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.
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.
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.
Must really stop giggling every time I think of the Boguslawski case, but this is difficult given that my mental connection of the facts of the case with its name involves imagining a bunch of Polish people in an English courtroom shouting “LAWSKI!” and “No, BOGUSLAWSKI!” at each other.
(Sorry, I know that’ll be lost on anyone who doesn’t know public international law. I’ll stop talking about it soon enough, I promise. Monday is jurisprudence.)
I write the Great American Novel, save it to disk, and come in here to find that my disk can’t be read.
Okay, it wasn’t the Great American Novel. It was company law notes on agency and shareholder litigation, plus two blog entries, and I’m not American. But regardless of all this I claim the right to be annoyed.
Public International Law on Thursday. If Re Pinochet (No.3) and humanitarian intervention don’t feature strongly in the paper, heads will roll, namely mine.
Fucking dissertation due today. Fucking moot tomorrow in fucking Lincoln about the fucking law of fucking finding i.e. if Lord Fucker leases his land to Fucker 1 who employs Fucker 2 as a gamekeeper, and Fucker 2 finds an antique brooch one day while walking through the forest, who gets to keep it? DUDE, DO I LOOK LIKE I FUCKING CARE????????
[Hmmmm. An addendum, now that Microsoft Word has finally kindly consented to stop conducting chaos theory experiments with my footnotes. The dissertation is printed. Love dissertation. Love computer. Love printer. I am calm and full of love. Except for the fact that I now need to prepare the moot. Which I still FUCKING HATE.]
Oh, I forgot to say: things will probably be quiet here till Monday at least, because I’m Ryanairing off to Ireland tomorrow.
Meanwhile I continue to utter unfortunately phrased and embarrassing statements garnering strange looks from surrounding people in the computer cluster room, such as explaining on the phone to a public international law coursemate that “I really have to get my public international ass into gear”.
Miscellaneous disjointed updates:
After spending more time and energy thinking about eyelash-tinting than mentally healthy, I’m pleased to report that we won Wednesday’s moot and are in the next round of the competition. Notable successes of the day included restraining ourselves from referring to Jennifer Lopez’s butt insurance while trying to argue that “Demi Massinger”, the model suing our beautician client, could bloody well have gone and insured her eyelashes if they were that important to her career. Also satisfactory was our efficient downing of Screaming Orgasms and peach margaritas in the 20 minutes we had in the pub before we had to catch the train back to London. A rather fulfilling day.
Don’t bother with Pacha London on a Friday night unless you want to see the tackiest chandelier ever, and pay nearly twice the price (£15!) for half the quality of music you can get in Turnmills. The crowd was friendly and unpretentious, though, which is always good. Even Martini Breath Guy who felt it was very very important to talk to me in order to promote the interaction of Western and Eastern cultures, and who simply couldn’t understand that my name was not Mya-Chung or Mi-Choo or something else vaguely Oriental sounding, was amusing for about ten minutes.
The dominatrix boots have received their first wearing. I managed to teeter quite successfully through the Egyptian and Greek sections of the British Museum, although staircases raised minor issues. Teething problems. I’ll whip these boots into shape soon enough.
Django is showing me love for the first time in a long while. Goodbye 20th Century (Sonic Youth) and Sounds From The Gulf Stream (Marine Research) are hopefully pootling their way across the Atlantic to me. Yay.
Just found out that I have a jurisprudence essay due this Friday. I must not have known about this because it must have been announced at one of the three seminars I decided to skive. Conveniently, I am also told that the major focus of the essay just happens to be the material covered in the aforesaid seminars. Somehow I always manage to do this to myself. It’s a sort of gift.
So, er, if anyone’s got (jurisprudentially informed) views on whether:
1. there is a right answer to every legal question, or
2. what function the notion of community has in the making of law,
I will be eternally grateful and consider naming my firstborn child after you (as long as you’re not called Prunella or Bubba or something similarly vile) if you send a few ideas my way.
[While we’re on the subject of my general crapness, I ought to write here and now that I had a productive power lunch today with Sabrina, where we tried to get our act together about our external moot in January (representing UCL at the Blackstone’s mooting competition), and I have to know something about incorporation of terms into contracts by December 28th so we can start assembling our cunning plan for world moot domination. Must not let Sabrina down. Must not let Sabrina down.]
[While we’re on the subject of my general malaise, I should also add that the only reason I’m typing this whinge right now instead of studying my arse off in the library is because we’ve all been evacuated due to what is apparently a fire emergency. This will, no doubt, give the little gremlins that live in the UCL library ample time to take the books I was using and hide them in Medieval Feminine Hygiene Products or some other ridiculously obscure section of the library. They do this frequently. I was hoping I’d foiled them today. Obviously not. Gah.]
I didn’t win the moot finals, but I’ve never cared less about losing something in my life.
I’d spent the entire night (well, the entire night after watching King Lear at the Globe) trying to convince rebellious hordes of personal junk into neat compartmentalized existence (apologies to corridor-mates whose sleep might have been interrupted by country n’ western, gospel and opera renditions of The Star Spangled Banner, which was one of the ways I was trying to make myself less miserable, in between swigs of Jack Daniels), and the standoff didn’t end till noon the next day, where I had to switch my attentions from packing to writing my submissions for the moot, which was in seven hours (in terms of preparing for a moot, this is a ludicrously short amount of time).
So I didn’t win, but the girl who did win obviously put a great deal more effort into it than I did, so hey, congratulations, Dee. Now I might have to take part in the damn competition again next year just to beat you.
Meanwhile, today has been spent smiling sweetly at Budgens, Cullens and Boots employees in order to persuade them to give me boxes (of the cardboard, not bruising, variety), booking debating tournament rooms with Mark and the very conscientious but rather bizarre room-bookings lady, who felt the need to tell us that her skirt was riding up and how embarassed she was, and battling dust demons in the loft.
I’m tired. And dusty.