End of Trinity

Half one in the morning and I have eleven tabs open. Do I care? Do I care I won't be in bed for hours? No. No, no, no. For it is the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year, and I have sat - deep breath now - the First Public Examination in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. (Or PPE prelims, to the rest of us.) It's over. Oh, god, it's over. I woke up this morning feeling like death, ran down to Claire's and ate toast - it feels like years ago now - and expressed amazement at how on earth she could have got through three pairs of tights in two days. For someone who was spending six hours sat down in once place, she laddered them impressively.

Post-toast, Pat ran in with a handful of flowers. She'd been down to the post room and found that Sky, bless him, had been making phone calls from London and had pidged us our red carnations. Because I never explained this properly before - I blame the brain-falling-out issue - there are some very interesting archaic traditions tied up with taking university exams at Oxford. There is of course the sub fusc issue - "sub fusc" is Latin for "dark brown", and it's a bit of a misnomer. For women, sub fusc is a white shirt, a black shirt and tights (or trousers), black shoes, a short commoners' gown with tails, a black ribbon tied around your neck and a mortarboard. (Men wear jackets and white bowties.) You're not allowed to wear your mortarboard at any time, for fear of hefty fines; instead, you carry them around. For exams, there is the additional tradition - for your first exam, you wear a white carnation pinned to your gown; for your next exam(s), a pink one; and for your final exam, you wear a red one. Mine were a bit silly, because with three exams I simply went white, pink, red, but I was very touched by the ones I was given. Also traditionally, you can't buy the flowers yourself - they must be given. Mine were given to me by Ben, Pat and Sky respectively, who got up at unearthly hours of the morning to procure them.

The walk down to Exam Schools was through beautiful bright sunshine, and the exam, when I got in there finally, was potentially very difficult, but okay. Yesterday's exams were not okay - I remember now that narahttbbs saw me having a proper temper tantrum in the front quad - as while the philosophy paper was doable, the economics paper included a hidden IS-LM question and a maths question that almost drove me to tears. It was hideously, horrendously difficult, and I had no time, and I ended up by leaving out three parts of a five-part question (there were only four questions on the paper). Like I said yesterday, I might potentially be a good economist - I mean, I worked so hard for that paper, I really did - and it all comes to nothing because now no-one will ever know. If I fucked up the maths - and I'm sure that I did - then I've potentially done terribly, no matter how well I did on the economics section. It was quite, quite awful.

Yes, back to this morning. The politics paper - was okay. I mean, I could do it. So I did it. And then I left Exam Schools in a hurry, and although I knew I should go out the back way because that's the way the finishers go, I got shoved out the side entrance by an officious proctor. And then I didn't know what to do, because despite running into random PPEists, and kuteki more than once, I couldn't find anyone I knew. And in the end I tramped back towards college in a right old sulk, feeling utterly unloved in the midst of the rampant celebration. I got in the way of a flour bomb (I should mention, people wait for their friends coming out of Exam Schools and hug them and kiss them and drench them with water and cheap champagne while covering them with flour and eggs and ketchup and glitter; it's bad for prelims but when Finals let out, they have a police presence!) which I was brushing off awkwardly when I got to the Rad Cam feeling quite horrendous. (An American tourist asked me, incredulously, "Is that what you guys wear all the time?" I should just have told him that yes, yes we do, we even iron our shirts every morning at six am.)

And then - well, and then in the distance Pat appeared, and Ben, and she started running and I started running and we were both shrieking and attracting the attention of hundreds of tourists when we collided into a hug outside All Souls. She wrapped her arms round me, shrieked, "It's OVER!" and dumped a full shaker of glitter onto my head. I shrieked some more, and Sky appeared from nowhere and placed a yellow plastic garland ceremonially around my neck. And I was so pleased to see him, and so pleased that people loved me after all that I think I would probably have burst into tears right there if the tourists hadn't been there gawping at us. And now comes the photographic evidence, because I'm having trouble describing such a wonderful moment.

( it's over, it's over! )

Back in college, there was a consensus - alcohol, and the buying thereof! So we went to Sainsbury's, still in full sub fusc, still covered in glitter and now silly string, and bought picnic food, lemonade and Pimm's and fruit to put in it. I met parrot_knight briefly and babbled gormlessly at him, and then repaired to the back quad, lay down on the grass under my favourite tree and began the process of getting completely sloshed. There is definitely more photographic evidence of this.

( lemonade! and Pimm's! )

Here, I am sober. Not for long. It was wonderful, lying there in the sunshine, watching PPEists cavort debauchedly in the brightness and cover each other with flour, whilst Pat chopped up apples inexpertly with a very sharp carving knife and poured large amounts of Pimm's into the lemonade jug, which we stole from hall.

Eventually I switched the sub fusc for my ordinary clothes, but clung to my carnation with a deep and pathetic love. I earned that red carnation, dammit. I worked hard, I went to tutes, I wrote essays, I did tones of reading, I spent two weeks in the library. That red carnation represents it all. So it stayed about my person and no one dared object.

( obligatory picture of me completely pissed )

The afternoon passed very pleasantly in three empty jugs of Pimm's, Pat teaching Ben to cartwheel on the lawn and the glorious sunshine and dappled shade. Pat and I went out to ceremonially buy new copies of Brideshead Revisited at one point, and when we got back it was a quarter past five - four hours gone in blissful somnolence! - and time to run. I am impressed that it took us less than ten minutes to purchase two cans of silly string, a purple balloon, a(nother) glitter shaker, a "CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR 60TH BIRTHDAY" banner, Sky and Ben (well, they were not purchased so much as retrieved off Turl Street) and sprint down to Exam Schools. At half five, almost exactly, Claire emerged, having had one more exam than I did.

There was screaming, glitter and silly string. ( so much silly string )

And then it all starts getting complicated, what with the mathmos also returning and much more alcohol. Eventually, Claire and Pat went to a pub to watch the England match, and I demurred, popping off to an Indian restaurant off Cornmarket to say hello to jacinthsong, slasheuse and cannons_at_dawn. "Saying hello" turned into "hanging around for ages and then coming with them to the Pansexual House of Love", and at the PHL I seemed to have joined an impromptu exams-are-over party and drank wine and ate cake and was tipsily happy at sebastienne and steerpikelet and about a million other people.

And then, and then, back into town, watching Saturday's Doctor Who (Love & Monsters - and I really liked it, more later) with jacinthsong, and now I'm back in the attic and have just scribbled this for hours. I'm happy. I'm so happy.

And because I'm happy, the last and essential picture: ( Read more... )

I thought I was going to bed. I'm not. Claire and Pat are back from drinking and dancing. She is not pissed, Claire says. She finds that remark hugely offensive. She is, um, whatstheword, tipsy ohyes.

Yes. I have finished my first year at Oxford. I love you all.

The Tenth Doctor ficathon

Sign-ups are now closed. Assignments to come shortly, I hope.

It's that time of year again, folks. I promised I'd do this last year, and now I give you:



"I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy."
-the Tenth Doctor, School Reunion

Welcome to the Tenth Doctor ficathon, a gen, het and slash ficathon where all fic is welcome - so long as it features our beloved Tenth Doctor in some shape or form.

Sign-ups begin today, June 21st, and run until June 28th. I hope to have assignments out by July 1st at the latest. Stories will be due in a month, on July 31st, 2006. I will post a masterlist on my journal (loneraven) at midnight BST where everyone can comment with links to their fics.

If for whatever reason you sign up and can't make the deadline, the thing to do is to tell me. I won't be pissed off if only you tell me, so I can assign a back-up author and your recipient gets a story and everyone's happy. If you then get your story to me later, everyone's even happier. Just let me know.

To sign up, comment on this post with the following:

Your name and LJ name
Your email address
Three things you want in your story
One thing you don't want in your story
One thing you'd rather not write
Can you be a back-up writer?

Here's my sign-up, as an example:

Your name and LJ name: Raven (loneraven)
Your email address: iona.raven[at]gmail.com
Three things you want in your story: Ten being ruthless, gen, ghosts
One thing you don't want in your story: explicit romance
One thing you'd rather not write: smut
Can you be a back-up writer? yes

All stories submitted must have Ten in them somewhere. I'm willing to be flexible over this - if, for example, you want to see what happens to Sarah Jane and K9 after School Reunion, but Ten doesn't actually appear, that would be acceptable, as would a story about one of the members of LINDA, or the adventures of Mickey and Rose whilst the former was a companion. You get the picture. What wouldn't be acceptable would be a story about, say, Nine and Rose on Satellite Five.

Edited to add: Minimum word count is 1000 words, and you can write as much as you like above that.

Also, regarding old-skool requests, which some people enquired about - I've thought about this, and, well, whilst I don't object in principle, they make assigning requests very difficult. If you want to make a specific old-skool request (e.g., Ten/Romana, a cameo from Tegan, etc.) that's fine, but I won't be able to ensure your assigned author will be familiar with that bit of canon. If they are, then that's good and they'll write it for you, but if they're not, then they won't and you'll lose one of your three things. It's your call whether you want to make the old-skool request to start with. And of course, if you get an assignment that asks for something old-skool that you don't know about, then just produce a story based on the prompts that you can write.

One last note to the Yanks among us: if you don't want to be spoiled massively for season 2/28, then I recommend you don't sign up, as I'm sure many fics will have spoilers.

I think that's it. If you have any further questions, post a comment or email me at iona.raven[at]gmail.com. In the meantime, get signing up!