Hilary Term II

Apologies for the sudden drought of posts. Things got kinda busy (degrees tend to do that to you) and then life took over but now I'm going to try to catch up. I've got about 6 months to cover so I won't include it all at once. Here's the first instalment.

In my last post, I gave a very brief account of Hillary Term (Jan-Mar) 2013 in Oxford. Now I'll give a bit more detail. During 0th week, from Monday to Wednesday, I went on the annual Oxford Christian Union retreat known as "House Party". We spent three days focusing on God and planning for the term ahead and the mid-term mission "Born Loved". We also went on a walk in the Shropshire countryside, in the rain.

Something we found on our walk

Shropshire countryside

A group of us on a walk

Shropshire countryside

Born Loved was held in 4th week of Trinity and included a set of lunch-time and evening talks, exploring some of the big questions around and objections to Christianity, as well as looking at what it means to be Christian. In a slightly ironic turn of events, this week of talks opened my eyes in a completely unexpected way. Actually, it made me realise I couldn't quite see properly and that I needed glasses :-P. It happened because we held the talks in St Aldates Church, which uses large flat-screen monitors, and I noticed that the writing on the screens was a lot more blurry than it ought to be. This, along with general observations from walking around town (blurry signs and people's faces) and sitting in the back of a seminar and noticing I couldn't read the board, confirmed that I needed my eyes tested, something I hadn't had done in about 5 years. At first, I was quite worried about this revelation, as it seemed to have happened quite suddenly. Also, I didn't know much about optometrists in the UK. After some enquiry, and the advice of a friend that I go to Boots (for my South African friends that's pretty much the equivalent of Clicks), I managed to book an appointment that only cost me £10 (thanks to a 50% off voucher they were offering online). It was confirmed that I needed a low prescription for distance, but my near vision is still fine. I got the cheapest pair of glasses they offered, for only £25. I found it quite difficult choosing frames, but my friend Emily helped me decide, and in the end we both agreed that we liked the cheaper pair better than a more expensive one I'd tried on. I'm not sure how long these glasses will last, but they've done me well thus far and made a big difference. For the first couple days I was walking around Oxford in a daze, since it all seemed so much more beautiful than before. Nothing like a new pair of glasses to make you appreciate better what you'd come to take for granted. I'm sure ought to be a spiritual metaphor in there somewhere.

New glasses!

Well, aside from the Born Loved talks and visiting eye doctors, most of Hillary was spent finishing off my Historical Linguistics tutorials and reading for and working on my thesis. For my tutorials, I wrote essays on language contact, sound change and semantic change. My supervisor gave me a number of deadlines for my thesis throughout the term which helped me to space out the work but keep working on it regularly. I also attended the weekly philology graduate seminar. Hilary term seminars are always spent looking at one of the lesser known old Indo-European languages and that term we looked at Faliscan, an extinct Italic language related to Latin. It was really interesting to see how it compared to and differed from Latin.

Hilary term also saw the beginning of a weekly event that came to be known as "Dinner and Doctor". Two of my friends from the Worcester college CU, Emily and Mary, came over on Friday or Saturday nights. Most times I'd make a mince dish (spaghetti bolognaise, South African bobotie or cottage pie) and after that we'd watch a couple episodes of the British SciFi series Doctor Who. It was Emily's first time watching and I had only seen them for the first time last year. Mary, as the Brit among us, was the most familiar with the show and we watched her DVDs of the show.

I mentioned in my post on Michaelmas Term, my excitement in getting a tour of CS Lewis' house, the Kilns, by his former secretary, Walter Hooper. In the 5th week of Hilary Term, he was the guest speaker at the weekly CS Lewis Society meeting. Members of the society are allowed to sign up to have dinner with the guest speaker beforehand, and so Emily and I signed up to have dinner with him. As mentioned before, he is a very sweet, humble man. On introducing ourselves to him, he pulled out a little notebook and had us write our names in it so he could remember who he'd met. As is custom in the UK, we got to discussing the weather, and in particular the recent heavy snowfall. I, of course, was still ecstatic over the snow but some people had already had enough of it. Mr Hooper, having grown up in a part of the US that saw lots of snow, told us how when he was a child, his mother used to make them "snow ice-cream". She'd wait an hour, till all the "dirty" snow had fallen, and then put out a container to collect fresh clean snow. Then she'd bring it indoors and add vanilla to it and make ice-cream. I also asked him to autograph a book of CS Lewis excerpts that he edited, which I happened to have with me in Oxford.

Outside Franks Building

Worcester Orchard

Oxford in snow

My first robin

             

                                                                   Autographed book                                          Dinner with Walter Hooper 

                                                                                                                                picture courtesy of Jason Lepojärvi

The 8 weeks of Hillary term sped by and before I knew it it was the Easter break. Break isn't exactly the right word in my case, however, as it was time for the final haul on my thesis and syntax essay, both of which were due not long into the following term, the end of 1st week of Trinity Term - 26 April.