Matriculation, study, dinners. Less ducks.

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.