Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna Teng

I suppose I should begin by saying that I passed all the rest of the bits of the LPC, and got a distinction in every paper. I'm pleased; that's a note to leave on.

As for what else I did this week, I should say, well, cried, mostly. ( Oxford )

( Cambridge )

I had another two days in Oxford. brightlywoven said, over dinner and late-night ice-cream, that if we were going to say goodbye at the station, then I needed to book a train. "It's okay," I said blithely, "I'm meeting people at five, I've got to get the four o'clock train."

"Yes," she said, "but there's another train twenty minutes after. And another twenty minutes after that."

In the event, Shim and I left on Monday afternoon and got a bus to the station, and all the way we talked about nothing, and had a brief argument about OS X and Linux, and when we walked over the canal he threatened to throw me into it, and all was ordinary and well. And we got to the station with eight minutes to spare before the four o'clock train, and we were doing so well, and then we were standing there in the station like any other two people waiting for the Paddington train and I started crying in that horrible, wounded way where you're never going to stop except with gravity and the passage of time.

I got the four o'clock train. I cried all the way to Reading and sniffled into Slough, and pulled myself together when the train pulled into Paddington; and after that I cheered up to see gavagai, and apotropaios met us for dinner and I was positively cheerful over dinner, more ice-cream and an utterly delightful interlude spent climbing the lions in Trafalgar Square.

Okay, yes, about that. I'm apparently more afraid of heights than I recall, so we got to a point where I could get on the back of a lion and no further, because of the, oh, six feet between me and the ground, and Laura had not much better luck. After we had made utter idiots of ourselves, to the delight of all the children and American tourists in the vicinity, we persuaded apotropaios to lay down his dignity for the occasion and hoist us onto the lion. There are happy pictures of us triumphant. We went home and got drunk and watched First Contact. It was an antidote to misery. Data gets greener with age, and Picard is surprisingly buff, and Worf never does crack an expression. There are constants in my life, apparently; strange and wonderful.

We also went, on a whim, to see the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. I was there at UCL five years ago to be interviewed, but he had been taken away for cleaning and I was bitterly disappointed, so we went there to satisfy one of my minor heart's desires, and took pictures of his handsome waxy dead face, and the passers-by smiled at us indulgently and took pictures of us when we asked. One nice chap thought we were starting in September before we put him right. It's a little perturbing to be mistaken for seventeen when I am supposed to be on the verge of grown-up things, but. But, we went to a cafe I like, and got soaked in the rain, and had lemon cake and chocolate shortbread, and so what if people think I'm seventeen. I suppose they always will; I'm about to be the youngest person on my course. I'm not even grown-up in my head.

( Vienna Teng )

I am still a wreck, really. I said goodbye to Laura this morning - how can all of this be the same day, I can't even - and cried all the way to Stafford, and came home and slept and went out for dinner with my family and cried some more. It's not even proper crying, any more; now it's certainly drunken, for one thing, but it's because things aren't sinking in quite and I can't help it.

Now, I really must sleep.