Notes from a lazy Sunday

(Numbered for ease of perusal, or indeed to spare me from offering any connections between them.)

1. Merton is top of the Norrington. This may account for why I look out across the road at the windows level with mine and see people studious and sitting down hard at work.

"In the meantime, what do we do?" I went on, sitting on the kitchen table fairly early this morning. "We download TV off the internet and throw mouldy bread at the freshers."

Maria was making a paper aeroplane at the time; she got it perfectly balanced between wingspan and general pointiness, I scrawled "HMS Bounty" in blunt pencil beneath one wing, and she launched it gracefully into a clear blue sky. The three of us hung out of our third-floor window and watched it arc beautifully up and out and down, through the sparkling air, down down down...

...straight into a cyclist.

Oops.

(Balliol is, as we speak, fourth in the Norrington Table. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this.)

2. Nothing like a clear sparkling day, though. I went up the Cowley Road revelling in the sunshine, and noticed that there is an Indian restaurant about halfway up called "Dil Dhunia". I am unsure whether this means "heart of the world" or "heart of the coriander". Both seem equally likely.

3. Nothing like a long lazy afternoon, either. I was supposed to be working. I managed to read an article by Samuel Scheffler that I've been meaning to read for two years - a critique of the basic-structure objection to Rawlsian egalitarianism; it bothers me slightly because it ought to be manhandled into an unmessy feminist argument, but I can't see how to do it - but other than that, I drank peppermint tea and talked to chiasmata most of the day. I was hit by a wave of sleepiness around about half seven, just in time to go to OULES.

4. OULES. Yes. We ran the flashback scene today, which I remember writing "unstageable" next to in the margin for the first few drafts, up to the mountain-in-Kashmir draft (so called because I did, indeed, leave the last extant copy up a mountain in Kashmir) and yet, we never did much about that. And it seems to have been a workable approach, because it went far better than expected. Once again, the cast are made of uber-talented love, and one would think I'd be sick of the script by now, but I'm really not. It's wonderful fun.

Afterwards, foulds and I were walking home and idly dissecting the rehearsal when he noted that we seemed to have stepped into a nineteen-twenties gangster film. The fog is thick tonight, clinging to the gargoyles and the architecture, and the lights were blurring beautifully through it all the way. I love Oxford in that mood - the night-time mood when the familiar looks strange - and it was an interesting backdrop to an interesting day.

5. I got in about half ten, wondered why I felt funny, noted dispassionately that I hadn't eaten in almost fourteen hours, and settled in with a bowl of pasta, with Maria and James, watching The Undiscovered Country.

I think we got about an hour in before I put my head in my hands and said, "It's a fucking Cold War allegory, isn't it?"

Well, it is! And I possibly enjoyed it even more for this fact. I like the notes of whom you can trust and who you can't, why a Neutral Zone is familiar and peace isn't, and how the original crew of the Enterprise really do belong to a different, more paranoid world. I even liked the knock on the head by bloody Francis Fukuyama. It was great fun. And after that we ended up eating peanut butter out of the jar and watching "Trials and Tribble-ations", which is made of love, particularly Dax, whom I have always thought is made of love despite seeing minimal amounts of Deep Space Nine compared to the others.

And now it's four am. I should go to bed, considering I have a lecture to go to in five hours.