That is not what I meant at all (Part II)

The highlight of today was our acquisition of a new fridge-freezer - frost-free. no less, so no more of that cooking five hundred frozen peas because they all stuck together inseparably in the bag. No sir.

So, I thought I’d share with you, dear Reader, a selection of the instructions which Samsung so kindly provided in the manual which came with Mr. Fridge (as my mother has affectionately christened him - he stands next to Mr. Bin and across the room from Mr. Microwave):

“Never use the combustible sprays like lacquer and paint near the machine for those will cause blasting hazard.”
“When the refrigerator works in malfunction, or is damaged, operation shall be stopped immediately.”
“In case of discard the refrigeratory, please discard the door seal at first.”
“Glass separation is moveable and very heavy. Please take care of children no touching lest injured.”
“In case of refrigerator door keeping open in a long time, it will make “Hooting” sound”.

And my personal favourite:
“Do not store the items with rigorous temperature requirements, such as blood serum, bacterin, academic data and so on.” Well, now I know where not to put my doctorate, I suppose.

A cold coming we had of it

Gosh. So, I owe D my life, soul and anything else, mortal or immortal, that he should care to ask of me. For indeed, he spent three hours or so helping me move out of my room. How can I possibly have amassed that much stuff? I mean, the books I understand - they breed on my shelves (I try gender segregation, but then what do you do with anthologies, or books by Anon.? Tricky.) But what was I doing with three different tubes of foot lotion? Or five types of laundry-washing bag? Never mind the three bags full that went to the charity shop on Wednesday, or the two bags of food I left with D, or the box I have in storage in College, or the crockery which is on my shelf in the MCR dining room. I think I need to downsize. A lot.

The journey back was uneventful, though of course Wales is immediately rainy and cold (I’m not kidding!) And we managed to unpack the hire car with little trouble and only minimal sticking my arse out into the street to get stuff out (see photo - cheers, mum.) The damn thing was like a tank (car, that is, not arse) - though D, being American, thought it was quite dinky when he saw it.

And, having left the cultured sophistication that is Oxford, I return home to find that Swansea has not changed at all in its sense of propriety and moral values, as evidenced by the headline of the local newspaper. Good to be back.

Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Today, in between all the packing and stuff (trying to fold up one of those wire-framed laundry baskets that should fit into its own front pocket. Yeah, right.) I managed a bit of time off to visit the University parks with D and K and their simply fantastic D-O-G Wookie. Naturally, we conformed to our species types - D, K, and I bouncing around chasing a frisbee and making fools of ourselves, while Wookie sat sedately in the leafy shade of a big tree, occasionally exchanging remarks with passing fellow-canines. Admittedly, the poor guy did manage to get himself hit by an ill-thrown frisbee (well done, D!) but moved himself quite sedately to a safer spot with dignity unruffled.

Tonight, then, I met with Y to say goodbye - she’s going back to Canada for good at the beginning of August, which is pretty sad for me, though should be very exciting for her - new job, new city, all that stuff. And I suppose now I’ll have someone to visit in Canadia - check out all the quaint accents!

Other than that, I’ve been wandering around in a bit of a daze trying to remember the five million things I always want when I’m at home that just can’t be found in Swansea. Like nice olives. And books. Lots of books. That kind of thing.

Children's voices

Harry Potter night! I have to admit that, despite my advanced age, I’m a sucker for the Harry Potter books and all the assorted paraphernalia that goes along with them. Tonight, that meant owls. Real ones. And I got to hold one!

But, more importantly, my fabulous ex-flatmate T came to visit to take me to dinner. Since we’ve not seen each other for two years, this was quite an experience, and it took us a good few hours to catch up. I think my favourite story of the night was that, now working in the archives at Lambeth Palace**, he challenged George Carey for identification when he was trying to gain admission. OK, so he’s a Catholic (T, that is, not Carey - no great scandal to expose), but still. T’s excuse was “he looks much bigger on TV - which isn’t fair”. Well, I suppose at least Rowan’s not in danger of the same thing happening - what with the unmistakeable eyebrows, and all.

**N.B. Glossary for Catholics, Canadians, and other heretics: Lambeth Palace = the Archbishop of Canterbury’s HQ; George Carey = former Archbishop of Canterbury; Rowan (Williams) = current Archbishop of Canterbury; Archbishop of Canterbury = head of the Church of England; Church of England = does exactly what it says on the tin, but with refinement, cucumber sandwiches, and incense.

He do the police in different voices

Met the delightful DK for a drink this afternoon, amidst box-packing and other related activities, to say goodbye before he goes of to Corsica for a week or two. I am not jealous. I am not jealous. I am not jealous…

Tonight was pub with JJ and R - we encountered one of the wonderful Thames Valley police vans on our way down Cornmarket - their slogan is “Reducing crime, Disorder, and Fear” - you just have to love it.

Leave me sitting pen in hand

It's weird. Everyone's leaving Oxford for the Summer. Ok, admittedly, I'm leaving myself on Sunday, but that doesn't change the weirdness of it all.

I spent part of this afternoon with the lovely J (who is leaving, naturally) shopping for birthday presents and drinking frappucinos. And I do have to thank him for the most wonderful bit of corporate silliness I've heard in a long time, which came in the form of his itemised phone bill from Carphone Warehouse, in which the only itemised charge was the charge for sending the itemised phone bill.

Do you have anything more ridiculous to share, dear Reader? Please do so - I could use a laugh now that I'm mouldering away here alone!

Any meaning we can assign to happiness

When I moved in to a new College last year and was feeling a bit new and fragile, my friend RL offered me possibly the best advice I've ever received - "smile whenever you see a Royal Mail van". After that, every time I saw one, even if I was feeling really down or tired or dispirited I made myself smile, and now it's become second nature. Which is great, because you really do see a lot of Royal Mail vans around the streets of Britain. So, I recommend this to everyone - take an incongruous but relatively common object, and invest your happiness in it! Americans - maybe those yellow school buses; Canadians - I don't know, moose or something? (N.B. I'm assured that the plural is actually "meece".)

Wrestle with words and meanings

How can my Latin primer keep a straight face (books have faces, don't you know?) when giving me, as an example of the vocative, "O, puer magne!", translating this as "O, big boy!"? Well, I suppose I'll know what to say next time I'm trying to get a Classicist into bed... "C'mere, puer magne!"

Just to warn you, there is a law, which states that communal kitchens and fridges have to stink. A refinement of this law proves that, the greater the number of students (particularly those below the age of twenty-five) who use said kitchen and fridge, the worse will be the smell. My kingdom for a clean kitchen!

Babble the same speech without need of meaning

Oh yeah, and there are people having loud fights and kicking things on the street outside my window, and there's a damn massive wasp on my mirror. Strictly speaking, it wasn't necessary to blog this, but I wanted a) more sympathy from my friends, increasing the chance of an imminent neck-rub and b) an excuse for posting a gratuitous Jude Law picture. Again.

Sweet dreams, dear Reader, and may the heavens rain down radiant jewels and sweetmeats upon you.

Ecstasy is too much pain

OK, I'm making a plea here - please, please, please will someone come and rub my neck? The chairs in the library are really hard and my back hurts a lot. Poor me. (N.B. this is only a plea to people who actually know me - no random perverts or anything, please. Unless you're Brad Pitt or, at a pinch, George Clooney, in which case I'll make the sacrifice.)

I've started learning Latin today, and made the surprising discovery that "fiduciary" doesn't mean even vaguely what I thought it meant. I now realise how deprived I've been by not having a classical education. I'm doomed to make a fool of myself with North Americans who use long words for the rest of my life. On the plus side, though, I've taken the first step towards being able to read Jerome's Vulgate all by myself. Is it sad that I'm quite excited by that thought?

Oh, yes, and Jude Law - if you're reading, you can apply for the neck-rubbing job too...

That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.

Just a short voyage into cyberspace today, to discuss misprints. Yesterday, I read in an article that someone (probably some whingeing medieval) was "stick of love". Well, aren't we all, dear? My mother also provided me with the fabulous "King Cock" as a subtitler's error for "King Kong" on the television - although one has to wonder whether someone isn't perhaps having his little joke there in the BBC studios... But back to the point, which is that I am simply astounded by the amount of howlers I read in academic articles. The "stick" one was at least amusing, I will admit, but of the forty-odd articles I've read in the past few days (yes, that was me boasting, in case you missed it), a good proportion of the authors or typesetters seem unable to distinguish, for example, between words such as affect and effect, practice and practise, and so on. I mean, really. If you're writing an article, on the subject of English literature of all things, you could at least try to be literate, eh?

Sorry.

To be fair, at least misprints have provided me with perhaps my most amusing medieval-articles moment, in a fine essay discussing the status of the medieval couple as "man and wide".

He who has seen what has happened and who sees what is to happen

I’ve been watching Alias - the one where Jennifer Garner gets to wear lots of revealing dresses and silly wigs and run around pretending she’s a spy, right? And, well, it kinda got me to thinkin’ (as the Americans say in their folksy idiom). Now, I’m the first to admit that perhaps I read too many thrillers, and I’ve always been a big fan of James Bond, but I think it’s having a weird effect on my brain because I’m starting to be seriously paranoid. There are bugs in my radio, listening devices in my MP3 player, and that little hole in the wall above my bed? Obviously a concealed microphone. There are people reading my text messages and emails, and I’m longing for the day when that self-destruct paper they had on Mission: Impossible back in the seventies really exists. Even some of the catering staff in College look suspiciously like Mata Hari.

In order to allow myself some chance of sleeping at night, therefore, I thought I’d have a quick scout around to see what I could find to put my mind at rest. Imagine my surprise, dearest Reader, when the most cursory glance over the BBC News website provided me with the following…

Article #1 - a senior lawyer’s email communication with his secretary ended up all over the news. I bet the poor man wishes he’d never heard of the modern wizardry that is Outlook! And further on the subject of computer privacy, the organisation Privacy International reports that “As consumers engage in routine online transactions, they leave behind a trail of personal details, often without any idea that they are doing so. Much of this information is routinely captured in computer logs.”

Article #2 - all about how your mobile phone can be bugged, or even turned into a bug, without your knowledge. Apparently the answer is to live inside a little silver tent.

Article #3- the case of a Welsh woman who discovered, well, not to put too fine a point on it, some pretty raunchy text messages on her husband’s phone. It turns out that he’d bought the phone second hand, and the messages were left over from the previous owner (who was a very lucky man, by the sounds of it…)

Article #4- the so-called “snoopers’ charter”, allowing a whole series of agencies and authorities to use surveillance.

Privacy International’s UK Big Brother Award shortlist, 2005, includes nominations for “The Land Registry. For openly placing details of all house purchases and purchasers online for a fee.”, “Richard Granger, head of the NHS IT project. For his project's lack of regard for patient privacy and for his policy of non-accountability to the public.” and “The European Union. For consistently approving bad policies that even failed at home. Including data retention, identity cards, biometric passports, passenger surveillance, ... and that's only this year.”

So, what can I say? I don’t suppose I’ll be losing too much sleep over it, to be honest. After all, even if they are listening in, all anyone’s going to hear are my conversations with my stuffed-toy bunny. And I should have learned my lesson about text messages the day that a missive intended for my at-the-time dearest boyfriend reached another person entirely. (I have been more embarrassed, but not since I was about five.)

But this really is scary stuff - and what's the remedy? To avoid all forms of electronic communication? To resort to semaphore and hope the government has forgotten how to use telescopes? Or just to be practical and never, ever, communicate in an email or text message or telephone conversation anything we would not be happy being read out in court?

And as for all these government agencies and corporations and criminals and random perverts, well, as Ira Gaines kept warning us, “that’s right… we’re watching you…”

References: Article #1; Privacy International on computers; Article #2; Article #3; Article #4; The Big Brother Awards

Yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened

So, then, (as Seamus Heaney would undoubtedly say), today I had a moment of epiphany. I was about to return to the Beowulf article, having taken some time away in order for my toes to regroup their strength, when I suddenly realised that it had absolutely no relevance to my DPhil topic whatsoever. This admitted, it logically followed that to continue reading it would be an act of absolute masochism, and Somerville has never liked S&M in the library. Perhaps understandably. So, with great reluctance, the article is consigned to the back of a lever-arch file.

That is not to say, dear Reader, that your industrious correspondent has been neglecting her studies. Far from it. So far this week I have studied in two libraries, and am hoping to add the Bodleian to that list on Thursday morning. (Just so you know, it's not the amount of work you do, but the number of libraries you do it in that counts.)

In other news, I read that the Ship of Fools website is running a competition called The Laugh Judgment, trying to find the funniest and most offensive religious joke. This is in response to the government's proposal in the Incitement to Racial and Religious Hatred Bill to ban remarks likely to cause hatred against religious groups.

On the face of it, this seems a sensible proposal. But who draws the line? How do we define something which is likely to cause hatred? It seems to me that there is an obvious difference between those religious jokes made out of affection or wit, and those made through ignorance and malice. For example, consider the joke "What do you call one lawyer at the bottom of the sea? A good start." Ha-ha. We all hate lawyers, right? But if I made that same joke about Muslims, I would be censured by anyone with an ounce of decency, and rightly so. In contrast, here's a joke from Ship of Fools' competition: "Jesus' last words on the cross: "Don't touch my Easter eggs - I'll be back on Sunday." " Well. Inciting hatred? Maybe, but probably only against anyone with little enough wit to tell such a joke.

In a sense, it seems that what the government is trying to do is to redefine certain types of speech almost as speech acts - if you say this thing, then it has a concrete real-world effect above and beyond its semantic context. But surely this is also an infringement on the right to free speech? Don't get me wrong - I'd love more than anything never to hear a racist, homophobic, sexist word spoken again. What I don't want is a cosmetic job that papers over the cracks of prejudice in our society without taking definite steps to stop those cracks spreading. Just because people can't say something, it doesn't mean they don't think it. I'd rather hear someone make a bigoted remark against me so that I can challenge them to their face, than have them think it and never have it disputed.

So, anyway... What do you call one BNP member at the bottom of the sea?

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

Still reading the Beowulf article... Someone come and save my toes!