Trinity Term 2013

 28 April - 14 June 2013

On recovering from my hectic thesis submission, it wasn't quite over yet. On the Tuesday of the following week (i.e. Second Week) I had been asked to give a presentation on my thesis to the graduate Philology Seminar (one of my coursemates was to do the same, and another was to present his the following week). Fitting a 25 000 word thesis into a short talk was not easy. I also had to tone down some of the specifics of the linguistic detail as most of those attending wouldn't be familiar with the Chomskyan framework I was using. I was extremely nervous since a number of well-versed faculty members would be in attendance and most of those present probably knew more about Greek than I did. In the end, the talk went really well. There wasn't too large a turnout and I think I was able to answer the one faculty member who bombarded me with questions afterwards quite well. (In most cases, I could say that I had thought about his objections even if they hadn't been directly implemented into the thesis). A number of people congratulated me afterwards on making the subject matter accessible to those who were unfamiliar with it.

The remainder of trinity term involved me preparing for exams. I had three exams over two days (13 and 14 June): General Linguistics on the first day and Historical Linguistics and  History and Structure of Greek on the next.

Between studying for exams, I had a little spare time this term. The two social highlights were a dinner organised by Emily with a bunch of college friends who were all quite special to us: Mary, Rosaria, Rex and Zoe. The second was a River Baptism held by my Church (St Ebbes) on 2 June. Two of my friends from the Worcester College CU (Chris and Yiyi) were among those getting baptised. It was a lovely day weather-wise, and it was nice to see two of my friends share their testimonies of what God had done in their lives and show their commitment by being baptised.

Rosaria, Zoe, Emily, Rex, Mary

Rex, Mary, Me, Emily, Rosaria

Baptisees

Worcester crew attending baptism

Emily, Mary and I also continued watching Doctor Who once a week and we succeeded in getting to the end of Series 5 by the end of term. Mary's birthday was in early May, so we doubled up one of our "Dinner and Doctor" evenings with birthday cake. We also had a break from our normal mince-based dinner one week by eating fish fingers and custard. This will make no sense to people unfamiliar with a particular episode of Doctor Who. (If you really want to know, watch this link).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo2RKAHu-kI

Mary, as the most sensible of us three, kept her custard for pudding and ate the fish fingers separately, but Emily and I actually dunked out fish fingers in custard. Let's just say it didn't taste too bad....

Emily and Mary

Mary's cake

Fish fingers and custard

Yum!

Exam week was quite stressful, but in a different way to thesis week. The thought of writing nine essays in two days, with an hour per essay, was more than daunting. But I prepared as best I could by revising the preparatory essays I had written. Oxford has a rather bizarre tradition when it comes to exams in that we wear a "uniform". This consists of "subfusc" (a white collared shirt and black skirt or trousers with a black bow for women, and a dark suit and bow-tie for men) and our college gown. We also have to carry graduation caps into the exam, though we are not allowed to wear them. In addition there is a recent tradition of wearing carnations to exams: a white carnation for your first exam, pink for any intermediate exams and red for the final. Since I had exactly three exams, I got to wear one of each. Exams were written in a building in the Oxford High Street aptly named Exam Schools (the same Exam Schools where I rushed to submit my thesis as recounted in the last post). It is used for lectures outside of exam time.

My carnations

Morning of first exam

At the Rad Cam between exams 2 and 3

After last exam

The exams themselves were, for the most part, all right. The structure and set-up was not that different to what I've been used to at UKZN. Although I didn't get all the questions I was hoping for (and sometimes the wording was slightly different or specific in a different direction to what I'd prepared for), I was able to write answers for three questions in each paper, which was what I needed to do. Although I panicked a little in the days leading up the the exams, the Lord gave me a sense of peace and calmness as I was writing. And looking back, it's an enormous privilege to have been able to write exams in the same location and similar circumstances as countless great academics who came before me. I had two hours between my two Friday exams, so I didn't go back to college, but stayed around the High Street area and had lunch. The matter of most concern on the day was that my left wrist (I'm left-handed) was very sore from writing the first exam and I didn't think it could handle another on the same day. So went to Boots (for South Africans that's a medical store roughly equivalent to Clicks) and found a wrist support. I had to find a very cheap one as I had little money on me (we had to leave our bags outside the exam venue), but I managed to do so. The support was basically elasticated fabric that wrapped round my wrist but it was enough and I was able to write the second exam without much problem. During the break between exams, I spent some time with two of my course mates who also had two exams that day and, although we were writing on slightly different topics, just talking to them helped me with my preparation for the second exam. During the break, Emily also came to find me and brought my red carnation so I could switch it with the pink one I was wearing.

Another Oxford tradition is that when you come out of the final exam, your friends "trash" you by throwing confetti and other things on you (the less pleasant forms involve champagne or even worse, raw eggs - though the latter is banned and you can be fined for making a mess). Emily (and her parents, who had arrived in Oxford that day) came to trash me. She threw confetti on me, and gave me a fun party hat and balloons. Her father took lots of photos :D

All done!!!

Maddy and Charlotte

With Rex

Bubbles!!!

Walking up Cornmarket

And with that, my studies at Oxford were over. It was just a matter now of waiting for results (which we would not hear about until 2 July).

That night was a strange evening, since it coincided with the last day of term and so many of my undergrad friends were packing to go home and I had to try to say goodbye to all of them, many for the last time. On top of it, Emily's parents had arrived, so they were getting settled in and Emily was getting most of her stuff packed up. That Sunday, I was going with her family on a trip to Angelsey off the coast of Wales (but that will be another blog post all of its own).

That evening, we celebrated by - you guessed it - watching Doctor Who. It was essentially our only opportunity to finish series 5 with Mary (and since they were her disks, we needed to do so).

It was all a bit of a whirlwind, and the sense of relief and joy and appreciation took some time to sink in. Of course, there was also the little niggle,that I still had no idea what my results would be (up to this point I still hadn't had a single mark for anything I'd done at Oxford). But those were worries for the future and for now I just enjoyed being finished.

I close out this post with some pictures that my TLC friend "The Happy Islander" drew and sent to me as encouragement in the days leading up to and during exams.

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.

Visits to The Kilns, A baptism, Thanksgiving and Some lovely Americans

Five weeks since the last post, and term is over again - it's scary how fast these eight-week terms speed by. So much has happened since the last post, I'm going to write about it in two parts: The first will be on the second half of Michaelmas term and the second on the last week since term ended.

I was still sick with my cold and cough for much of 5th week, which wasn't a whole lot of fun. On the Monday night (not Tuesday as I said in my last post) was Guy Fawkes. I could hear fireworks all around but couldn't see any, even when I took a short walk in the freezing cold around the neighbourhood. I had, however, seen some out of my window on the Saturday, which was better than nothing. I might have mentioned last year that I'd forgotten how pretty fireworks can be since the ban in SA seems to have limited the amount and variation of fireworks that are available.

The highlight of that week was the Saturday evening when I went to the Kilns to watch a performance of An Evening with CS Lewis by David Payne. David Payne is a British Actor who started up this one-man-show after playing CS Lewis in a stage performance of Shadowlands, a dramatic biography of Lewis' life. People would come up to him and ask him questions about the life of Lewis which he couldn't answer, and he thought it would be interesting to research and come up with a performance in which he, pretending to be the man himself, could answer those questions. The show has been running for a number of years all over America and also in Canada and he has eventually decided to bring it to Britain. From 7 to 11 November, he performed it in the library at CS Lewis' old Oxford house, the Kilns. The show was free of charge and a collection was taken up to aid the running of the Kilns Centre. I had heard at least two members of TLC talking about having seen the show in America and Canada, so I was quite excited to be able to see it myself. It was also the first time I got to see the inside of the Kilns, having only seen it once from the outside when I first arrived in Oxford last year.

An Evening with CS Lewis is a one-man-show in which David Payne pretends to be CS Lewis talking to a group of American authors in the final years of his life. He sits in a chair drinking tea and tells them his life story. Usually he does the performance for large crowds in theatres and the like, but the library of the Kilns could only fit in 20 people at a time. The show was excellent, although you could tell that it was written with an American audience in mind (he made a joke about iced tea) and that he was less used to acting in such an intimate setting (sometimes he came across as a little too theatrical, which I could see as working fine on a stage, but this made it less convincing as he sat on that chair in the library not far in front of a small group). I tried to imagine that he really was Lewis and couldn't quite convince myself. I think he also missed a few opportunities to make use of the fact that he was really in Oxford, in Lewis' house. For example he would refer to Headington (the town/suburb of Oxford where the Kilns is) as "the village" rather than just "here", and when he referred to the first house Joy, who would later be his wife, lived in, he could have said "just down the road" and pointed in the appropriate direction. But in all, it was a great performance and a privilege to be there. I had the opportunity to greet and thank him after the show. I also met two old ladies who were attending the show, one of whom said she was at Oxford 60 years ago and used to attend some of Lewis' lectures. The second lady (who it turned out was a Classicist, and like me, prefers Greek over Latin) had been to some of his lectures in Cambridge when she was training to be a teacher there. Apparently earlier in the week, a man had come to a performance who was a childhood friend of Douglas Gresham (Lewis' stepson) and used to play in the woods by the Kilns with him.

The following weekend, my friend Emily's parents came to visit from America. Mary (my other friend who likes hedgehogs) and I got to meet them on Saturday evening when we went out for dinner at the Eagle and Child. I also got to see them again on Sunday evening at and after church and on Tuesday before the weekly CS Lewis Society meeting. They are a lovely couple and it was great to meet them. On Sunday evening, one of the guys from the Worcester CU, Rob, who became a Christian earlier this year, was baptised at St Aldate's Church. I went along with a number of others from Worcester. It was the first time I had been to a service at St Aldate's (the other large evangelical Anglican church in Oxford) and we were treated to testimonies from a number of people who were to be baptised. It was an amazing evening, hearing how God has worked in the lives of these various people and especially in our friend Rob's. After the service those of us from the CU went up to pray with Rob which was a really powerful experience.

On Thursday 22 November, Maryanna hosted another Thanksgiving meal to which she invited all the LingPals and a number of her friends from Wolfson college. It was a great time, especially as I don't get to see the LingPals so much this year since we have fewer lectures together.

Thanksgiving group photo

Christelle and me

The turkeys

Carving the turkey

A plate of thankfulness

That Friday afternoon, the Worcester CU held a "Text-a-Christmas-Treat" event. It was like the Text-a-Toastie sessions we have except this time college members could text in for Christmas treats (mince pies, gingerbread men or carrot sticks) along with a question about God or Christianity. We had some very interesting questions and discussions that resulted from that. That evening I went out with Emily and two of her friends that are also here for their year abroad at Worcester, Michael and Peter. It was the evening the Christmas street lights were turned on and although we missed the lantern parade and switching on ceremony, we went to the evening fair and market in St Giles Street, which was lots of fun though rather cold.

St Giles Christmas fair

Peter, Michael and Emily

St Giles fair

St Giles fair

In case you are starting to think that I didn't do any work in the second half of term, I really did. I finished my essay on Greek verb stems (mentioned in the last post) which was the last of my History and Structure of Greek tutorials. Since then, I have had three tutorials for Historical Linguistics (one of the other options for which I will be writing an exam in June). I wrote three essays on grammaticalisation (the process in which words in a language lose their lexical/word-based meanings and become grammatical forms like prepositions or prefixes and suffixes), analogy (the process in which forms change in a language based on other related forms) and the comparative method (the method historical linguists use to reconstruct the ancestors of language families based on what we know about the descendant languages)*.

In addition to the essays and tutorials, I was forced to come face-to-face with my thesis topic as I had to give a presentation on it on 27 November. It meant sitting down and working out exactly what I'm trying to do in a way that I could explain it to my course-mates, which was a good exercise. For those interested, my thesis is looking at Hellenistic/Roman Period Greek word order as used by the 2nd century Greek novelist Achilles Tatius. Greek word order is really free and I am trying to find out if there are any patterns that could help us identify a "standard" word order and am using Chomsky's syntactic framework (the Minimalist Program) to see if I can explain why we get the variation we do. (I may at some point write up a clearer explanation - "My thesis for dummies" (?) - for those for whom that makes no sense. Those who do understand what I'm talking about, I can send you the handout from my presentation if you are interested, though I don't know how much sense it makes in isolation). I was extremely nervous for the presentation, but it went pretty well in the end (though I went a bit over time).

The evening after my presentation Emily and I were treated to something I've been looking forward to since Myriam told me about it last Christmas. Every year on the last Tuesday of term, the CS Lewis Society has a Christmas party at the Kilns. There was a lovely spread of Christmas and other snacks (mince pies, cakes, cookies, Turkish Delight ;-) ) and mulled wine. Mulled wine is a Christmas phenomenon that they have here in Britain that consists of spiced heated wine. I've never tried it as I don't drink alcohol, but at the party they had alcohol-free mulled wine so I could finally try some. It tasted kind of like warmed grape juice with All-Spice added (probably not as exciting as the real thing) but at least I could get an idea of what the fuss was about. Part of the tradition of the evening is a reading from a short piece written by CS Lewis called Xmas and Christmas: A lost chapter from Herodotus. It's a piece I have loved ever since I first read it and has become even more special since I became familiar with Herodotus' actual works (and Herodotus became my favourite Greek author) and could see just how Lewis was imitating him. It's a satirical piece about this strange tribe that lives in Niatirb (Britain in reverse) and practises this strange annual festival called Exmas, which involves the stressful activity of sending Exmas cards and Exmas gifts to friends and family (a terrible task as one has to guess which of one's friends will send cards and presents and what the value of each gift will be so one can send a present of equal value to the friend). It also involves over-eating and drinking and and wearing paper crowns is on the whole a very stressful and depressing time. He goes on to talk about another festival practised by a smaller number of Niatirbians called Crissmas which takes place at the same time. Some say the two festivals are related, but he doubts this as observers of Crissmas, "doing the opposite to the majority of the Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast. And in most of the temples they set out images of a fair woman with a new-born Child on her knees and certain animals and shepherds adoring the Child." The passage was read out to us by Richard, one of the older members of the Society with an amazing knowledge of all sorts of things. He was the one last year who told me, after a Tolkien-related talk at the society, about the time when, as a boy, he met Professor Tolkien.

The evening was to get even better. We had been told we would be given a tour of the Kilns. What I didn't know is that one of the tour guides would be Walter Hooper, the literary advisor of Lewis' estate, who has been responsible for publishing much of Lewis' work posthumously. Mr Hooper is often present at society meetings and I always feel slightly in awe of him since he actually knew Lewis during his lifetime. I didn't realise that the man had actually lived with Lewis and his family at the Kilns in the later years of Lewis' life. Lewis believed that once an author published a work he had written, it was his responsibility to answer every letter his readers sent him. Lewis' brother, Warnie used to help with the letters (as he could use a typewriter and Lewis could not), but Warnie suffered from alcoholism and would go off for long stretches at a time. As a result, Walter was asked by Lewis to help with the letters (making him I guess a kind of secretary). More than a tour of the house, we got a first-hand tour of Walter's memories of Lewis. We would go into one of the rooms and Walter, being old, sat on a comfy chair while we stood around (or sat on the carpet like little children) listening to the stories.

Photos of the outside of the Kilns from my trip last year - I didn't get any from my visits this time around:

Grace and I at the Kilns

The Kilns door

The Kilns

Outbuilding near the Kilns

He told us about the first time he came to visit Lewis in his house. After a few of cups of tea, he (being an American man) asked Lewis if he could use the "bathroom". Lewis proceeded to take him to the room where the bath is (the toilet being in a separate room) and gave him soap and a towel and left him there. Eventually he plucked up the courage to tell him what he had really meant and Lewis laughed saying that that would teach him to stop using American euphemisms. He also told us about the time (not long after that first meeting) when he was invited to a gathering of The Inklings at the Lamb and Flag. One of my favourite stories was about how Lewis gave away all his earnings from the initial publication of The Screwtape Letters and the radio broadcasts that would become Mere Christianity to orphans and widows in need. He then got into trouble because he was supposed to have paid tax on those earnings and didn't have the money any more. He managed to work something out with the lawyers and after that set up a charity fund where he would give (I think it was a third) of his earnings so he could still pay tax and look after himself and those he was responsible for. He also shared how Lewis lived a very simple life, despite being an Oxford fellow and successful author. Apparently years after the end of Word War II, the Kilns still had black-out curtains because Lewis couldn't be bothered spending money on having them replaced. Eventually they had to be replaced after a lady insisted they be washed and they disintegrated. Walter said they could have lived a much more comfortable life, but Lewis was happy as he was and settled for "digestives and beer" over more luxurious food and drink.

The most ironic story was from after Lewis' wife, Joy died. When people learned that he had lost his wife, they thought to encourage him by sending him copies of a recently published book on grief: A Grief Observed, by NW Clerk. The book was actually written by Lewis himself, but published under a pseudonym. To kept up the secret, he made Walter write thank you letters to those who had sent the book, the poor people oblivious that Lewis himself was the author. A fun fact we learnt from the "tour" was that Walter Hooper's cat is named "Blessed Lucy of Narnia". Apparently the Italian town of Narni, after which Lewis named Narnia (Narnia was the old Roman name for the town) really has a saint called Lucy - Blessed Lucy of Narni. I was quite excited when Mr Hooper referred to the Kiln's gardener, a man named Fred Paxford, who is said to have been the inspiration behind the beloved overly pessimistic character Puddleglum in The Silver Chair. When Lewis and Joy were about to leave for a long-planned trip to Greece, Paxford insisted that they really should not go as there had been a tragic plane crash in the last week and they were likely to die while flying over. I wish I'd been taking notes - there were so many more awesome stories. Emily and I were sitting with out mouths agape half of the time. While I really enjoyed David Payne's Evening with CS Lewis that I attended earlier in the term (listening to a man sitting in the Kiln's pretending to be Lewis tell us about Lewis' life) it paled in comparison after being in the Kilns while Walter Hooper as himself told us stories of his memories of CS Lewis. It was an evening I will not easily forget.

I spent the rest of the week, finishing off my essay on analogy. Although it was the last week of term, I had one more essay and tutorial last week, in "9th week", as I had missed a week earlier in term when I was unwell.

I'm going to end my account there for now. Last weekend (between the last two essays), Bethany (my friend from TLC whom I stayed with in Easter and who went to watch The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe stage show in London with me) came to visit. Emily and I also did some fun and touristy things around Oxford, but I'll keep those accounts (with pictures) for the next post.

Thanks again for reading my posts (apologies for the length of this one). I hope you enjoyed reading about some of the experiences from this term as much as I enjoyed experiencing them.

* These are gross simplifications of the topics. If you want to know more about them you're welcome to send me a message, email etc.

Mid-Michaelmas Update

I've been back in Oxford about a month and a half now. It's been a very busy few weeks. During the weekend 27-30 September the Christian community in Oxford ran a number of events to welcome international students to Oxford: a free diner and two paid-for cream teas with guest speakers. I volunteered to help host a table at the dinner and the Friday cream tea. It was a great opportunity to meet new students and welcome them to Oxford. It turned out that one of the girls at my table both days is a literature student at Worcester college.

The following week was "freshers" or "noughth" week at Oxford. This involved a number of social events to meet up with the new students in college. There are four new linguistics masters students at Worcester this year (which is exciting since I am the only one in my year).

On the Saturday of noughth week, one of my friends from primary school, Lauren Pearce, came to Oxford and I took her on a short tour around the city. She and her family were having a holiday in London after being at a family wedding in Ireland and they came to Oxford for the afternoon. We went up the University Church of St Mary's tower to get a bird's-eye-view of the city. If you've been following my blog since last year, you'll know that I have already been up three towers in Oxford: Carfax (the popular tourist one which I went up with my dad when we first arrived last year), The Saxon Tower (which I took Sarah Docksey up when she came to visit last year) and the Magdalen College tower which Prerna took us up when Maryanna's parents were here in June. After doing these four, I think the University Church tower wins the prize for having the best views of Oxford. Magdalen comes close, but the beauty of St Mary's is that it looks down into a number of colleges including All Souls, Brasenose and Exeter with their beautiful quads as well as the splendid Radcliffe Camera (which are on the whole prettier from above than the roofs of buildings). I think as an architect, Lauren particularly enjoyed seeing Oxford.

 

Term began officially on 8 October. I don't have a lot of lectures to attend this term, but there are a few that I missed during Michaelmas term last year because of timetable clashes. These include the Introduction to Philology lectures, a Homer and Early Greek class and a class on Greek Dialects. I'm also continuing to attend the weekly Philology (Historical Linguistics) seminars which are themed "Towards a synchronic grammar of Proto-Indo-European". In addition, I have weekly individual tutorials this term. So far I have been having tutorials for the exam paper I will be writing on The History and Structure of Greek. I have written an essay on the Greek Middle Voice and another on the Greek dialects. Currently I am looking at the tenses (in particular the different tense stems).

During second week, one of the American ladies from the Narnian web community I belong to, The Lion's Call, came to visit Oxford with her husband. We met at the Eagle and Child (the Inklings favourite pub) for dinner, and I showed them around Worcester College including our lovely chapel. We had considered going up to the Kilns, CS Lewis' home, but there wasn't enough time for that. The two of them had taken themselves on a tour of Oxford during the day while I was in lectures and were immensely pleased that they not only got to see where Tolkien's room in Exeter College had been, but the girl who is staying there now let them take a photo of the inside.

 

I've made a couple of great new friends in the Worcester CU. Emily is doing her year abroad, studying Linguistics and Philosophy. She was naturally "introduced" to me every time another CU member learnt she was studying Linguistics, until "have you met Sonja?" became something of a joke between us. It turns out and is also a fan of CS Lewis. Mary is a first year biology student and shares my fondness of hedgehogs. If you should hear us simultaneously break out in to a squeal of excitement or an "awww!", it's probably something hedgehog related. They are both in my CU small group together with Emma, another graduate student (yay!) doing Mathematics.

Last weekend, Tim from CU had a fancy dress birthday party with the theme "London Underground Stations". I had no idea how that was supposed to work until I looked at a list of the stations and saw Paddington on it, which made me think of going as Paddington Bear. I already had the right coloured blue coat and could get away with wearing my pink gum boots (wellingtons). I was looking for the right kind of hat, when I remembered that "teddy bear" hats are a phenomenon here. So I ended up buying a cheap teddy hat from Poundland (where everything costs a pound) and making him a red hat out of the socks I got for free on the Virgin Atlantic flight over. I bought some toggle buttons to add to the coat, and made a "suitcase" out of one of my boxes I'd used for storage when I went home. I was worried that my coat would be too warm to wear (since it was my really warm one), but it turned out that temperatures were down to 4°C that weekend, which was annoying in general, but handy for my costume. It did get a little warm indoors, but I could keep the coat on long enough for people to see my costume. One of the guys, David, also went as Paddington, but since we did our costumes quite differently, it didn't really matter.

Me (Paddington) and Mary (Chalk Farm)

Me and David (Paddingtons)

Me and Tim

Sometime over last weekend, I picked up my second cold of term (I had "freshers flu" during first week). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to shake it and am still feeling congested and coughing. Hopefully it won't last much longer.

And that pretty much wraps up the last few weeks. I can't believe we're half way through Michaelmas Term already. It's Guy Fawkes on Tuesday and the big bonfire and fireworks celebration is happening tonight, but I guess I won't be going with this cold. The Christmas lights have already gone up in the streets, though they won't switch them on until December. I suppose I should start thinking about putting up my Christmas tree again (yes, the one with the cheery fairy lights that I only took down in June). Clocks went back an hour last week, so it's now starting to get dark decidedly "early".

Until next time, I hope you are all doing well, and thanks for your continued support and prayers.