You're Avon a Laugh

*Someone* (me) forgot to take a camera to Stratford. Hence, please find attached a picture of my cat.

It's nighttime, I've had about 5 hours of sleep and 5 plastic beakersful of cheap sparkling wine. It is time for me to take care of my responsibilities before bedtime, and as this clearly isn't quite the state to be in to effectively critique post-1960s Holocaust drama it is time to turn to the second on the list. 

Firstly, I must acknowledge that the photos on this blog are vastly inferior to those I used to treat you with every week on Guten Morgen Berlin. It's regrettable, but it's also representative of the way of things around here; one gets a lot done and sees a lot, but as most of it consists of dreadfully boring literature or dark and empty pubs the photo opportunities are far less colourful than wonderful, spectacular Berlin. Oxford is photogenic nonetheless, and the fact that I have so far not yet given you a single glimpse of Japanese tourists wearing Union-Jack ponchos has driven home the fact that I must start taking my camera everywhere I go like I used to. Worry not, loyal readers; the visual interest is coming soon. Nicht umschalten!

Secondly, and if I may, I would like to move on to the real topic for today. A few days ago I got an email from the Royal Shakespeare Company asking me if I wanted to go on a student coach trip to see Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade performed in the Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace and general rad place to be. Like a shot I booked a place. "Now why on earth would you pay all that money and go all that way just to see a postmodern German play about the French Revolution and the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as reconstructed by a group of lunatic asylum inmates as a metatheatrical device?" I hear you cry. It's not an obvious choice for a Monday night treat, I'll grant, but I happen to be studying Peter Weiss and it seemed like it would be educational. It involved a journey in a coach, for crying out loud. Of course it would be educational.

Baby, I got ants in ma pants and they make me do the hula dance

I have been staring at this exact spot for the last FIFTEEN HOURS. No exaggeration.

My particular college in Oxford is a little out of the way, a few minutes 'uptown' so to speak. A brief wander from the town centre. "Central", an estate agent might call it. Yet since the majority of the colleges in this city are unceremoniously dumped in between the shops and the faculties and the ice cream parlours (yes ok, chronologically speaking there were there first and everything else was dumped there afterwards...) if you ever mention my college to a 'city-college' student they will, without fail, react thus: "Wow, that's...far." People seem to think that we're way up north out here, in fact that we are so far north that our climate is slightly chillier then theirs and that actually we have six months of night and then six months of daylight during which time we practise ice fishing and skin elk. Seriously, we are only about ten minutes out of town. But in Oxford standards, my college is a mythical, far away place, one that people have heard tell of in stories of yore, told by crinkly-eyed grandmothers by a crackling fire.

The fact is that if you are able to lie on your side, roll for a couple of minutes downhill and scoot effortlessly through the faculty door into your first lecture everything will of course seem far if not immediately beside you. It is a glorious existence, I admit; if I need to buy bread that involves hitching up my skirt, getting on my on-the-verge-of-death bike and hulking my great mass up or down to the nearest shop while the saddle leaks a suspicious and seemingly never-ending liquid onto my rear. If Jesus students need bread, they reach out of their window into Tesco's and grab a loaf, but not before giving Ray on the bakery counter a disembodied high-five. A lecture for me entails the requisite fifteen minutes of trying to find everything I need for leaving my room (keysmoneyphonekeysmoneyphonekeysmoneyphone), ten minutes to get to the faculty, an hour of dull pontificating from the lecturer, ten minutes of waiting for the hipster in the tweed shorts to get out of the way and let me out of the building, ten minutes of small talk with colleagues and finally ten minutes to cycle the entirely uphill (and always, for some reason, in the wind) route back to college. A lecture for them is a brief interlude in their day of luxury.

Hitting the wall - no, not the Berlin one this time

Coming soon: Ghostrider, the prequel.

Good grief, I do apologise. Here I was, assuring you that this wouldn't become another one of those blogs that dies out as quickly as applause at the end of a German lecture, and now here we are; staring into the abyss of two weeks without a single post to redeem myself. It's not right, and it won't happen again sir; although if you have been looking for reading material in my absence I have a rather wild essay on Elfriede Jelinek ready that you're welcome to take a look at.

Yes, we are now just over two weeks into term and already everyone seems to have pitched forward head-first into catastrophic, world-consuming busyness. This is one of the characteristics and symptoms of the Oxford Uni system, where you have a brief eight-week term in which to learn an entire bookshelf's worth of crumblingly dry theory, cycle until your thighs catch fire and complete enough extracurricular activities to make you a candidate for a real-life version of Rushmore before suddenly being booted out for six or seven weeks of skulking about somewhere else with nothing to do. This leaves you feeling jellified both inside and out; your legs quiver from the toing-and-froing, your arms ache from hulking books about and your mind aches from the theory of Michel Foucault et al. 

One thing I get asked a lot is whether it is weird to be back here after a year in Berlin. Being back in the UK, with its rubbish trains and lack of Club Mate, was for a while a huge jolt to the system, and I found myself repeatedly saying 'Entschuldigung' to people on the street (the word is German but the ingrained impulse to constantly apologise is an Englishness you will never drive out of me). But being back here, in Oxford, is actually so un-weird Berlin seems like a half-forgotten hallucination sometimes. 

Join the club

Oxford University: Making you resort to binge eating since 1296.

Yesterday I went to a wine tasting given by the wine society. Well, one of the three wine societies. The day before that I went to the German society. On Friday there's jazz and cocktails with the law society and on Saturday I'm going off to the university farm with the Green society to plant vegetables. On Sunday I might do some work or tend to my massive stress-induced hernia.

There are so many societies in Oxford University that it's almost impossible to try to sum up or comprehend the selection on offer. British students will be familiar with student societies, but while some unis (though by no means all) erect societies simply to give people with similar interests a chance to get drunk together, Oxford societies really - and I mean really - go to town. Freshers' fair this year was a masterpiece, rickety stalls lined with an incredible array of ideas. There appears to be a new 'Lolita' society, for those who like meeting other people who like dressing up as a Japanese businessman's secret fetish, and I very almost signed up to a new philosophy/discussion society until the kind lady described it as spiritual and I ran away. How wonderful, that at this stage in life between the grinding pain of puberty and the dull grind of working yourself to the grave you can spend a few years joyfully, gleefully, entertainingly dorking it up with like-minded people.

Blog the second

A year ago I was in Berlin, coming to terms with a new job I hated and a new hometown I loved. In the year that followed I saw the whole city from every angle, taught English to a selection of unwilling babies and blogged constantly about it here. I also, funnily enough, managed to learn German, which was sort of the point in the first place; at the end of this year I hope to get a degree in it. Yes, the year to come is the final year of my studies at Oxford University and all of a sudden this hardened and weatherbeaten Berliner is having to come to terms with being a new student all over again. With someone to empty my bin and someone else to set me homework. Gone are the toddlers, in with the essays.  It's odd to be back in the UK, mostly because nothing has changed whatsoever; the weather's as grey as it always was, the student accommodation is as grimy as it always was and the economy is still resolutely tramping towards catastrophe. The one difference for this blogger is having a whole new language to blog in, and that's what she'll do. This year I'm going to parallel-blog in English and German. I'll blog about Oxford and finals and about living 'between two stools' (a phrase I have never understood - though perhaps I am simply strange and the rest of you well know the feeling of literally not being able to choose between a selection of backless chairs). Sometimes the topics will be the same, and sometimes different, and that's for you canny readers to figure out among yourselves. Maybe some of you will pick up some vocab; maybe some of you will be so offended by the smug concept that you'll hurl your laptop out the window on reading this introduction. Mal schauen. (We'll see. Fnar fnar.)