sleep & sociability (and Kate & the cat)

I've been reprimanded for not having posted lately. I've been mostly sleeping and hanging around the UL, sometimes at the same time. Last week I varied my sleeping habits through a visit to King's archives to track down a book from 1549.

The other week, Chin Hwa, Trudy and myself met up with Jameela Lares at Teri-Aki (the third time I'd been to Teri-Aki this term!). Jameela is an American academic at the University of Southern Mississippi I'd been in touch with by email and sent us lots of useful references for our work. We all chose the same thing on the menu (I think with a slight variant on Trudy's part), and we had a great time together.

One day I travelled to the basement of the English faculty and found Kate (girl from Christ's) very patiently trying to get hold of a cat. Kate and the cat would have made a good photo. The cat was discovered to have a tag reading 'Selwyn College' round its neck and I think found its way back home.

I managed to see the bumps (rowing race on the river where boats try to 'bump' the boat in front) for the first time in my Cambridge career the other week. It still took me two hours of wandering up and down both sides of the river before I found the people I was trying to meet, and I didn't quite work out who was winning the competition, but at least I saw boats going up and down.

I was wondering whether I've been being too sociable recently. I'm maybe making up for not having been so in adolescence. This week I've been to two parties. Joseph had a surprise birthday party on Thursday, at which I was one of two non-Koreans (for the first hour I was the only non-Korean). Here we played vicious Korean games which involve hitting each other. Yesterday the inhabitants of 27 Acrefield Drive (now sadly depleted in number) had a gathering. This weekend Nicola Purser's been back in Cambridge, and she met up with some of the Christ's CU people on Friday afternoon.

I liked this sentence I read recently from John Carey:
"But all we know for certain about Donne's wife is that she was generally pregnant, and that no one recorded for posterity any clear impression of her character."
(John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981, 1990), p.60)