Winter Hols – Days 2 and 3 – Drivers Everywhere

It’s a strange but true fact that having not lived in one, single place for more than four months at a stretch (that is, without leaving to fly off somewhere else) for the past few years, I get acclimated to my new/old environments extremely quickly.

What I find most startling about being in Israel, so far, are the honks. People lean on their car horns at the slightest provocation, whether they’re waiting for someone to come downstairs and want to alert them of their presence, or whether the light has turned green and the car in front of them isn’t moving fast enough. Sometimes, the first person in a line of cars at a green light will honk, just out of habit, you know, but then will realize that it’s their responsibility to start driving first. They won’t look embarrassed, though – Israelis don’t.

This isn’t to say that New York drivers are that much better. They lean on their horns too, all the time, but somehow the sounds of honks, shouts, and rushing traffic is melodious in New York City. It’s expected. Complaining about honking cars in the Big Apple is equivalent to grumbling about buying a CD of dolphin ambient noise and finding out that all you get is the sound of waves and screeches.

Oxford drivers, to be fair, aren’t much better. Alright, they don’t honk – this is why I keep jumping half a mile every time someone does here – but they should maybe start. Honking would be better than that passive aggressive rumble of acceleration. Whenever I cross the street in Oxford, I can hear the cars zooming towards me, just aching to get all that repression out by killing one – just one! Oh, please, they have it coming! – obnoxious, jaywalking student. When I cross the street on my way from ho-hum Summertown towards hooray City Centre, I encounter car after car that almost runs me over, even though I’m crossing at what is clearly an intersection and the only place where I can reasonably cross.

Maybe it’s the small cars and low building in Oxford that are heightening the sound of the cars’ engines, but I don’t think so. I think that there’s a lot of anger in those drivers. It must, after all, be a horrible place to drive in – students walking wherever they want, dashing across the streets whenever the whim takes them, darting off the curbs without so much as a moment’s notice, cyclists streaking around corners with the bravado of Joseph Gordon Levitt in every film ever (he always rides a bike, have you noticed?) and either obeying or ignoring the traffic laws as the mood strikes them. Who would want to drive in Oxford anyway?

Winter Hols – Day 1

Flying from Heathrow to Israel is no laughing matter. First, you need to get from Oxford to Heathrow. True, there’s a bus that takes you there, right from Gloucester Green, but what about poor suckers like me who live all the way out in Summertown? We need to take a bus to the bus. First world problems, right? Right. Okay, but I did need to pull two suitcases – one of them is technically a carry-on, but let’s not kid ourselves, the thing has wheels, it’s a suitcase – over the frosty and uneven sidewalks; I needed to pull both of them onto the first bus; I needed to pull them off the bus without running over any small dogs or children; and I needed to then pull them all the way to the central bus station without running over any unsuspecting feet. I’m glad there aren’t any people wandering around under Invisibility Cloaks here, because my suitcases would be going over all their poor little footsies on the way.

Once at the station, I said goodbye to a new-found dear friend (a rare title, not to be extended lightly) for what was probably the third or fourth time. We had said goodbye at least twice the night before but then somehow managed to talk again and see each other for another hug and chat before I left. I think that might be a measure of friendship – not really wanting to say goodbye to someone because you enjoy their company. At least, I suspect that’s one of my internal measures.

The bus itself was nice. There was a toilet, which, for some reason, always makes me feel very excited. I believe that this is purely because of the complete and utter lack of such facilities on any buses in Israel. They simply don’t exist here, even on buses taking you very long ways. Even on new buses. I’m always surprised and slightly shocked at the absolute genius of providing such a thing on a bus – so smart, so simply, so apparently intuitive a solution to many of the bus-rider’s common discomforts (how many times have YOU heard “Mommy, I have to GO!” or “Hrp… Mmmp…Blaaaaawwwrrrggghhh” on a bus before and wished that there had been a toilet available for the child or the nauseated sod, if only to shut them up?).

Am I in a strange, rather different, slightly cynical and nasty mood tonight? Perhaps. But you must forgive me, reader-and-a-half, for I am tired, I haven’t made all the phone calls that I owe my friends, and I have slept very little and traveled quite a lot in the past twenty-four hours.

I confess, however, that I am very spoiled, having lived in Israel most of my life. I’m used to the airport being twenty minutes, not an hour-and-a-half-plus-many-more-minutes-of-slow-and-jolting-traffic-stop-and-start away.

At Heathrow, El Al put all us Jews and other loonies flying to Israel inside a small space where we were kept safe from everyone who might want to attack us (or maybe kept us consolidated to make easy work for a potential attacker? Who knows?). Our gate was closed off, in other words, but extra security that consisted of bored Israeli El Al workers checking our passports again. I bought a bottle of water and watched as a group of Haredi men got up to pray. I wouldn’t have minded as much if they didn’t do it so loudly. I was very tempted to join them, as I was reading a book that had a white cover. I could have stood among them, starkly in contrast, a woman among the men, hair uncovered, cleavage on display, white-rather-than-black book in my hands, reading fairy-tales that are pronounced as such rather than a prayer-book basing itself on a bible that proclaims itself as ultimate truth that cannot and should not be interfered with.

But I didn’t. I wish I’d had the courage to do so. But honestly? I wanted to get home. I really didn’t need the hassle of being arrested and taken away to await the next flight in a secure room at Heathrow Airport.

Oxford Minus the Crazy

On Thursday afternoon, I finished writing the seventeenth essay of term. Seventeen essays in eight weeks, plus at least as many pages of notes. Yesterday, someone asked me how it was possible to write fifty thousand words in a month – we were discussing NaNoWriMo – and I pointed out to her that both she and I write easily as much here every month without even making an effort. It just happens. Accidentally.

Saturday was eerie. It is the busiest day for tourists, and as I walked down Cornmarket, I could feel their presence, their palpable excitement, but there was something missing. It was the students’ derision, the offsetting ingredient, the eternal cool of the pretend local element. After all, the students aren’t real locals. They’re as temporary as the tourists in their own way. They – that is to say, we – take advantage of Oxford for a certain amount of time. We enjoy its charms, we revel in its beauties, and we use every single drop of the rivers of knowledge it has to offer us. We drain it of its cliches, getting drunk and drugged and heartbroken along the way. We study hard and party harder. We pretend to be more confident and grown up than we are and we give off a worldliness that we need to exude in order to feel.

But Saturday of Eighth Week turns everyone into small critters, blinking rapidly as the cage door is opened. One moment, a frozen shock, and with a shake of the tail there’s a mad dash to get out, get out, get out. I went to Christ Church Picture Gallery to see the artwork there, and as I left via the tourist exit, I could see the line of visitors waiting to enter the Hall, where some of the Harry Potter films were shot, even while students were streaming out with suitcases and backpacks, loading things into their parents’ waiting cars.

By Sunday, I succumbed as well. I slept until three pm. My brain refused to wake up even when my body was aching to stretch and get out of bed. There is a fatigue that comes from such long-term, stressful, continuous work that happens over such a relatively short period of time.

Monday’s Oxford was eerily quiet. The tourists weren’t there, and nor were many students. As the countdown to Christmas echoes the pink lettering across the screen in “Love Actually”, I suspect the town will get emptier and emptier. The locals don’t live in the center, or else will be visiting family somewhere less depressingly empty, and the local students will be going home for the most part, and those who remain here will discover that there isn’t much to do in a university town during Christmas time. There’s a reason why this place has it’s own holiday time, OxMas.

As I sit in Turl Street Kitchen, it’s easy to pretend that it’s term time and everything is normal. After all, it’s still Ninth Week. A young tutor and her student sat beside me and completed their oh-so-cool tutorial, surely their last of the term. They both left smiling. The cafe itself is as full as ever with the usual alternative, interesting crowd. Two dads and their baby, sitting across from one another in the armchairs in the lower room. The cute, pink-shirted barman in front of me, baring his tummy and his red boxers as he reaches up to put glasses away. The dimpled girl smiling at and having coffee with the older woman who may be an aunt, a friend, a mum, a tutor, a woman she’s just met. The blonde and her brunette friend who don’t appear to be listening to one another. The quiet, red-skirted woman with amazing hair hanging over her face, alternately texting and reading her book. “Two hot chocolates!” announces another barista.

The tutor has come back, bringing with her another student. He’s about to look at his essay, which she has returned without too many comments.

But even so, even with a tutorial happening here, there is a sense of relaxation. More than usual. There aren’t as many of us hiding behind laptops, earphones buttoning us away from the world, glancing up impatiently when someone makes too much noise. There aren’t as many people here alone, eyes glazed over as their thoughts pass between their rumbling stomach to their heightened thoughts.

The madness has lifted. For a few brief weeks, the cloud of dank, difficult, crazy concentration is less dense over this city.

Early Night Ghosts

I think there might be rats in the walls. Or mice. Possibly cockroaches, although that seems far less likely, as the climate here isn’t very conducive to such insects. Then again, it might be the ghost, the Merry Field ghost that wanders about our halls and sometimes opens windows and doors that we haven’t touched. When I knock on certain doors in our flat, the doorknobs will rattle and there will be a little rustle from inside. When I call out, I’ll find out that the room’s occupant is out or in the shower, but definitely not in the room. So I back away slowly, respectful, giving the ghost its due. It doesn’t hurt me to be careful and I don’t lose anything by being occasionally superstitious.

Eight week begins tomorrow. The last week of Michaelmas Term, 2012. There is something alarming, terrifying, about seeing how fast these weeks have gone by. Each day has been long, sometimes tortuously so. Today, for instance, has been spent with a back-ache, fury and resentment and resignation moving through my gut, and a constant need to sleep rather than study; all of which have been, of course, pushed back so that I could read Henry Miller’s book, “Tropic of Cancer.” Which, by the way, is the first book I’ve read in a very long time that I actively dislike.

Listening to Duke Ellington, I try to soothe my back and chest aches with deep breaths and reminders that soon enough I’ll be going to bed. I have vowed to have an early night. One a week is allowed, is it not? I think so.

Seventh Week Stories

Seventh Week

Seven is a lucky number, supposedly. I misspelled the word “supposedly” at first, typing it out “supposefly” by accident. Suppose. Fly. Suppose I could fly? Suppose a fly? Suppose “fly”, the word? Freudian slip, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me. You need to be clearer, if you want me to listen to you.

I am flying in less than two weeks now, though. Maybe that’s what the suppose-fly business was all about. I’m going to be flying out of my beloved England on December 6, a Thursday, in the evening.

Here is a story about things that happen in Oxford sometimes. My thoughts are in disarray tonight, and so putting things together in the following form should make things easier.

____

A crowd gathers in front of the Pret A Manger on Cornmarket Street. They are holding signs and chanting. They want Palestine to be freed. They announce to the world that they are all Palestinians. They don’t discriminate – they include anyone who wants to stand with them. They are all Palestinians.

Two girls watch them for a while before disappearing into a shop across the way in order to buy glitter, safety-pins and other basic needs for what is to be one of the biggest nights of the year. They aren’t the only ones. The city is packed with people in their late teens and early twenties, finding their way between the slow-walking, photograph-taking tourists. The students are easy to pick out. They’re the ones who don’t look awed anymore. They’re the ones whose eyes are slightly glazed, either with last night’s alcohol or with the weight of their own inflated thoughts. They have balloon heads, if balloons were always filled with shrieking confetti. They have concrete heads, if concrete could also have live worms crawling around in it.

The big night happens. There is a tent, there are lights, there are noodles and there is booze. There are lots of blackened eyes. Nobody gets as sweaty as they wish they would because even under the tent, it can get cold. One blond man in smart casual dress didn’t get the memo, he doesn’t understand what kind of party this is. He is escorted out by security officers before midnight, fighting them valiantly. His friends trail along behind the guards, drunkenly accepting the situation, not asking any questions.

Many things happen that night. There are plays and other parties and there is always something else to do if you go looking for it. There is also always work, waiting, sizzling like a popcorn pot on a low flame. It waits in your room and its smell reaches you eventually; the oil, burning, and then the popping noise as the guilt-kernels begin to smash against the metallic top of your brain. That’s when you know it’s time to go home. If you don’t, the house might burn down.

There is another week, the sixth or seventh or eighth really, but it’s named – officially – only the sixth. That’s acceptable. It is like any other week, except people begin to disappear. Some are in their rooms. Others hole up in corners of various libraries. There is a smell of hormones permeating the city, or maybe it’s Christmas, or maybe it’s just your fucked up nostrils. You remember to be thankful. You forget. You remember. You rebel. You remind yourself. You hate it. You’re thankful anyway. It’s petty not to be. There is too much that’s good, and anyone who doesn’t realize that… stop. No judging.

A restaurant is packed for a girl’s birthday. Her face is pasted on all of her presents, because her friends love her, think she is beautiful, and want to remind her of that. She laughs, but inside, she melts. Someone thinks I’m beautiful, she wants to sing, and as everyone hands the presents around, they all agree. She is beautiful because she is she, one of a kind, the only one. Each person is. Everyone is beautiful. This is a thing to be thankful for, in grocery-stores and markets, on buses and on dark streets where only houses are visible. The houses could be in Yonkers, or in Bronxville, or in Los Angeles or in New Jersey. But they’re not. They’re here, and they have their own brand of mist hanging in front of them.
Marshmallows, two bags of them, each bag mixing pink and white tufts of sugar. They go on some yams. It is the day after Thanksgiving.

Crowd of Latelies

Lately

Sunday. Woke up at an ungodly time in order to cram some studiousness into a day otherwise abandoned to the pursuit of catching up with a friend. Picked said friend up at train station – a new discovery for us both, this place – at noon, and proceeded to show off the gloom of Oxford. As friend is castle connoisseur and lover of old things, he found the city as bizarre and beautiful as I had at first. He reminded me of how taken aback I was, at first, by the strangeness of walking in and out of buildings dating back hundreds of years. It’s a kind of time travel. You get used to everything. At least James Bond does.

Monday. Errands achieved, story written. Majority of the day taken up, of course, in the pursuit of Faulkner’s sounds and furies as well as children’s specific reading disabilities.

Tuesday. I missed my Aba. I didn’t realized until I started vacuuming the apartment that I was channeling my inner Uriel. I love the way I find myself haunted by his thoughts sometimes. I hate how rare it increasingly becomes.
An interview on the subject of being, living and identifying as LGBTQ followed by an international talk with a friend followed by a sub-editing shift at The Oxford Student. Looking at this list, it seems to be so comprehensively communicative. I am not a hermit. I am not a hermit. I am not a hermit.

Tuesday night. Election obsession. BBC was shamed into becoming CNN. The Americans were entirely at fault, or virtue, for that. Those of us who stayed, riveted, to the screens in the Junior Common Room (JCR) were unabashedly nervous, checking our computers constantly, refusing all alcohol until after the results were in. There was a very drunk student near me who was, at times, amusing to watch; at others, I was close to physical violence, asking his less belligerent friend to get him to stop blocking the screen. When we realized, coming on 4:30am, that everything was over, Obama had won for certain, three of us – the three girls who happened to share an incredible literature professor last year – rose from our seats, chests heaving, smiles ripping at our faces. Everyone was cheering. We were hugging.

Wednesday. Lost to Faulkner criticism, I realized that I also lost another pair of black gloves, as well as the first two items of clothing I’d ever knit for myself: a purple scarf and a black and blue hat. I have yet to find them again. I suspect they have been swept into the trash or stolen. If stolen – I hope someone is enjoying them, at least. If binned – damn damn damn the waste.

Thursday. 3am. Almost finished Faulkner paper. 3:30am. Went to sleep. 6:45am. Woke up. Finished Faulkner paper. Went to school in East Oxford to read with a graceful, wonderful child. She was ten, and reminded me of myself at that age. She thought I was cool. I thought she was cooler. We hit it off. I wished I could teach her every day. Making a connection with a child like that – feeling like you’re getting somewhere with them, helping them enjoy and understand and retain a piece of written material – is one of the best, most uplifting, joyous and heart-swelling feelings I’ve yet to experience. It’s a terrifying kind of trust and power dynamic.

Thursday. Night. Danced behind the Sheldonian to the ghostly music floating out of it. Had incredible, romantic and passionate conversation about books at a bar that includes horrendous artwork in glaringly overbearing frames. Danced, danced, danced between sweaty people stuffed between sweaty walls.

Friday. Errands. A realization. I fucking hate thinking about clothes. I hate how they make me feel. I hate needing to think about them. I hate needing to be aware of them all the time. I hate dealing with them. They are not where I invest my money. I will always – always – feel like I’ve wasted money by spending it on clothes that aren’t practical and comfortable and that I can and will wear on a daily basis. I love the way other people wear clothes. I love the way other people have the patience for them. I love the way other people have eyes for them. I love looking at clothes. I am envious of their attitude towards clothes. I am jealous of their ability to enjoy clothes. I wish I had the patience for clothes myself, or the belief that there was a point to them. But I am perverse: take me in my ragged tank tops, my old sweatshirts, and my comfortable jeans. Take me in the same style of clothing, day after day. Or fuck off, don’t take me at all. As usual – I don’t want to be judged, but I am my own worst natural foil. I am not alone in this. I am one of many, a vast majority of us who trip ourselves up. Just one of the crowd.

Observations

1. The angelic royal (or the royal angel) and his fool are an odd couple. A prince and a man dressed in black motley, they spend much of their time together. Their height, when seen from afar, seems to be identical. Are they twins? Merely brothers, one a bastard, the other acknowledged and his birthright celebrated? Their story is knotty, twisted within the rumor trees which leak sap that sticks to my fingers. I lick it off, one finger at a time. Each one tastes different, and even the bitterest ones, I relish.

2. The mazes they told me about were only a myth. I know there are labyrinths there; there must be. But they’re empty now. The books are gone. They live in a facility, far away. Someone took Bertha out of the attic and put her away in a clean, white space, where she’s being taken care of. She’s fed three meals a day and she gets to watch television and finger-paint. She’s calm now. She doesn’t bite or growl anymore. But she isn’t really alive anymore either. The books are the same, locked in their cages. Their pages are safe, climate-controlled, but their smell is leaking away into the chrome and plastic and silicone. I’m glad that I don’t have to trample them under my dirty, leafy-wet boots, but I miss them. I miss Bertha sometimes, too.

3. I get less migraines, on the whole, but when I do, they are worse. Much worse. I am getting less acquainted with the sense of continual heavy pain. There are still the usual constant headaches, but they are the norm. The migraines, in the weather shift between ice and heat, are like the buffets and blows of a cruelly punching wind. My eyes roll around and I get confused. Stop it, head. Just stop it.

4. To the Owner of My Father’s Black Gloves: I hope you’re enjoying them. If you don’t like them, leave them on a bench somewhere. Maybe I’ll find them.

5. Balancing on a beam is easier when it is made of sunshine. Jumping between raindrops and fog makes me lose my footing. My lucky charms are worth exactly one cappuccino, and my bookshelves are the emptiest they’ve ever been.

6. There is a storefront in Gloucester Green designed as a deliberate tease. It advertises free books in the window. The door, made of glass, has a bold sticker on it, instructing pedestrians to PUSH. But it is always locked. I find myself smeared against that door, every time I walk by, peering in to see if the boxes upon cardboard boxes lined up in a neat rectangle on the floor have moved. They haven’t. Maybe whoever has the key will open up, one day, and will let me take the three books I’m allowed to take. Saving books from landfills is noble work. I think the books will be happier on shelves than in boxes, in a dusty shop, all alone.

Worth Having

Information is a fluid, flowing, dangerous thing. There’s a reason why the oppressed are cut off from its stream. It is because in the hands of one person, a tight-knit group, or a disorganized mass – information is powerful.

I have a tattoo on my back. It looks like this:

I decided to get it when I was thirteen. I waited until I was eighteen to actually have it done. I thought I’d always remember the date, just like I remember some of the other significant dates in my life: birthdays, the day my father died, the day I lost my virginity, the day I thought I physically wouldn’t survive heartbreak… But no. I know that I got my tattoo sometime in May of 2009, a month or so before my nineteenth birthday.

Some people think the tattoo means something about me that it doesn’t, necessarily, mean. And that’s fine. Our appearances project things, and I was always aware that my tattoo would do that to some people who were familiar with the books.

Others think that the thing is just a generic, boring, “tribal”-design rose, and that’s alright as well. Anyone who gets to know me will, most likely, ask me about it at some point.

Until very recently, I could sum up the meaning of my tattoo in the words that I found beautiful when I was thirteen and that I still do: Love as thou wilt. To me, that means a variety of things, but most of all – and most importantly – a freedom to love and be loved with equality, without judgement, without others being biased against you for no real reason except some arbitrary notion of “norms.”

Recently, I’ve come to realize that my tattoo is significant for another reason, one I hadn’t even planned on and hadn’t thought of at the time of getting it. Being in Oxford, studying intensively, being so incredibly focused on getting the most out of this year not only academically but socially as well – these things have reminded me of another of my favorite quotes from the book that inspired my tattoo:

“All knowledge is worth having.”

It is. For instance, that heartbreak, that I thought I’d never recover from? Learning to deal with it, live through it, and continue beyond it: that was knowledge worth having. My father dying, though I’d never wish it on anyone who had as wonderful a relationship with their parents as I did – being in the hospital with him, growing up faster than any fifteen-sixteen-year old should, watching him slip away into morphine dreams, when his face was thin enough that his already papery cheeks seemed like they wouldn’t stand the weight of my lips – even that. Even that was, and is, knowledge worth having.

Being at Oxford is full of experiences like this. Many have been awesome – inspiring jaw-dropping awe in the full sense of the word and requiring new species of either intellectual or emotional butterflies to stretch their wings free of their cocoons in order to flutter around my belly.

Some experiences have been terrible, like the day I needed to breathe very, very slowly in order to not burst out sobbing when I reached the Office of Student Affairs after running, all the way from the computer room, to tell them that the file they’d told me to print wasn’t online. I needed to register with the police, I was afraid of being kicked out of the country, and nobody apologized for making me run around campus when they had five computers and two printers right there in the room with them and the responsibility for getting this process done wasn’t mine alone because I couldn’t produce the information that the border-control people needed. I was very abrupt and quite rude that day and I still feel bad about it. But you know what? All knowledge is worth having.

Other experiences have been bittersweet: a blue sweater getting hailed on, an earring lost at a dance, waking up to a filthy apartment as the only evidence of a massive party the night before.

With renewed meaning and love of my tattoo, I regard Week Two of term as having ended on a good, if uneventful, note. Uneventful for me, that is. I have plenty of stories that I have heard from other people. Gossip is one of my favorite things. I don’t spread it. I acquire it. Because all knowledge is worth having.

My First Publication

I am honored, terrified, ecstatic, nervous, pleased, proud (and so many other adjectives that seem quite incompetent to describe the strange muddle of emotions in me) to share with you the following link, which leads directly to my first ever credited publication:

http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/18949/master-plotto-week-two-winner-ilana-masad.html

The fact that this piece was written, sent out, and has won a competition while I am here, at Oxford, is not lost upon me. These last few weeks – less than four since I arrived – have been some of the most incredible in my life.

Why? I can’t put my finger on it. Something in me has been unfastened, a door has opened, and breaths of fresh air are allowed in and out. Maybe it’s the lack of any extremely close confidants, as yet. Being an unknown quantity to so many people, all at once, used to be a horrible, crippling and terrifying experience for me in the past; When I got back to Sarah Lawrence, healthier and more whole than I’d been, with a huge chunk of myself suddenly taken away, as if removed by an operation, a phantom pain still clung to me, throbbing. By now, that phantom has become, once more, a solid part of me and my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But back then, I threw myself vulnerable, emotionally naked, into the arms of a student body that didn’t remember I existed, and I learned how to protect myself just enough – not too much – so as to obtain the required scratches and calluses to make me able to survive in that wilderness. I am now, again, in a new place, but this time with a home base, a camp, to return to, and I’m thankful for it.

My point, I suppose, is that, as undefinable as this feeling is, it has something to do with where I am. Maybe it’s the lovely sweaters I keep seeing people wearing. Maybe it’s the plethora of accents. Maybe it’s the vibrancy of so many other brains, throbbing at the same time in their race to study, read, write, talk, study, read, write, talk ad nauseum.

Whatever it is, I’m glad Oxford is here and I’m glad I am in Oxford.

Ten in Seven

Henry James’s novels are, by no accounts, easy reading, but nor are they exactly the painfully long mazes in which one loses oneself between the commas and semicolons, only to be found, panting, some three paragraphs later, with still very little idea of what has just taken place. Rather, the novel that I spent the end of 0th week and the beginning of 1st week reading, was a mixture of deliciously complex sentences couched between smooth and subtle dialogue that played across my mind like nursery rhymes for adults, so full were they of questionable double-entendres and humorous perhaps-allusions.

Wednesday was a daze, lived between the covers of The Ambassadors, waiting for Strether and Waymarsh and Chad and Mrs. Procock and the rest of them to figure themselves out. I fell asleep with my lamp on and woke up with my early alarm, thinking it was still the middle of the night. But, alas, it was only a cloudy and dreary English morning, and I still hadn’t reached the last page.

My luck held out and I reached the English Faculty Library, where bowls were filled with little squares. At first, blearily tired as I was, I rather suspected they might be condoms with literary quotes on their covers, but no, they were only little info cards to stick in one’s wallet. Shame, really. I would have loved to have a condom in my wallet with the words “‘Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish!” splashed across the front. A good way to let a partner know you’re on your period and a fantastic conversation piece to boot.

But I digress. After finishing the book – which took an hour, because I was nearly falling asleep in the comfortable chairs, black ones, with lovely wide backs to them that one can really lean on – I rose and began to search the shelves for critical work by other authors. I found five books, two of which turned out to be irrelevant to me, and only one article online that seemed to hold any truly helpful wisdom or readable writing. Remember, friends, that I was running on minimal sleep – some six hours in the past forty-eight.

At 10:00, I began to write. At 17:00, I got up, with a completed essay, ten pages long (including the bibliography – let’s not quibble, though). I don’t think I’ve ever felt my brain working so hard. The time flashed by in fits and bursts, making my stomach roil a little harder whenever I dared look at the clock. If I were a robot, there would have been steam coming out of my head, whistling like a teapot, rust flaking away from my hinges and oil dripping out of my eye-sockets.

At 17:45 I sat in my tutor’s office, with the printed essay in his hands. He was impressed that I’d read the entire book and admitted that it was a tall order. He said nine pages was enough – I’d been laboring under the impression that he’d asked for 10-12 and that I was slightly under the mark – and that I’d used my sources well. He told me I had to simplify my prose and stop splitting my infinitives. I didn’t know anyone cared about split infinitives anymore; I thought that we were liberal about those these days. I got a mark of 70 on the paper, which, in Oxonian terms means, apparently, an A.

My sigh of relief may have created a brilliant set of majestic waves all the way out in the middle of the English Channel, where no one, except for a few confused meteorologists watching the satellites, saw them.