"Because the night belongs to us, because the night belongs to lovers..."

SPEAKERS!

Of a sort. They're a bit old and crappy and very very quiet, but they work. I have proper ones on the way off eBay, so they're good for the meantime. I am working my way through the playlist of songs (I still download and am given music when I can't listen to it, natch) and stopped abruptly at 10,000 Maniacs' Because The Night and stuck on repeat. Love. Just, love.

Library event still in full swing. I am stressed and getting snarky, to the extent that I've started snapping at the first-years and when I retreated to the library office, I heard Miranda telling them, "She's tired..."

Actually, the poor girl has had to cope with a lot of me being temperamental today. At about ten past one, I jerked upright. "Wah? What happened?"

Miranda and Cath were looking down at me from a great height. "You fell asleep. We were going to wake you for registration."

"There were spoons," I said, blearily. "Someone was shouting about spoons.

"Clue number seven," said Miranda sagely and absolutely accurately. Clue number seven is a wooden spoon in a bowl. "Please, sir, can I have some more?" I've had to have it explained to me three times; apparently I have a mental block where Dickens is concerned.

Still, Friday is always good. Fidan was on food today and she provided two boxes of ice-cream and a lemon meringue pie. All of which was very nice. The lesson itself involved evaluating hormonal contraception. Rice-Oxley doing sex education is always, well, an education; she can say the most wicked things with a perfectly bland expression. Exemplia gratia:

"There's the natural method, which can also be used in reverse if you want to conceive... it involves having intercourse when ovulation is occurring." She paused. "Which can get very tiring, after a while."

There was a pause. Then Fidan asked, "Do all the other Biology teachers know you're like this?"

Later:

"You know those models you used when you were younger?" Murmurs of agreement. "When we first used those white polystyrene penises, they came with instructions to stick them to the table so you could put the condoms on them. When the lesson ended..."

"What?"

"They were still stuck to the table!"

We were first-years at the time, Sarah noted. We could have walked in on a lab with polystyrene penises stuck permanently to every table!

It seemed a suitably surreal note upon which to finish the day, and the week; I went home and froze on the station platform. Two more things:

The icon meme. Yeah, if you want me to explain any of them, they're here.

And, ohmygodsquee hathy_col got into St Andrews! Not that I ever doubted it, but she's so happy and she so deserved it. Hee. The Colleen Show rides again.

Economics

I just had a faintly odd but resoundingly fun experience. It's Friday night, my mother doesn't want to cook and neither do I, so Pedar and I went out to a chippy in Southport (also Chinese food) run by a family friend whose daughter is in the year below me at Merchants'. He always chats to me when I'm leaning on the counter waiting for the food, and he asked me how my studies were going, and was it Oxford or Cambridge?

"Oxford," I said.

The man next to me turned round at that, and asked what I was studying. I started explaining about PPE, and he stopped me, asked me about the Economics and if I'd had my book-list (I have - it came last week) and what was on it. I talked about it, and he started to explain a specific problem to me, namely, how economics can be considered as a science, dismal or otherwise. He compared it with Chemistry, which of course piqued my interest, and Physics, and concept where the pronouncements of the observer have an effect on subsequent events. This moved on to a mathematical problem - he mentioned he was a maths lecturer - which he sketched for me, describing the antics of an ice-cream salesmen on an infinite beach, and how the solution can also be applied to the behaviour of political parties across the spectrum. I managed to guess at the solution of the problem, which interested me.

Then his fish and chips came, so he grabbed a piece of the greaseproof paper they use to wrap the chips in, wrote down a book recommendation and sketched out the problem and its solution, wished me luck for next year and apologised for hijacking my time before disappearing into the night before I could thank him.

He mentioned he was a lecturer at John Moore's, formerly a lecturer at the University of Hanoi in Vietnam (I thought it was cool) and of course on the basis of that information I could find out who he was easily. But I'm not going to. It's more fun to have had an academic discussion with a stranger you met at the chippy while waiting for them to give you your chips. It has, in fact, made my day.