Too many hours at the bar to be posting now

The fact that I have even found the keyboard seems an achievement. Call it a delayed reaction to the good PhD news. (Thanks all for the supportive comments and old-friend e-mails, it means a lot to me, honest.)

So yeah, today. Today was archive fun with the grad students committee VP and Mr Producer. Strange as it may sound, the Middle Combination Room (Grad Students Lounge) is an entirely separate space from the MCR Office, a small room off B staircase where few committee members dare tread. The VP as a committed medieval historian thought we should make the world a better place through effective finding.

Over the course of the day I helped dispose of decade-old lost property, managed some sage nodding, some removal of broken glass (don’t ask) and collated and printed an academic year’s worth of minutes by me and those brave enough to fill in on the weeks I couldn’t take it anymore.

Then I went and bought us sandwiches.

Then I went to have a medical for my new scholarship organisation to prove that I was physically fit to travel to, reside in, and conduct graduate study in Cambridge.

Yes, the Alanis-irony of the moment (and the 38 pound 50 fee) was not wasted on me.

Then another evening as a tele-fund raiser. Including the surreal experience of calling a head-master who was using the same firm of tele-fundraisers to provide infrastructure and training for his fund-raising campaign. A more profound moment of post-modern reflexivity I’m not sure I could have encountered outside of being an actor in “Being John Malcovich”.

Anyway, one of the experiences of the evening was drinking with Mr Producer, a second-generation Iranian immigrant from the People’s Independent Sunshine Republic of California.

It is a continual source of wonder that the most erudite, Wildean wit I have met in Cambridge is a US national (even if the world suspects his passport of being a fake because the page numbers are not in proper sequence).

When we realised a bottle of the house-white at the college bar would cost less split two ways than a pint (the first two times I typed that it came out “punt”) we basically went crazy.

Would that I had stopped there. Or that I had not had a gin and tonic within work hours with the director of development.

Um … where was this going? Oh, I forget. Merry Christmas one and all!