?

Oh, President’s Collections. This is just when you go and talk to the President for eight minutes (I’m not kidding, my meeting with him was scheduled for 9:08am) about your work and what you hope to do next. I used to have these sorts of meetings once a term at school with my tutor or house-mistress, but as the President of the College doesn’t spend much time with the undergraduates, they ask you to fill out this form before you go with your aims and achievements and extra-curricular activities, all that jazz.

God, I hate forms. I ended up telling the President of the College about my aim to write a series of short stories for kids, mostly featuring mythological creatures and all containing the not-so-secret maxim that what people expect of you should not be allowed to get in the way of your happiness.

Oh, well. At least he laughed when I told him my plans for the Dragon Who Wore Tweed.

And now to a tute. A tute for which I wrote a painfully short, largely incoherent essay. This is going to be fun…

As part of my degree, I have the option of writing an “extended essay” instead of my eighth paper (or I could do eight papers, plus the extended essay, and Oxford would use the top eight marks to calculate my degree).

And so I have decided to write about the portrayal of women in the book of Proverbs. Because I’m cool like that. And because I really enjoyed studying Wisdom Lit. And maybe, as my college chaplain suggested, a little bit because I’m in a very traditional university where these questions aren’t always given the same amount of attention as other questions, a fact which may annoy me just a little bit. 

But to do this, I need a supervisor. Which means I need to find someone in Oxford who will get both the Old Testament Wisdom Lit side of it and the feminist-reading side of it. 

My friends, who are much smarter than I, suggested I go and talk to the Chaplain. And when I failed to do that quickly enough (because I decided it would be much more sensible to go and knock on her office door when she wasn’t in College than just to email her like a normal person), one of them just told the Chaplain I was looking for her and so she emailed me. Thank you, Alan.

And I went to talk to the Chaplain, who was suitably enthused about the whole idea and asked lots of helpful questions which helped me narrow down what I actually want to write about and recommended a book, and then told me that she didn’t think her knowledge of Wisdom Lit was sufficient to be my supervisor.

BUT she knew lots of people who had the necessary duel-interest!

BUT… they’d all moved to London or Exeter. Because they didn’t get jobs at Oxford.

I might well end up having to chose a supervisor who is good at half of my question. Not ideal, but the Chaplain has said that she’d be happy to help with the feministy-feminine ideas of God side of things. Because it’ll be fun.

(Now I’ve been at that weird stage in my life when studying theology is fun and some bits are funner than others for a while now, so I’m familiar with that feeling, but the Chaplain thinks my essay is going to be fun!)

In conclusion: *headdesk*

(And I’m writing an extended essay. Not a dissertation. Because dissertations are scary and grown up and real academic work, and I fail at sending people polite formal emails asking if I could meet with them, so clearly I am not cut out for the writing of dissertations.)

In about an hour, monochromaticwinter is going to come to tea.

Because, you know, I wasn’t really paying attention to all those talks in school about how you don’t meet people in real life when you only know them from talking to them online. And I was going to say something about being stereotypically British and offering everyone tea in lieu of, you know, food or intelligent conversation or life-saving medical treatment. Only, you know, that’s not really a stereotype anymore. If it ever was. Because that’s really how my people deal with things.

Seriously. Tea. You’re too tired, tea. You’re not sleepy enough, tea. Birth in the family, tea. Death in the family, tea. Happiness, tea. Tears, tea. Old friends, tea. New friends, tea. All alone, tea.

And, usually, tea is a social thing for me. I’m a proud member of the Trinity Tea Drinkers (aka, the Mad Hatters, aka, that weird little insular group who always eats together and is unreasonably amused by squids, dragons, and oddities from all schools of thought), so tea-drinking at uni is most of my social life. And at home, I can’t make a cup of tea without making my brother one, mainly because of what my brother would do if I didn’t make him a cup as well.

In other news, I’ve written my first essay of the term. I’ve got no idea how well I actually did, as my tutor hasn’t marked it yet and the tute was… somewhat less than helpful. The trouble with Zachhuber is that he likes to talk. So he’d ask a question, let me say maybe a whole sentence in answer, then interrupt me to talk more about terminology and issues with discussing a poorly-recorded period of history.

Take Marcion. Some books will tell you that he was a second-century heretic. But as there was not really, at that time, a unified church in any form, can we talk about heretics asks Zachhuber? As the man rejected the entirety of the Old Testament and claimed that the Jewish god, who had created the world, was vastly inferior to God the Father of Jesus… yeah, I’m comfortable calling him a heretic.

But, in more seriousness, as Marcion’s work was rejected as heretical, all copies of it were destroyed. All of our knowledge of Marcion comes from refutations of his theology - we only have the arguments against him, not his own arguments, and so we should be aware that we’re working from biased sources. However, as the reading I did told me this at least twice, surely Zachhuber didn’t need to make the point more than once.

And in happier news, we went out for dinner last night to celebrate (really quite belatedly) C’s birthday. Once, for Christmas, I wrote C a 3000 word story about a teeny-tiny squid who wanted to be a kraken. So for her birthday I got her a bright pink hat shaped like a squid.

(For anyone who might doubt the existence of such things, I direct you here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/92583110/pink-squid-hat)

So I’m actually using a timeline from WIKIPEDIA to help me write this essay. Yeah. I’m gonna be bloody brilliant at this whole Patristics bollocks.

*deep breath*

I have tea, I have biscuits, I have Wikipedia. It’s all going to be fine…

And the theologians are back in business!

Term officially begins tomorrow, but 0th week is the time for returning to Oxford. Yes, the chaos of packing, the search for much-needed books and supplies, the horrifying realisation that not nearly enough work has been done for the beginning of term exams…

Collections weren’t too bad, I suppose. For one thing, I only had to sit one exam, which was a rather nice surprise. The paper that I actually sat… Well. There was a certain amount of, “Ah! This is the question you want me to answer! But first, we must discuss these issues over here before I can properly answer your question!”

Yeah, so that probably won’t work as well as I might hope, but maybe I’ll get points for trying.

And I’ve sorted out tutes for this term - it’s Patristics with the dreaded Zachhuber. I’m not a huge fan of the tutor and I’m pretty indifferent to the subject, so this should be… interesting. Wisdom tutes with the lovely Mette won’t continue until the second half of term, because she’s got to hand in her dissertation in 4th Week - a valid excuse if ever I heard one.

I’ve also got the books for my first essay and mostly unpacked. I got to Oxford and then realised that I’d forgotten my posters. I’ve still got all my photos, so I could decorate my room to some extent. Would take a lot of effort, though. Possibly too much effort for a lazy Saturday…

But it’s good to be back with my friends.

One of the more literal examples I’ve seen of adding insult to injury…

(According to the vet, the tshirt will stop Merlin from worrying at his brand-new stomach wound. I remain unconvinced, and slightly shocked at that shade of pink.)

This is Merlin. He’s a springer spaniel and he’s almost twelve years old. And he is lovely and very affectionate.

Now, you might be asking about the rather large bandage which has been so expertly wrapped around his middle. That is a standard army field dressing. Why is it wrapped around a spaniel? That would be because he had his spleen out on Friday. He had internal bleeding, caused by a growth in his spleen, which we only caught when the resulting anaemia left him unable to stand or walk.

And apparently internal bleeding in dogs can be solved by removing the offending internal organ. Yeah, I didn’t know that either. Mind you, I’d never really considered the internal organs of a spaniel before, so I’m not the best informed.

But the major surgery went as well as it could be expected. Merlin’s now meandering around quite happily, having apparently forgiven us for arranging the theft of one of his internal organs.

(The army field dressing, by the way, is courtesy of my brother’s time in the Officer Training Core. That doesn’t really explain why he still has them a good three years after leaving, or why they issue real field dressings to cadets who are, hopefully, issued with fake bullets.)

Last night, I went with my family to see Spamalot, a musical lovingly ripped off from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Spamalot was first performed in New York, by the way. I’m still not entirely sure how Monty Python’s one and only musical started on the other side of the Atlantic, but I was there at the time with my family and off we went to watch it. (Oh my god, that was seven years ago, how can it be that long ago?) Tim Curry was playing Arthur and doing a damn good job of it. 

There was something slightly surreal about being a Brit in a foreign country watching something so very, very British while surrounded by Americans. But it was an excellent show and it did very well and it eventually made it home to Britain. 

The British production is a little different to the American one. When the Knights who say- who formerly said Ni demand a musical as tribute, the American version leaps into a song about the necessity of Jews in order to succeed on Broadway. In the version I saw last night, they changed it to the difficulty of getting stars to perform in [insert town name here and pray it scans properly].

It was a jolly good show all around, continuing the great Python tradition of having as few actors play as many parts as possible. I was a little bit disappointed that they skipped my favourite scripture of all time. 

And the LORD spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.” - Book of Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 17-21