Day 1

I've decided that an excellent way to stave off boredom over the course of revising for my Finals in Classics (or 'Literae Humaniores', if you'd rather) at Oxford will be to blog about it. That way, when I am craving human interaction but have to spend another three hours in the library in order to 'finish' something I wish I'd never started, I will be able to vent my frustration via the internet, and no-one will get hurt. I think this is a good plan. 


This could go one of two ways. Either I will blog obsessively every day and you will discover far more than you  ever cared to know. Or it will sustain my interest for a week, and thereafter be consigned to a the Great Big Recycling Bin in the sky. Whichever it is, it will have done its job, so I don't feel too bad involving any unwitting readers in my experiment. Blogging is surely one of the most selfish acts of sharing, with the possible exception of gratuitous facebook status updates (a sin of which I also admit to being culpable).


Anyway. Today started relatively well. I was up before my alarm and was therefore at the library early - even before it opened. Naturally this meant I bumped into my erstwhile professor, Hutch (not his actual name), who is currently on sabbatical writing a book. No big deal. We had a short burst of library/revision 'banter' before the doors opened and all those eager beavers for whom the word 'vacation' means only that there are fewer people stealing their books flooded in (if floods can be composed of between six to ten people). I was the first person into the Gladstone Link, that weird, Star-Trek-style library that someone thought would be a useful addition to the Bodleian. In fairness to it, I have used it an awful lot this term. Today I found an impressive-looking stack worth of books and sat at a desk all to myself from 9am until nearly 12. I did also do some work.   Then I returned and bumped into some friends one after the other, who provided me with my source of human interaction for the morning. So far, so good. After a lunch break I headed to Exeter library with my Ovid file, in order to work out what I was going to revise on Ovid. Turns out there isn't that much, which is reassuring as all my other files are at least twice the size (and in the case of my Greek History file, possible three or four times the size). A quiet afternoon of desperate attempts to convince myself I was working alternating with lapses into complete apathy resolved itself into a mission to find myself some hot water. I have had to move from my nice, big, and above all shared room on the front quad of college into a small, fairly shabby and crucially single room on the back quad for the duration of the vac. In the process of dividing up the shared room, I have lost access to a kettle. This is a serious blow as I have been without tea all day (tea is effectively my life blood and I would have a tea IV if I thought it wouldn't get in the way). Happily my search proved successful and I even managed some more human interaction in the process. 


Here endeth the lesson. Day 1 of many, many more draws to its inexorable close. 


The scene is set. The next post will be funnier (/funny?), promise.