Events other than Obama
Last couple of weeks. Hm.
Well, I had a visit to Rowena in Aberaeron, which was lovely as usual. I always sleep so well there, and Aberaeron is so unreasonably pretty, this little harbour town nestled in the hills. There is also so much bustle around Rowena's house generally, given she has four sons, two still at home, that I never really feel that I'm in the way, because I hardly add to the chaos! (Good chaos.) Rowena is also as large a character as she ever was when she and Mum were friends in nursing school. On the Saturday, Ifan brought Rowena a big package which had been dropped at the post office for her. "What's this?!" she demanded, and predictably, "How should I know?" he lilted, Welshly, "Package, isn't it? Left at the post office for you." Rowena got it to the kitchen table instantly and ripped it open to discover a pair of wellington boots in a funky blue swirly pattern. "I didn't order these!" she bellowed. "What's this! I didn't order these!" She clearly suspected internet fraud, and I was on the verge of pointing out that anyone fraudulently buying things on her card would probably have them sent to themselves.... Ripping through to the invoice, however, she quickly discovered it was a gift from a friend who had been to stay with his children some weeks ago. She was so thrilled she instantly put them on and wore them all day -- "I may well bathe in them!" -- stumping around the village going, "Look at my new wellies! Have I shown you my new wellies?! Have I told you about my new wellies?! You know who sent them?" while Ifan muttered, "Fancy wellies. Who needs fancy wellies? Cost about three times as much as plain yellow ones. I don't know. What's he sending her fancy wellies for. I think it's something kinky. You're not wearing them to bed, mind!" "I may!"
So, that was fun. Rowena is a nurse specialising in paediatric oncology. She drives all over South Wales visiting children with cancer and providing home care and once a week works at the hospital in Cardiff. I chatted to her a bit about the NHS while we were driving from Cardiff to Aberaeron the day I arrived (I have always so far made sure to arrive on a Thursday, which is the day Row's Cardiff, so she can drive me back after her work day -- though going into Aberystwyth could be a possibility also). She told me she disagrees with all privatisation of the NHS but she doesn't think that privatising the cleaning services or dirty hospitals in general are the reason for the rise in superbugs (eg MRSA). She thinks it's just because at this point antibiotics have been used -- and often misused -- for so long that the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections is a direct result. She also said that superbugs never kill people who aren't terribly unhealthy/immune-compromised in the first place, which I hadn't known. I said that Mum used to describe how they had to be so careful about hygiene when they were training at Great Ormond Street and Rowena said, "Well, she's forgotten the cockroaches in the nursing home. And the rats in the basement!" She also said that a lot of the criticism that the NHS gets to is for closures which she says are inevitable. "Not every community can have a specialist centre in everything, can they? We have to have centres of excellence." Which actually makes sense to me. And the UK is so small, travelling from Wales to Bristol is equivalent to travelling from one part of British Columbia to another, which people just do, because seriously, no one expects there to be a world class children's hospital like B.C. Children's in, say, Prince George. Or a world class cancer treatment centre.
Anyway, it was a lovely visit. Hopefully I can go back soon -- but I say that about so many places. I really ought to visit Mark and Amanda, I only once have since they moved to Jersey, and I'm desperate to get back to Turkey again. *sigh* Too many places, too little time, FAR too little money!
I recently picked up Maus (both volumes in one book) on a whim (I've been transfixed by it ever since a boyfriend introduced me to it in Grade 12). Susie said she would like to read it, but she's been really busy with her painting it's just kind of sat on our TV ever since.
I also found Madame Bovary in French in a second-hand book store and bought it, in the continued delusional belief that I shall read it. I didn't have a French-English dictionary at the time, so it got stuffed in my bookshelf and temporarily forgotten.
Then I -- FINALLY -- dug up the gift certificates for Waterstones that my colleagues gave me when I left the NSPCC, plus a gift card, also for Waterstones, that I got for a birthday at some point, and went off the Waterstones near school. I bought the Philip Pullman trilogy which I've been wanting for ages, ever since I read The Northern Lights, borrowed from a young relative. I also bought a massive French-English dictionary to push me further along the path to reading Madame Bovary, but was unable to decide on anything else.
However, I also really want Persepolis in French, as I think that might be nearer my current reading level than Madame Bovary, and wonder if I should start with that. There are some French bookstores in London. Hm...
eyelid made a post about the importance of Israel to American Jews and I posted a few comments which resulted in a discussion which made me realise how long it's been since I paid much attention to news out of Israel and the disputed territories or tried to understand the conflict. I decided I've been out of academia a bit long and need to start reading some scholarly texts.
I did a blitz through some university websites to try and find course materials required for courses on the Middle East. Perhaps not surprisingly all of the course pages at the Israeli universities I checked were, duh, in Hebrew. Harvard and Yale didn't give me much, but Oxford obliged with a reading list for the Middle East unit of their MPhil International Relations. It was a about three pages long. I decided to stop with that for the time being, rather than go on to Cambridge, McGill, Exeter, Durham, and some other American and Canadian unis, because, really, three pages is enough to start with!
I went through and eliminated every book that hadn't been published or republished in the past ten years (except one -- the Tessler was specifically recommended elsewhere as being a common university text), everything that focused only on a specific war or time period, anything that only focused on military history in general, anything that focused solely on eg, Camp David negotiations, basically anything that wasn't an overview history from the late 19th-century until the present. Then I checked all their reviews on Amazon and tried to eliminate anything that seemed massively biased, or somewhat biased and not scholarly enough to make up for it.
Now my list is half a page long.
On a whim, however, I dropped into Waterstones in Camden Town (I still had one £20 gift certificate plus £3 on the gift card) yesterday afternoon, and went to their history section. I didn't have my list with me, but there was only one text which looked simultaneously scholarly and like an overview of the entire history -- Israel: A History (a new edition, published this year) by Martin Gilbert, which is absolutely massive and has a lot of maps at the back. I read the back cover, the reviews and the introductory remarks and concluded that Gilbert is more sympathetic to Israel than otherwise, based on:
-the back cover blurb, which mentions Palestine only once and Palestinians not at all
-back cover also mentions the author's "intimate knowledge of the country and its people" and calls Israel a "powerful and proud nation" (with which I don't quibble, but it does send a certain message!)
-favourable reviews from the right-leaning Times, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Times Literary Supplement and not a peep from, say, the Guardian or the New York Times (only perhaps there wouldn't be, on a UK edition)
-the preface to the 60th anniversary edition, which begins:
"Ten years have passed since this book was completed. Those ten years have seen a surfeit of history in this land that, since creation of the Jewish State in 1948, has known -- has been allowed -- too little peace and quiet."
-and the fact that the main other work for which he is recommended (apart from being Churchill's official biographer) is one on the Holocaust
However, as I say, it looks like a respectable, well-researched tome, and I figured a history of Israel from the Israeli perspective might be just what I need to start me out, so I took it to the desk to ask if it had any reviews. The guy said, "Well, I'm not supposed to say the A- word, but the reviews on Amazon seem favourable," and read me one or two. He was right, they did.
So, OK. I have my first scholarly text devoted exclusively to Israel. Now everyone can tell me a better one I should have bought! Advice much appreciated. On my list of possibilities (if I ever get through this one, it's massive!) remain:
Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995, 2003).
Fraser, T.G. The Arab-Israeli Conflict (2004).
Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005).
Gilbert, Martin. The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2002, 2005).
Hirst, David. The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East(1977, 2003).
Laqueur, Walter and Rubin, Barry, eds. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (1969, 2001).
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (1999, 2001).
Ovendale, Ritchie. The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Wars (1984, 2004).
Schulze, Kirsten E. The Arab-Israeli Conflict (1999).
Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000, 2001).
Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988, 2004).
Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1994).
Wasserstein, Bernard. Israel and Palestine: Why They Fight and Can They Stop? (2003, 2004).
But I shall have to see if I can find any at the library, because seriously, I have no money. The next installment of my loan comes on the 15th of this month, and I have around £40 to last me until then. *sigh*
My rent is up in my new place, which I thought I would be able to absorb with the larger loan I've taken this year -- and I have been able to, just about, it's just that I started the year at the bottom of my £2000 overdraft, which I had used to last me the summer (plus money from Mum and Hywel) and I don't see any way out of that. Whereas last year I started at a thousand pounds or so in the black. Then rent and bills are now £600, when they were £400-£450 last year. Then there's transport. I used to live in Zone 3, so one would logically think I would pay less for transport now I'm in Zone 2... except that when I was in Zone 3 I bought a Zone 2-3 travelcard every month and simply took the bus when I was in Zone 1. That's not an option anymore, because there's no direct bus from here to campus, and there are no single-zone travelcards anyway, so I'm buying a Zone 1-2 travelcard. A Zone 2-3 travelcard cost around £45 if I remember correctly, with my student discount. A Zone 1-2 travelcard is £65. And so it goes.
I'll just have to start making even more of an effort to stick to my budget. As I say, I hate the way our classes are spread out at college, it forces me to eat lunch there every day, and if there isn't something easily transportable from home, or if I haven't had time to throw something together, that means spending money at the cafe. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a microwave and student lounge other than the cafeteria, but there isn't. I'll just have to make a greater effort to work around it. More cooking at home, and just eat things cold at college.
I'm finding this year in general much more slapdash than last year. Last year I did have various complaints about the College of Law, but because there GDL caters to such a huge number of students it is at least very efficient in its organisation of materials, class times, etc. I remember only one or two schedule mix-ups the entire year, and no problems receiving materials at all.
This year, we constantly get emails telling us to be at this class at this time, no sorry, correction, here's the amended list, or that our loose-leaf materials are waiting for us at the front desk so we'd better go and get them within the next couple of days or they'll be gone. And then we get them and have to put them in order ourselves.
In addition, I still find the teaching all over the place. I don't blame the teachers because I've gleaned they have to stick strictly to the lessons plans and materials with which the college provides them. I find the materials really all over the place, and hardly ever feel there's been follow-through on anything we're learning. It's procedural rules mixed in with skills -- I get that --but it's so thoroughly mixed in that I never feel anything's consolidated. The only thing I'm certain of is I could make a damn good bail application a couple of weeks ago.
I like the skills a lot better than the procedure. A lot of people say the advocacy makes them feel very nervous, but it doesn't me, and I always get good feedback, even when I do a submission after walking into class still scribbling it up. But I find the procedural rules incredibly dull, and I'm still pretty vague on precisely what knowledge we're going to be tested on in our Multiple Choice Tests -- mocks in January, reals in April. I haven't been revising as I go along like I did last year, either.
So part of it's down to me too. Last year, there was so much work and I was so frightened all the time that the only thing to do was put my head down and run run run like a rat in a hamster wheel. This year there is much less work, it seems much less directed, and much of it is very dull. So I admit, I quite simply am not working as hard. I am also somewhat foxed about how to file everything. At the moment I have one big folder for Criminal Procedure and one big folder for Civil Procedure. But all the skills are all mixed up in there -- advocacy, negotiation, research, drafting, etc. I've considered separating all my notes out into separate folders for each skill... except that the Multiple Choice knowledge questions are divided into Civil and Criminal, so from that point of view it's better to have it the way it is. I find it extremely difficult to work out a coherent system of doing anything in this course and that really bugs me. I'm naturally an incredibly disorganised person, so I really need systems, and I'm just not finding it easy to work any out.
*rant rant* I'm sure it will come out well in the end. I've received very good feedback on all my advocacy and the two pieces of written work that I've so far got back from marking so I must be doing something right. I just have to make sure I'm on top of the material for the MCTs. Which will first involve finding out what, precisely, that material is, but when I brought up some of my concerns to my Criminal tutor yesterday she said we should soon be receiving an email telling us what will be covered on the Criminal and Civil MCT mocks in January.
I expect I will once again have a revision-packed Christmas holidays, but that's OK. I survived it last year, I can survive it again!
Am booked to go home for Christmas -- yay!
Susannah and I are getting along great. We still shop, cook and fuss over Daisy together and I download Grey's Anatomy for us to watch every week.
Daisy is still alive, still ill, and seems to be even more hungry all the time than ever -- *sigh*. A couple of days ago when I got up she began howling like a banshee and Susannah said, "Can she really be that hungry? I mean, well," (looking at her watch) "it has been two hours..." "What is she?!" I asked, "a baby?"
Have been seeing a lot of a PhD student at the University of Kent in Canterbury named Paul. His specialty is film studies and cognitive theory.
My hair needs cutting, I have a disgusting tangle of split ends. Because of my financial issues, I think I may ask Susannah if she will do it for me. (Edit, she will!)
Well, I had a visit to Rowena in Aberaeron, which was lovely as usual. I always sleep so well there, and Aberaeron is so unreasonably pretty, this little harbour town nestled in the hills. There is also so much bustle around Rowena's house generally, given she has four sons, two still at home, that I never really feel that I'm in the way, because I hardly add to the chaos! (Good chaos.) Rowena is also as large a character as she ever was when she and Mum were friends in nursing school. On the Saturday, Ifan brought Rowena a big package which had been dropped at the post office for her. "What's this?!" she demanded, and predictably, "How should I know?" he lilted, Welshly, "Package, isn't it? Left at the post office for you." Rowena got it to the kitchen table instantly and ripped it open to discover a pair of wellington boots in a funky blue swirly pattern. "I didn't order these!" she bellowed. "What's this! I didn't order these!" She clearly suspected internet fraud, and I was on the verge of pointing out that anyone fraudulently buying things on her card would probably have them sent to themselves.... Ripping through to the invoice, however, she quickly discovered it was a gift from a friend who had been to stay with his children some weeks ago. She was so thrilled she instantly put them on and wore them all day -- "I may well bathe in them!" -- stumping around the village going, "Look at my new wellies! Have I shown you my new wellies?! Have I told you about my new wellies?! You know who sent them?" while Ifan muttered, "Fancy wellies. Who needs fancy wellies? Cost about three times as much as plain yellow ones. I don't know. What's he sending her fancy wellies for. I think it's something kinky. You're not wearing them to bed, mind!" "I may!"
So, that was fun. Rowena is a nurse specialising in paediatric oncology. She drives all over South Wales visiting children with cancer and providing home care and once a week works at the hospital in Cardiff. I chatted to her a bit about the NHS while we were driving from Cardiff to Aberaeron the day I arrived (I have always so far made sure to arrive on a Thursday, which is the day Row's Cardiff, so she can drive me back after her work day -- though going into Aberystwyth could be a possibility also). She told me she disagrees with all privatisation of the NHS but she doesn't think that privatising the cleaning services or dirty hospitals in general are the reason for the rise in superbugs (eg MRSA). She thinks it's just because at this point antibiotics have been used -- and often misused -- for so long that the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections is a direct result. She also said that superbugs never kill people who aren't terribly unhealthy/immune-compromised in the first place, which I hadn't known. I said that Mum used to describe how they had to be so careful about hygiene when they were training at Great Ormond Street and Rowena said, "Well, she's forgotten the cockroaches in the nursing home. And the rats in the basement!" She also said that a lot of the criticism that the NHS gets to is for closures which she says are inevitable. "Not every community can have a specialist centre in everything, can they? We have to have centres of excellence." Which actually makes sense to me. And the UK is so small, travelling from Wales to Bristol is equivalent to travelling from one part of British Columbia to another, which people just do, because seriously, no one expects there to be a world class children's hospital like B.C. Children's in, say, Prince George. Or a world class cancer treatment centre.
Anyway, it was a lovely visit. Hopefully I can go back soon -- but I say that about so many places. I really ought to visit Mark and Amanda, I only once have since they moved to Jersey, and I'm desperate to get back to Turkey again. *sigh* Too many places, too little time, FAR too little money!
I recently picked up Maus (both volumes in one book) on a whim (I've been transfixed by it ever since a boyfriend introduced me to it in Grade 12). Susie said she would like to read it, but she's been really busy with her painting it's just kind of sat on our TV ever since.
I also found Madame Bovary in French in a second-hand book store and bought it, in the continued delusional belief that I shall read it. I didn't have a French-English dictionary at the time, so it got stuffed in my bookshelf and temporarily forgotten.
Then I -- FINALLY -- dug up the gift certificates for Waterstones that my colleagues gave me when I left the NSPCC, plus a gift card, also for Waterstones, that I got for a birthday at some point, and went off the Waterstones near school. I bought the Philip Pullman trilogy which I've been wanting for ages, ever since I read The Northern Lights, borrowed from a young relative. I also bought a massive French-English dictionary to push me further along the path to reading Madame Bovary, but was unable to decide on anything else.
However, I also really want Persepolis in French, as I think that might be nearer my current reading level than Madame Bovary, and wonder if I should start with that. There are some French bookstores in London. Hm...
eyelid made a post about the importance of Israel to American Jews and I posted a few comments which resulted in a discussion which made me realise how long it's been since I paid much attention to news out of Israel and the disputed territories or tried to understand the conflict. I decided I've been out of academia a bit long and need to start reading some scholarly texts.
I did a blitz through some university websites to try and find course materials required for courses on the Middle East. Perhaps not surprisingly all of the course pages at the Israeli universities I checked were, duh, in Hebrew. Harvard and Yale didn't give me much, but Oxford obliged with a reading list for the Middle East unit of their MPhil International Relations. It was a about three pages long. I decided to stop with that for the time being, rather than go on to Cambridge, McGill, Exeter, Durham, and some other American and Canadian unis, because, really, three pages is enough to start with!
I went through and eliminated every book that hadn't been published or republished in the past ten years (except one -- the Tessler was specifically recommended elsewhere as being a common university text), everything that focused only on a specific war or time period, anything that only focused on military history in general, anything that focused solely on eg, Camp David negotiations, basically anything that wasn't an overview history from the late 19th-century until the present. Then I checked all their reviews on Amazon and tried to eliminate anything that seemed massively biased, or somewhat biased and not scholarly enough to make up for it.
Now my list is half a page long.
On a whim, however, I dropped into Waterstones in Camden Town (I still had one £20 gift certificate plus £3 on the gift card) yesterday afternoon, and went to their history section. I didn't have my list with me, but there was only one text which looked simultaneously scholarly and like an overview of the entire history -- Israel: A History (a new edition, published this year) by Martin Gilbert, which is absolutely massive and has a lot of maps at the back. I read the back cover, the reviews and the introductory remarks and concluded that Gilbert is more sympathetic to Israel than otherwise, based on:
-the back cover blurb, which mentions Palestine only once and Palestinians not at all
-back cover also mentions the author's "intimate knowledge of the country and its people" and calls Israel a "powerful and proud nation" (with which I don't quibble, but it does send a certain message!)
-favourable reviews from the right-leaning Times, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Times Literary Supplement and not a peep from, say, the Guardian or the New York Times (only perhaps there wouldn't be, on a UK edition)
-the preface to the 60th anniversary edition, which begins:
"Ten years have passed since this book was completed. Those ten years have seen a surfeit of history in this land that, since creation of the Jewish State in 1948, has known -- has been allowed -- too little peace and quiet."
-and the fact that the main other work for which he is recommended (apart from being Churchill's official biographer) is one on the Holocaust
However, as I say, it looks like a respectable, well-researched tome, and I figured a history of Israel from the Israeli perspective might be just what I need to start me out, so I took it to the desk to ask if it had any reviews. The guy said, "Well, I'm not supposed to say the A- word, but the reviews on Amazon seem favourable," and read me one or two. He was right, they did.
So, OK. I have my first scholarly text devoted exclusively to Israel. Now everyone can tell me a better one I should have bought! Advice much appreciated. On my list of possibilities (if I ever get through this one, it's massive!) remain:
Finkelstein, Norman G. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995, 2003).
Fraser, T.G. The Arab-Israeli Conflict (2004).
Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005).
Gilbert, Martin. The Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2002, 2005).
Hirst, David. The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East(1977, 2003).
Laqueur, Walter and Rubin, Barry, eds. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (1969, 2001).
Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (1999, 2001).
Ovendale, Ritchie. The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Wars (1984, 2004).
Schulze, Kirsten E. The Arab-Israeli Conflict (1999).
Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000, 2001).
Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988, 2004).
Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (1994).
Wasserstein, Bernard. Israel and Palestine: Why They Fight and Can They Stop? (2003, 2004).
But I shall have to see if I can find any at the library, because seriously, I have no money. The next installment of my loan comes on the 15th of this month, and I have around £40 to last me until then. *sigh*
My rent is up in my new place, which I thought I would be able to absorb with the larger loan I've taken this year -- and I have been able to, just about, it's just that I started the year at the bottom of my £2000 overdraft, which I had used to last me the summer (plus money from Mum and Hywel) and I don't see any way out of that. Whereas last year I started at a thousand pounds or so in the black. Then rent and bills are now £600, when they were £400-£450 last year. Then there's transport. I used to live in Zone 3, so one would logically think I would pay less for transport now I'm in Zone 2... except that when I was in Zone 3 I bought a Zone 2-3 travelcard every month and simply took the bus when I was in Zone 1. That's not an option anymore, because there's no direct bus from here to campus, and there are no single-zone travelcards anyway, so I'm buying a Zone 1-2 travelcard. A Zone 2-3 travelcard cost around £45 if I remember correctly, with my student discount. A Zone 1-2 travelcard is £65. And so it goes.
I'll just have to start making even more of an effort to stick to my budget. As I say, I hate the way our classes are spread out at college, it forces me to eat lunch there every day, and if there isn't something easily transportable from home, or if I haven't had time to throw something together, that means spending money at the cafe. It wouldn't be so bad if there was a microwave and student lounge other than the cafeteria, but there isn't. I'll just have to make a greater effort to work around it. More cooking at home, and just eat things cold at college.
I'm finding this year in general much more slapdash than last year. Last year I did have various complaints about the College of Law, but because there GDL caters to such a huge number of students it is at least very efficient in its organisation of materials, class times, etc. I remember only one or two schedule mix-ups the entire year, and no problems receiving materials at all.
This year, we constantly get emails telling us to be at this class at this time, no sorry, correction, here's the amended list, or that our loose-leaf materials are waiting for us at the front desk so we'd better go and get them within the next couple of days or they'll be gone. And then we get them and have to put them in order ourselves.
In addition, I still find the teaching all over the place. I don't blame the teachers because I've gleaned they have to stick strictly to the lessons plans and materials with which the college provides them. I find the materials really all over the place, and hardly ever feel there's been follow-through on anything we're learning. It's procedural rules mixed in with skills -- I get that --but it's so thoroughly mixed in that I never feel anything's consolidated. The only thing I'm certain of is I could make a damn good bail application a couple of weeks ago.
I like the skills a lot better than the procedure. A lot of people say the advocacy makes them feel very nervous, but it doesn't me, and I always get good feedback, even when I do a submission after walking into class still scribbling it up. But I find the procedural rules incredibly dull, and I'm still pretty vague on precisely what knowledge we're going to be tested on in our Multiple Choice Tests -- mocks in January, reals in April. I haven't been revising as I go along like I did last year, either.
So part of it's down to me too. Last year, there was so much work and I was so frightened all the time that the only thing to do was put my head down and run run run like a rat in a hamster wheel. This year there is much less work, it seems much less directed, and much of it is very dull. So I admit, I quite simply am not working as hard. I am also somewhat foxed about how to file everything. At the moment I have one big folder for Criminal Procedure and one big folder for Civil Procedure. But all the skills are all mixed up in there -- advocacy, negotiation, research, drafting, etc. I've considered separating all my notes out into separate folders for each skill... except that the Multiple Choice knowledge questions are divided into Civil and Criminal, so from that point of view it's better to have it the way it is. I find it extremely difficult to work out a coherent system of doing anything in this course and that really bugs me. I'm naturally an incredibly disorganised person, so I really need systems, and I'm just not finding it easy to work any out.
*rant rant* I'm sure it will come out well in the end. I've received very good feedback on all my advocacy and the two pieces of written work that I've so far got back from marking so I must be doing something right. I just have to make sure I'm on top of the material for the MCTs. Which will first involve finding out what, precisely, that material is, but when I brought up some of my concerns to my Criminal tutor yesterday she said we should soon be receiving an email telling us what will be covered on the Criminal and Civil MCT mocks in January.
I expect I will once again have a revision-packed Christmas holidays, but that's OK. I survived it last year, I can survive it again!
Am booked to go home for Christmas -- yay!
Susannah and I are getting along great. We still shop, cook and fuss over Daisy together and I download Grey's Anatomy for us to watch every week.
Daisy is still alive, still ill, and seems to be even more hungry all the time than ever -- *sigh*. A couple of days ago when I got up she began howling like a banshee and Susannah said, "Can she really be that hungry? I mean, well," (looking at her watch) "it has been two hours..." "What is she?!" I asked, "a baby?"
Have been seeing a lot of a PhD student at the University of Kent in Canterbury named Paul. His specialty is film studies and cognitive theory.
My hair needs cutting, I have a disgusting tangle of split ends. Because of my financial issues, I think I may ask Susannah if she will do it for me. (Edit, she will!)