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Jesus fuck. I am shivering deep within my bones, because wow, it is cold. And I know I've been twittering for weeks about how it's not cold yet, why is it not cold, when will it be coat weather damn it, and you would be excused for thinking aha bet she's sorry now, but actually I'm not, I'm loving it. I love cold weather as much as I hate it when it's hot, which by the way is a lot. It gets beneath your skin and into your blood and makes you open your eyes with a start in the morning. It wakes me up, makes me think and write better. Which may be just be me being fanciful, but I don't think so; maybe there's a bit of science in it, sort of like a whole-body-and-soul cold water splash. And this year I was beginning to think it wouldn't happen, and was keeping BBC weather up as my home page in a sort of dull autumnal hope, and on November 1st the day's average dropped from about eight degrees Celsius to four below and made my day. The British climate is apparently genteel enough to take account of such niceties as the Gregorian calendar.
And it helps, of course, that it's so clear. The sun is low but very bright, and yesterday I was walking up by the Rad Cam taking in the cold and the crystalline edges and everything so bright and hectically brilliant, and fell in love with Oxford over again. I was slightly less enamoured of the city once Claire and I had staggered home from Westgate laden down with what felt like hundreds of bags of shopping - and we'd quite deliberately not bought either tins of tomatoes or cartons of orange juice - and I had broken lots of eggs. (Oh, all right, two. But the way Claire goes on you'd think we didn't still have thirteen left, for crying out loud, etc. After twenty minutes of this, I observed that we are chopping onions in tandem, bickering over eggs and finishing each other's sentences. Old married couple doesn't actually quite cover it.)
Anyway, yes, we were shopping for a dinner party. Seriously. Claire has had two essay crises in the last four days, and I had had one fairly horrible one, so we decided that we should do something fun. And somehow "cook a nice dinner" turned into "invite everyone we know and force-feed them stir fry." I happened to mention this to my mother after the fact, and she said, after a long pause, "...who cooked?"
"I did!" I said. "Claire and I did!"
Another veeeery long pause. "Did you feed them cheese on toast?"
Honestly. We actually fed them - them being Claire, me, Liya, Pat in absentia, Sam, Maria, Maria's James, and, er,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chiasmata, who seemed initially quite bemused by proceedings - sushi, chilli chicken, prawn stir fry, noodles, two types of salad and the amazing chocolate pudding of OMG, which Katie provided with the comment that it was mostly double cream. This was a good, good thing. And, actually, the whole thing came off beautifully. We were running about an hour behind schedule, which was all Chris's fault - my hour-long political theory tute ran to two and a half hours of bickering over liberalism, the East India tea company and the nervous breakdown of John Stuart Mill[1] - which meant we sort of roped in all our guests to help cook, and Sam, who is currently trying to learn Russian (for part of his degree, not conversationally, which is why he knows the words for "liquidate" and "counter-revolution" but not "hello") was stirring my chicken with one hand and conjugating verbs with the other.
And we got everyone sat down and fed, and they all liked the food, and barring the odd bizarre incident - er, mostly, Sam deciding that we do talk about Pat a lot, and keep food for her when she's at rehearsals, but as far as Katie was concerned, Pat's a figment of our collective imaginations. "Maybe you killed her," Sam said suddenly. "Maybe this" - he indicated the pan of chicken - "is Pat!"
To which I can only say that, er, Pat is a real person and we have not killed and eaten her. In fact, if you all come to Carousel at the OFS at the end of fifth week, you'll see her in all her astonishingly-well-rehearsed glory. [/pimpery] Er, yes. At this point we ate the pudding of OMG - OMG, seriously, OMG! - and Katie and I proceeded to chat for the next, er, four hours. I have absolutely no idea where the time went. It was half ten, and then it was two in the morning, and I have no idea where the time went.
That was the day it started to get cold, and although it was only yesterday it feels like a very long time ago. Tonight, I have been essay crisising LIEK WOAH. It is tragic. My tute, I should mention, is in, oh, about seven hours. But that said, I finished the essay about an hour ago. The problem was the three cups of coffee (and one of Maria's strawberry tea) that I had consumed to get me that far, so I can't go to sleep just yet. I decided, as you do, to call my mum - which isn't as silly as it sounds, as she's working nights and gets home at about two. But unfortunately, I don't have signal in the flat - I have to hang out of the window with my phone, and on a night like tonight, the heat in the room just leeches out and heads skywards. So, as it seemed logical at the time, I donned hat, coat and scarf, left my nice warm flat and went wandering up and down Jowett with my phone, watching my breath and the endless clear sky. I noticed Orion for the first time this winter, and I'm sure it's been above the horizon for weeks, but it's the first time I've seen it and hell, it's two am, I can stand and stare at the sky if I want to.
It was actually quite a memorably weird experience. It's so dark outside, so, so cold, and at the end of Jowett I noticed the light on the stop sign is blinking. Every time it blinked on, it lit up a large black cat sitting, sphinx-like, at the base of it. Its eyes flashed mirrors with the light, and it barely moved, so I just stood and watched this surreal frozen tableau whilst waiting for my mum to call me, woe is me.
And that is my whole life at present. While I'm waiting for the caffiene to wear off, I thought it would be a good idea to try and finish off the Supernatural fic that ate the universe, but realised it needs to be canon compliant, and it may not be. So I finally brought myself to watch 2.01, "In My Time Of Dying", and twenty minutes in I am... er, dying. Waaaah.
Ah, well. Fic is compliant, and has a bizarre convergence with the canon - I swear, there's a bit of it I wrote before I saw the episode and the resemblance is quite startling - and I may finish it tonight because aha, essay crisis over. Tomorrow I am going to go to my tute and spend the rest of the afternoon doing laundry and baking cookies. I don't know when I got so domesticated.
[1] I wondered if he wrote about this in his autobiography, so in a quiet moment in the SSL today, I picked it up and had a look. He did. He wrote a lot about it. And he was about my age when he had it, and he read a lot of poetry, and, oh, god, yes it has the sentence structure and lexis of something written in the nineteenth century, but he's SO DAMN EMO. Worthy of LJ at times, honestly.
And it helps, of course, that it's so clear. The sun is low but very bright, and yesterday I was walking up by the Rad Cam taking in the cold and the crystalline edges and everything so bright and hectically brilliant, and fell in love with Oxford over again. I was slightly less enamoured of the city once Claire and I had staggered home from Westgate laden down with what felt like hundreds of bags of shopping - and we'd quite deliberately not bought either tins of tomatoes or cartons of orange juice - and I had broken lots of eggs. (Oh, all right, two. But the way Claire goes on you'd think we didn't still have thirteen left, for crying out loud, etc. After twenty minutes of this, I observed that we are chopping onions in tandem, bickering over eggs and finishing each other's sentences. Old married couple doesn't actually quite cover it.)
Anyway, yes, we were shopping for a dinner party. Seriously. Claire has had two essay crises in the last four days, and I had had one fairly horrible one, so we decided that we should do something fun. And somehow "cook a nice dinner" turned into "invite everyone we know and force-feed them stir fry." I happened to mention this to my mother after the fact, and she said, after a long pause, "...who cooked?"
"I did!" I said. "Claire and I did!"
Another veeeery long pause. "Did you feed them cheese on toast?"
Honestly. We actually fed them - them being Claire, me, Liya, Pat in absentia, Sam, Maria, Maria's James, and, er,
chiasmata, who seemed initially quite bemused by proceedings - sushi, chilli chicken, prawn stir fry, noodles, two types of salad and the amazing chocolate pudding of OMG, which Katie provided with the comment that it was mostly double cream. This was a good, good thing. And, actually, the whole thing came off beautifully. We were running about an hour behind schedule, which was all Chris's fault - my hour-long political theory tute ran to two and a half hours of bickering over liberalism, the East India tea company and the nervous breakdown of John Stuart Mill[1] - which meant we sort of roped in all our guests to help cook, and Sam, who is currently trying to learn Russian (for part of his degree, not conversationally, which is why he knows the words for "liquidate" and "counter-revolution" but not "hello") was stirring my chicken with one hand and conjugating verbs with the other. And we got everyone sat down and fed, and they all liked the food, and barring the odd bizarre incident - er, mostly, Sam deciding that we do talk about Pat a lot, and keep food for her when she's at rehearsals, but as far as Katie was concerned, Pat's a figment of our collective imaginations. "Maybe you killed her," Sam said suddenly. "Maybe this" - he indicated the pan of chicken - "is Pat!"
To which I can only say that, er, Pat is a real person and we have not killed and eaten her. In fact, if you all come to Carousel at the OFS at the end of fifth week, you'll see her in all her astonishingly-well-rehearsed glory. [/pimpery] Er, yes. At this point we ate the pudding of OMG - OMG, seriously, OMG! - and Katie and I proceeded to chat for the next, er, four hours. I have absolutely no idea where the time went. It was half ten, and then it was two in the morning, and I have no idea where the time went.
That was the day it started to get cold, and although it was only yesterday it feels like a very long time ago. Tonight, I have been essay crisising LIEK WOAH. It is tragic. My tute, I should mention, is in, oh, about seven hours. But that said, I finished the essay about an hour ago. The problem was the three cups of coffee (and one of Maria's strawberry tea) that I had consumed to get me that far, so I can't go to sleep just yet. I decided, as you do, to call my mum - which isn't as silly as it sounds, as she's working nights and gets home at about two. But unfortunately, I don't have signal in the flat - I have to hang out of the window with my phone, and on a night like tonight, the heat in the room just leeches out and heads skywards. So, as it seemed logical at the time, I donned hat, coat and scarf, left my nice warm flat and went wandering up and down Jowett with my phone, watching my breath and the endless clear sky. I noticed Orion for the first time this winter, and I'm sure it's been above the horizon for weeks, but it's the first time I've seen it and hell, it's two am, I can stand and stare at the sky if I want to.
It was actually quite a memorably weird experience. It's so dark outside, so, so cold, and at the end of Jowett I noticed the light on the stop sign is blinking. Every time it blinked on, it lit up a large black cat sitting, sphinx-like, at the base of it. Its eyes flashed mirrors with the light, and it barely moved, so I just stood and watched this surreal frozen tableau whilst waiting for my mum to call me, woe is me.
And that is my whole life at present. While I'm waiting for the caffiene to wear off, I thought it would be a good idea to try and finish off the Supernatural fic that ate the universe, but realised it needs to be canon compliant, and it may not be. So I finally brought myself to watch 2.01, "In My Time Of Dying", and twenty minutes in I am... er, dying. Waaaah.
Ah, well. Fic is compliant, and has a bizarre convergence with the canon - I swear, there's a bit of it I wrote before I saw the episode and the resemblance is quite startling - and I may finish it tonight because aha, essay crisis over. Tomorrow I am going to go to my tute and spend the rest of the afternoon doing laundry and baking cookies. I don't know when I got so domesticated.
[1] I wondered if he wrote about this in his autobiography, so in a quiet moment in the SSL today, I picked it up and had a look. He did. He wrote a lot about it. And he was about my age when he had it, and he read a lot of poetry, and, oh, god, yes it has the sentence structure and lexis of something written in the nineteenth century, but he's SO DAMN EMO. Worthy of LJ at times, honestly.
