Summer

I am still a little messed up in the head. Not so much as I was the other night, and hopefully it's an improving thing, but in the meantime I am attempting to function whilst ignoring it. It is not easy. I am doing it regardless. I have not got this far, worked so hard to get to this point, to let anything go now.

But everything was made more difficult by my collections, which were mind-bogglingly awful. I had my Philosophy on Friday morning, had to write four essays in three hours, and the first one I picked was about whether it was rational to reason inductively and I was really quite proud of it. The second one was about free will and was about half the length. The third and fourth are best not talked about.

Outside, it was getting warmer, more humid, and the magnolia tree is shedding blossoms all over the place. I sat under that for a while, ate soup, was chastised for not stirring it, went back in for the next collection. The first two essays, this time, were fairly dire - one on Rousseau, one on Mill - and the third, on France, was hilariously bad. But the fourth one gets the prize. For various reasons mostly related to the fact that I am crap, the only British politics essay I was able to write was to do with demographic and opinion representation since 1945. The only question on the paper remotely related to this was "do parties have the same functions as they did in 1945?", and I wrote that they used to respresent opinion and now they represent demographics. I suck.

And after emerging from that, I couldn't do anything; I had dinner and thought, vaguely, about going for a wander. This idea was seized from me with enthusiasm and Claire, Pat and I went walking through Christ Church Meadow to the riverbank. I love it down there, strolling down the banks of the Isis, and even though it was threatening to rain very heavily we went equipped with umbrellas and boots and watched the various practising college crews drifting through the water. There were picture-postcard views even in the grey and the rain; from the river, you can see the quintessential view of the city, rolling mists over dreaming spires. It was beautiful.

Actually, Oxford in general is beautiful at present. The garden quad is thick with flowers, daffodils and crocuses as well as the magnolia, and the trees are blooming, and the college has acquired a pair of ducks to finally replace Rosa (college pet tortoise; boiled by Trinity two years ago). They have been named the Colonel and Martha, and they seem to like walking serenely around the grass and quacking amiably. There are tourists around everywhere now, enjoying the summer, and also people bedecked in full sub fusc with their carnations in order to go and sit their exams! It seems unfair, somehow, that just as the city is becoming a summertime idyll of flowers and sunshine and Pimms on punts clanking below Magdalen Bridge, we suddenly have to reconcile ourselves to the fact our exams are in eight weeks from now. My prelims are the 19th and 20th of June. This seems simultanously much too close and much too far away.

Today, I had my economics collection. Heh. If you don't laugh you'll cry. And I think I would have cried quite a lot if people hadn't managed to distract me from it. I tried to revise last night - I really did, despite my very real temptation to go slasheuse's birthday party at the Pansexual House Of Love (and jacinthsong tried her best to tempt me further!) - but to no avail. Failing economics is a part of life, like breathing.

Afterwards, I went shopping, and took in the aforementioned summertime idyll, and afterwards lazed on the grass before going to Wadham to watch Doctor Who. The evening became a bit silly after that - for some reason most of Balliol crashed a Hertford bop, and I randomly met wadiekin, much to my delight - and at some point I finally gave up on being social and retreated to my attic, which is still a haven of sorts. Tomorrow I am going to do all my Descartes reading, and sort out the mess in my room and in my head.