philosophy supernatural nude

Dear self: passion fruit daquiris are not a substitute for actual food. Also, you are lucky to have friends who find it endearning and not head-smashingly annoying when you get drunk and are VERY! EMPHATIC! ABOUT! EVERYTHING! (Why I do this, I don't know. Normally I do not have strong opinions about... well, anything.)

On Tuesday, shimgray and I went to London - mostly, he followed me around Oxford Street looking put-upon, but we did have a lovely lunch in a Mediterranean place which fed us spiced quail with peaches and calamari for the princely sum of £6.95 - and yesterday I ran around like a madwoman trying to make some impact in the to-do list, but mostly I cooed over sir_rosealot's cats and it all ended at the bottom of a Martini glass anyway. Today, I am wiped out, and not just because of yesterday evening's red-lipstick patent-heels tropical-cocktails extravaganza. Possibly I cannot quite manage nine-in-the-morning to ten-at-night days yet, thank you swine flu, but today I have mostly sat in bed, read a very little about civil procedure and listened to "Poseidon and the Bitter Bug", the Indigo Girls' latest. It is a Thursday dropped out of a weekend - wet, and grey, so the electric lights are too bright, but with something good in it, something peaceful.

A few incidents, all from the last week or so:

-On a very bright and sunny morning, Shim and I had an argument about the fungibility of toothbrushes. (The gentle reader is gently asked not to inquire into the provenance of said argument.) He said they weren't. I said they were. We reached an impasse. He said, they have an intangibile aspect to them, namely possession - that I cannot use your toothbrush, you cannot use mine, they are not fungible.

No, I said, that's not true. If I bought a toothbrush, and left it in a packet in a drawer, and you came to visit without one, I would give it to you without a murmur. It's not an intangibility - it's the verifiable attribute of whether or not the toothbrush has been in someone else's mouth.

So, we agreed, the set of unused toothbrushes are fungible between themselves, and pre-owned toothbrushes are not.

(I've since thought that you need to add another level of rigour to this - you have to define "toothbrush" as "plastic stick with bristles that may be used for cleaning teeth". For people who define tootbrush with other characteristics, e.g. "red", or "electric", or whatnot, fungibility mileage will vary.)

-This week I have been dipping into the collected journalism of Francis Wheen. For those who have not come across him, he is a genial and occasionally very caustic Guardian journalist who writes about all sorts of things, mostly political, and is otherwise remarkable for having accidentally admitted on national radio that he quite fancies Sarah Palin. (I love the News Quiz; for many episodes after they greeted everything he said with, "Yes, Francis, but you fancy Sarah Palin.)

Anyway, I was reading something he had written - caustically, naturally - in the late nineties about Rupert Murdoch. The column basically hoped that he would die on some suburban street somewhere, surrounded by the debris of satellite dishes, so he could be buried where he fell and have on his headstone "si monumentum requiris, circumspice".

It took me a minute to think about it, but I laughed eventually. I like Francis Wheen very much because of the easily difficult way he writes - he draws down allusions and draws out verbal trickery with a practiced disdain for his readers' comprehension level, which I find disingenuous on one level (because, as a self-confessed old-fashioned leftists writing his dispatches from the class war, etc., he nevertheless writes in a way accessible to people who have been elaborately, expensively educated) but satisfying like a crossword clue on another, the way he writes to a trick and then in retrospect you see how it was done.

-As part of the foundation course of the LPC, I had a couple of sessions of something impressively called "professional conduct", but which mostly consisted of doing the set reading and answering a few questions on it. Very schoolgirl, very formulaic. I did the reading and I answered the questions, and I went to class, where there was a quick group discussion on the prep.

One of the questions, paraphrased was as follows: you are acting for a client on a civil, non-contentious matter. In passing, he happens to tell you that some years before he arranged for the murder of a business rival. You know that the murder is still unsolved. What do you do?

I had done the reading. The reading in question is, precisely, rule 4.01 of the Solicitors' Code of Conduct - you and your firm must keep the affairs of clients and former clients confidential, unless certain exceptions apply, and I checked them, and they didn't.

So I wrote "Nothing (see rule 4.01)" and left it at that.

But in the discussion, I was something of a lonely voice; it seemed to flow around what was right, and what was honest, and what duties a lawyer owes to public authorities, and what common sense and intuition dictate.

I didn't quite figure it out until later - why I apparently went for the question differently from everyone else, why I looked in the book and went no further. The answer, I think, is this. Because the code of conduct is complete in itself, it is how lawyers ought to behave; within the closed system of solicitors' practice, it is all there is. And I used to be good at philosophical thought - that was what I loved about it, how you could strip a question down from common sense and other passing inanities and say, here are the rules, here is how logic works, here is the answer. And it may not be "right", but given the premisses, here is our conclusion validly reached.

So my answer, while not common sense at all, was right. And that was why I reached it - because I furtively and guiltily love logic, and that's how I think, damn it, and it took three years to teach me to think like that, and I am proud of it.


...and here is the conclusion, validly reached: I have been intellectually stagnating, and something in the deep water of my brain has changed. I am willing to spend time and effort on arguments over breakfast about toothbrushes; I am finding joy in authors I tried to read in 2008 and put down as too difficult for me just then; I am the odd little girl in my classes. Another part of the LPC, strangely, is accounting and revenue calculation, and while I missed most of the work because of swine flu, the tutors who helped me catch up were kind, reassuring and told me I was smart and quick with figures and I shouldn't worry, I'd get it. I got it. It wasn't easy, but just hard enough for the answers that came out right to please me unduly.

I am doing something about it, on which more anon, perhaps. But I thought it was worth writing down: I have been somewhere else, and I'm ready to go home now.

In other news entirely, a quick-hit for something that needs attention: for yuletide, a challenge to make forays into Non-English, Non-Western, or Non-youknowwhadimean fandoms. For various reasons I'm not going to participate, but will selfishly bask in the warm glow of everyone else's participation. Quite apart from anything else, the linked posts are interesting reading: worth checking out.

Right. Now, perhaps to do some work.

I'm having a bad few days, mental-health wise. After a week or so on the up, I then decided that sleeping eighteen hours out of every twenty-four was quite, quite reasonable. In the words of my favourite author, if I did sleep any more, I might as well be dead and save on my board and lodging. When awake, I have been grumpy and entirely unable to get anything done. It's been... special. Still taking my pills, of course. I continue to be therapied at. I wish the sun would come back, that would help. Last night I tried to cheer myself up by trying something new with my eye glitter. This time, liquid metallic green with a layer of green glitter with a touch of silver on top of that. It worked, but I might not wear it anywhere but to a Hallowe'en party.

Anyway. Tuesday, November 4th. I'm looking forward to it. I really, really am. Because, well, I don't think that Barack Obama is the messiah. I don't think he's going to change the world forever. But I think he's a nice chap with a good sense of humour, with sensible policies, who inhaled in college (that was the point) and has kids who make fun of his pants. And when he speaks, he gives the impression of being intelligent, witty and charismatic. That's... that's great. I can go with that. I can endorse this whole-heartedly. I wish I could vote for him, but I can't, and I wish I could donate money to his campaign, but I can't. I can, however, sit up all night on Tuesday and drink. This is what I plan to do.

(In the meantime, John McCain is aware of the internet.)

In the meantime, it's cold and wet and cold again. It's November, I guess. Still here.

Despite the gloom, though, it has been a good and robust day for democracy as an abstract concept, which is actually what I meant to make this post about before my brain abruptly went south for the winter. This morning at half eleven shimgray and I were woken by the local councillors, who wished to know our opinions on the local council and its many achievements, and to leave behind a leaflet about their surgery. ("Bob and Oscar's Rolling Surgery" - srsly. I am not making that up. The leaflet has a picture of them being cheery. It's all very English.

(The thing is, though, I couldn't actually think of something I wanted to complain to the council about. The bin men come regularly and recycle. The roads are well-lit. The speed limits are low enough to make life easy for cyclists. The leaves are swept by small men on comically enormous blowing machines. It's as though... stuff gets done. My council wants to know my opinion, and I can't think of anything because I think it's doing pretty well. I think this is definitely a sign of a healthy democracy.)

Also, yesterday I found out that Sefton Council want to know if I wish to vote in Sefton. I'm a little torn on this issue - I am quite fond of Sefton Council, as they are cheerfully hung between Labour and the Lib Dems and accordingly also get a lot done. I don't know. Local government is usually unexciting, but it's a nice thing to wake up on a Sunday morning and be reminded that I'm a citizen. I'm still amazed at the concept of democracy, don't mind me. Am reading The White Tiger at the moment, the Booker Prize winner, and thus feel bound to qualify that: legitimate democracy, it's really great.

The day has been spent, also, watching The West Wing and avoiding an essay on EU preliminary ruling procedure. I like uncodified constitutions and the common law, I like being part of a system from within; I was never quite sold on the concept of political science, despite studying it for three years, because structural and constructivist political analysis is rigorous and academic but... dry. It has no style and no ticker tape and wet mornings waving placards and rosettes, it deliberately avoids telling you that you are an ordinary person in an ordinary place and you matter. Which is well and good and exactly how it ought to be, but makes me glad I'm now within and not without. Woman is by nature a political animal, I guess.

I would be a bad feminist if I had uncritical faith in the liberal democratic system, and a muddy thinker, too - but I kind of think that there are times and places for considered debate, and other times for sitting back and thinking oh wow, we made this.^[1]

---

[1] yes we could.

This is a happy Sunday morning. The light is grey, filtering through the glass and and the rain so it's washed out and translucent, and mixed up with all my low reading-lights. There are flowers at the edges of my room, and shimgray is walking around barefoot singing quietly to Joni Mitchell and I can tell I've had some sleep and a rest, because I'm awake and all these things are lovely.

Further to my feeling quietly happy, I notice my entire flist is not, as is usual, variations on "omg, Doctor Who!" (which I actually don't mind; how nice of the BBC to miss the week in which I have Finals!), but instead, variations on "omg, LATVIA". So far I have deduced that a) Eurovision was good; b) the Latvian entry involved pirates; and c) OMG, EUROVISION LATVIAN PIRATES. I'm sorry for boring you all with the minutiae of my mental state, but I honestly can feel the difference - rather than thinking belligerent thoughts about people having better things to do, I am happy about Latvian Eurovision pirates. I feel like myself for the first time in ages.

(Note for Americans and other aliens: the the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual competitition in which the countries of Europe (and North Africa, and Israel, and whatever else the Eurovision definition of Europe encompasses) each offer up a musical act (with quotation marks inserted there as you see fit) and the other countries vote for them. Politics has nothing to do with this at all. Neither does musical ability. PIRATES. Yeah.)

I am halfway through, as is probably clear by this time, and it has not been, er, easy. ( Ethics; Political Theory; History of Philosophy From Descartes to Kant )

Afterwards, I had my first lazy afternoon in, oh, forever, and went up to Summertown in the sunshine to meet the medics. triptogenetica and luminometrice came out looking dazed and washed-out and glitter-bedecked and happy and beautiful. We gave them ice-cream and covered them with silly plastic leis, and they did seem so happy, and ah, the end is in sight.

I have four more exams to go and a lot of work to do today - I don't finish until Wednesday - but things are a lot better now I have got through the first four consecutive days of hell. (There are another four consecutive days to go, but I think I can face it better now.)

All is well in the world, it seems. It's the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, too, and I am not wearing the lilac because I was not there, but I wish you all truth and justice and reasonably-priced love. And a hard-boiled egg.

You know when someone comes into your room and you have to persuade them that you're not, really, really not trying to jump out of a third-floor window, really, you may have hit a low point in your life. (Actually, I was trying to catch a cushion I had just knocked out of it. Perfectly sensible thing to do, no I am not going crazy at all.)

Speaking of having hit a low point in my life, not only am I accumulating unhappy symptoms with a disturbing rapidity - why, hello there random tinnitus, swinging-from-hysteria-to-somnolence and jumping out of my skin at someone dropping a clove of garlic - I am reading cultural-imperialist articles on the philosophy of forgery and being encouraged by an insane classicist to use my newly-discovered heterosexuality FOR SCIENCE.

...not crazy at all.

Okay, let me backtrack. You - yes, you! - can help out not one but two nutty Oxonian finalists in their quest to retain their sanity and be awarded a degree! There are two ways in which you can do this!

First of all. I am, at the moment, revising for paper 109, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Criticism. I have many criticisms of this paper, it must be said. (Aha, see what I did there?) Most of them involve the way it's not a philosophy paper at all, it is a paper for failed literary critics. Real past questions have included: "The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game, it is the pointlessness of human life itself." Discuss and Given that horror movies frighten us, why do we go to see them? and so on.

Anyway. Yes. What is very handy for this paper is a ready stream of examples of "subversive" art. You know the sort of thing I mean. Tracy Emin's bed, Duchamp's Fountain, that kind of stuff. Of course, those are the two examples that everyone uses. I would quite like to use something the examiner hasn't heard eleventy million times before. Which is where you come in, dear flist. You all undoubtedly have better artistic taste than me. Tell me about art - things that are unusual, things that are on the boundary between art and non-art, things that a floundering philosopher might find interesting. I really would appreciate it; I'm swamped by awful aesthetics reading and nothing makes any sense.

Second of all. apotropaios is a very dear friend of mine, he is also a finalist, he is also going somewhat crazy. In the interests of science, he has been asking everyone he knows whether they've ever had intercrural sex. (Apparently, this was a particularly well-represented sexual practice in Greek vase painting of the sixth century onwards.)

This has rapidly devolved into a horror story of soft fruit and armadae of battle penguins. However. Hilarity aside, it is a serious request. If you - or anyone you know - actually has done this, or knows anything about it, he would like to know. Comments - his, not mine - are screened, and he is actually a good human who will be respectful and discreet and indeed, very grateful for any information.

I leave you now for a return to the philosophy of mechanical reproduction. Oh my I am so very fascinating.

I have spent most of the last two days in my windowseat, watching the clouds drift by overhead, watching the way the sunshine falls on the leaves in the tree below, really not doing enough reading about philosophical visions of the relationship between God and humanity. Instead I have been doing this:

( it be categorical imperative tiem nao? )

You are all very much free to disown me now. In my defence, it wasn't my idea, and I'm a finalist, but personally I would disown me, so.

I decided early this morning that if I didn't leave the house soon, I was going to go stark raving insane. So I walked the thirty-five minutes into the village to get a pasty from Sayers - actually, let me have a point of digression here while I talk about how great pasties are. I did not know, until I moved to Oxford, that despite the fact there has been one everywhere I've lived - and there used to be one on the way into school, and I'd pop out during the afternoon and get flaky pastry all over the library carpet - Sayers are Liverpool-based only. I was delighted to discover, therefore, that there are in fact places that sell pasties in Oxford. But. But, these are pasties that you have to pay £2.50 for, that have, I don't know, ingredients, whereas a real pasty is made of indefinable vegetables and something-that-might-be-meat, all covered in astonishingly-bad-for-you pastry and is much too hot to hold, let alone eat, before you have carried it around with you for half an hour and made a glorious amount of mess, and it should be 79p, because more than that would imply that it were made of food.

Enormous digression aside, I bought a baked-bean-and-sausage pasty and a luridly purple fairy cake, and dropped in on the bookshop on the way home. I do like it when people are pleased to see me. At any rate, I stepped in and was greeted with, "Oh, fantastic, Iona, can you answer the phone and tell Assistant Book Monkey to give up smoking?"

I did both, to limited avail, and ended up idly stickering signed copies on the counter while they told me what I've missed through being away for three months. One of the reps has taken up astral projection ("Well, he said he'd spent a month in Birmingham sort of flying around, and people didn't believe him when he said he'd been projecting himself. There were a lot of Jamaican guys in the street selling weed. Yes, that is a funny coincidence, isn't it?"), Assistant Book Monkey is still in love with Her Upstairs ("She's gay, I'm an optimist"), Setch has gone to Loughborough and isn't at all falling into the insanely-sporty stereotype ("He came in the other day and told us he'd named his biceps.").

A customer came in at that point, but I just couldn't resist. "What has he named them?"

They looked at each other, looked at me, looked at the little old lady customer, and chorused, "Pinky and the Brain!"

Also, Anne Fine came in to sign books and, despite her epic amounts of kids' books (including Flour Babies and Goggle-Eyes, both of which I loved), she apparently doesn't like children ("Such bloody shrill voices!") or, indeed, Jacqueline Wilson ("I've been saying that for years, but no one ever listens to me," I sighed at that point); Katy Flynn has written yet another squidgy book of squidge and dedicated it to us; there are so many books exploding through the back of the shop that they've had to fill one of the toilets with proof copies and OS maps.

Situation normal, I said, promised to help out over Easter weekend, and paused to ask, before I went home with my luridly purple fairy cake, "If you could fly anywhere you wanted, would you stick around in Birmingham?"

"He's moved now, anyway," they told me. "In fact, you should look out for him."

("Passing through on a nearby jetstream?" I said, but no, apparently the Bloomsbury Astral Projection Rep now lives a couple of doors down from where jacinthsong and potatofiend lived last year. I take all of this as proof that all it takes for my life to get surreal again is for me to step out of the house.)

Anyway! I actually made this entry as an excuse to use this icon - which is great and marvellous, and probably indicative of much talking-about-philosophy I'm going to be doing - and for a meme, seen everywhere but most recently with glitzfrau:

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post or comment about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc.

I'm pretty sure I write about everything that pops into my head, but we shall see. And now I go back to doing some actual work, rather than eating cake and babbling.

I was linked yesterday to this article: Jonathan Wolff on the philosopher's sense of direction, which very sensibly asks, if you don't understand the concept of "here", then how can you be expected to manage with a map?

I said that I was now going to blame every stupid thing I ever do on the lack of grasp of reality engendered by my two and a half years with philosophy as my primary academic concern. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, and that seems as good a place as any to start telling the story of Super Duper Shrove Tuesday and how exactly I ended up stumbling in at 5.40am. I want to write this, but I am also incredibly sleep-deprived, so bear with me through this. The whole thing didn't start in quite so debauched fashion; I went up to Wadham with deepbluemermaid, a lot of paper plates and a box of chocolate brownies that looked like they hadn't been so much baked as excavated. Down in the cavernous kitchen below Wadham JCR, jacinthsong was making pancakes with gay abandon, there was lemon juice and chocolate chips everywhere, and the air was warm and thick with sugar. All lovely, and I took off my coat and offered up paper plates and juice as my contribution, and was told I had to answer a very serious question. Very serious, they said. Okay, I said.

"Melanin," jacinthsong asked, "or CUNT?"

A very good question, I said, seeing as how I find it very hard to see beyond my own biology in choosing political candidates, which leaves me in quite the quandary, doesn't it. The question remained unanswered. I ate pancakes.

It had been a successful day, too - foulds and I went on a super-secret co-directorial field trip in the morning and found, much to our joint surprise, that we have a venue for the Aeneid. This had led to suitable jubilation, but not the now traditional victory twirl, which originates from the moment we were originally told we were putting on the show, and we were drunk and eyeliner-smudged and he picked me up and twirled me below the night sky. This will be an important point later, bear with me.

I also have a distinct memory of hitting foulds with a rolled-up newspaper, and it being a singularly ineffective weapon; I reached out and shimgray handed me a kitchen knife and a tin opener, and turned to find my erstwhile co-director cowering behind the fridge.

After pancakes, there was drinking. The rules of the game weren't strictly enforced, but, pretty much, we were drinking at the mention of "change", "divisive", "America", "Iraq", and indeed, whenever we bloody well felt like, and I have no idea where all the booze came from, but there does seem to have been a lot of it. And, well, this is GMT. The first polls to close were West Virginia, and that was one in the morning, my time, so we had to keep ourselves amused for five hours first.

So, er, we drank a lot. Yes. A lot. Quite a lot. absinthe_shadow dropped in, I remember, and I got sebastienne to sing to me, which was lovely, and as I have just been reminded, I really, really should go to the St Hilda's Queer Cabaret this term. I wanted to last year, and it passed me by. Anyway, I digress. I seem to remember that at this point, we gave up on Real Life and started watching The West Wing for a while, and some of the uninitiated were introduced for the first time to the episodes with Big Block of Cheese Day. I love The West Wing so much, and as noted last night, with a mostly uncritical love - yes it's sentimental, yes the score is schamltzy beyond belief, yes, yes, but it's so smart and so funny and it makes you want a better world. What more can you ask for, in a television show? And, also, it has lines like, "Andrew Jackson, in the foyer of the White House, had a big block of cheese..."

(About a year ago, I promised foreverdirt I would write a fic where Remus Lupin comes to the Bartlett White House on Big Block of Cheese Day to demand better rights for werewolves. I still need to do this.)

Now, I think that at some point, some point between pancakes and politics, I think I was picked up and twirled. I may be wrong. foulds says not. But: he may be saying this to torture me, and: I remember flying. I remember being suspended below the ceiling and I remember someone saying, "Oh god, he's breaking her", and these things fit together. Again, I am sleep deprived. I don't know.

All of the above took many many hours, but there was no actual politics. At half twelve, we had BBC News 24 on and they called the first state. West Virgina, for Huckabee. There was much, much drinking. The thing about the Republican race is that I'm still very unsure about McCain - the man has some decent policies, I thoroughly approve of McCain-Feingold, I think he wouldn't be an awful president. But he's a Republican, and I don't want a sane and sensible Republican going into the race in November - I want an easily-defeated crackpot. That's not a very sensible bias, but it's one I have nevertheless.

Still, the very fact that there are people in the world who want Mike Huckabee in political office was reason enough for significant amounts of drinking. (Also, I've shaken the man's hand. I went and washed it at this point. Symbolically. Mostly.)

The next few states to be called were mostly ones we could have predicted - Arkansas for Clinton, Utah for Romney - "Mormon" was one of our drinking-words - Georgia for Huckabee. I remember thinking to myself, I'll go home and get some sleep just when the next state is called, maybe I'll have a bit more wine while I wait. This proved to a good plan. Every time the television commentators said something about voters "choosing between race and gender", we drank; every time someone mentioned God we drank; every time there was change and hope for America, we drank. If we'd been watching CNN or Fox News, I'm sure I'd have got paralytic; as it was BBC News 24, merely very very drunk.

And so the night wore on. Eventually, I was perched on shimgray and he handed me his glass of whiskey every time a political candidate said something cringe-making, and it seemed a shame not to see it into the dawn with California. I was sobering up a bit and talking about really, honestly, whom do I want to win on the Democrat side. Obviously, obviously, I won't care even a tiny bit come November. Any Democrat will do me fine, then. And right now I want to say intellectually that apart from the issue of mandated health care - that came up so often when emily_shore and I were working for the campaign - I really don't mind between the two. But intellectual is one thing, and giggling joyously when Clinton won New York is another thing. I think I still want her to win, more than the others. That's not such a bad realisation. What a wonderful world, what a wonderful wonderful world where you can at once be part of a small thing, a room of friends drinking and laughing through the night, and an enormous thing, a whole world waiting for the same story to break, at one and the same time; what a wonderful thing, to be part of something bigger than yourself. Bring on November.

And, finally. 5.15am. The "Hillary Clinton Has Just Been Declared As Having Won California" interpretive dance, courtesy of shimgray.

(I love how happy I look - tipsy and exhausted and so, so happy.)

We stumbled out into the night, stumbled home, I fell into bed, woke up briefly at ten, rolled over again and went back to sleep. It was a lovely clear winter's afternoon, and I didn't do very much except daydream and direct the Aeneid. And now, back to bed.

So, I woke up this morning with an unappealing and vaguely aromatic mixture of wine, woodsmoke, chapel dust and mud in my hair. I washed it out - and proceeded to get drenched in an unexpected rainstorm - but I feel lots better now. And I love OULES, both people and concept, and mostly, love everybody, and am also suddenly aware that my journal has most likely been incomprehensible to out-of-Oxford people for a while now.

OULES is the Oxford University Light Entertainment Society. Its defining characteristic is the fact it's lots of fun. Unlike most Oxford thesping, which tends to be serious, overwrought and for people with, um, talent (which isn't to say there aren't lots of talented people in OULES, but does explain why I'm involved). I've been to several cast parties - last term I was presented with one of the flamingoes from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, despite not having been in the play - and at the end of Hilary Maria came to visit me one evening to tell me about her research project for this term. After two years as an overworked medic, she said, she was going to have a quite a bit more free time, and it was time to do something fun and extracurricular.

"OULES," I said blithely, and accordingly she and I and jacinthsong presented ourselves at the auditions at the start of this term.

I'm aware that there is an explanatory gap between this and, er, red wine and mud stuck to my head, but, well. The play, yes! The play, which was on three nights this week in various locations - sometimes various locations within the same performance - was a product of the pleasantly twisted comic stylings of darwinian_woman (I quote directly from the programme here) and was called Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Inanimate Body, and it was, of course, marvellous. The plot features a murder at a manor house in the English countryside, Holmes, Watson and Oscar Wilde, a butler called Fetish, a Narrator (who has a secret identity), various domestic staff, silly jokes and and ridiculous goings-on.

I was the corpse. Well, initially, I wasn't; I was supposed to be one of the bebusbied guards of Buckingham Palace, but in a rehearsal taking place sans the original corpse, it was discovered that I was probably the lightest member of the assembled company. And one might wonder why this is a relevant fact, but, um, it was. Holmes does a reconstruction of the murder in the middle of the play - a play within a play - and, according to the script, "any residual good taste should be expelled from the scene at this point – from now on, this needs to be utterly sick."

Cue several increasingly-bizarre rehearsals where I was carried on stage, dropped, animated from behind (as it were), and hit, punched, slapped and kicked. Except, of course, not, and much as I have complained about foulds' abuse of me, he did it all very well and only actually hit me once. (This was the second performance, which we were doing in the chapel because of rain and it wasn't until too late that I realised that I was going to have be knocked onto a stone floor. Ouch.)

I was, of course, having to screw my eyes shut and take a lot of deep breaths throughout to try and stop myself from laughing (cue heckling, "The corpse is corpsing!") and I just about managed it during the ordinary run of things, but it was the ad libs that got to me. On the first night, I initially got placed too far away from the audience, and there's a scene where Watson gave me a push and I, well-trained, rolled over; however, that night, they didn't stop rolling, happily ad libbing - "A well-rolled corpse yields more clues!" / "Gadzooks! We didn't see that the third time we rolled her over!" - and I just... argh. I was face down, but people tell me that they could see me shaking with giggles.

By the third performance, I thought we were getting quite good at it. So there I was, cloaked during the interval (I had to hide under it while the audience filed into the gardens; it was curiously relaxing, lying on the grass listening to people talk about me), when suddenly - trouble. Matt, whose job it was to animate me and indeed, carry me on and off, was AWOL. Cue panic. Some brief consultation led to the decision that osymandias learn all the lines in ten minutes and step in. And he was utterly marvellous - people later professed to having no idea that he'd been substituted in, and the only bits he read from the script were in the play-within-the-play, which was thematically appropriate - but we had a hiccup at the point where I get carried off.

Oh, they tried. They tried. Alas, I got dropped on my head. Oh dear. I wish I'd seen it. I also wish I'd got a record of the moment where foulds came up to me backstage (i.e., under a tree), in cape and deerstalker, and said, "I'm sorry. Just for... everything."

I still think it was a wonderful role to play, because, well, I can't act. I have no thespian, artistic or creative talent whatsoever; playing dead is clearly my forte. Argh, it was so much fun. And afterwards, fun was had at the cast party, which was something of a farce - after wandering around Oxford for about an hour looking for a venue for dozens of people to have a party at the last minute, we ended up on Port Meadow at midnight, with the Flosscar ceremony happening around a hastily constructed fire. Despite the fact it was wet and muddy and ridiculous o'clock, it was actually idyllic. It wasn't raining, it was lightly warm and the sky was not dark but a curious grey-purple colour, and you could see people as dim impressions of themselves, which led to glorious reunions every few minutes ("Oh, it's you!"), and the fire was deliciously warm if very smoky, and, watching the sparks fly off into the night sky, I got to use the line "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards" to groans from all present.

And also, I was drunk. Looking back, yesterday I ate two slices of bread with honey, some brie, some grapes, chocolate fingers and an apple. No wonder I got so thoroughly inebriated very quickly, and correspondingly maudlin. In an attempt to cheer me up, someone - I'm not sure who, but would like to be reminded - suggested that jacinthsong and I, as new OULES, be cocktailed. Cocktailing is a ritual that I have only recently discovered the existence of, and did I mention I was really drunk? Cocktailing requires you to be adopted, and darwinian_woman and foulds stepped up the plate to be mine and Laura's new OULES parents. And so. I got on the ground in the mud, looking up into the still curiously livid sky, aware of the fact I was lying on Port Meadow at two in the morning, and foulds said, "It'll all be over in a minute..."

It's quite interesting, having red wine tipped on your head in the dark. Some of it got in my mouth, but more of it into my hair and eyes. And it was at this point that someone pointed out the familiarity of a scenario in which I'm on the floor and foulds gets to abuse me. (This would be the third such context this week - corpsing, cocktailing, and an unrelated performance mnenomic on Christ Church Meadow where he hit me with a baguette.)

There is now a ridiculous quantity of photographic evidence of him abusing me. The thing is, though, I'm going to miss it. I'm going to miss all of this. I leave Oxford tomorrow, before Doctor Who, and I won't be back until September at the earliest. But oh, it was so much fun and I'm going to miss everyone so much.

About two weeks ago, my Mind tutor was trying to get me to talk intelligently about externalist theories of mind. We'd got onto proper names, and how there's a difference between an externalist rendering of my name by someone who's met me, who knows the individual in the world which my name refers to, and the people at the passport office, who have my name as a convenient label.

"What about fictional characters?" I asked. "Are they all like the second case?"

He thought about that, and finally said that no, perhaps the author knows the character in the same way as we know real people, and that Conan Doyle perhaps knew Sherlock Holmes in that way when no one else did. "Although," he said, "there's a spectrum of canonical knowledge here - for example, I believe some people write Sherlock Holmes pastiches..."

I corpsed.

Yesterday morning, I had my Tutors' Handshaking, and my Mind tutor has sent me a lovely, lovely report, which finishes, "She maintained a splendid standard despite, perhaps, the calls of student drama..."

Trying to think about OULES and "student drama" in the same sentence is, perhaps, more than my cognitive function is quite capable of; Sky tried to convince me that what I really wanted to do now was get involved in, or get OULES involved in, "real" drama - but I maintain he's missing the point. I don't quite know what the point is, but I think it's something to do with lying on Port Meadow in the middle of the night, safe in the warmth and mud and wine.

It's time to go.