Here's a groovy visitor having his first go at punting! Happy birthday Jase! 

Land of the seven-hour garden party

Today I went to cricket practice at 3, then left to go to a garden party on Darwin Island, arriving at 3.30. A perfect Spring day in Cambridge by the river, finishing with drinks outdoors at the Anchor.

Got home at 10.30 from the pub and practiced my seminar presentation to the PhD group tomorrow. It needs trimming.

This week? Not too busy.

Give a seminar tomorrow (no, wait, later today dammit), then go train for Ultimate Frisbee. Going to formal hall at Cauis (say "keys") on Tuesday. Have a vistor Wednesday, and am organiser for a pre-dinner talk (in charge of publicity and looking after the guest speaker). Formal Hall after the talk (I have 5 or 6 guests and the speaker), followed by opening night of a friend's play. Thursday I have a reception hosted by the trustees of my funding body, followed by an election-night party. Friday another 30th birthday. Saturday a Dr Who viewing, and Sunday a cricket match.

I'm also supposed to squeeze in a game (OK, hit-about) of tennis at some point.

But the weirdest part of my life recently? Farewell drinks for a friend off to Rwanda to be part of a defence team for a general implicated in the genocide.

Surreal? Never.

Message in an e-bottle

Hiya Caroline,

I haven’t laughed so much while reading someone’s e-mail in a while. You’ve lost none of your lovingly sardonic turn of phrase in describing friends, pets and events and it carries so well in e-mail I can hear you reading it.

Hope you won’t mind my life-update e-mail being recycled as blog-fodder, but I’ve had my nose to the grindstone recently and (non-PhD) writing time’s a bit thin. I’ve also been clearing the decks for Jason’s arrival in Cambridge on Monday, which I’m sure will precipitate a whole crazy cart of chaos to rival his adventures in South American and Egypt.

… Though with significantly less chance of being bombed in the market place or having to walk in the dark 30 minutes through heavily defended border crossings. Although some college porters could give most border guards a run for their money.

Still, he arrives on Anzac Day, so much hilarity should ensue in Cambridge pubs. I'm sure we can get around octeen or so before closing. ("Octeen" being any number of drinks greater than 4 when you lose count of the total. Octeen drinks in Octeen pubs would be a worthy, if suicidal, goal. Not entirely unlike capturing ANZAC cove from Attaturk. Unless you want to be literal, in which case it is, of course, entirely unlike that.)

It is, indeed, Spring in Cambridge. That time of year when the soul can’t help but be gladdened by the returning flocks of small, colourful creatures darting about the streets and lawns of Cambridge, warbling incomprehensibly.

But enough of the tour parties of French schoolchildren.

Weather soaring to the dizzying heights of 18 degrees and the presence of sunlight (!) in quantity (!) has filled me with an unbounded exuberance and atomised all sense of appropriate punctuation. Honestly, if every day was like the last week, you’d never leave. I’ve found myself signing up for the college cricket team and dragging people to the college courts to instruct me in tennis.

Frankly, I think the tennis is more likely to rise to any level of skill. It requires less organisation and equipment to get out and have a practice. That and the man who will be preparing cricket team “lunches” made an excellent wine steward last year.

A German and guy from the US have taken to playing croquet every Sunday, for pretty much the whole day, on the lawns I can see from my kitchen. I’m going to have to join them next Sunday – if by Sunday I’ve recovered from Jason’s birthday in London on the Friday.

Or even found my way home by then.

I have proposed a “black tie and barefoot” croquet afternoon, which is gaining steam as a proposal in the grads committee at college. I don’t need approval to run one, of course, but this way others may do the work and their may be subsidised drinks.

I’ve also founded a “People’s Direct Action Committee for Cake” that meets every Thursday at 4.30 in the grads common room at college and brings cake. People keep wanting to make it “official” and approach the committee for funding. I say the day we sell out to the bureaucracy is the day the heart goes out of afternoon tea. A floating dinner party also seems to have crystallised around watching the new “Dr Who” series on a Saturday evening.

Not sure there’s much else to report, and I’m probably rambling as I just sent my supervisor an 18,000 word draft of the 15,000 word paper I have due in 8 weeks time. Yes, yes, I scare myself some days. At least it’s a reasonable sign I’m enjoying the research and am probably equipped to do a PhD.

I look forward to hearing of the delirious autumnal excesses of industrial-scale grape jam manufacture (I have visions of Sam selling it on street corners, or abandoning cases of unwanted conserve on ACTION busses) and the internecine struggles of your pets for pre-eminence.

Aye me, to bed.

Love

Doug

Mick Jagger at the UN (or “Get me to the IMO on time”)

I’m exhausted. Twelve hours commuting in three days, the chain coming off your bike (again) and being locked out of your room (again) could do that to a person.

Despite this, I’m pretty damn cheerful.

The reason is I’ve spent those three days tootling down to the International Maritime Organisation to watch the drafting of an anti-terrorism and WMD-proliferation treaty. (Sounds a lot more exciting than “I’ve been at the IMO to watch the Legal Committee adopt a draft text on an amending Protocol to the SUA Convention which will in turn go to a Diplomatic Conference later this year” doesn’t it?)

A flatmate who interned at the Security Council said that a less-than-exciting bit of that environment was that everything that happened in the Council chamber was scripted and no-one ever speaks unless reading from a prepared text. This was rather more exciting.

Despite being “closed” the sessions routinely have student observers and everyone’s pretty friendly. While I can’t comment on anything that happened in closed session (a report summarising it will soon go up on the IMO website), I think I can make a few observations about the practicalities of treaty-making that would be apparent to any visitor, won’t upset anyone, and couldn’t breach any confidences.

The set-up is a mini-UN on the Thames embankment. IMO HQ is an architecturally uninspired building with a lot in common with a late 70s law faculty. It was opened in 1983, but I suspect the plans were approved a decade earlier and the UN ran out of funds for a bit. Still, the staff cafeteria has a lovely terrace with a view of the palace of Westminster.

The main committee room accommodated over 60 national delegations of between 2 – 10 lawyers, government officials and diplomats each. Proceedings were mostly conducted in English, but there was simultaneous translation into six official languages. Even in the visitors seat there were listening posts (after the IMO headset started making my ears sore, I switched to listening on my iPod earphones).

Long, long curved desks faced the raised platform where the Chairman, IMO secretary general, head of the Secretariat, and others sat. Each delegation had space at the table, and spare chairs behind, and a large name “card”. The cards were important in debate, you held it aloft, or turned it at 90 degrees so it stood vertically in the supporting groove at the front of your desk to attract the chairman’s attention.

The cards even crept into the use of language in interesting ways: “I raise my card to speak in support of …” or “I see no more cards, can we move on?”

While the text of the draft convention hard largely been hammered out over previous sessions of the committee (which every IMO member may attend), a lot of work had been done in “inter-sessional” working groups which had to be approved. This was not immune to amendment from the floor, or simply debate over what the States understood the words to mean. As you watched your saw States fly kites, state positions or seek clarification for the record, and sometimes make a real stab at changing things.

The other thing that sort of staggered me, but was obvious in retrospect, is that the text that was debated was an English text. Despite the treaty ultimately being produced in several official languages, all equally authentic, all States – regardless of their official language – were effectively debating shades of meaning in English.

The diplomatic culture was interesting to watch in operation. There was clearly a high premium placed on being seen to be “flexible”, and on supporting “compromise” solutions. A phrase often repeated was “we can live with this wording”, often proceeded by phrases like “while it may cause us some problems in domestic law” or “while the drafting could be improved” or “while we find the language vague”. The role of a good chairman in articulating the mood of the meeting and seeking to arrive at consensus decisions was apparent.

It was a sudden and salutary lesson that you can’t consider a treaty as a text received from on high. Problems in drafting, odd gaps or ambiguities, of the type endlessly worried at by academics represent hard-fought battles to reach something which, if not entirely satisfactory to anyone, was the best that could be achieved.

That said, there was a surprising amount of good humour in the whole process. (Proving that some jokes really do translate.) The Rolling Stones quote was even raised: “You can’t always get what you want / But if you try sometimes you just might find / You get what you need”.

Quite apt really.

Engagingly silly suspense: “The Interpreter”

Set your credulity to max and scepticism to zero, and this is surprisingly enjoyable and decidely entertaining.

OK, a UN-based human-rights themed thrilled just shouldn’t work. Especially when it features the following:

Nicole Kidman’s quasi South African accent as a UN translator with a mysterious past;

Sean Penn as a gun-toting hard bitten Secret Service Agent with a tender side;

some dodgy politics (a CIA briefing on African independence movements calmly describes their inevitable descent into autocracy – such a backward continent, diplomatic protection detail often involves protecting Asian diplomats from lap-dancers);

more than the odd glitch on international law; and

some awful dialogue moments and clumsily manouevered plot elements that almost jump out with a red flag and go “look at me! I’ll be relevant later on!”

This should only be compounded by a truly contrived plot device: a translator - by sheer fluke - overhears an assassination plot, a whispered conversation conducted in a room filled with microphones in an obscure African dialect she just happens to understand.

This sets the film rolling when we realise a dictator from the Kidman character’s fictitious African home country may be assassinated in the General Assembly as he gives an address to attempt to avoid the Security Council referring him to the International Criminal Court. (Don’t ask.)

Why does it work? A wonderful sense of urgency, tension and menace pervades the film. Some scenes are wound tight enough to burst. Penn and Kidman bring a surprising amount of depth to their roles as individuals damaged by loss and struggling with their respective cynicism and idealism and mutual mistrust.

Even if the detail on international law and relations is occasionally a bit thin, the resonances with present international debates (human rights, international criminal law, the role of the UN) is engaging and the UN building in New York makes a unique set that astonishingly has never been used before in film.

I also have it from my flatmate who used to intern at the US delegation to the Security Council that many of the extras are genuine UN delegates who insisted on playing themselves during filming.

And if it inspires a new generation of idealists about the UN's potential in international affairs, that can only be a good thing.

MCI sports center, Washington DC 

A day at the races, at the basketball

Yes that is a race-course laid out in the middle of a basketball court.

For babies.

I’m not entirely sure what I expected on going to see a Wizards’ game (Washington’s home team) while I was in DC, but my idea of half-time entertainment had not really extended to baby-racing.

It had been part of a plan to take in some local culture: a Sunday basketball game, what could be more American? The sports complex, near the Chinatown metro station, was a simply enormous affair, and we seemed to go up a gazillion escalators before finding our seats.

So, if you want proof of the short, short, short American attention span: go to a basketball game. Several things astonished me. First, the organ dude didn’t just play the national anthem – he or she provided a continuous sound-track to the entire game, meant to heighten suspense (presumably) but largely consisting of standard riffs, including, oddly, the Addams Family theme. Second, whenever a time out was called – even for 10 seconds – cheerleaders, sorry the “dance team” or some strange blue mascot would rush on court to entertain us. The Canadian was disturbed by Cheerleaders. We were sitting a long way from the ground, but in their initial outfits their cleavage was still visible from about five floors up. Later in the game they came back on in something more like Britney Spears business-wear. Presumably to keep things “wholesome”.

If not being distracted by dancing or amusing mascot-antics in the time-outs, the cameras would sweep the seating and you’d watch the big screens as people were encouraged to dance, or kiss, or wave. I’m not sure if there was a prize beyond your face being plastered on a really big screen.

And at half time? Baby-racing. Kiddies crawling along a strip from one parent to another. Two rounds of heats and a grand final with a $300 prize. It could only have been better if you could lay bets on it. Though my kid would have been the one who crawled half way down the course, took a 90 degree turn out onto the basketball court and sat down and looked bemused. None seemed frightened by the noise.

Oh, and I asked the Belgian to get me “a small sprite”. The smallest available was the size of my head. I had to go the bathroom almost continuously for the second half.

Not that I missed much. It was one of the slowest scoring first halves that either the Wizards or the Pacers had ever had, apparently. There was a cliffhanger in the last six minutes of playing time with the visitors holding a slim lead. The home team, scrambling to catch up, tried to equalise with a 3-point throw in the final seconds of the game, to no avail.

But they weren’t a patch on baby racing.

Bangkok Joe's, Washington DC 

The DC adventure: hitting the town

It’s always fun seeing a city through a friend’s eyes. It’s also fun travelling in a place with a weaker currency than the pound (ie everywhere). While eating out a lot was still an indulgence, it was a far more reasonably priced one.

Led by a Belgian (see yesterday’s entry) the PhD gang hit some great restaurants once the conference buffet dinners petered out. One such establishment was the lovely, and remarkably reasonable, Bangkok Joe’s (see photo). Excellent Thai. We repaired afterwards to the fabulously funky Mie N Yu. Check out the online tour (we were in the Moroccan Bazaar bar).

With my Australian host I saw the inside of several bars, one of the better was Local 16. Including having the experience of a head waitress/bar-person cross the room to give him a hug, have a chat and wave our little party past the ID check to the rooftop bar. (He’s clearly spent some time and money in a number of places.)

And I managed to buy clothes, again. An amazingly sleek grey wool overcoat with duffle-coat toggles and (wait for it) a blue cord jacket with fawn suede elbow patches. Perfect junior academic regalia. My host’s comment on the latter was: “When I heard cord with elbow patches, I feared the worst. But that actually looks like rather funky streetwear.”

A change in my routine

I am attempting to be good this week. Recovering from jet-lag, and still being inspired by the conference and my interviews about my research - it seemed a good time to try and form new habits.

Part of this process is that I’ve come up with a totally new plan of what I want to do for my first year paper, so I’m trying to pull different things together and get a lot of new research done.

So, my new daily routine. Wake up 7.00 or 7.30, 10 minutes yoga followed by a 10 minute run round the sports-ground. Shave, shower, breakfast. Coffee and the online newspapers until 9 am. 9-1 work in my room, mostly writing.

Then lunch from 1-2, and in at the law school library by 2 chasing references, looking things up, photocopying and reading. Leave around 5.30 or 5.45.

This is proving frighteningly productive, and means I am finally and definitely treating the PhD as an office job. Let’s hope it lasts.

Tomorrow: a day at the baby races.

Vietnam memorial, DC 

Coming full circle in Washington DC

Ah, Washington when the cherry blossom is in bloom: when it can be a sunny balmy 21 degrees one day and belting with rain the next.

My time in DC (I got back on Wednesday) was something of a homecoming. The last time I was there, nearly a decade ago, I was a law student competing in the Jessup International Law moot. It was an astonishingly stressful week, but which culminated in my team reaching the grand final. Presenting arguments before the Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge (now my supervisor), a judge of the International Court of Justice and a prosecutor from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was exhilarating. We lost to the State University of Mexico, but managed to walk away with a number of prizes other than the runners-up trophy.

I had never studied international law before the gruelling four months of my life that the Jessup moot eventually consumed. Part of the thrill of even being at the international rounds was that they were held in conjunction with the American Society of International Law conference – the academic conference in the field. People you though of as names on a textbook were all there, milling about, talking.

So, returning to go to the ASIL conference as a PhD student from Cambridge was accompanied by an odd, quiet sense of having come full circle. I wasn’t at all hyped about the Jessup dimension to proceedings until a Canadian friend and fellow Cambridge-Phud type convinced me to go see the final. Not only had she done the international rounds of the Jessup the same year as me, but the problem this year overlapped with both our research interests (the law of the sea, piracy, terrorism and State responsibility).

When we arrived, we wound up watching the final in an overflow room on a giant screen: the big advantage of this being we got an extremely good view of the advocates and close-ups on the judges during questions. What really got me though, was the grand final was an Australian (UQ) against a Malaysian team. There was a strong sense of déjà vu, as I and the Canadian sat and muttered and twitched and whispered comments on points of law to each other. We left satisfied as to which team had won, and decided to look up the result on the web later.

Curiously, I also wound up staying in much the same district, Adams Morgan near Dupont Circle, as I had last time I was in DC. Not a lot appeared to have changed, but with my “native” (Belgian and Australian) guides to the city, the night life was certainly a lot more interesting. But more of that later.

Un-American activities

I wonder if I'm randomly searched at Dulles and my copy of Phillipe Sands "Lawless World: American and the making and breaking of global rules" is found in my hand-luggage whether that will constitute grounds for being summarily deported?

Fun days in international law

"It's great that the law of the sea has got exciting again."

These were the words of a senior academic to me on Tuesday, on discovering that several PhD students working on law of the sea issues had trotted down to London for a symposium on the law of the sea. For a field with a dry, technical reputation the place was - as academic affairs go - buzzing.

WMD proliferation, terrorism, the environment, fisheries disputes have all put the law of the sea back on the agenda in terms of issues with a lot of political currency and academic interest. Of course, it's symptomatic of law that "interesting" usually equates to - "things may go badly wrong sometime soon."

On average, the papers were very good. Presentation quality, though, was variable. Some academics do not make the greatest public speakers.

Anyway, as much as anything it was good to make a few connections, both with senior academics and peers. Similarly, about a month ago I went to a highly informative round table session on the Proliferation Security Initiative at Chatham House - where I was, I think, able to participate in a discussion with academics and other lawyers without coming across as a moron.

And on Tuesday I'm off to the intellectual theme-park that is the American Society of International Law conference in Washington DC for a week. While I'm over there it also looks like I'll be interviewing lawyers in US government agencies who work in my field - and having a supervision meeting in the conference venue lobby to discuss my term's work with my supervisor.

The level of weird in my life just keeps rising.

PS Went punting again today. And watched the new Dr Who episode as it went to air with another Australian brought up on that heady Tom Baker vintage.

Spearing a bike while punting 

A fine three-day weekend

When you’ve suffered through a five month British winter, even when you did get to go home for Christmas, even when you’ve promised your supervisor a frankly silly amount of work by Monday – nothing is going to keep you indoors when the mercury hits 17c and the sky is pristine blue, like the shrink wrapping just came off.

So, I cheerfully threw my Friday away and got myself out into the sun – snapping some photos included over here under “End of Lent Term”. By far the best moment came with bumping into another couple of sun-delirious Aussie international lawyers. One had just finished applying for research exchange programs to the States, the other had just finished a term’s teaching and had booked a week’s lastminute.com skiing in Austria.

We sat at the riverside near Magdelene college and watched a guy accidentally spear a bike on the bottom of the Cam with his punt pole and drag it up from the weedy depths.

I had Jasmine and Peter up for the weekend from London, and despite abandoning them for a few hours on Friday to go to a formal dinner at Downing, we had a fine old time in Cambrige.

Besides, they gave me a long awaited excuse to tackle a 1999 Royal Hungarian Tokaji I’d been saving for a special occasion (never has a dessert wine been so smooth and apricot-y). For double the fun, we even teamed up with some friends of my sister’s over from Oxford for some Saturday punting action.

I didn’t spear any bicycles, but got us without mishap through an hour of tourist-fuelled mayhem on the river. We were rammed once by an undergrad punting a whale of a barge of a punt, but everyone stayed in the punt, including, happily the guy attached to the punt pole – me.

As always, there was some poor Japanese dude, first time in a punt, at 90 degrees to the current and the traffic just prodding about helplessly with the punt pole while his girlfriend looked amused. I tell you, there's one every sunny summer weekend day.

We happy three also got through a hit-parade of Colleges, pubs and ducked through King’s Chapel and the Fitzwilliam Museum, and more or less rounded off the weekend in Cambridge with an outstanding pub lunch at the Free Press, one of the few non-smoking pubs in Cambridge.

Anywhere three people can have two courses and wine for £40 is great by me, especially when the lamb shank portions are so huge Jasmine had to declare defeat.

Very full of food and sleepy now, time for some West Wing DVDs and an early night.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a fabulous day for international law: I’m certainly well rested and gloriously fortified for it. If it's sunny again though, my productivity may be ruined. (My flatmates have been checking sites obsessively: weather.com is picking rain; bbc.co.uk/weather is backing sun. Go figure.)

Leaving the house for a 1920s Jeeves and Wooster party, Sunday 

Keys and porters, once again

So I lost my keys on Wednesday. I’d just been to Oddbins on Kings Parade with a friend to buy a bottle to take to the Blind Wine Tasting Society Annual Dinner (it was super, thanks for asking) – unlocked my bike, cycled down the Road to King’s, unlocked my lock, looped my lock through front wheel and frame and went into the King’s café.

Forty minutes later – no keys and a stationary bike. I checked, neither Porters nor café staff had seen them. So I wheeled my bike (on it’s back wheel only) round to college. It had gone five and the workshop was closed. The Porter’s bolt cutters had weary old blades that came about 2 mm short of meeting in the middle – making it impossible to completely slice the cable core of my lock.

So, I dumped it, mutilated lock and all in North Court, borrowed a gown and went to grad hall in turtle-neck and cords. (I had a guest, a lawyer from Queensland who did the LLM with me last year. We were joined in the bar afterwards by two medics. Three words: very messy night.)

The next day I finally managed to catch one of the maintenance guys in the workshop as opposed to out on call. The workshop is through an old stairwell, round a corner, down three flights of stairs and through a cage door. Getting my bike down there – less than super fun.

Seeing a maintenance dude sever those last 2 mil of cable with an angle grinder: fun. Orange sparks everywhere and a safety briefing amounting to: “You probably shouldn’t look straight at this.” Then a ride back up to the garage in the maintenance lift. (Thanks for telling me earlier.)

Oh, and my bike now has a combination lock.

On seeing the new lock one friend said: “Aren’t you afraid of it getting stolen now you have a thinner lock?”

“My bike is basically a mouldering piece of crap,” I replied. “I doubt anyone’s going to want it that much.”

“I thought it was your trusty steed.”

“Oh it is. I just have no illusions that my trusty steed is anything other than a mouldering piece of crap.”

At which point she offered to sell me her bike when she leaves in the Summer. Farewell, trusty steed.

Dr Who and class

Most of the actors playing the Doctor played a slightly foppish eccentric, who if not exactly an aristocrat, certainly had an RP accent and a distinct belief that the rules did not apply him.

One of the delightful things about Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor (yes, I’ve cheated and seen the new episode) is that he has a Northern accent. In his really interesting interview on the BBC website he displays a great sensitivity towards the show’s place in UK culture. He talks about the innocence of the time in which the character was born, an innocence in the face of rapid technological change. He also speaks about his own youthful enjoyment of the show as escapism, but feeling distanced as a council-estate kid from the Britain the foppish Doctor moved in. Eccleston also comments that he wanted to portray a Doctor who was neither assertively working class, nor an aristocrat, but somewhere between. (Apt, really, for the outsider the character should be.)

With a very light touch, the new Doctor Who series is negotiating issues of class and reaching out a little more directly to the child Eccleston was. The Doctor’s new companion, Rose (Billy Piper) is an assertive, self-confident girl who’s left school without A-levels. She lives with her mother (no visible Dad), works in a department store and has a black boyfriend.

In a gorgeous moment she asks why, if the Doctor’s an alien, he has a Northern accent. “Plenty of planets have a North,” comes the reply. Not only does the Doctor now have a regional accent, he has relatively unremarkable (even faintly cool) dress sense. Eccleston in his leather jacket is going to be the first Doctor since Pertwee to completely spurn a hat, and could actually walk down Oxford Street and catch the tube without anyone batting an eyelid.

The initial episode, or the edit of it circulating the internet, has some problems. The incidental music is heavy-handed, the special effects variable, the sense of humour occasionally far too slapstick. However, it has an exuberant sense of fun, and some genuinely creepy moments. It honours the old show, without being subservient. It brings back that sense that the real world is a strange place, that at any moment an eccentric seeming-Englishman might burst from a flimsy wooden blue box and transport us into a dangerous world of adventure.

I’m rather looking forward to it.

Back from the trenches

The play ended Saturday, and I’m still tired. Also, I’m realising how many things I foolishly said “yes” to, on the basis that they were in that infinite expanse of time marked “after the play”. So, this week I have two graduate halls (Wednesday, Thursday), a cast reunion (Friday), possibly a house party (Friday), the blind wine tasting society annual dinner (Saturday) and a Jeeves and Wooster themed gathering to read Wodehouse (Sunday).

I’ve also organised a “people’s direct action committee for cake”, to see that it is possible on Thursday’s at 4 pm to eat cake in graduate common room in college. So yes, still tired, still shaking my second (third?) cold of term and still procrastinating.

I did, foolishly, attempt some research today. After spending a few hours writing in the morning my afternoon consisted primarily of an hour spent chasing down a footnote to an irrelevancy.

This took me to that place where all good intentions go to die, the University Library. I understand the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a marvel of architecture. The Cambridge UL is a marvel of hideousness and was used as the exterior of the Ministry of Truth in a French TV production of “1984”. (True.)

The bookstacks are of the ugly metal shelving cabinet variety, and have very narrow spaces between. There are ugly green carpet squares on the floor, and lights on timer dials one can never find. In the South Front section of the building the actual corridors at the head of stacks are so narrow it is only possible to sit across the short side of a table while consulting a book.

Admittedly, there are some nice reading nooks on the ground floor and the rare books room is pretty. But the main stacks – claustrophobia, seventies archival ugliness and the pervasive smell of dust.

In addition, the e-catalogue is not entirely reliable pre-1978. The old catalogue consists of huge books with tiny slips of paper pasted in in three columns and runs to hundreds of volumes. I kid you not.

Some people complain about the modernity of the law library: bring it on I say.

The Home Front


Rifle drill (me far left) 

My flatmates rock. They threw me flowers at curtain call tonight: tulips and lilies. They kind of caught me in the head, but never mind.

The front two rows of stage right were college friends. A trifle intimidating, but the Americans loved the “Texan pirate” accent I attempt for my American role.

Anyway, some extremely good photos from the play are now up over here. I can’t claim credit for them, they were taken by a photographer for one of the two student papers here. The one of me sitting and reading featured in today’s rather favourable review. I was praised for my “confidence”, though my name was misspelled.

What is it they say about publicity?

For those who don’t know “Oh What A Lovely War!” it’s a musical satire of the first world war (and implicitly, all war) but is framed as an end-of-the-pier Edwardian pierrot show (hence the clown outfits), which becomes more militaristic and dark as it progresses.

News from the Front

"Oh What A Lovely War!", despite a major last minute crisis, is playing to full houses and an amazing reception from audiences. We’re two nights down and three to go.

The rewards of sacrificing up to 12 or 15 hours a week on rehearsal over the last 5 or 6 weeks are becoming wonderfully apparent as the show goes off each night largely without a hitch.

The hideous crisis, though, was that we’re doing a musical with live piano and drums accompaniment and the night of the technical rehearsal our pianist fell really ill. By the next morning he’d been hospitalised with sort of stomach infection, the poor guy.

As a friend of the director and producer, I spent the morning of the dress rehearsal frantically e-mailing musicians (then friends of friends of musicians) while they chased around Cambridge. Eventually I got an ad out on a musicians’ e-mail list – and we found someone who knew the piano score for the show already, so all was well.

And the show really has come together. The liveliness of the Edwardian popular songs and comedy in the first half are going over really well in the intimate (and very oddly shaped) space of the Corpus Playroom, and contrasting nicely with the much darker humour of the second half.

It’s also fabulous that we’d sold out the run, other than 20 seats on the first night, before the show opened – and not only sold out the first night, but had to turn people away. True, the venue only sits 80 or 90, but over a 5 night run it’s still a big achievement. (Our producer is a PR genius.)

I’m really beginning to relax into my second-half role of Sir Douglas Haig, and have got some praise for my surprisingly convincing “rah rah” toff’s accent. I did come out with an utterly Australian “ab-Zurd” instead of the UK RP “ab-Surd” as a British naval officer on opening night, but otherwise I’m giving the order to “AD-vance” (with a short plosive "a") instead of a drawling “ad-VAH-nce” nicely. My comic accent for the American war profiteer (think John Wayne meets a pirate in Texas) is also playing well.

The cast is amazingly talented, and has bonded really well. We don’t so much whistle as we work (we have 20 minutes to get-out the set and all props before the late show comes in) as sing tunes from the show.

I’m quite exhausted, but loving every bit of it. As with reading Sir Isaac Newton last term, though, I still get a really stupid buzz out of being an Australian in Cambridge playing significant figures from British history.

Revenge of the empire, wot.

I don't believe it ...

It's taken just over two years of on-line publishing to achieve (and several months of private writing before that), but I've done it. I've finished a first draft of Naylor's Canberra.

It's been a long, long trip and I hope if you've been reading and have made it this far, I hope you've enjoyed it. If you have any comments on this first draft of Naylor please do leave a comment or e-mail me at reallyquiteunlikely AT yahoo DOT com DOT au.

In fact, please leave a comment even if you're just one of the silent, regular readers. It would be great to know how many people the Naylor project has reached.

I'm off to cycle through snow and help deal with theatrical crises now.

PS A shout out and special thanks to Marissa (for support, and setting in motion the train of thought that culminated in Naylor's Canberra), Jason (for regular comments, and equally regular badgering every week I missed) and Dan at quantum meruit (for regular comments, and legal advice when I got rusty).

I am the logistics king!

Two recent examples of why I manage to top most of my friend's list of "most scarily organised people."

(1) I have managed to organise a group booking of 20 for one of the smaller, but very pleasant, May Balls - thus securing everyone a discount-priced ticket. (Discounts were for groups of 10. Just try imagining the logistics, and potentially the politics, of putting together 2 groups of *exactly* 10.)

I am even doing reasonably well so far at rounding up payment from everyone, thus avoiding footing a 1300 pound bill on my own. (Gulp.)

All this while spending around 13 hours a week rehearsing a play that has led me to, as I've put it, "cancel my life" from 6 pm Thursday gone to 11 pm Saturday coming. (PhD, what PhD?)

(2)Speaking of the play, an emerging issue in "Oh What A Lovely War!" was props management - every character each actor plays (and most have 6+) has different props and hats. Multiply that by a dozen actors in a small space and it's - well, primordial chaos, really.

Anyone would think there was a war on.

I happened to be the first to think of, and give breath to, the blindingly obvious thought: "Wouldn't it be great if everyone brought in a cardboard box to keep all their hats in?"

Result: I am still hailed as a logistical genius.

Small ideas, executed with little fuss. Some days its amazing what will impress people.

Naylor tomorrow, with luck.

But the War commences Tuesday, so maybe not.

Dining all Blade Runner style at the Science Musuem, London. 

A weekend in the Metropolis

It’s been snowing in Cambridge. OK, not in a way Canadians do anything but fleer and scoff at, but since Sunday there have been regular flurries of snow, which mostly just turn to slush.

You know you’ve acclimatised (or had a couple of pints), when at closing time you’re standing outside a pub in nought but a wool jumper and brown velvet jacket (well, and trousers and such obviously) chatting amiably while the snow settles on you. Fortunately, you can usually brush it off before it melts, making it much more convenient than the rain if you’ve forgotten your Gore-Tex.

Anyway, there was also the odd snow-speck while I was in London over the weekend, visiting Jasmine and Peter. The number of guys I know from undergrad in Canberra who are now in Washington, New York, or London/Cambridge/Oxford is getting spooky, but is also rather cool.

The nicest part of the weekend was just staying with old friends and taking it easy. I’ve been a little anxious about Phud progress this term, and hadn’t left my tiny home-law-school-college triangle of Cambridge for a month. Saturday was the least disturbed sleep I’ve had in ages: seven hours, out like a baby. Funny the amount of security old friends can give you when you’re a long way from home in an environment as weirdly transitory as graduate study.

That and it was nice to have a huge hot bath (and brilliant Chinese take-away, mmm … duck pancakes).

Sunday we hit a Café Rouge for breakfast, and tramped ourselves footsore about the Science Museum, which had Stephenson’s Rocket, sunflowers being preserved in something that remained liquid at – 15 degrees centigrade, and the weird Blade-Runner café pictured above. Next door the Natural History Museum was a weird fusion of high-tech multi-media madness, dioramas clearly assembled in amateur taxidermy hour, and elegant Victorian cabinets full of what happens when you let nineteenth century Britons explore foreign lands, “discover” strange new creatures and kill and stuff them.

The Dodos next to a weird combination of sea-dwelling dinosaur skeletons and a cabinet full of stuffed hummingbirds looked exactly like the one in that episode of “The Goodies”. The dinosaur exhibit was also rather cool, the skeleton in the lobby being a special favourite.

The early evening passed in Kensington pub, where I got to catch up with a variety of LLM and undergrad friends, all now lawyers or management consultants in London. Gosh only knows how, but alcohol was consumed and the event horizon of my return to Cambridge kept receding. Yummy bar snacks didn’t help.

Jasmine and Peter eventually got me reunited with my luggage and back to Platform 9¾ at Kings Cross, where I bumped into a college friend just back from skiing in France with his family (as you do). Somehow all four of us managed to stand on the platform trading bad jokes until it was time to find seats for trip back.

A most satisfactory weekend.

Just like the Dodo from The Goodies! 

A late Valentine’s day story

Thanks to Nichole for putting me onto this wonderful piece of US constitutional law from Geogia, where a state law criminalizes "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" suggestions made by telephone. County prosecutor Inez Grant had the unrewarding task of defending this rather … Southern … piece of morals legislation in the face of the constitutional protection of free speech before Justice Robert Benham of the Georgia Supreme Court. The judge mused aloud as to whether a salacious Valentine’s day call to your romantic partner could land you in jail.

"You need to know," Grant told Benham later, that a lascivious telephone call to your wife could bring prosecution.” Benham thought a moment and deadpanned, "I'll pick her up and talk to her in person."

This apparently brought the house down. It wasn’t the only spontaneous outburst during the case:

Most of the court members appeared highly skeptical of the law's constitutionality. When Grant first brought up her argument that the state could regulate telephone speech because it regulates telephones, Justice Carol W. Hunstein exclaimed, "What?"

Indeed. This would imply that anything the state could regulate excludes human rights protections … in which case why would you have constitutionally guaranteed rights at all? They’d just be rather pretty little statements that didn’t actually apply to limit State power.

The ruling isn’t out, but I suspect the right to make lascivious phone calls will prevail.

Half-size Naylor, again

This week's Naylor is a bit short once more, due to a weekend in London (of which more later).

We're very, very close to finished now ...

We’ve done it now

US foreign policy has summoned an “axis of evil” into being, as Iran and Syria, nations without a lot in common – other than marginal status in the world community – have declared a mutual defence pact.

The problem is, you just can’t bully a State into giving up nuclear aspirations, and it’s inevitably going to be counter-productive. Think of it this way, you feel threatened by the US, the world’s largest nuclear power. It has the capacity to nuke you into non-existence and leave your territory glowing for several centuries more or less at will.

Substantial disincentive to acquiring nuclear weapons, no? Well, no. Owning a few nuclear devices and having the capacity to project them as far as a key US ally (read Israel, the UK, Saudi Arabia, etc) is all you need. Mutually assured destruction is never going to be a strategic option for you, but the capacity for limited retribution if a nuclear strike is launched against you might still be all the deterrent edge you need to feel an awful lot safer.

Then it becomes a chicken and egg diplomatic issue. Do you persuade these guys to abandon WMD ambitions by first integrating them into the mainstream of the international community, or do you refuse them that privilege until they agree to dismantle their nuclear programs in a verifiable and irreversible way?

Personally, I’d like to see the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) given more time to work on a diplomatic solution with Iran. The best outcome would be if that process was lent an urgency by US intransigence and pressure on the Security Council to impose sanctions. A “look you can talk with us, or stay out in the cold and get beaten with a stick by the other guy” approach.

Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have made much headway yet.

A remarkably Cambridge kitchen conversation

Sunny Californian flatmate: "Hey, how's the cold?"

Doug: "Mostly better. I've assigned my residual barking cough its own name and personality."

Flatmate: "What've you named it?"

Doug: "Ponzo the trained seal."

Flatmate: "Ponzo? Isn't that from Waiting for Godot?"

Doug: "Very possibly."

Flatmate: "As in Ponzo and Lucky, slave-owner and slave?"

Doug: "Which was the slave-owner again? Ponzo or Lucky?"

Flatmate: "Ponzo, which is totally appropriate in this case."

Doug coughs with a seal-like bark, then asks: "How so?"

Flatmate: "Because the cough totally owns you, not the other way around, my friend."

Father and son, spending quality time 

I blame Lyn (because blaming old friends beats shouldering responsibility)

What if your Dad’s job was saving the world? What if adolescence involved the prospect of not only growing hair in new and interesting places and seeing the opposite sex in a whole new light, but developing super-powers?

Why the hell am I thinking about these issues?

I blame Lyn, of course.

I stayed chez Lyn in Balmain on my way back to Cambridge, part of it on a wet Monday, with the unfortunate consequence that swimming at the Dawn Fraser pool was out, sitting around with Lyn’s comic and magazine collection for the morning was perilously easy.

Lyn’s been responsible for a number of my graphic novel buying relapses. Just when I thought I’d straightened out at uni after several comic-free years, she reintroduced me to “The Sandman”. I then managed to slide back into the comics-for-grown-ups market for some years, but kicked the habit on arrival in the UK as financially perilous for a student.

Then of course, over the break, I managed to wind up seeing “The Incredibles” three times. All of which is by way of saying I’ve made the financially ruinous discovery of “Invincible” – a super-hero comic about 18 months old (scroll down if you click through on the link). Both Invincible and The Incredibles have an interesting take on a newish theme – the super-hero genre as a vehicle for stories about family.

This is actually quite subversive of the genre. When you think about it, most classic super-heroes have absent fathers. Batman’s was murdered, Superman’s left on another planet. Wonder Woman never had a dad (the mysteries of reproduction on the all female Paradise Island never being entirely clarified) and Spider Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, is largely defined by his relationship with his dead uncle Ben.

By contrast, Bob Parr (Mr Incredible) is a man frustrated by his job but one who, when liberated to resume doing what he does best, realises his self-obsession was damaging his family. He’s a supportive father who learns to stop projecting onto his kids.

Nolan Grayson (Invincible’s dad) is simply cool: a supportive, kind but firm presence who’s always home for dinner (unless he’s trapped in a parallel universe). When Invincible as a series gets interesting is when rebelling against your father means standing up to his plans for taking over the world to save it from itself.

The Incredibles and Invincible also take a delightfully nostalgic view of the super-hero genre before the grim-and-gritty fad of the 80s. Both were prepared to flirt with whimsically stupid names for supporting characters (“Gazerbeam” or “Omni-Man”), and I love that in Invincible one can turn a page and find a gleeful depiction of an alien invasion underway. It doesn’t have to be foreshadowed, or explained, it’s assumed to be just another day at the office for superheroes.

It’s all so geeky, but rather charming. Besides, I’m entitled. I was sick recently.

(Yes, Lyn, I re-read my Sandman collection, too. So there.)

The birthday-present mug, the local movie guide 

Slouching towards a conclusion

Okay, I may not have gotten much of anything done in the last week of flu (except reading comics ... and OK, dissenting opinions in the Lotus Case ... and watching old episodes of West Wing), but I have kept the Naylor's Canberra crime serial moving towards a conclusion.

Feedback on where I'm taking this is, as ever, most welcome.

Half-size Naylor

Sorry this week's Naylor is rather short, I'm a bit under the weather.

I'll see if I can add to it later in the week. At the very least, it wraps up a good chunk of the plot.

Only a week or two off finishing now, I think.

Honestly, not every day is this indolent

Dateline: Monday.

Wake 6.11 am, involuntarily. Attempt to resume sleep. Admit defeat circa 6.45 and rise to greet the day. When 9 am arrives and all I’ve done is some yoga, shaved and showered, dressed, had breakfast and browsed an article – I suspect my morning routine has become to elaborate.

That or checking my e-mail and on-line papers before breakfast is a bad idea.

Hit the law school shortly before 10 am. Locate the court submissions and transcript for the Lotus case (1927) – realise the whole proceedings were conducted in French. Proceed to read Counsel for France’s submissions – slowly.

Decide to read the (translated) judgement and some contemporary articles. 12.50 and my brain is caving in.

Repair to MCR at College to eat sandwich, assist fellow grads with crossword and realise that as treasurer of a seminar series I owe a someone a cheque for eight pounds that is well overdue.

Return to law school for PhD seminar. Who knew neo-Arisotelean jurisprudence could be so controversial? (No, really?)

4 pm – realise the afternoon is a write off, have coffee with friend. 4.45 pm dash home to change, eat something, collect my ISO standard wine tasting glasses. Text the director I will be up to 30 minutes late for rehearsal.

Cycle to Downing College, attend blind wine tasting (5.30 – 7.15 pm).

Arrive at rehearsals for “Oh What A Lovely War!” 30 minutes late, as scheduled.

Leave rehearsal 9.15, amble up street to the launch party for a literary anthology: the venue is a café in a converted church on Trinity Street.

10.30 pm – cycle home. Chain disengages from bike, despite recent repairs. Curse bike. Arrive at security gates at same time as friends, have them let me in, attend to greasy paws, resist urge to kick bike.

11.27 pm – finish typing blog entry and contemplate bed.

Score at half-time: Lifestyle – 3; PhD – 1.

PS Yes, Tuesday was a guilt fuelled binge of writing, reading and indexing as a result ...

The heart of Saturday night: Banana bread

Strange as this may sound, often the only chance in Cambridge during term to take a quiet night in is Saturday. The hazard of intense seven week terms where the pace is driven by hyperactive undergrads is that you might try and hold out too long against the simple truth that you’re not eighteen any more, and need sleep.

The week was packed with the usual frenzy of events, a formal dinner, guest-lectures, rehearsals and the like. Friday I went to rehearsals and a friend’s PhD-completion drinks over karaoke, my regular pub night or female jazz vocals at St John’s College.

So Saturday, I planned to have in, expecting that after dinner – around eight – there’d be someone around to sip tea with and chat. It was faintly disheartening that the place seemed kinda deserted. Then, at about 9.30, I bumped into one of the Californians in the corridor.

“Hey, I’m glad to find life in our flat!” she chirped. “Do you have eggs, I’m making banana bread.”

After a rather random debate about the time at which bananas should be eaten, I traded my last egg for an anticipatory share of banana bread. (For the record, I think of ‘ripe’ as slightly soft and mushy, the Californian backed eating ‘em while the skin still has a tinge of green. I claimed her concept of ripe left a weird texture and aftertaste in my mouth, her view was that I left them until they tasted like floury apples or overcooked potato. Who knew?)

I made tea while the Californian went off to barter for more eggs. By eleven, we had banana bread and six around the table eating it and sipping tea and complaining about how we were all slowly falling asleep.

When I crawled into bed, I was amazed to discover that midnight had crept up unnoticed.

The loaded gun on the mantelpiece in Act I
(or, “It’s my novel, I’ll change the rules if I want to …” )

So, as Naylor’s Canberra grinds towards a conclusion (sorry, hectic start to term) I realised I left something out. “Wouldn’t it be useful if there was a knife lying around in this present scene?” I asked myself. I answered, oddly enough: “Yes, yes it would.”

The problem being that there isn’t a knife, and it kind of breaks the rules of foreshadowing not to have flagged its presence earlier. The simple solution is that this is a draft novel, dammit, and I can go back and stick stuff in if I want.

The problem being, of course, that most people won’t know I’ve altered an earlier post. So, I present without further ado, the cheese knife which now resides in an earlier Naylor post:

On the coffee-table next to her Marina had laid out an improvised cheese platter on a deeply gouged chopping board. She had the dinner-party trifecta of a wedge of soft white cheese (probably King Island brie), a small blue-veined wheel and a stolid yellow block of extra-mature cheddar. They were presented in a workmanlike fashion on the scarred board, crackers on the side, and one had the inelegant choice of a table or carving knife to hew oneself a piece.

Realising I was hungry, I took the smaller knife and a piece of the soft cheese. Camembert, but I was still silently backing Tasmanian origins. By the time I swallowed the silence had grown uncomfortable.

“Marina,” I prompted.

Happy? Now read on.

PS Thanks everyone for comments: I hear the constructive criticism that it's getting a tad exposition heavy. A first-draft hazard, but I'll try and tone it down from here to the ending.

An overdue shout-out, while I'm about it, to quantum meruit for his helping me fudge my way through the insurance and bankruptcy law details of Elliot's back-story.

PPS The new dose of Naylor is up, but unfortunately the exposition is still a bit clunking - hopefully a little more situation-driven than before.

The trusted beast, this time last year 

Reprieve from the knacker’s yard

I’ve developed an affection for my bicycle, not enough to treat it well, you understand, but we’ve had our share of adventures together since I arrived in the UK.

Even though I only bought it expecting it to last a year, it was thus still pretty peeving when the chain kept jumping right off whenever I cycled up (or, occasionally, down) a hill.

The first bike shop I took it to said the gear teeth were wearing out all over, that it wasn’t worth fixing, but if I chose to it’d be sixty to seventy quid.

Ouch.

After another bad chain-jumping experience (the rear mud-guard and shopping basket have been falling off too) I ditched it in a college bike shed and went looking at second hand bikes.

The most fun of my bikeless period was being caught in a snow flurry (it seemed like a storm to me, but the Canadians and Swiss here said it was hardly worth mentioning) while making the 30 minute walk to the law faculty. The novelty of arriving in an ice-encrusted overcoat, or watching snow settle in strangers’ honey-and-caramel hair (I will never understand the lightweight clothes and beanie-less heads of English girls in winter) has not entirely worn off.

I also had some adventures borrowing the downstairs neighbour’s bike to go return some library books and go for one of my slightly-less-intimidating-now-thanks conversations with my supervisor (aka “god”). I’d not been warned about the bungee cord dangling from the luggage rack, which swiftly entangled itself in the gears, getting me as greasy-fingered fixing it as I would have been refitting the chain on my old rattler.

Still, once off an moving, an amazing bike. Sporty, silent, deadly – a shark on two tyres. It could also only have belonged to the downstairs neighbour. I’ve never seen her dress in anything but black, white and silver. The bike, weirdly enough, was black, white and silver.

Collecting the keys from her was another story entirely, involving a plaintive note to would-be bike thieves, which I’ll save for another time.

Anyway, I was finally spared taking my lamed old beast out behind the bikeshed and doing the honourable thing by placing a bullet between the handlebars.

All I can say is, hurrah for an honest bike mechanic and a second opinion. I have now had the pedals’ gear-wheel replaced with a second hand part. This has fixed the chain-jumping problem, though the gears are still a bit dicey. This ten-pound fix has given the trusty old steed an extended lease of life, and the bike guy said he’d give me a trade-in on a new second-hand bike if I wanted to think about that later.

Meantime, it’s so good to have an old friend back, and to be on the road again.

Questionable priorities: kill or cure?

Much as I like to tub-thump occasionally about civil liberties being the first casualty of the war on terror among the western democracies, there are equally disturbing social consequences of defence spending in the ‘new’ security environment. The Guardian writes of the UK that:

Almost a third of all public spending on research is funded by the Ministry of Defence - far more than is spent on research by the National Health Service.
British universities are caught up in a new wave of military partnerships, and young researchers have switched to high-technology weapons-based research in a dangerous atmosphere of commercialisation and secrecy.

The fact that the secretive arms trade remains a principal British export is of real concern, especially given its potential for increasing conflict and instability – in direct opposition to Tony Blair’s ostensible foreign policy priority of acting to prevent grave human rights abuses.

It’s also concerning that more is spent in the UK on weapons research than health. The fact that health and other socially important research should suffer for the sake of government-subsidies to the arms industry is, at best, repugnant.

Naylor

For those who might be wondering what's happened to Courting Disaster, other than an extended holiday and jet-lag, I've been putting my energy towards finishing Naylor's Canberra by crime-novel-by-blog (see new year's resolutions, the last two years running).

Another shortish installment is now up at the Naylor's Canberra site, as the story draws closer and closer towards a conclusion.

Finishing a draft novel while jet-lagged may not be the best way forward, but at least I don't feel like I'm wasting time I could usefully be spending on PhD research ...

Why I love my flatmates 

Forever departing

I can't believe I've been home four weeks and blogged so little, and now I'm leaving with so many things I'd like to set down before I head off, and precious little time. Unfortunately, the free web access at Sydney airport is playing up so I'll have to keep it brief.

In contrast to the mad flurry of seeing people and hopping between cities that was September, I kept this trip back to Oz simple. I think it was the best thing - I'd said my goodbyes for the coming three years, and it was great to have the time with family and old school friends.

In some ways, with one term of the PhD under my belt, everyone's support this trip back has strangely meant more than it did only a few months ago. My family in particular, have been lovely.

Still, in some ways the great joy of the trip has been spending blocks of time with the old friends (and my sister!) who know me best. Everyone's lives are at a stage when so many interesting things are happening, and many have been making their first big change in career. I couldn't be happier with the people my friends are becoming - the same people they always were.

Ah, I'm getting sentimental. I'd best leave it there. I think (fingers crossed) I finally have a decent seat for the flight back - but I'm too superstitious to boast about it in advance.

Holding formation Naylor

I have half an installment of Naylor's Canberra up for the week, I'll finish the week's installment tonight or tomorrow, promise.

Retroblogging 2004

Lyn is right when she says that 2004 was, for most people we know, a momentous year - one that I think we'll all look back on as a turning point. For me it's seen me cement myself in graduate study (making the transition from Masters to PhD student) and equally make a definate commitment to the academic career-path in law. There's also been the huge psychological reorientation of Cambridge becoming "home", a city I while wind up living longer in than any since I was in Canberra.

Personal top 5

Looking back on 2004, I feel enormously grateful and privileged in a number of things, principally being fortunate enough to find funding both for my LLM and now for my PhD. I l know I'm lucky to have succeeded in both, not in that I got there other than on merit - but there are so many equally qualified people competing for these things that there is always an element of luck in the selection. You have a responsibility, in a weird way, to the ten people who didn't get your place.

I was really priveleged being in the last class of graduate students taught by my theory of international law guru. It's a rare teacher who really changes the contents of your head and inspires you to continue what you're doing.

I also had the good fortune to engage in probably more travel than any point since my childhood. Barcelona and Budapest were the two best weeks of my summer. Seeing Singapore, East Berlin, Dublin, Florence, Milan, Prague, York, Edinburgh and the Scottish highlands was also amazing.

Also, in a year of hard work to get the grades I needed to stay on for the PhD, I don't think I missed out on the Cambridge experience. I debated for the Cambridge Union and got back on stage (I need a public performance outlet in my life, and had forgotten how much I enjoyed being on stage). I went to formal dinners and May Balls. (May week is, of course, approximately two weeks in June. You have not seen opulence until you've seen one of the seriously big May Balls.)

I was enourmously lucky in terms of falling into a set of Cambridge communities. My two different sets of "flatmates" in the 2004 calander year have both been fantastic, vibrant, inclusive, interesting people from a variety of educational and national backgrounds. My "law" community has also been good to me: supportive, collaborative colleagues who are fun to drink with. I am particularly grateful, though, for having been accepted by a small, friendly and old College. It's wonderful to be a part of an institution that's cozy without being snobbish and that has a sense of tradition without being stuffy. It may not be the richest college, or the most architecturally beautiful; but it is renowned as the prettiest, and possibly one of the most welcoming. It's nice to feel part of a supportive local "family". One is certainly somewhat institutionalised living in college accomodation, but it's an institution which (refreshingly, after corporate law) makes no demands of conformity.

Obviously, the support of friends and family back home has been incredibly important in coping with the weird culture-shock of being in a place where you speak the language, but are definately a foreigner (if less foreign than some ... )

Okay, that's six - so shoot me.

Resolution (a direly belated entry for blogger idol)

Interesting word resolution, suggesting determination - that you've set your mind on something. So, what am I determined to do this year? I'll content myself with the usual self-obsessed shopping list.

(1) I will finish Naylor's Canberra if it kills me and several innocent bystanders. I will finish it by the end of February, honest. I've been good for the last few weeks. I've managed to post here, here and here and again today.

(2) I will start a new novel - but not start posting on-line until I've gotten enough preparation done. I have three ideas, Naylor's Melbourne, Naylor's Cambridge and a piece of weird-ish semi-Victorian science-fantasy (scattered ideas for which can be found over at the notebook, though the name "Trumpington" has left my thnking - thank goodness).

(3) I will maintain the pace on the PhD. I've had a crackingly productive first term, largely aided by my project growing out of my Masters paper and so not needing to spend the time on background reading and formulating a "proper" topic out of a vague proposal. I've been lucky, but if I can keep the pace I'll have a lot more time to polish the finished product in my third year and can avoid the usual panic.

(4) New hobbies: salsa and wine tasting. I'm determined to learn to dance. Better yet, one of the best salsa classes at uni is on Wednesday night straight after grad hall - this will eliminate after-dinner port and the possibility of having my decidedly rubbery arm twisted into heading up to the college bar for a few pints after that.

Thus exercise, a new skill and a decent night's sleep and productive Thursday can replace overindulgence and a somewhat seedy and slothful Thursday. Taking up wine-tasting on Sunday afternoons, of course, could undo that good work, but it's a pleasant way to learn more about something I already find quite pleasant.

(5) I will travel. Especially to see friends from my Masters year in Europe.

(6) I will get down to London more often and keep in touch with London friends, especially the rapidly increasing contingent of ANU lawyers I know who've moved to London in the last year.

(7) I will try not to grow too obsessive about any of my projects. The great benefit of being a student again is the freedom to pace yourself, follow your interests and maintain a work-life balance.

(8) I will work on finding my supervisor a little less intimidating.

(9) I will set up a discussion group/dinner party with some on the new Master's students on legal theory. Intensely geeky, but a nice way to work while socializing - and good preparation for giving supervisions to undergraduates next year.

(10) I will remember that while a student, I am scarcely impoverished: others are worse off and I need to resume charitable giving.

Other eye-catching resolutions (will be added to over the day):
Daniel

Greetings from jet-lag central (for "blogger idol: travel")

I don't take drugs to alter my consciousness.

Except alcohol, caffeine, over-the-counter pain killers and the occasional large dose of legal theory. This may not be so much a matter of personal morality as naivete. I wouldn't know where to score anything else in Cambridge anyway. Despite doing a lot of amateur theatre with thespy undergrads.

Anyway, I digress ...

I write from an increasingly familiar space to yours truly, jet-lag central. I arrived back Chez the Folks, near Canberra, today after a 22 hour flight from London and an involuntary stop-over in Sydney due to a certain lack of foresight on my part in co-ordinating a connecting flight far enough ahead of time.

This is the third time in three months I've done a 22 hour plane trip. Weirdly, I'm getting used to it - especially weird as I can't sleep on planes. Jet lag has become my most expensive form of altered consciousness.

The main thing I notice is that time becomes a marathon race: I'm always counting off the hours to the end of the flight, the time the next good movie starts on the in-flight entertainment, or on arrival the hours until I can reasonably go to bed and (hopefully) sleep.

Also the small stuff stops mattering at all. I just shrug and go: "Huh, I've lost a travel padlock."

"What do you know, despite being up for 30 hours, I just can't sleep. Let's go downstairs and pester the desk clerk for the right time, then."

"Hurm, just dropped the boxers I was planning to sleep in on a wet shower floor."

Everything happens in slow motion, quite some distance away. I can converse, using stock phrases, and listen with polite intensity (because it requires a weird intensity of concentration to get through simple actions like wrapping a Christmas gift) but am relatively useless for any activity which is not closely supervised.

Other weird side effects include making unguarded personal comments to strangers and crying at movies (neither usual pass times). Both I guess indicate that the emotional filters are down, and the world while oddly distant becomes peculiarly heightened, too.

Still, my biggest achievement in all of this has been (other than not losing any luggage) reading and possibly understanding about 150 pages worth of a book on the history of theoretical approaches to international law.

No honestly, it's considerably more interesting than you'd imagine.

Okay, yes I am still jet-lagged as I write this.


PS Blogger idol 'travel' entries that made me think:
Livingroom
A Dervish's Du`a'
Cliff between the lines

New Naylor

Right, I'm off home for Christmas. Looking forward to an improbably long 40+ hour trip door-to-door, including 22 hours flying insomniac air.

("Drink gin," suggested one friend, as if that's usually a problem.)

Meanwhile, go play with Elliot Naylor. Things are getting worse, you know.

King's Chapel on a perfect winter afternoon 

Australia’s “terror exclusion zone” and reading past the headlines

Much as I am forever cringing at the present Australian government’s general shoot-from-the-lip approach to international law, you’d have thought they’d have learned something from the fiasco over our announcing a policy on pre-emptive strikes against terrorist within neighbouring State’s territory. Of course, Indonesia, Malaysia and others were not best pleased about this, resulting in some furious back-pedalling.

So, it was with some surprise that I read in the The Independent the headline “Australia to impose 1,000-mile 'terror exclusion zone'”:

In a controversial and possibly illegal step, Australia plans to intercept and board ships on the high seas if it believes them to be a terrorist threat.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, yesterday announced the creation of a 1,000-nautical mile security ring around the coastline, extending south of New Zealand and north of Indonesia, far beyond Australian territorial waters.

All vessels that pass through the zone en route to Australia will be monitored, and required to give details of their crew, location, speed, cargo and destination port. Defence and customs officials will be given powers to intercept those suspected of being a threat.
…
Legal experts suggested yesterday that intercepting ships in international waters would contravene maritime law and provoke an outcry.

Don Rothwell, a professor of international law at Sydney University, said Australia was entitled to monitor ships beyond the 200-nautical mile limit of its territorial waters.

But he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: "With the exception of pirate ships and ships that are not flying flags, and one or two very minor exceptions, there is no real basis upon which any country can just stop any ship at all on the highs seas because it does infringe this fundamental freedom of high seas navigational freedom.

"If they are proposing to enforce this zone within the maritime zones of our adjacent neighbouring states, that would really be seen as quite a hostile act."

The Independent’s “security ring” looks like it might have been inspired by The Australian’s “security zone”:

AUSTRALIA is casting a 1000-nautical mile security zone around the coastline as part of a new maritime plan to counter terrorism and protect shipping, ports and oil rigs from attack.

Under the new offshore protection command, the Howard Government will monitor thousands of ships approaching some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and intercept suspicious vessels.
…
Existing navy and Customs ships and resources will be used, but much more will be demanded from international shipping in Australian waters.

The $4 million revamp of maritime security arises from a taskforce that identified threats from the sea as fears increase around the world of terrorist attacks through less secure ports and on vulnerable oil tankers.
…
The US has also introduced restrictions on movement and more exact information about cargo and passengers within its nautical zone and is demanding similar action from its trading partners.

The US has dramatically lifted its demands on shipping within its national waters amid fears of a cataclysmic explosion of a ship carrying chemicals or oil in a crowded port.
…
The Australian Maritime Information Zone, which will extend to 1000 nautical miles, will demand that ships passing through provide details of their journey and what they are carrying.

When ships come within 200 nautical miles they will be required to give even more detail of cargoes, ports visited, ship owners, registration and destination.

Under the new arrangements, due to begin in March next year, a Joint Offshore Protection Command will take responsibility for all offshore security and co-ordinate civilian and military operations.

It will be able to independently order the interception of ships within the information zone, rather than waiting for a specific report, as is the case now.

Then I went to the PM’s website, for the original press release:

Based on cooperative international arrangements, including with neighbouring countries, the Australian Government also intends to establish a Maritime Identification Zone. This will extend up to 1,000 nautical miles from Australia’s coastline. On entering this Zone vessels proposing to enter Australian ports will be required to provide comprehensive information such as ship identity, crew, cargo, location, course, speed and intended port of arrival. Within Australia’s 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone, the aim will be to identify all vessels, other than day recreational boats. The collection and coordination of this maritime information will improve the effectiveness of civil and military maritime surveillance in support of key tasks such as border and fisheries protection, as well as counter-terrorism response and interdiction. The Zone will be managed by the Joint Offshore Protection Command at an additional cost of $4m over four years. The protection of Australia’s oil and gas facilities is a key focus of the Australian Government’s priorities to enhance offshore maritime security.

The critical words here are “[b]ased on cooperative … arrangements … with neighbouring countries” if that’s done the proposal is much less likely to be seen as “hostile”. (Though as Don Rothwell points out, some shipping states might still see these procedures as infringing upon the freedom of the high seas.)

Okay, it’s ambiguous as to whether counter-terrorism interdictions would be limited to the exclusive economic zone (which I think would still exceed Australia’s powers as a coastal state, except to protect oil platforms) or would range out to 1,000 miles – taking in Indonesian and New Zealand territorial waters.

But nothing in the document directly talks about interdictions inside this 1,000 mile zone. That’s pure media hype and shabby research.

So, naturally, you’d expect that our neighbours would’ve been briefed, right? That it would have been explained that this really about gathering information, not asserting a right to land the SAS on ships in their waters in violation of their sovereignty, right?

However, the word on “international law street” is that the Australian announcement took New Zealand by surprise, the Kiwis not previously being aware that their waters were subject to Australian security enforcement. Though it seems they have no problem provided it is only a plan to ask ships for information out to 1,000 miles as they already do that themselves.

Others are less sanguine. Malaysia has already criticised the plan and Defence Minister Robert Hill has had to calm the predictable Indonesian reaction, saying that this is just about protecting offshore oil rigs.

Still, as for diplomacy and selling the message: nice one John, nice one Alexander.

New Naylor

Yep, four days ago after a hiatus of months, I posted a new instalment of Naylor's Canberra. Points to quantum meruit for picking up on the fact unprompted. The concept that there are people dropping by occassionally to see if I've managed to write anything on the novel is faintly terrifying.

But it's that terror I always expected to force me into finishing it. And it's almost finished now, well a scruffy first draft.

I had hoped to have had it done by now, but commencing PhD research sort of ate my head.

I could summarise the plot (again) but will content myself with simply re-hashing the last plot re-hash from October (sorry, it has indeed been a while ... ):

"... for a little over a year, I've been completing a crime novel by installment at a sister site, "Naylor's Canberra", at a rate of about 1,000 words per bite-size installment. Some bits are more polished than others. The first episode is over here.

The story so far? Elliot Naylor, a law graduate, has been refused admission to legal practice for reasons to do with a fatal car accident, and works an under-employed part-time law librarian. A former girlfriend of his is missing, Marina - a highflying political staffer to Milton Dawes, Minister for Justice and Customs. Her father, David Carmichael, a prominent local barrister, hires Elliot to find her before he has to report it to the police in an attempt to keep it quiet and close to the family and avoid scandal.

It seems easy enough, until Elliot begins to dig into David's shady business dealings and close ties to the Minister. Further, Elliot is the first to discover the dead body of someone connected to Marina and, while having an alibi, is the only obvious suspect in the murder inquiry.

On top of that, he decides to investigate the background of one Jeremy Ryder, who has business ties to David Carmichael as well as Canberra's legalised prostitution and pornography industries. Marina and Jenny were both involved in a Ministerial task force investigating sexual slavery - is Ryder somehow connected to the disappearance of one and the murder of the other?

Elliot recieves a good deal of practical and emotional assistance from his flatmate Eva, and his (rather new) girlfriend Danielle. This still does not stop him doing things that are just plain stupid.

Visiting one of Ryder's brothels, Elliot recieves a beating from which he is still suffering. Indeed, his symptoms appear to be getting worse rather than better.

Recently, he has learnt something quite surprising (but definately foreshadowed, I promise) about one of Marina's flatmates' involvement with the murder victim.

He has now also finally heard back on an important piece of research he entrusted to his grandfather regarding Milton Dawes' mother, who lives at the same retirement community as Mr Naylor senior. Read on ..."

Cambridge centre for mathematical sciences 

Doctor Doug, indahouse
(or “a prequel of sorts”)

So, I’ve been teaching this winter school. Four hour-and-a-half classes with five late high-school students from Singapore and Malaysia, in which I planned to cover an introduction to the idea of rules and then international law, the UN Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the World Trade Organisation.

Most lawyers I spoke to said: “Wow, that’s ambitious.”

Most other grad students I spoke to said: “Wow, that sounds interesting. Can I come?”

Both have made jokes about this being the first appearence of "Doctor" Doug, my future lecturer-self.

Four classes over three days has been tiring (and the preparation was very time consuming), but it's been amazingly rewarding. I prepared about 35 pages of notes and materials in two bundles. The kids sat at a horseshoe of desks while I paced around in the middle.

I just had so much fun. They were switched on, engaged, asking great questions. (They stumbled on things like the criminal law defence of duress or the economics/trade law principle of the “free rider effect” from first principles.) They spontaneously started debating among themselves whether WMD was – just as an idea – a good justification for self-defence, and even got into a debate with each other over whether an example of a real case (the 1959 Italian Tractors dispute under GATT law) was “protectionist” or not.

Other than being lucrative, it’s been really reaffirming that what I want to do is teach.

A friend came to sit in on my WTO session (the one I thought would be hardest to teach), and just came up afterwards and said: “You’re going to be a great lecturer.”

It was the kindest thing anyone could have said at that moment.

Now I just have to supervise their “exam” tomorrow morning … it’s printing as I blog.

Christmas dinner (note paper crown and carol sheet) 

Death by eating

I’ve become a binge eater. The Christmas end of Michaelmas term is simply lethal.

Monday last week was the new PhD students self-organised dinner. Tapas at the restaurant upstairs at Bun Shop, the food was not bad and the quantities were unconquerable. Had a pint at the pub downstairs both before and after the meal, and half a bottle of white with it. Then wound up in my kitchen with a course mate talking, demolishing another two bottles, and instructing one of the Californians how to write her media, government regulation and civil society paper.

As the Americans say: “good times.”

Wednesday was the graduate Christmas dinner, photos above, and over here. Carols, great food, wonderful flatmates and friends. Well worth crawling out of bed a week earlier to trudge into the college and manually sign up a dozen nearest and dearest under the baleful eye of a Manciple deeply peeved that people were having the temerity to sign up friends.

Friday did not involve excessive eating, but I did go to the ADC Theatre to catch the Christmas panto (a very, very loose, extremely funny adaptation of “Great Expectation”) and the late show (Harold Pinter’s rather creepy “The Lover”).

Saturday I was the only graduate student at Dr Eden’s commemorative supper. Dr Eden, 21st master of our college, left money by will in 1645 for an annual chapel service, an oration and a dinner in his memory for the fellows and scholars. He left an income in excess of 50 pounds a year, secured by around 80 acres of land in 1645. Allow for inflation, it’s a pretty amazing dinner.

New scholars (ie, me) get invited once only to the supper, and if they attend the chapel service receive the traditional allowance afterwards in the master’s study before dinner.

That allowance is four shillings. Which is exactly what you get. I have four shillings of imperial coinage in a little commemorative velvet drawstring bag with a printed label.

I should mention the Chapel oration. Dr Eden’s will stipulates that the oration be an hour long, in Latin, delivered from memory, on the virtues of civil and cannon law. It is now 20 minutes and in English on a topic of the speaker’s choosing, following a ruling of governing body in the 1960s that had a lot to do with convenience and little to do with estate law.

Dinner was four or five courses (starting with mussels and roast Norfolk pheasant), depending on how you want to count, and involved adjourning for a digestive break before the port and petit fours and fruit course.

I could, apparently, have stayed to drink whiskey until 2 am, but slid off to a birthday party a bit after 11. (I was actually too full of food to drink anything much.)

Tonight I just had the blind wine tasting society’s Christmas dinner. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

This coming week I only have dinner parties Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

I think I need to break out the bigger pants.