Yes, it is December 4th, why do you ask?

I am still here, I swear. I am not dead. I am not even significantly mentally ill. (Ahahaha, I'm so very unfunny. But so are the people who never processed my blood results or, indeed, bothered to get back to me at all. I could be suicidal and hanging out of windows for all they'd know. As it happens, the situation appears to have resolved itself. I'm still having low points, but they're normal-person low points rather than WOE ANGST WOE low points, I think. Anyway, enough of that. I started feeling better and long may it last and I don't want to talk about it.)

So, yes. A few things have happened. I think I was about to go to my Tutors' Handshaking last time I wrote in here, and that went rather well. My tutors like me! Eeee! In all seriousness, I was solemnly informed that I'm not what Rowland calls "flashy", but I have consistent high-level critique and I could get a first in my Ethics paper. Yaaaaaaay. Chris thinks none of my essays were great, but they were all flawed in different ways, which is a good sign - because I'm not crap, maybe I'm just inconsistent? - and that I have mastered the art of being a political theorist and a philosopher at the same time, which is apparently not a ubiquitous skill. Also, he turned away from me and to all the other assembled tutors and said, "Iona is the only person in the years I have ever taught in this university to write an essay about compulsory heterosexuality!" and they all tried not to smile in terribly professional fashion.

(Speaking of which, a lot of people asked about the conclusions I reached with that particular essay. I can post it in here under flock if people stil want to see it - do they?)

Sudhir, my very nice personal tutor, thinks I come across as "significantly less unsettled" - apparently, I now appear to be a happy, interested and interesting human being. This does me fine. And that, I think, was more or less the end of my academic pursuits for Michaelmas. I had four hours - urrrrgh - of tutes on Wednesday, which involved an Ethics class in which I ended up yelling at one of the PPEist boys, and my very last Political Theory tute, which is depressing. I liked those so much, and I'm pretty sure Chris spent this one gently teasing my partner and I safe in the knowledge we were too tired to notice. But there was espresso and much badly-informed babble about Marxist ideology, and I'm going to miss those a lot.

Thursday. Thursday was November the thirtieth. But it was also Balliol's Christmas dinner. I feel the need to point out again that Oxford terms are eight weeks long - we're here for nine weeks, counting noughth week - and so end ridiculously early, but we couldn't not celebrate Christmas. Perish the thought. So my flatmates and I trekked across to college and ate and drank and made merry. And then went out and got ridiculously drunk. I think. I was so tired that I was asleep against a wall, but I have very vague memories of dancing, and being told I dance like sex by a gay man and replying that one or both of us must be drunk, and smoking menthol cigarettes and deciding it must be me, and yelling over the music to someone about shoebox_project. And then leaving - because I was in a packed, hot, noisy club and had, er, fallen asleep against a wall - and meeting Ben randomly outside of college, who gave me some chips and sang to me all the way home.

I wasn't that hungover, which is probably more than I deserved, but a good thing, because Friday was the day Claire and I cooked the Platonic Christmas Dinner. Seriously, we did. My mum had donated twenty-seven pounds in Marks & Spencer's vouchers to the cause, so we went shopping with wide eyes like kids in a toy shop. We came home with lots of food, and on Friday afternoon at two o'clock, I said, "It's time to cook."

(Well, before that, we had a bit of a ritual - secret Santa. I've never been in one before, and it was horrible trying to find a gift for someone without being able to confer with anyone else. But the gifts that appeared were varied and wonderful - books, pens, milkshakes, socks with pianos on them, something which I thought was a toilet brush but turned out to be a Christmas tree - and Ben gave me the most thoughtful gift I think I've ever been given. (And that too under our agreed spending limit!) He gave me three bags of sweets and a book called "Greek For Beginners". It's a tiny paperback primer in ancient Greek grammar, written for the turn-of-the-century public schoolboy. I love it, and despite the fact I am not, much to the probable horror of the author, male - "It is assumed the pupil's study of his Latin should be kept rather in advance of his Greek" - I have just about mastered my alphabet and present indicative active. There is gleeeeeee.)

Yes, time to cook! Very anti-feminist, Claire suggested, but I disagreed. "We are a pair of autonomous educated women who have chosen to spend the entire day in the kitchen cooking Christmas dinner for nine people."

There was a pause at this point when we both tried to remember when exactly we chose to do this. But we must have at some point, because nine people duly sat down at half six to a table heaving with food. Oh, so much food. Two roasted and stuffed chickens, parsnips, shallots, peppers and carrots roasted with olive oil and garlic, chicken, bacon and brie parcel-type things as starters (with chilli sauce! yes!) and lots of salad, cranberry sauce and roast potatoes. We also had homemade (incredibly unseasonal) caipirinhas and deliciously aromatic mulled wine, and a tiny Christmas pudding which I drenched with vodka and gleefully ignited.

Our wonderful guests - apart from the flatmates, we had invited Ben (who wasn't invited, really, because he now practically lives with us and had arrived two hours previously with shopping bags of vodka and tinsel), Sam, James and chiasmata - did the washing up while Claire and I sat back and looked on over the chaos and debris of what had been the Platonic ideal of a Christmas dinner. At which point chiasmata turned to me and asked, "Iona, what is a Platonic ideal?"

So I leaned against a wall and slowly, quietly, because I was very tired and full, retold the myth of the cave. It amused me that three separate people overheard and responded with some variation of "Oh, Plato!" It was a lovely moment.

My Christmas pudding burned a glorious blue, and then Ben served up a Dalek-shaped chocolate cake - I got the plunger! - in quite enormous slices, and the party collectively demolished it, sat back and groaned. So much food. Ohgod. So much. But we couldn't sit and digest it for long. We were going to Nepotists, which is a Christmas Balliol tradition. Held by the Arnold and Brackenbury Society, it consists of everyone in college in hall being plied with huge amounts of mulled wine and mince pies and engaging in loud and gloriously untuneful singing of all the good Christmas carols. The whole thing has a kind of drunken starry-eyed passion about it. And technically it is only open to actual Balliolites, but the wonderful people on the door let chiasmata in without my needing to lie at all, and we walked up the stairs past the bagpipers and were just in time for the partridge in the pear tree.

Oh, it was lovely. The low lights and the glowing red wine and the carols were just beautiful, and we sang through lots of them and mangled the tunes and it was so much fun. The memorable ones were "Adeste Fideles", which Claire, Ben and I tried our very best to sing properly in the Latin - it is apparently more difficult than you would think to sing "Venite adoremus, dominum!" without bursting into gleeful laughter - and "Jerusalem", which rose into the rafters.

Following which, the Gordouli. And this time it was not sung over the back fence. Using the clever technique of going out the back door - honestly, the intelligence is dazzling - to avoid the porters, the whole college went outside onto Broad Street and got through several choruses of "Bloody Trinity!" over Trinity's gates. (chiasmata seemed understandably bemused, not having been indoctrinated into the tradition of institutionalised college abuse.) And at length, we all went home, and lay about eating chocolate cake, watching films and chatting about not very much into the early hours. It really was a lovely evening.

In the morning (at nine am! wanton cruelty!), Claire and Pat dragged me out of bed and we went for breakfast before Pat had to leave for Heathrow. I hate the last morning of term - it's so depressing, leaving the people and the place I love so much, and it's always worse when we're all bound up together by the ups and downs of eighth week. Pat left, and Liya left, and Ben curled up in a foetal ball in my bed and went soundly to sleep, so Claire and I went for a walk while waiting for my parents. On the way up to college, she turned to me and demanded, "Where is my bow of burning gold? And where are my arrows of desire?" and I laughed a lot and clutched at my head and the morning was bright and beautiful and the bells were ringing and it was time to go.

I think I live in Oxford now. It was so good to see my parents, and we chatted for all the four-hour drive back, and even now it's nice curled up in the kitchen, but I'm seeing Claire tomorrow, and reading my Greek book at the moment, and thinking about plans for Hilary, and, I don't know. I live there now.

And yes, that's good.

er, I aten't dead?

There seem to have been a lot of posts lately where people detail the various points and factoids whereby they can prove they are a) not sockpuppets and b) not dead? I would have thought the continued vitality in my typing fingers - middle finger of each hand, if you're particularly interested - would have been sufficient exemplification for the latter, but there does seem to be insistence on this fact. Anyway, to be quite clear about it:

1. I am not dead;

and 2. I am a real person.

That is to say, I am not, for example, an incredibly delusional individual who sits in a room somewhere and imagines all this babble.

Anyway, I hereby declare that I am exactly the person that I claim to be in this journal. I am a nineteen-year-old university student with a faintly dull life, I have never asked anyone to buy me an iPod - I have one already, so there - and neither have I ever faked my own death. And if you don't believe me, there are about fifty people with LJs who have met me at one time or another, fourteen of which have seen me in the last three days. And if you don't believe them, then I don't know what to tell you. You could perhaps check all the houses painted white situated on the English sea coast. Or indeed you could try Balliol College, Oxford, which is eight hundred and forty-three years old and thus outside my capacity to make up.

I would continue being flippant and ask why someone would want to pretend to have my life - but it did actually happen once. I was very surprised.

Anyway, in other news, I went to work today and got drenched coming and going; the shop is just the same, although it's been broken into twice since I was there last; and the best book we sold today was called "Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance."

Yep, that's it.