"Lucid and up to a point compelling, but if you reached a point it escaped me."

1. I don’t know if any of you have been blessed with seeing any of the posters/trailers for Eddie Murphy’s latest film, Norbit. Which looks like it might possibly raise a grin or two if you have absolutely nothing to do for an hour and a half. But it makes me cross because what is with the film industry? What is so fucking wrong with being overweight? Why are only thin women film stars, and fat women (or frankly, fairly normal women) destined to remain the comedy value or the Best Friend? Why, for that matter, are we all so hung up on appearance? I am who I am in my head; what I look like on the outside doesn’t really have a great deal to do with it. Whether I am a good or bad person, whether I am mean or generous, funny or serious, clever or stupid, liberal or reactionary: NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with how I look.

2. OMFG. Heroes. The love continues unabated. And now we have hiatus for SIX WEEKS!!! Katie and I hate America now. All we have to cope with in England is a couple of weeks here and there for Wimbledon and snooker…

3. Woohoo – today is my Friday! We’re off to the Full Mooners gig tonight, which is jolly exciting, and tomorrow I have off, which is always a pleasant prospect. But my room (well, both of them) is such a fucking tip that I should probably sort it out. And I need to find the ICL student union office to buy Arcadia tickets, so I will probably do that on Saturday.

4. Guides on Tuesday went off pretty well. When we pack the programme as full as possible, we manage to keep more control over them. They finished off their ‘pennies for pencils’ things (to raise money for Guides in the Ukraine, where a bunch of people are going in the summer to run camps for the Guides there), and then we were preparing things for the Brownie meeting next week. I had them cutting out templates for little boxes for the Brownies to make and decorate (have to find out how many we’ll be having, and check that we have glue etc – fortunately discovered a stash of sticky-back felt in the cupboard, so we can use that to decorate, though I still want to get some sparkly bits as well), Hannah taught them lashing to pass on to the Brownies, and Keira had them making up questions for a running quiz. All the Guides managed pretty well, though L got sent out during notices for being disruptive. M was uber-keen as usual, though Hannah had to tell her off for trying to take over when someone else was doing the lashing. N seemed to actually be back at her normal self, which was a nice change. O also seems to be quite keen (she’s the one who’s just come up from Brownies), though she’s still quite shy about joining in with the others. We sang Thunderation, which they all enjoyed, and we will do it with the Brownies next week. Yoicks. I do love Guides, even though it’s a bit hard work.

5. Jericho was on last night, so it is downloading away. *g* I rang Katie this morning to ask her to find a DL, but she had beaten me to it. The girl’s a downloading guru. But yes, I am hoping for more Stimi. It is my Jericho OTP. Oh, and I was amused and a little bewildered to discover that my Jericho ‘fic’ (yes, that would be the one that was about three lines long) managed to find its way onto the Jericho news comm, espesh when, unusually for me, I had not pimped it anywhere (what with it being about three lines long and not particularly good). Huh.

6. I am reading a very interesting book at the moment, called Confederates in the Attic, about Southern attitudes to the Civil War (sorry, War Between the States or even War of Northern Aggression *g*), which I would highly recommend. Obviously when it comes to the more fact-based reasons behind the war (slavery, essentially), you kind of have to go with the Union on that one, but in terms of the principles of state power over federal power, it’s quite interesting to look at the dynamic there: I remember reading in a Bill Bryson book once about how the whole union of states thing was a bit woolly at first (nobody was particularly keen about signing the constitution, frex), and it’s interesting to consider that the states in the 1860s didn’t necessarily think of themselves first and foremost as ‘American’, and more ‘Carolinian’, or whatever. I think it would be worthwhile researching further, and I may do so.

7. Rah. I always reach my seventh thing and find I have nothing else to say. We had lasagna leftovers last night. Yum. Buzzcocks was very funny.

"Well, you're not in monastic history, that's for sure."

The crap thing about Oxbridge is that it’s such a notable achievement to get in (for most people), such an important mark in one’s career in life, that leaving becomes an equally – if not more – important mark. It’s such a defining thing. Most of the time I don’t care that I didn’t graduate from university, because I bop around in my life and it’s quite jolly, and I think that generally I made the right decision at the time. But God, I do regret it sometimes. And I think it’s mostly in a melancholy, sentimental kind of way, because I wanted so desperately to go, and because the concept of ‘Oxford’ had been such a part of what I read and so forth, but I wish that I could have experienced Oxford the way they do in books, and as so many people seem to do in real life, rather than as I did, which was mostly mulching around being fabulously depressed and living in some sort of crazy dreamworld bubble type thing. And I read books or articles that interest me, or see a play, or watch a TV programme, and I have such a yearning to study it, but I *don’t* and I know that I never will, because I never seem to quite want it enough to do anything about it, and any attempts at independent study have been abject failures, because I have no self-discipline. If I hadn’t been depressed, would I have managed to graduate? I don’t know. I certainly had the brains for it – even at my most self-loathing, I never really doubt that (except for that one time, Xanthe!) – but I don’t know if I had the commitment. I think I probably would have done, out of habit if nothing else. I’d have got a second class degree, probably a 2.ii, because I’ve always been a bit lazy, and known that if I’d really worked hard, I could have got a First. But I went a bit mad and sort of lost touch with reality, and that was that.

Posner lives alone in a cottage he has renovated himself, has an allotment, and periodic breakdowns. He haunts the local library… and has a host of friends, though only on the internet and none in his right name, or even gender. He has long since stopped asking himself where it went wrong.

I may stop listening to The History Boys now. It is depressing me ever so slightly.

ETA - Sorry to keep banging on about this time after time. Still, that's sort of the point. It's hard to let it go completely. Pants.