Drunk drunk drunk like a drunk thing but linguistics last thing to go, I don't know.

So, I am completely hammered right now. I mean, more hammered than I've probably ever been, but with that thing where my motor and linguistic skills are the last to go. Some of my flatmates have been in my room showing me Green Wing and feeding me vodka that has, I don't know, pine or spruce catkins in it or something. I don't know. Maria's pretty good with obscure but really nice soft vodka that goes with cranberry juice and rapidly gets you very very very drunk so you see the world through shifting golden haze and the feeling that everything is okay really if vaguely surrealist and oh my god Dali would have loved this oh god I am very very very drunk and have typed all of this without pause oh god.

But we went out for dinner tonight. We went for Chinese, my flatmates and me, because term had been so awful, to Café Opium, and we had Chinese food and laughed a lot and had fun and I proposed a toast, because back then I wasn't nearly as completely and utterly ratarsed as I seem to be now - I don't know why, I didn't mean to drink - and like I said before, I just keep typing this, it just keeps flowing out, and I guess I must be really drunk, but yes, anyway, I proposed a toast and it was the classic one, it was "To us!" and we all drank to it, but Liya tried to toast, "To Hilary!" and we all said no, no, no, no toasts to Hilary, Hilary who has treated us all like shit, Hilary which has been the worst five weeks of my whole life, Hilary that is going to go on to March 10th, Hilary which has been so bad we decided that we were going to go out and eat Chinese food and come back and play two hours of Texas Hold 'Em poker and drink three bottles of wine and one of spruce catkin vodka and get so drunk we can't be hurt any more.

So no toast to Hilary. But we went past college, and every time an old member of college dies they put a sign on the door with the list of all their achievements, but Andy, oh god Andy. I wish I could have made the post public yesterday, but I knew him, and he was friend of some of my friends, and oh god his girlfriend she lives in the flat above ours, and he killed himself and she found him. Oh god, she found him, she found him, she found his body and now she's broken and so is everyone else. I was depressed and Claire was miserable and Pat and Liya were four-essays-a-week overworked and Ben's rehearsing for plays so many plays and yesterday, oh god, yesterday and and oh god he killed himself. They stuck a card with his name on the door of the college. It was so bad he hanged himself and you're not supposed to know that it's current members they put a card for as well as old members, you're supposed to not ever have to know that, and all the other old-member cards have long lists of life achievements as well, but not his. His says, "Andrew [last name], scholar, died February 5th 2007", and it's the most awful thing in the whole world.

And he was Lord Lindsay. It means he ran the bar. He ran the bar, and he sent an email round everyone to say there was going to be a room raid, the pint glasses, the beautifully fluted Erdinger glasses were all gone, stolen from the bar. And now there is a glass outside college. There is an Erdinger glass outside of college's front door filled with three bunches of flowers, because he was one of us and he was so unhappy that he killed himself. And that's why I'm totally and utterly and completely drunk. Completely ratarsed. Because I was unhappy, but he's dead. I had to tell everyone. I was the only one who was in college and I was the only one who knew. I had to knock on everyone's doors and say that he's dead. And everyone looked at me one by one and said, "Are you kidding?"

And I wasn't. Why would I be? How could I be? But how could he be dead?

Argh. Drunk. So very drunk. Because drunk is the only way to be right now. Because someone I knew only well enough to say hello to is dead. Because he was one of us and he's dead. He's not allowed to be dead, he's an institution. And I love my friends so much, I love them, I love them so much because they decided tonight we were going out, we were going out, we were drinking, we were playing poker, we were going to forget. But we walked by college! We saw the card and the flowers and we couldn't forget. But this term has been so bad, and everything has been so bad, and how can your whole life be measured and forgotten in twenty years, how can I be stumbling around my room laughing at Channel Four comedy when someone didn't live to see this dawn, why, I don't know, why.

Claire and Pat have gone out, and I think I'm going to bed because I have to work tomorrow and probably I'm going to be hungover and probably I'm going to deserve it because probably I'm pretty much really drunk right now 'cause we had lots of wine and the vodka and the cranberry juice and I thought I wasn't going to do this but I just, I want to forget, something bad happened to me, I was depressed but it wasn't that bad and it wasn't until I tried to get medical help that I felt this bad. I was getting better, and then I got ill. Then I got miserably flu-ish, and Claire was miserable and I missed her so much but didn't want to infect her, and then I was better and I wasn't depressed and term was half over, my degree was half over, it was all still salvageable and Andy killed himself.

Oh jesus fuck he hanged himself. I think I need to go to bed now. I wish he wasn't dead. I wish no one was so unhappy. I guess I wish I could be drunk forever, and lying in my room watching comedy with my friends and jesus I love them so much. But if no one knew he was so unhappy, then no one knows if anyone's unhappy, and the only way to keep them safe is to hold on to them tightly until the morning comes.

Shit. Shit shit shit and shit again. I guess I should drink three glasses of water before I pass out. I guess. Why did this have to happen? Why? And why did Hilary treat us all like shit when no one did anything to hurt it?

Going to bed yes. I wish it all didn't hurt so much.

Edited when sober: Mostly sober, anyway; my room looks exactly as you would expect for having had six people and lots of alcohol in it, but I'm all right and so are all my flatmates. Anyway, I'm not going to touch the main body of this post. For all I was out of my head, it seems to convey the nuances of the emotion better than stilted sober prose. All I'm going to do is go through and edit the details so I don't have to friends-lock it.

Thank you for your comments. They're really appreciated.

the winter here is cold, and bitter

And life keeps on going on. Today was bizarrely and comfortingly normal. I cleared the glasses and bottles and associated debris out of my room, having been decisively woken up by the fire alarm, and sat having breakfast looking out over the frosted field. I went out into a sparkling, freezing morning and walked down to college, and checked my post. The Erdinger glass that I couldn't stop thinking about is stil outside college's front door, filled with even more flowers and appropriately, notes of drink orders. The Balliol flag was flying at half-mast, and a picture of it, I believe, is going to be the cover of this week's OxStu; it hasn't been published yet, but Sam, Claire's friend-whom-I-have-longstanding-ridiculous-crush-on, is news editor this term and came over last night looking for an opinion focus group on exactly how they should deal with the story. From what he's said, it sounds like they're dealing with it tastefully and well, and I rather thought the picture of the flag rather than of the man himself was a nice, subtle thing to do.

I broke an egg on the way back and when I got in Pat and Liya were running very late for lectures. It was normal. I went to the JCR in the middle of the day to be met by Ben, who looked up and sans greeting, said, "Iona, what's a medieval male accoutrement to the nether regions?"

"Codpiece?" I suggested, and sat down with him and worked through the rest of the Guardian crossword, like we always do.

Tonight, the weather forecast is for thick snow. Which normally I would be very happy about. But Pedar was supposed to be coming down to London tomorrow, and I was going to meet him, and there are weather warnings up north, no non-essential travel is advised, and now it doesn't look like he can come. And I'm so irrationally disappointed I'm very tempted to walk around kicking things and saying "fuck!" a lot. I wanted to see him. I really wanted to get out of here. And, if anyone can remember that far back, I came back from the States after Christmas without anything I took with me, and the airline didn't deliver the goods before I came back down south. Pedar was supposed to come the weekend of my birthday to see me and bring some of my stuff, but he couldn't come, and he was supposed to come tomorrow, and now he can't come. But actually I don't really care that I've been wearing the same clothes for five weeks or whatever, I just really wanted to see him. It was the bright spot, because I'm dreading this weekend, it's going to be so lonely - Pat's mum's coming to visit, Claire and Liya are both going home - and I have an essay, as usual, and too much other work and everyone and everything is sad and it's so cold and I'm... urrrrrrgh.

Whine whine whiiiiiiine. Things could be so much worse for me right now. But I'm kind of sick of things sucking anyway. And obviously is no one's fault that there's snow, there's just... snow. But I really want to see my family right now, and just, fuck.

Guess I'll go and bake cookies or something and try not to mope. And definitely no more drinking for a while - appparently between us we got through four bottles of wine and one of vodka, which doesn't sound like that much but took six people about two hours to drink, which probably isn't a good thing - and perhaps no more sugar either, but I'd choose eating sugar straight out of the packet as a justifiable alternative to moping. Boooo.