it's friday i'm in love #6

Apologies for neglecting this blog once again - for someone who technically has nothing to do at the moment, I've found myself incredibly busy. Partially it's because of the pressure of doing nothing, since as I imagine myself as having oceans of time, I make far too many plans to fill it, and end up incredibly busy. It's also because May Week is utterly exhausting - too much enjoying myself, as my dad says! In addition, a lot of my friends are leaving Cambridge soon, and considering that some of them are international students, it's particularly horrible knowing that we may not see each other again for years and years. I dislike goodbyes immensely, but at least we have the miracles of Facebook and social media in order to keep in contact. Some of my friends are also going onto PhDs, and we're all waiting for results/funding to find out exactly where we'll be next year...how tense!

Nonetheless, it's been a most excellent week. I'm doing a full May Week write-up as we speak, but after I recovered from that (my boyfriend has it worse, he stayed up all night on Friday only to have to spend the weekend doing the cleanup for his college!) my lovely friends Rowan, Meg and Vic came to stay for a few days. I haven't seen these lovely ladies for a while, so having time to hang out and catch up was both wonderful inspirational and utterly invaluable. It's lovely having good friends to catch up with, particularly when they join in your love of quaint cafes and book-buying, and spend evenings in pubs reciting poetry and what it's like to have testicles. If only we had some Scrabble, then it would have been an evening truly in keeping with the traditions of our collective friendship. I'm going to write all that up soon as well, since there are some truly brilliant photos, but that was one of the highlights of this week.

The other major event was punting to Grantchester with my boyfriend Paul and my friends Patrick and James. The ideal of punting to Grantchester is a truly Cantabrigian one - my grandmother, who went to Newnham in the 40s, asked me if we still punted to The Orchard the morning after May Balls for a champagne breakfast! - but it's quite difficult and time-consuming, since it takes about five hours to do the round trip, and it's not very easy to punt in such a deep river. My boyfriend was the only really strong punter - James is very good, but unfortunately was put off by the fact that he fell in (again!) At least it was hot enough that he didn't catch cold. It was also made more hilarious by the fact that once we got to Grantchester, despite its reputation, there was nowhere good to moor the punt. The only places were iron rings screwed into wooden stakes in the river, but when we tried to leave, we turned away...only to find that the weight of the punt had in fact pulled out the rusty screws and was floating away! At least we managed to get it back, but we couldn't trust it, so we had to get a takeaway tea and eat it in the meadows. Still, it was a lovely afternoon, even if I'm a tiny bit sunburned as a result.

All in all, it's been a good (albeit alcoholic!) week, and I'm looking forward to having a weekend of catching up with my mountain of books and cross-stitching. Hopefully I'll actually pull my finger out and finish the multiple blog posts I've started and not yet finished (why does Blogger insist on making it so difficult to insert multiple photos?), but at any rate, I'm just planning to enjoy myself. Spiffing.

One thing I've been incredibly happy about this week is the fact that my route into town is along the river, which is currently full of ducklings and baby moorhens. They're so fluffy and cute! I do love living along the river, although I'm extremely glad my cat is a few miles away...

When I've not been on the river, or in pubs, I've spent a lot of time rewatching Green Wing, one of my favourite shows of all time, whilst cross-stitching and drinking a lot of tea. I can't show you the project, since it's for someone's birthday, but it's been a lot of fun to make. Although doing anything while watching Green Wing is a bad idea - I get too immersed in it to concentrate!

Whilst punting, there were some incredible views of the Cambridge countryside. This photo seems to represent the gloriousness of Cambridgeshire to me, since after all, I'm a true East Anglian at heart - I love the flatness, the stillness of the river and the muted colours of the country.

My boyfriend and I celebrated the end of vivas with Chinese food and new episodes of True Blood. So delicious, and so good. (Both the food and True Blood.)

This week's book buying spree. As I said to my mother on the phone, 'Help! You must stop me before I kill again! And by 'kill again', I mean 'buy more books.'' I also told her I bought a couple of Trollopes. She was most amused. Oh, homophones.

I went home for an evening, and ended up being a feline-cushion, since my cat was rather insistent that she sit on me! I was unable to refuse her, since she had lost her voice and was wandering around croaking and squeaking. It was tragic, but hilarious.

I met up with an old friend this week - it's incredible, we've known each other since we were five! Since she'd never been to Fitzbillies, I had to take her, which was an all-round successful experience. While I was waiting for her, I treated myself to an iced coffee (it's far, far superior to any frappe), and A Feast for Crows, which is an excellent read. I can't wait for series 3 of the show now, I want to see how they manage the Red Wedding. 

 

I was walking back from the pub with my boyfriend this evening, and the sky over Senate House and Gonville and Caius was beautiful. The tents are set up for undergraduate graduations, so there are lots of people wandering around in fur-lined robes at the moment. I can't wait for my turn in three weeks.

tarquinius delendus est!

I'm quite annoyed with myself that I've let this blog slide recently - many apologies to anyone out there who for some reason enjoys my mad ramblings. My thesis was due in on 13th June, and the severe lack of preparation time has left everyone on my course having a bit of a panic. Last time I wrote a dissertation, I had a final draft in over two weeks before the deadline, and spent a good week editing and tweaking. Two weeks ago, I was feeling like I'd be amazing if I had a final draft five days in advance. As it is, I was editing and tweaking and rewriting basically continuously, and even though I gave it in a day in advance, I spent every moment up to the wire rereading and editing. It wasn't a bad thing, but I'm not used to having so little time to do such important work. I had a fairly substantial panic when I realised that I had less than a week and I still needed to redraft a good chunk of it. Still, the panic was quite instructive, and I ended up with something I was rather happy with. I will permanently hate that stage of final 'housecleaning': that is, making sure my content flows well, making sure the structure is crystal clear and that there are no terrible grammatical or spelling errors (I dread finding that 'public affairs have become 'pubic' affairs, or that I've lost a letter out of 'count'...) One thing I think I'll never learn with academia (but I hope I do!) is that I'm never happy with what I've written: I will inevitably be quite ambivalent about it until enough time is passed for me to look at it objectively. Nonetheless, I'm about as happy with it as I can be, and bearing in mind that a week before the deadline I felt like there was no time and the world was ending as a result, this is a pleasant surprise.

[*]

I feel rather intimately connected with Tarquin now, like he's Galatea to my Pygmalion. (Or the monster to my Frankenstein. Depends on the mark this thesis gets, really.) What I've been working on is the role of the theatre and the theatre as a paradigmatic monument in the novels, since it acts as a symbol of the tensions between literary heritage and contemporary culture. It's been a really thrilling piece to work on, and it's something which has been quite neglected in current scholarship, so I'm really rather pleased to have had the opportunity to write it. The only problem is that it's a topic which feeds heavily into my PhD, so cutting it down to 12,000 words was rather tough!

[*]

My viva was today, which was sort of terrifying and exhilerating all at once. A viva voce is meant to be an opportunity to be grilled on your thesis, and thus an opportunity to clarify any misunderstandings and any questions the examiners might have. It's really rather terrifying, but it's a surprisingly productive experience. I really don't know how it went, but I didn't leave crying my eyes out, so I'll take that as a plus. It's one of those experiences which leaves you rather numb, but the last time this happened, I ended up getting PhD funding out of it, so I'm remaining quietly neutral on the subject until I find out. Nonetheless, there is something hilarious about mentally psyching yourself up for a viva, only to be told that it can't happen because one academic has been lost. This is why I want to work in academia - it is just so wonderfully bizarre and improvisational at times.

The upside of this long, rambling post? I'm now a good deal freer, so hopefully I'll actually be, you know, blogging here rather than being bogged down in work. Expect lots of pretentious Cambridge photos soon!