and the landscape of merry and desperate drought

Ever have one of those days where you just can't get out of bed?

Not, thank god, for the oh-god-I-have-nothing-to-get-up-for reason, but just, I was so tired, and am still having hugely violent horror movie dreams that keep waking me up through the night, that I couldn't shift myself. It didn't help that I was woken up by my scout at some obscene hour - yes, yes, I know, complaining about your scout makes you the lowest of the lowest of the low, I state this merely as a fact - and then by one of my ghastly cousins, who wanted to moan about her boyfriend before nine in the morning - er, I am normally a sympathetic person, but just, no - and then by the maintenance people, and then by Pat and Ben doing some sort of Greek chorus impression in the corridor, and then, finally, by my alarm. I dragged myself awake before half ten, just, stepped out through the sunlight pooling on my bed and into the kitchen, and spent most of the rest of the day moping over Plato's Republic and drinking peppermint tea. I deduce, therefore, that I have come down with something or other. Surely it's not normal to be this tired so early in the term? Anyway, I should have got an early night and stayed in the warm all day, right? I didn't do that. Not so much.

Which makes it sound like a bad day, and it really wasn't. I went out to the Bodleian in the morning, and got back around lunchtime to find Pat in the kitchen scribbling equations furiously on a napkin whilst Maria looked intently out of the window. I said, "Isn't that my bread?"

"It was mouldy," said she, perfectly calm.

"Yeah, so I threw it away!" I said, but really, it was no use; in this house, nothing is wasted. They got it out of the bin, cut it neatly into squares and were throwing it out the window at the freshers. Pat, meanwhile, was trying to calculate the velocity and kinetic energy of the bread.

"It should," she said authoritatively, "take 1.63 seconds to hit the ground."

Wordlessly, we watched it fall - we're on the fourth floor - and miss the passing fresher entirely. "Air resistance?" I suggested after a bit, and Pat started scribbling madly again.

Ben came in shortly after that and said that air resistance is calculated using perfectly smooth spherical bodies, and really, we should be doing it with complex field dynamics to allow for turbulence, and did we have a spare pen and napkin? I lay on the windowseat in the afternoon sunshine, balanced the Republic on my knees and dozed off to the sound of adult men and women throwing food at small children.

Several hours and much peppermint and Plato later, I went up to the pridehousewarming with Ben, Maria and jacinthsong and proceeded to drink lots of wine. The pridehouse is lovely - all wooden floors and real fireplaces and fairy lights - and it was stuffed full with nice people and alcohol and naked flames, and it was just lovely. I leaned against a wall and got very relaxed, then tipsy, then drunk, and quite possibly talked lots of rubbish at people for which I do apologise, but it was very nice nevertheless. I love this, most of the time. I love my life when it's like this - quiet, and full of philosophy and good people.

In fact, the only drawback to the whole thing was pointed out to me while walking back down into town, and I'd spent most of the evening in the night air in the garden. "It's got cold, hasn't it," I was saying, rubbing my hands together.

"No," said lizziwig, "it was always cold. You've just sobered up."

So tomorrow I shall no doubt have a raging cold, but never mind. It was lovely regardless.

Yeah, I don't really know what the point of this entry was. It was just... just nice. A nice day, and those should probably be recorded.