End Of Term And Everything After

The term is finally over, thank God. I only handed in 2 of the 3 essays I was meant to hand in, and it worries me that I don’t really care. Oh well. Put it on my tab at the New Year’s Resolution pub.

I was feeling a little down last night – walking home alone at 11 pm on a Friday night in London at Christmas somehow has that effect. Everything and everyone seemed either incredibly bleak and unChristmassy, or so overwhelmingly Christmassy that I missed Singapore, where Christmas is no less commercialized but a lot prettier, at least in my opinion. But! When I got home, Ruth and Chris were dancing to Waterloo on the table, Avril was red and giggling, Michael was being high-pitched and Scottish, and there was Cointreau. Lots of Cointreau. It’s amazing how different I was feeling after a while.

I go to Madrid early tomorrow morning, but we’re spending tonight at the airport because our flight is too early in the morning for us to get there on time otherwise. It’s me, Avril and Russ, which should hopefully be a merry band of wanderers and not too dysfunctional. I’m slightly worried about language problems since I learnt everything I know about Spanish from Sesame Street 15 years ago, but things did go all right in Italy, and my very helpful hallmates Samer and Noelia will be available if we do run into serious trouble. I don’t quite have a specific agenda of things to accomplish there – the Spain in my head is the Spain shown to me by Salvador Dali and Picasso, but the realist in me generally prefers not to overly romanticise a place before going to it, because I’m scared of disappointment. We’ll see how it goes.

Funny moment yesterday, in a conversation with a slightly stoned Nick about Madrid:
Me: Pop quiz. Name a Spanish terrorist group.
Nick: EDTA?
Me: I think you’ll remember when you’re coherent that edta is a chemical compound thingy that we learnt in A’level Chemistry. But nice try anyway.

Music randomness:
I really should remember to remind Gareth to return me the CDs he borrowed. Last night I had this craving for that escalating guitar riff in Aneurysm, and couldn’t satisfy it. (This is was probably a result of the Westlife that followed ABBA on the songlist during the Cointreau tabletop dancing sessions…). I had to substitute Cross The Breeze (Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation) instead, which is at all other times anything but a substitute due to its absolute fanf***ingtasticness. I also have to get Maxinquaye back so I can lend it to Nick in exchange for more Thievery Corporation albums. Matt just returned me what he borrowed, which is good because Marten wants to listen to XO. Esther still has Mezzanine and From The Choirgirl Hotel. I should probably do something about the increasingly distributed nature of my CD collection before things get out of hand.