What's he doing over there?

A new era... A nerd era.

2010-10-23T11:35:00.005+01:00

Well hello there!

It's been a while. There's a point that you sail past, when you've moved to a new place, when it stops being a New Life and just becomes Life. I think that's the point at which the impetus for updating a personal blog totally evaporates. It certainly did in my case! Facebook also infected Australia, which meant that quite a few people got my news that way.

But now there is news. I have a presence in the blogosphere once again - just not here. In fact, I've started a whole new website. It's about science and stuff. It's here:

http://nerd-alert.net

There is quite a team behind it, but the site itself mostly my baby. It aims to do 2 things. Firstly, we want to entertain people with science. I firmly believe that science has huge power to entertain and divert, something for which it is not given enough credit in the popular press. There are some great examples (like Eureka! in the Times, or the Economist's science section), but they are vastly outnumbered by fleeting scare stories or overblown New Cure headlines. The second thing we want to do, through providing this entertainment, is promote critical, scientific thinking. We want people to 'switch their brains on' whether they are dealing with science (What were the experiments? The controls?) or with the world (What was that claim? Where is the evidence?). Again, there is already quite a community of "skeptics" promoting just this sort of thing - people like Ben Goldacre - but rather than just exposing quackery we want to bundle switched-on thinking with an appreciation for good science, a few laughs and even a few good tunes!

As such, I warmly invite you to check out Nerd Alert and add it to your RSS reader, iTunes or subscribe by email. We have a blog, we have a podcast and we have awesome science wallpapers, updated weekly. Drop in and say hello!

What's He Doing Over There is dead. Long live Nerd Alert.

JW.

Terms, tours, nicknames, birthdays and ships.

2007-04-15T01:51:00.000+01:00

Well howdy there people. It’s been a while and I apologise, but it’s going to be another while before I can write anything else, so here goes nothing!

The last you heard was the big beautiful snowfall, which was back in 4th week of Hilary Term. The last four weeks of said term went on with a typical mix of reading, presentations, rehearsals, performances, visitors, dinners... oh, and bops too. Remember that word? This one was at Worcester, preceded by a graduate dinner, and had a “bad taste” theme. No, really.

(Accompanying me and my tie-dye are fellow Rhodents Michiel and Jeni, from South Africa and Sydney.)

My rollcall of visitors since the last instalment has included Bec Wetherall on a European jaunt, Jessie Keath en route to Germany, Jim Partington coming back for more and Gus Lipman all the way from London. It was great to see them all and they seemed to have a good time! Jessie and Jim got dinners in the Worcester hall, a genuine musty-gowned Oxford experience that looks a bit like this:

Jimbo and I shared a girly cocktail beforehand...

... while Jessie made the pilgrimage to the Bird’n’Baby afterwards (the Eagle and Child pub, hallowed watering hole of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis). Here she seemed to hold up better than Shaggy Pete, a microbiologist from Brisbane...

... although she did cut my head off with my own camera (remaining intact is fellow Adelaidean, Tom).

Earlier, Jessie accomplished the rare feat of capturing my halo on film - possibly a result of the virtuous solid day’s work I’d just done in the ‘Bod’ (ancient abbreviation for the ancient Bodleian Library, whose most famous building is just visible through the saintly haze; it’s easy to feel virtuous studying in that place).

Gus managed to make it out of the big smoke to see a concert I performed in called ‘Musicals and All That Jazz’, a fundraiser for the NSPCC featuring many talented Oxford students in all sorts of music theatre tidbits – I got to fulfil a long-standing ambition and belt ‘Stars’ (from Les Mis) at an unsuspecting audience. A huge thrill.

I was also chuffed that my Suffolk cousins made the trip to see the show, as did my former Gallerie Consort colleague Renee and her husband Peter, from Shrivenham. Thanks guys!

Oh, almost forgot about one of Jim’s favourite memories from his visit. Tom Smith has been at Magdalen College far too long and has a room that is far too big – obviously, this makes it an appropriate venue for footy in the wee hours:

Don’t try this at home. I almost lost the ability to father children and Tom’s lampshade will never be the same again. Enough said.

Just so you don’t think it’s all been beer, skittles and soft tissue injuries, I also managed to get quite a lot of work done during the term. Especially towards the end. This included possibly the most rewarding – certainly the longest – oral presentation of my academic life. It was about the modern Darwinian synthesis and it lasted nearly two hours, largely because it kept getting interrupted by the sort of discussion and argument that represents everything good about Oxford. OK, it’s not exactly blog material (sorry!) but it is experiences like that I will treasure because they are, I feel, truly hard to come by.

Many fond memories will also come from my time with Out of the Blue, the singing troupe you may remember I was somewhat apprehensive about joining. While our repertoire still isn’t always to my taste, the fun we have performing is completely infectious, and having just returned from 3 weeks touring east-coast USA, the perks are pretty good too! We sang pretty much everywhere, from the Washington monument

to the Empire State Building

and Times Square.

If nothing else, the tour has left almost all of us with nicknames. We now have a Bags, a Bobo, a Sensei, a T-Turn and a Calamity, among others. Mine doesn’t seem to have settled quite yet; the two names for me with any staying power seem to be J-Bag and Treebeard. Moving right along... Among visits to Maryland, New Jersey, Yale and Boston, a highlight was our two days spent recording in a studio and otherwise lounging around Cornell Uni in beautiful Ithaca, NY. The weather was (apparently unusually) stunning, and I got sunburnt. On the left, standing on a large rock, is Joe, a first-year philosophy student also at Worcester.

Our host choir there – a terrific all-girl group called the Touchtones – took us ‘sake bombing’ at a Japanese bar. Rich shows his apprehension (can you guess what happens next?!):

We also shared a gig with them, which was advertised in true college style.

Our hosts in New York also deserve mention – a hugely talented and friendly bunch of seniors (Year Twelves, roughly speaking) from New Rochelle High School in West Chester. Here are some of them (Rich, Erica, Ross, Julie) after they put us up for an unexpected extra night on our way back through New York. Legends.

The previous night we actually sang as the intermission entertainment at an NHL ice hockey game – wow. If anyone knows how to do spectacle, it’s the Americans. Sadly (or perhaps luckily for my persevering blog readers), my camera was absent. Towards the end of the tour, my birthday was rung in quite rowdily at a party thrown by our lovely hosts in Philadelphia.

Despite the best efforts of my OOTB colleagues, I survived with my dignity intact; video evidence is available on request. Before I move on, if you want to see more of the group in action, check out *this* Sting song from our tour gig at Wellesley College or *this* Stevie Wonder number from the big competition in which we came 2nd before leaving the UK. [Warning: footage may contain traces of choralography.]

In other news, I have decided to use my two years at Oxford to take two separate one-year courses, instead of the two-year course I was originally enrolled in. This seems a better use of my time here (I didn't realise originally that one-year courses were permitted on the Rhodes), so I am transferring into the one-year version of my History of Science masters and I’ve applied successfully for a one-year MSc in Neuroscience for 2007-8. This is reportedly a great grounding in neuroscience theory and techniques, so I’m looking forward to it – though it does mean I will be writing a history dissertation over the coming English summer, so I won’t get much of a holiday. Hard life, I know. Oh – and I’ve also been elected (unopposed – note to self: re-learn how to say “no”) as president of the MCR at Worcester College, starting this term. The MCR is the postgrad student body and this means I get to sit on various College committees and send a truckload of emails. When will I learn?

So: two terms down, four to go (that’s three per year, the English way, for anyone who’s confused). The next one begins in 10 days and is called Trinity Term – appropriately so, because I am going to need the help of all three of them to survive it. Chances are you will escape further news from me until I come up for air in eight or nine weeks, on the other side of 19,000 words’ worth of essays, one 3-hour exam, one play, one major concert and many OOTB gigs, who knows how many committee meetings, and a visit from Anna and Gregor (yay!). They are already in the UK and I’ll leave you with some shots of us in the south, where we went with Aneurin on Monday and Tuesday. He and Gregor braved the Brighton waters, alone...

...and the next day we went to Portsmouth and saw HMS Victory, of Nelson and Trafalgar fame, first launched in 1765.

Stunning weather – now is the time to visit the UK, folks!

Bye for now and congratulations on reading all the way to the end, or for having the good sense to skip the middle. I love and miss you all.

Dreaming of a white Oxford

2007-02-09T01:15:00.000Z

The pay-off for the short days, grey skies and numb fingers has arrived – several inches of it. Amazing!!

When I got up this morning, I was greeted by that beautiful cotton-wool snowfall-silence and this view:

I thought my bike was impressively snowed in...

...until I saw these ones.

Central Oxford looked pretty speccy...

..the Worcester lake froze (note the little ducky footprints in the ice - poor buggers!)...

...Broad Street slowly turned to slush...

...the philosophers all put on wigs...

..the uni parks were a tranquil picture-postcard...

..until the peace was shattered by hundreds of snowfighting students (about 9am)...

...Christchurch Meadow disappeared completely...

...my Krazy Kanadian friend Kate decided to ski to our morning lecture...

...and Ryan tried to pretend that even record snowfalls can't keep him away from learning Chinese. He wants his mum to see this picture.

And, finally, the kids down at Magdalen built what can only be described as a very Oxonian snowman.

I bet he'd lose to an Aussie one though. Hehe.

Ah dear. I'm spent. Get a tan on my behalf, and I'll slide around the footpath on yours.

I will leave you with a word of wisdom from The Prof. We discussed English forerunners of Darwin this morning, including various 'radicals' of whose credentials Pietro is, well, sceptical. Remember to read it with an Italian accent:

“Revolution is like suicide, isn’t it, you either do it or you don’t do it, and when you do it, it is pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

Indeed. All the best to everyone!

Sorry sorry sorry

2007-02-05T22:06:00.000Z

OK friends, it's been a while - and I apologise. The title is not just a result of a habit-forming week spent with Emily and Mark (the wonderful sorry twins) over New Year's; I am, actually, sorry. Those of you who have indicated that you wanted to hear more news from me, sooner than I was providing it, have warmed the cockles of my heart (you know who you are). The rest of you are probably, sensibly, less interested in my life and more in your own, so please feel free just to look at the pictures. I would. That reminds me: my camera is back on deck, on line and on fire! Yay! Watch the quality of photography fail to improve as I stop stealing other people’s pictures! (Oh, shut up Jonny, get on with it.) OK.

Oh, but before I do get on with it, are you all still alive? It’s just that the other day I read the local headlines courtesy of the illustrious online Adelaide Advertiser and found that they read like this:

Pharmacies broken into over night
Today, 02:45 AM

Victims threatened in two holdups
Today, 12:14 AM

Suspect stabbed in home invasion
Yesterday, 11:30 PM

Man shot in head with spear gun
Yesterday, 11:18 PM

Shark spotted off southers [sic] beaches
Yesterday, 03:45 PM

So what with rampant sharks and a whopping crime wave in SA, and the worst serial killer since Jack the Ripper operating in Ipswich where several of my beloved English cousins live, I was starting to suspect that everyone I know and love was in grave danger of extermination over the Christmas break... But I think we've made it.

Anyway, in terms of, like, actual news, what have I been up to? Well, in the weeks before Christmas I stayed in Oxford, planning to get plenty of work done on the essays I had to write. Here's the view over Rhodes House towards the 'dreaming spires' which I was looking at one afternoon while failing to do said work and, well, dreaming...

At least I was in a library. Despite the occasional speccy sunset, when the place drains of students and the weather drifts toward the freezing and grey, Oxford can seem a less than chirpy place to be. I defeated the winter blues by getting in touch with lots of folks from home, which was great. This spectacular hamper of 'Strine Stuff from Mum helped too, bless her cotton socks!

Oh, and, of course, there are always a few other postgrads battling on through the short days, so we tended to find each other by email and occasionally trudge pubwards in the darkness... On one such occasion, Liz, whom you may remember from a previous episode appropriating an abandoned television, turned her kleptomania onto a (huge) box of coathangers found outside a clothes store - apparently hangers were at a premium in Somerville College. No longer! Ryan is trying to help. I think.

I spent Christmas with three wonderful families of cousins who live in Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich. It was fantastic to be in real homes with books on the shelves - and, importantly, family. Had a great week, though didn't yet have my camera back so I can't show you any of it. Then back to Oxford briefly to spend a day and a very fun night with Aneurin who was visiting from Deutschland. I think I managed to show him five pubs - but again, no pictures. On the 30th it was off to Scotland where Out of the Blue had a gig at Gleneagles, one of the ritziest hotels in the country. Whe-hey. Not a bad night, all up. Perhaps not our finest performance, but they loved us in the bar afterwards... And our rooms were, needless to say, amazing! They weren't this blurry in real life:

And here's the outside, looking a very Scottish shade of grey but grand nonetheless!

The place even has its own picturesque little train station. Unbelievable.

The best thing is that I now have a little monogrammed pair of Gleneagles slippers in my room. And some shampoo, and some body lotion. (Not even sure what to use that for - it's like soap, right?) Mum got a letter on Gleneagles stationery, too. I decided to leave the dressing gown behind...

Back to Edinburgh for NYE, but the Hogmanay street party was cancelled (reason being a celebratory storm featuring 100mph winds) which left literally hundreds of thousands of revellers to squeeze into pubs all over town. It was a good night! And then I got to spend a week with Emily and Mark in their beaut apartment in Morningside, resplendent with two cats and enough cat-pampering equipment to send Mum on a guilt-ridden shopping bonanza for Chloe, who only has one climbing gym. These are the cat-hammocks that hang over the radiator. Luxury!

Had a very relaxing week and saw quite a bit of Edinburgh...

...plenty of Emily and Mark (thanks so much guys!)...

...and the odd highland 'koo'. Whoa!

Eventually I had to come back to Oxford and face up to the essays. Got there in the end, dazed, sleepless and relieved... I am now great conversation if you're interested in Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and how much they hated each other, or the creation of scientific facts as described by the faintly annoying anthropologist Bruno Latour. It is now fourth week, Hilary Term is in full swing and I'm doing lots of reading. For a change. The first big "bop" for the term was Australia Day; if you ever don't feel very patriotic about being an Aussie, just spend January 26th in England. Strange things happen...

Check out Snugglepot and Cuddlepie! (Hannah and Jeni, Aussie Rhodents who actually put effort into their costumes...)

Good times. But anyway, this has turned into a monster blog post. I will leave you in peace. You should all come and see Oxford for yourselves. Follow Jim's lead - he was here for a couple of days, so we climbed a church. Nice.

OK, done. I promise to be more regular and less long-winded in future. In the blog, that is. Send me an email, smoke me a kipper, and stay out of the sun. I am. :)

November's cold chain, made of wet boots and rain...

2006-12-12T02:45:00.000Z

Well helloooo there! Long time no bloggy. My apologies to those very sweet, slightly impatient people who have been asking for more. It's amazing how busy you can get when you make a few friends, join a choir and a football team, go to a few concerts in London and try to get some work done. Not necessarily in that order. Now term has finished, Oxford has emptied of most of its students and activities so it's a choice between getting work done and contacting friends. I hope you enjoy the blog entry. :-)

OK, so the month of November was actually lots of fun. That title was just an excuse to quote Tom Waits on my blog. We even saw the sun a few times. Let's start with another gratuitously scenic shot from a desk where I've been studying - this one is in the Worcester College library, which overlooks our main quad. The sun is setting, which puts the time at about 4pm. Still not used to that.

What's more, the inside of the library looks like the set of My Fair Lady:

Sorry for the crummy phone-pictures (camera is still with the camera doctor), but you get the idea. Oxford is still beautiful.

Somewhat less beautiful is the idea of me playing Aussie rules football. As unlikely and unprepossessing as this may seem, it has happened. The Oxford AFL team plays one match every year, against Cambridge, and the post-training trip to the pub is deemed almost as important as training itself; nevertheless, this fiercely (not necessarily elegantly) contested "varsity match" is the longest running AFL game outside of Oz. Many of the players haven't played in years or at all, and some of them are English, but after many weeks of practice, a creditable outfit took the field on November 25. We even had the local BBC current affairs programme at our final training session and an article in London's Australian Times. On the left you see a blurry but excited JW on the day we got our team guernseys. I seem to be scratching my bum, while Mayur seems to be making other important adjustments.

The game was a close one, in almost ideal conditions (except that we were in Cambridge), and ended up going to the right team by just 5 points. Check out the amazingly pleasant weather (it had poured all morning):

And now check out me, not quite getting amongst it:

I won't say that's as close as I got to the action all day, but I reckon it'd be safe to say I didn't have a major impact on the game. I did nail a tackle or two when not on the bench, and I enjoyed the rowdy celebrations as much as the next bloke. Perhaps not quite as much as Andrew (see right, WA Rhodes Scholar, and yes that's our trophy on his head...) or as much as Tom Smith (see below, SA Rhodes scholar, team co-captain and dirty dancer). For those of you who shared the Shout! experience with me, this is the older brother of Barnabas, our drummer. If you have Barnie's email address, please share this with him. :-) What is it with footballers and handling themselves?

For more on the football, have a look at the article in the Australian Times or the OUANZ website (has great pictures).

In other, less eyebrow-raising news, I have been doing some singing. Quite a lot, in fact. I auditioned for several choirs back in October, and ended up in the one which I wasn't sure I wanted to join and which had the most competitive audition process. Funny old world. It is called Out of the Blue and is something of an Oxford institution, singing all-male a capella arrangements of mostly pretty cheesy pop songs, complete with vocal percussion and (yes!) choralography. Here are some of the lads in rehearsal:

And here we are in glad rags at the Mansfield College ball on November 4:

The group rehearses three times a week and gets quite a few gigs, so it's a big commitment with the pay-off being an expenses paid East Coast USA tour in the Easter break. Most of the group this year is pretty green (only 2 out of 13 remaining from last year's lot and many are first years!) but thankfully all the work has paid off and by our end-of-term concerts I was quite enjoying it. If your internet connection is up to it, have a look at our rendition of "Sex Bomb" (!) in the video below, shot by a disturbingly avid fan at our sold-out concert on December 1.

We went on a bit of a mini UK tour last week; I got to see Durham, York and Manchester, which was great. One of the troop, Deep (also known as "first grandpa" because he is 28; I'm second at 25) has a great camera so I might nab some of his shots of the tour for next time. For the moment you're only getting my phone's impression of York Minster (breathtaking through any lens):

I've also managed to listen to some great music in the last few weeks. Andrew Lloyd visited on the weekend of the footy match, and that spurred me to attend my first evensong at Christchurch Cathedral. Real English choral music - Weelkes, Byrd and Smith of Durham. Stunning. Less highbrow but just as exciting was the night I went to Koko in London to hear Neko Case, flame-haired goddess of indie country. She was spellbinding, sang all my favourite songs and even threw in a duet with her excellent support act, M Ward. Hence, her very cool silk-screened poster now adorns my wall. I am an unabashed, totally one-eyed fan. While we're on alt-country, I also went to hear Lucinda Williams at Shepherd's Bush Empire. This woman has a voice that can strip paint, and it was a hell of a concert - including (get this) an unannounced guest appearance on lead guitar from Bruce Springsteen. Surreal. Mercifully avoiding his own back catalogue, he simply duelled blues solos with Lucinda's own lead guitarist, the terrific Doug Pettibone, and completely brought the house down. Bruce is the second blur from the left:

It's going to be OK - we're nearly there. If you're bored, you didn't have to read this far; if you're not, I'm flattered. Just so that you all know I have actually been doing some work, I'm going to wind up with some quotes from my entertaining Prof. I mentioned last time that he was Italian and outrageous. Every now and then he gets on a roll and deliberate provocation collides with slightly heavy-handed English to produce a gem. Here is a sample:
- On Karl Popper, philosopher of science: “I had great respect for Popper all my life, but I hope I don’t grow old like him.”
- Bonding with the three Indian students in the class: “India and Italy, we are both backward countries but you have a future.”
- On Napoleon the Great: “...some of his friends – well, Napoleon didn’t have friends, but, well, people whom he respected...”
- On people set in their ways: “I had dinner last night with a very senior biochemist, he is 84 years of age, who talked about the history of science like he was a positivist living in the 1870’s. People have their own agendas. I mean, I have no doubt at all that he is wrong, but you cannot kill him!”
- On bending the rules: “This Oxford is a curious place. Everything here is forbidden, and that is why everything is possible...”
- On success in academia: “...and then, if you want a career, go and find a very powerful supervisor and write lots of papers and quote him all of the time. Don’t quote me – no, I’ll give you a list of who to quote...”
- And finally, the explanatory punchline: “Is OK, I am just talking. I often say you must say 100,000 stupid things and then a good idea comes out.”

More of Pietro's pearls of wisdom next time. At least that proves I pay attention in class. I'm off to bed. When you've finished giggling at the Out of the Blue video, shoot me an email with your suggestions for future repertoire and choreography. :-) I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas.

Matriculation, study, dinners. Less ducks.

2006-10-27T02:15:00.000+01:00

Hello again! It's been a while and stuff has been happening. Hence this will not be a blow-by-blow description of my last 2-3 weeks - I'm aiming more for one of those "all killer, no filler" highlights packages, of the sort you have to use to explain cricket to Americans. We'll see how we go. But first of all, a little point of clarification: when I said "they seem to cope" in my last post, in relation to undergraduates living in the monks' cottages, I meant the cottages, not the undergrads. I have far more faith in the ability of undergrads to survive 700-year-old cottages than the other way around. Enough said.

Now that's sorted out (sorry), what have I been doing in this beautiful place? Well, for quite a lot of the time (as some of you will be pleased to know) I have been reading an awful lot about the history and philosophy of science - often in libraries where you can sit next to a view like this: (For the aficionados, that one's from the Radcliffe Science Library.) Hard life, I know. Soon I will get used to all the old buildings and I will start pinching myself. Classes have been interesting, and the "prof", while delivering many of his lectures in a style that could only be described as "non-linear", continues to say outrageous things, a few of which I will try to report soon. The rest of the course is taught at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, which is basically two converted houses on Banbury Road filled with friendly and focussed historians, not far from my college. Nothing is far from my college. Nothing is far from anything. Now that I have a bike, I am even getting to most things on time. :-)

Rhodes House has staged a welcome day and a black tie "Coming Up Dinner" since my last post. (For the uninitiated who are imagining a dinner that is perpetually postponed and never actually arrives, 'coming up' is the traditional way of describing arrival in Oxord. Apparently Oxford is 'higher' than everywhere else, although you wouldn't think so from the amount of water around the place. And whatever you do, don't get "sent down"!) I ended up as one of the, er, lucky few at the high table for the dinner, which put me next to the Chair of the Rhodes Trust, Lord Waldegrave and a lovely politics student from India called Namrata. He served on Thatcher's cabinet and she is a communist; I scratched my chin thoughtfully:
At the very least, we had a good view of the rest of the room - quite a night:
Following four spectacular courses at Rhodes House, many of us proceeded to take over a bar in central Oxford. Here, Michiel (South Africa), Ryan and I try to maintain our dignity in the face of unwanted photography...
..before discovering said dignity is much more easily maintained in the presence of the glamorous Jen, from Canberra. Well, almost:
As you can see, the night got a bit blurry at either end of the lens, fun was had by all and the real winner was the guy running the kebab van between that bar and home. Kebab vans are ubiquitous in Oxford after dark, and every now and again that is a really good thing. Mmmm, chips'n'cheese'n'hummus.....

The "Rhodent" crowd make great company and it has been amazing meeting them. This is Liz, an engineer from Brisbane and a closet kleptomaniac, who following a "bop" (ludicrously quaint word for a college party) at the end of First Week decided to take a discarded television home with her in a discarded shopping trolley (it's amazing what you find lying around a college during the first week of term...):
It was funny at the time. About six hours later, I was shovelling myself into an academic gown, white bowtie and full "subfusc" catastrophe in order to "matriculate", which means formally becoming a member of the university. At least the struggle out of bed was greeted by an only lightly frosted, misty English morning - as witness this highly scenic picture of the Worcester lake at 9am.
Matriculation involves hordes of similarly dressed freshers crowding neatly into the Sheldonian Theatre, college by college, to be spoken to briefly in Latin and only slightly less briefly in English before filing out again and going to the pub. The latter is at least as entrenched a ritual as the rest, and The Turf (yes Margit, the one with the dodgy alleyway!) was quite a sight, packed to its venerable rafters with frocked-up first-years. Here are said frocks crowding the streets...
...and a few folks from Worcester (Vicky, Sarah, Anneka, Magnus, me and TWO GUYS WHO MUST BE ABOUT FOURTEEN!!!) along with bemused onlookers, snapped by a friend who lives upstairs on Broad Street:
Oh look, here we are again! (Actually, the funniest thing is that we have to wear this get-up for exams. Yup - this is the uniform for matriculating, for graduating, and for stressing your brains out - each of which is followed by a pilgrimage to the pub. And until we graduate, we're not allowed to put the hat on - but we *have* to carry it!)
The theatre is quite a sight, both from the outside (once you get past the bleary-eyed students)...
...and the inside, even filled with bleary-eyed students! It was designed by Christopher Wren. Not a bad little shed for its age. :-)

Good friends Peter Chicken and Lou were in Oxford that day, and both had functional cameras rather than a gimmicky mobile phone, so expect to see some more pictures of me looking silly, sometime soon. In other news, I was able to bus down to London last week and catch up with Kate and Nat from the Festy Centre, who were halfway through their enormous world trip. They are both well and they look like this, if you need glasses and your name is Samsung SGH-ZV40:

I'm going to bed. Hopefully I can get my camera fixed soon and there will be more pictures to choose from - but you get the idea. Stay in touch, folks.

I made it!

2006-10-08T03:03:00.000+01:00

Allrighty, my debut blog entry. Exciting, huh? OK, not really. I’m only doing this because several of you said you wanted to know what I was up to; I would also like to know what I’m up to, so maybe we can work it out together. Anyway. News.

I made it into Oxford at the misty, moisty and faintly alarming time of about 7.30am, direct from Heathrow. Ryan, the SA "Rhodie" who arrived a few days earlier, helped me carry my bags to Worcester College, which is a highly convenient 1 minute walk from the bus station. From the outside it is big and, well, grey. Past the big heavy wooden door with the little bit in it that you can open and step through, the welcome from the 'porters' was very warm; I was told I looked a complete mess and should go to bed. Sent to the 'buttery' in search of a coffee, I wandered into a quadrangle that took my breath away, and still does every time I walk through it. Attempted digital re-creation follows, not quite capturing the luminous green of that lawn at 8am:

The monks' cottages on the left date from the 15th century and are now inhabited by undergraduates. They seem to cope. The dining hall and chapel are behind the camera and open onto this quad. Not a bad little place!!

From then on, my settling-in went swimmingly - in more ways than one, actually, since the city was basically submerged for the rest of the weekend. Having spoiled me with that view, Oxford decided to teach the new Aussie a lesson; by the end of the first day I had bought an umbrella, a coffee plunger and a kettle, and I was alive.

It is now a week later, and I am more than alive, though possibly just as tired as that morning. The Oxford version of O'Week is called 'noughth week' (i.e. the one before first week) and involves wall-to-wall social events organised mostly by the college's 'MCR' (Middle Common Room, which refers both to the room where the postgrad students can hang out and to the students themselves. Ourselves. Tee-hee!). There are some great people and, well, Oxford has lots of pubs. To cut a long story short, I have had very little sleep, but have met my supervisor, who is the brand new Professor of the History of Science, comes from Italy and seems to be a real stirrer. He says outrageous things and then watches, in a way that reminds me of my brother-in-law (hi Gregor!). I think we'll get on well - I do with Gregor, after all - and the course looks to be as interesting as it will be demanding: two massive reading lists every week of this term, which for a novice historian should be quite entertaining, plus three essays and four talks. Did I mention I need to get some sleep?

Anyway - finally got a walk around the college in the sunshine later in the week, during which I swallowed my pride and went completely snap-happy. This place is amazing. It has:

a lake,

ducks (below), squirrels (data not shown),

the most scenic sportsfield this side of the Adelaide Oval,

more ducks,

and *that* quad ...

...with *those* cottages (note shingled rooves and C.S. Lewis lamps).

What's more, it has my room, which is across the road and has a fridge and a bathroom (sorry, it's the obligatory my-room-at-college shot, taken on my phone because my camera needs the camera doctor; notably less scenic, but if I'd moved the dirty dishes that would've been dishonest, wouldn't it?!) ...

... and (as of last Friday) me!.

OK, next time I promise there will be more photos with people in them. People that are not me. And are not ducks. I'm going to try and keep these things brief and not boring, so I reckon little photo essays are the go. But right now I'm going to bed - thanks for listening.
I hope you are all well!