Damn, missed it.

Me in the kitchen last night with the girls and MC Lars and chocolate cheesecake:

"Um. Sorry I missed the show. I was waylaid by the force of darkness."

Pause.

"... and they had gin."

Since turning in my first-year paper 24 days early (have I mentioned that, yes, I have), it's been a hard week.

Monday I went to an open meeting of the MCR and told someone holding forth for far too long on whether we could/should vote in undergraduate committee elections to drop the subject because (1) the proposal "has an air of unreality verging on the ludicrous" and (2) the meeting was inquorate by this time so there was nothing we could do about it anyway.

Several were impressed by my 60 second tirade of constitutional lawyer babble. Apparently, though, what really commanded public acclaim was the way I then swirled the dregs of wine in my glass and tossed it back to punctuate that I was done talking. Ooops.

(I later apologised to the guy I'd more or less shouted down. But it did get the meeting over much faster.)

After I hit the bar with my friend who's working on a defence team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She'd had a pretty intense first three weeks in the job, but it was probably for the best she'd started so close to a break in the trial. Summing up our conversation, inflicted on an engineer, she said: "... and three beers later, we've dissolved the UN. Excellent work, Doug. Time to go home."

Since then there's been a lot of dining. Dinner party Tuesday. Grad Hall Wednesday (sat opposite a fellow who was kind enough to share a very nice Chianti with me). Formal at Girton college last night. Formal dinner at New Hall tonight. Also need to get to the Cambridge Beer festival, dammit.

Anyway, though, last night Girton formal degenerated into more law-talk in the basement bar at Girton after watching the Spring dalyight fade around 8.30 pm over port in a wonderful college garden.

This proved incompatible with getting across town to the MC Lars gig by 10 for my dose of post-punk laptop rap. MC Lars is a good friend of one of my Californian neighbours and one helluva nice guy in person.

What I've heard of his music online has real wit and he apparently puts on a great show: one to watch out for if your in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane next month.