Lakes District (Hawkshead village) 

A week of social excess

Monday. Dinner with social anthropologists (and their lawyer friends).

Tuesday. Had some people round to play “Versability” the poetry game: given the first three lines of a stanza, can you suggest a convincing fourth? The answer in my case would appear to correlate very closely to the amount of wine I’ve had to drink over progressive rounds.

Wednesday. Grad Hall and Halloween bop. Committee members morally obliged to help stay and clean up after the party. So what else could one do but drink and dance until closing?

The photos that have come back from friends are rather chilling. It appears I was persuaded to dress as the leather biker from the Village People, replete with moustache. However, once moustache, leather jacket and sunglasses all fell off, I seemed to spend most of the night in another Australian’s white cowboy hat.

At least I was not the man in a straw cowboy hat who was otherwise only wearing briefs, sneakers and a half litre of vegetable oil.

Thursday. Awake tired. Assist the Californian neighbour to make lunch from scratch from organic ingredients – a process taking only 3 hours. Talk legal theory in the gardens in the last of the day’s sun with the new LLM students.

Went to a friend’s flat in the evening to watch the first two episodes of the thought-provoking, if polemical, “The Power of Nightmares” – which suggests that Neocon and certain Islamic extremist ideologies have a lot in common, to some extent need each other to be political credible in their constituencies and even suggests both would have been dead in the water without September 11. Provocative.

I’d even seen one of the key Neocon interviewees (Michael Ladeen) speak in Cambridge on Wednesday. I'll blog more about that if and when.

Friday. Went to see a new play (“Folie a Deux”) based on the same New Zealand true-crime story as “Heavenly Creatures”, written by and starring a friend. Powerful, intense stuff requiring a couple of stabelising Guinesses afterwards at the King’s College bar.

Discover a 19 year-old thesp friend had two months work over summer as a small but significant character in production of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel being filmed in New Zealand. No wonder she kindly insisted on buying a round.

Went for a quick nightcap port in the common room with another Australian lawyer, which turned into a long sequence of largish ports with an expanding cast of people dropping by to admire my inMotion iPod speakers.

Well, that and the port.

Saturday. Go perform in a staged reading of “Calculus” (while simultaneously meant to be at a rehearsal for “Macbeth”). Finish feeling shattered. Go home, nap. Decide I have neither the energy for a Buffy-themed Halloween bop, nor a cast party that will start at 2 am (after the set and lights are dismantled). Have Mexican with the flatmates and proceed to the pub.

Sunday. Go to lunch for three hours at the house of my college mentor. Go to see “Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban” at St John’s film group. Afterwards walk through an English Rennaisance college’s cloisters by night – too Hogwarts for words.

PhD research? Don’t ask … I scarecly have time to blog ...