Thursday, November 10

Happy Birthday Shannon Smart

Today was the kind of day where things click together. I spent a few hours dealing with the banks in Canada and the U.K. and we are now set to make another attempt at a transfer. In the process, I even managed to unfreeze my application for a NatWest credit card. In the morning, I finished a stats assignment that I am more confident about than either of its predecessors. I also managed to secure some books for the two upcoming papers. In the afternoon, I began reading Jonathan Spence's The Search for Modern China.

Good things are also happening on various non-academic fronts. Tomorrow night, I have an engagement to spend some time with Emily: something that has definitely been missed of late. Friday, I am having dinner at New College. Saturday, if I am lucky, I might snap up a spot for the Walking Club's trip to the south coast. Getting out of Oxford, particularly for a bit of a hike, would be excellent. Next Wednesday, I am going to dinner and a movie at St. Antony's.

Looking out into a fast-darkening world at five in the evening is definitely one of the stranger and more difficult things about the fall. It requires you to rewire the bits of your brain that tell you what kind of lighting conditions you really ought to be doing work in the presence of: widening that set to include some rather more sombre ones. That said, the work these days is interesting. As we get into the timeframe of the second world war, we get into the period when all the major elements of the present international system emerged. It cannot help feeling relevant and important, especially when expressed with such obvious passion as Donald Watt has injected into his book. I was struck by the incredibly wounded tone of his introduction, in which he lists the destruction wrought by the war that he is about to describe the emergence of.

My favourite thing about the fall are the blustery days. Those at UBC should take a walk to the top of the sandstone escarpment near Place Vanier during one of them, when the wind has contributed white-capping energy to the sea, when the sun is glinting off of it, and when there are enough low-lying clouds about to get the full sense of a planet in motion.

In the midst of tonight's reading, I had the chance to talk with Astrid for about three hours. I won't say much about it. Just that it's a relationship that has always had an astonishing ability to avoid becoming mundane. I also got to speak to Alison, for the first time in what has become too long. She will definitely be among those who I write to when the inter-term break allows it.

Posted by Milan at 12:01 AM