One More Year

I went to Germany feeling extraordinarily low; protracted showers and sleeps over a too-brief weekend hadn’t been enough to combat the accumulated dust and disorientation of moving out of my comfort zone of 2 years, and remaining rebel elements in my lungs were still mounting the occasional tubercolotic (that’s probably not even a word, but you know what I’m getting at) revolution. I felt residually gritty and somehow off-kilter, like a bad photocopy of myself.

I returned from Germany yesterday and it feels like everything has changed. I had a pretty damn fabulous holiday with my pretty damn fabulous best friend, which will hopefully be written about soonish. I found out two wonderful pieces of news – one, that I got first class honours in my degree, two, that my scholarship organization will let me take advantage of this by sponsoring me for a Masters (which means another year before they have to pull me kicking and screaming from London back to Singapore).

For the first time in a while there is certainty, and optimism that can finally be more than just cautious. It’s sunny today. I’m feeling good in my skin.

LLB (First Class Honours)

The news for today, apart from the fact that Munich is scorchingly hot, is that I apparently have a first class honours degree to show for these 3 years I’ve spent at UCL. Next to news like this I suppose mild sunstroke is nothing really to complain about.

Very Short Update

Am going into periodic paroxysms of coughing in the computer room, and am getting tired of those furtive “Have I had that TB jab?” looks in the eyes of its other occupants.

Met Jared on Friday for rather shitty dinner at ULU (my fault, sorry Jared) but far more enjoyable drinks and conversation outside the Jeremy Bentham pub. Will be following his Eurotrash odyssey with interest.

Spent Jubilee weekend in Cornwall with Alec – great. Caught cold smack in the middle of Jubilee weekend in Cornwall – not so great. Hence coughing. Hence retreat now, back to warmth and love of duvet.

Bart Davenport/Homescience/Amazing Pilots/Ladybug Transistor (The Arts Cafe, London)

On Saturday people on the boating lake in Regent’s Park may have been pleasantly reminded of the age of imperialism by the sight of a small yellow girl rowing a tall poncily reclining white guy round the lake, although Alec had admittedly rowed me round the lake for the previous 45 minutes, and the Irish arguably have as much cause for resentment about imperialism as us yellow people do.

At night I’d decided to indulge my delusions of indieness by going to a gig at the Arts Cafe. We had a good time, but I ended up enjoying the performance of Bart Davenport (who wasn’t even advertised) most, and Ladybug Transistor (the only band I’d actually heard of) least. In between those two were Homescience (not the most cohesive or animated performers around, but their songs were mildly Pavementy so I liked them well enough) and The Amazing Pilots (who were, in contrast, incredibly cohesive, really got into their performance, and had much better rapport with the crowd, but whose songs were for the most part less interesting except for one called I Thought About It And I’ve Still Not Changed My Mind, which lived up to its rather great title).

Alec bought Bart Davenport’s CD on the strength of what he managed with just the quality of his voice, his songs, his guitar and the occasional kazoo, but it turned out to be disappointingly glossier – a bit too sunkissed and xylophoney – than what we’d been expecting from the performance. Still pleasant enough though, and well worth looking up if you like Summer Hymns or Yuji Oniki, who produced some of the CD.

There was nothing I specifically disliked about Ladybug Transistor, but there seemed to be a sameness to all aspects of their performance and their songs that didn’t capture me at all. In response to the last sentence of this review at Pitchfork, I guess I do just prefer the less sophisticated and trippier ways of channelling 60s sound that the Elephant 6 bands come up with (which reminds me, must go listen to my Olivia Tremor Control CDs for maximum summerness).

Spread Eagle Surprise

Friday was meant to be practical day. It was meant to involve writing heartfelt treatises about why a Masters in Law, and particularly subjects like International And Comparative Commercial Arbitration, would give me mojo. Instead I found myself staring up at the Cutty Sark and chasing an elusive meridian line across Greenwich Park with Luke. As you do.

Later, with a dead phone battery, I was in Shoreditch trying to find a public phone to call Russ about meeting up in Herbal. Walking down the street, a pub door opened and a man came out. Right, I thought, pubs are good for public phones, and so I strode in. In hindsight the fact that all the windows were frosted should perhaps have warned me that The Spread Eagle was a pub where the line between public and private was somewhat blurred. Specifically, the line between women’s privates and the male public. Hindsight is always 20/20, so they say, and here I did indeed sight several ‘hinds’ with disturbing and unlooked-for clarity before beating a hasty retreat to a pub where everyone was fully clothed.

Herbal was enjoyable enough, except that the diversity of the music in the Ninja Tune room meant that we didn’t always feel like dancing to what was being played. Also, getting a split lip from an accidental hit on the dancefloor (miscellaneous wanker dancing way too vigorously for reggae) wasn’t too much fun. While spitting a lot of blood into the sink, I remembered primary school health education tests where you had to memorize the functions of the different teeth. Mrs Ang was right about incisors, although at the time I think the point she was trying to make was that it was naughty to bite people.

Goddess Of Small Things

The details of my life seem that much more shallow sometimes when I try to write them down here, but for me buying a lot of CDs, endorphin-level-wise, is right up there with beautiful sunsets, belly laughs, MSG, and a warm man. Well, maybe not quite as good as a warm man, but anyway, it feels damn good.

So on Thursday I bought:

  • Since I Left You (Avalanches, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Spoonface (Ben Christophers, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Good Morning Spider (Sparklehorse, £8.99, Reckless)
  • Fog (Fog, £6.99, Reckless)
  • Black Whole Styles (Big Dada compilation, £7.99, Reckless)
  • cLOUDDEAD (cLOUDDEAD, £5.99, Selectadisc)

Yeah.

Dinner with Alec and his dad was inevitably stressful and toothachesome from holding back my usual stream of inappropriate comments and smiling a lot, but it was well worth it for the valuable ammunition of embarrassing Alec stories gained.

Back in my room, I snuggled up in bed with cherry juice and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal), which I found very much more tragic than ‘omedy, as opposed to the You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! type review excerpts it had on the back cover and elsewhere on the Web. When I closed the book the light outside was long beyond Prussian blue and well on its way to eggshell.

Happy Ending

I’ve only just come to the stage of post-examness where writing for the blog begins to feel like a growing necessity rather than the enforced sidetrack from Getting A Life that it would have been in the past few days.

There is nothing wild or bacchanalian to report. Company Law went much better than I’d expected, and I left quickly after exchanging a few perfunctory words with the few people I actually talk to in the course, nothing of substance; there was no feeling of Here Ends Undergraduateness (assuming I pass), no lump in the throat.

It’s an illustration of my general lack of connection with the social aspects of the law faculty, I guess, even if I will miss the lady in the cafe who worried aloud that the owner of the purply coat left behind (mine) would be cold and since then always reminds me to take it with me when I leave, the lovely Irish security guard who always tried to calm me down every time I was desperately apologizing that my debating tournaments were keeping him there overtime (we always got him some whisky to make up for it), and strangely, the roadworker on a long-term job on the road to the faculty, who chats me up every time I walk past and tells me I’m pretty even when I look bloody awful.

I grabbed a Time Out, a Marks & Spencers lunch, and made a long list of things to do, both practical and frivolous. I went shopping – the makeshift stall on Goodge Street again proved itself an unlikely treasure trove when I found Adventures In Foam (Cujo, 2 CDs, £10), reeled back in disbelief, and snapped it up hungrily. Oxford Street yielded two skirts and a garish top.

Last year the night the exams ended was celebrated in typical style – dinner, pub, club till dawn. This year I had dinner with just Russ (in Carluccio’s, which I loved. Can’t wait to try the one in St Christopher’s Place). It felt right, celebrating the end of my undergraduate life at UCL with a friendship which I count among my most important achievements at university. I didn’t feel the need for anything more glamorous.

Insensitive

The exam venue was a large room which is usually a stomping ground for rampaging medical students (in their UCL Union building on Huntley Street. Thursday nights here are epitomized by mass karaoke and wild table dancing.) I think it was a bit insensitive to leave the Time Crisis machine in there when converting the room to an exam hall.

Hall Chronicles: Theology Students

Being around theology students makes life that little bit more surreal. Two conversational snippets with my hallmate Stefan:

Me: You look troubled.
Stefan: Yes, I am trying to write an essay. The Trinity, it is annoying me.

*

Me: So how’s the studying for ancient Greek going?
Stefan: Oh, I decided to focus on human salvation instead today. I thought it was more important.

Halfway Through, Need More Bullshit

It’s half over. There was an annoying little man in my dreams last night; he had black spectacles and a reedy voice and followed me around rasping “interpretation, interpretation” when he wasn’t engaged in unintelligible mumbling. Without needing to don my armchair dream interpreter hat, I think I can safely say that he was very much inspired by this man, whose existence I was hoping to completely ignore in today’s jurisprudence exam due to my hatred of his Law’s Empire. I unfortunately failed in this noble endeavour, but am comforted by the fact that I only invoked his evil name in criticizing Fuller’s The Morality of Law, which richly deserved the criticism anyway.

So much for the fun exams. Today’s went fairly well compared to public international law last Thursday, where I found myself answering an essay entirely from hazy memories of the Human Rights Act, which I studied in 1999. I daresay much more has happened since then than Naomi Campbell’s grudge match with the tabloids, and I’m sure actually studying the topic would have allowed me to write an essay more than one page long, but such is life.

And now to Conflict of Laws next Monday (which I haven’t started studying for) and Company Law the day after. I think the bullshitting possibilities of these exams ran out today. Ulp.