Elderflower

I've had a peculiar sort of day. Mostly, it's been gloriously sunny and warm outside, and I've been stuck in the Indian Institute Library since ten o'clock this morning, up five flights of stairs so significantly closer to the blue sky and dreaming spires, but still, not in the sunshine. I popped out in the morning to see steerpikelet emerge from Exam Schools, having finished Finals, and joined the cloud tipping glitter, balloons and congratulations on her head, but didn't stay for the party - I tramped fairly miserable back across to the Indian Institute and moped there for the entire afternoon. It was livened up briefly by jacinthsong, who is still great, smuggling sweeties into the Bodleian and reading out funny bits from How To Lie With Statistics.

Still, by about eleven, I was feeling thoroughly despairing. I'm writing an essay on the importance of gender politics in India, as mentioned before, and it's so awful I wish I'd done economic liberalisation instead. Not that the essay itself is bad, but the material. In India, women are mostly illiterate. They're overworked, underfed, and more than ninety percent of aborted foetuses are female. Since I've started writing this essay, six Indian women have been raped and two have been burned alive for dowry payments. They are abused and tortured, oppressed and villified, they are downtrodden, ignored, derided and unfranchised, bought and sold. It makes miserable reading and even more miserable writing, which probably explains why it's taking me so long to write this thing; I just keep stopping because I can't take another reason to despair.

So when Ben came up with a bag of KFC chicken, I was delighted to see him. He suggested I get some food and join him outside on the terrace. Yes, we do, indeed, have a terrace. It's a flat surface of flagstones that is alternately too cold and too hot to sit on comfortably - the flagstones radiate heat - but out in the silent, warm night air, it was perfect. I think there are some people that are just good to be around, and he's one of them - in any case, it was very soothing to be sat out there, talking about nothing much. (Er - the sheer sweetness of the night, the play Sky was in tonight, the word I couldn't think of to describe Ben's chicken (it turned out to be "bilobal") and, after a bit, I explained the Gettier Problem and Ben tried to explain to me why maths isn't a very specialised type of philosophy.)

The ironic thing, of course, is just when I was considering renouncing my citizenship, part of the reason I was enjoying it out there so much is that it's a lot like India in early summer. I'm wearing my favourite skirt, today - short, ruffly denim, it flares out when I walk, I love it - with footless tights and bare feet, which is very like the traditional clothes for an Indian summer, and the night had that mix of cool and the radiating heat of the day, and the quiet, and the scent of elderflower and roses from the tubs of flowers beneath. We'd been sitting there, quietly talking, for a while, when Maria opened her window and she and Liya appeared to demand some of our midnight feast. Sky blew in, like a tornado, talked helter-skelter about the play - it went well - waved at me, kissed Ben, asked to borrow some money and disappeared off to the King's Arms.

Sometimes this is what you need, I think; quiet, and semi-darkness, and people who love you within reach in the dark. It did me some good.

After a while, the porter appeared from behind us, carrying a torch. I had this sudden weird thought - we're not allowed out here? we're not allowed to eat out here? - but he merely asked, "How long have you two been sitting out here?"

"About twenty minutes," I said.

"Have you seen anyone moving across the field?"

Apparently there's been a prowler who tried to break into some of the graduate accommodation across the field, whom we would have seen if we'd been paying attention. Or maybe not; the field's very dark at night, and you can barely see the ground from where we were sitting. With a stern instruction to Maria to close her window, he went off again.

"It's all very Gaudy Night," I said. (Er: in the novel, which also features night-time prowling about, Dorothy Sayers situates Shrewsbury College on Balliol's hallowed sports ground. Which is the field, naturally, that Ben and I were sitting above and looking across.)

We watched, and after a bit we saw a torch beam flickering on and off on the grass. I rang Balliol, and was informed me it was just the porters themselves and not to worry we'd get murdered in our beds, or anything. We went back to Gettier for a while, until I realised I really, really have to work.

And I do. This essay is not fun. At all.

Still, the only patriarchal oppression I have experienced this evening is, er, a man tracking mud all over my floor. And I'm sure if I went after him and yelled, he'd come back and clean it up. (He's having kittens over a computing project, so I won't.) And I had a soft, quiet interlude in a life that that's better than hundreds of thousands of others'.

Back to work.