update

As anticipated, posting has decreased in frequency over the holiday period, since I've been busy with other things. (By contrast, Mark Zealey has admirably increased his blogging in China). Hence news will have to be telescoped somewhat. I still haven't worked out how to post pictures or sidebar links. Once I have, the blog will be livened up a bit.

After coming back from York and spending a few days at home, I went down to my sister Lizzy's graduation from Brunel University. The ceremony was held at Wembley Conference Centre, which was brightened up a bit by a jazz band. The ceremony was long, but broken up by the conferral of honorary degrees on exemplary individuals who gave speeches to inspire and encourage the graduands. Lizzy's favourite picture of the day was of herself wearing her academic hood over her head. When we left the conference centre we saw big clouds of black smoke rising. This turned out to be a factory on fire behind the construction site of the new Wembley stadium. There was a whole fleet of fire engines weaving round traffic and pumping vast amounts of water up the road in rubber pipes. The next day we went to the evening of my cousin's wedding day at York House in Twickenham.

I am currently hanging around Cambridge helping to run two coffee bars for international visitors (Harry's and Andy's). As usual with international student work, this is great fun and a wonderful learning experience, though quantities of sleep are not enormous.

I had a minor alarm on Wednesday when I had a letter from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council), the people I hope will give me money to come back to Cambridge for an MPhil course after the summer, saying that they hadn't received the form from the university telling them my degree results, and that if they didn't receive the form from the university by Friday my application would be ineligible. After running round Cambridge on Wednesday afternoon, with no-one seeming to know who I should talk to, it turned out on Thursday to have been sorted out. It appears that the problem was not that the university had failed to send the form but that it was lost at the other end. I was informed by the lady at the English faculty that forms routinely go missing at the AHRC but that this year they had oddly managed to misplace half the batch and not the other half. Hence she always keeps copies of what she sends to them so faxed them another copy.

Yesterday I attended my third graduation of the summer, this time an MPhil graduation for a Chinese girl named Maggie. The ceremony, in the Senate House, was very similar to my own. I first met Maggie in my second year at Cambridge, when I read Latin grace for formal dining every Monday for a term. The main perk of this job is that you get a free three course meal. On Mondays there are often not many people there, and more than once it was just Maggie and one friend, so I got to know her quite well. She is currently working at Tianjin Normal University, and also flies round the world promoting Chinese culture on behalf of the Chinese education ministry. After the graduation, I accompanied Maggie and her two friends walking along the river to the orchard at Grantchester.

In the evening I got a cold burger and bacon at the barbecue for the Andy's and Harry's teams. (I suppose the coldness of the food was a consquence of arriving five hours late for the barbecue. I had already had a chicken souvlakia kebab from Gardie's, Cambridge's premier greasy Greek takeaway). We were at a house with an indoor swimming pool, and in the evening we watched the first Back to the Future (IMDB entry; official site). Whilst some of the paradoxes of time travel in the film perhaps seem a bit corny, it does provoke thought about the relationship between events and whether the tiny contingencies on which lives turn are entirely random or guided in some way.

I hope to return to posting my reflections on life sometime soon. It's strange how one comes to feel a responsibility to an invisible (and potentially non-existent) audience. It encourages me if you talk back to me by leaving comments.