Marmite Epiphany

Whilst scraping the last remnants of my pot of Marmite on to my crumpets yesterday, I suddenly realised that I was about to do something I can never remember having done before: throwing an empty Marmite pot in the bin. How can this be? How can I eat as much Marmite as I do and never get to the end of a pot?

My theory: that for nearly all my adult life I have been on one posting or another with the Foreign Office. That Marmite has never been available in the country to which I have been posted so I have therefore gone armed with large pots of the stuff.... and that I have never lived long enough in a country to get through a big pot of Marmite. The pot would probably have lasted all the longer for the fact that crumpets are not available outside of the UK either. But... well, it goes to show what a long shelf life Marmite has, doesn't it? Does it ever go off? What on earth is it made of? What exactly IS Marmite - I need answers!

Saying that, I do seem to remember one pot of the stuff being emptied in Geneva. My friend Jean-Luc, having tasted Marmite for the first time, had taken a great liking to it, first of all spreading it on toast like it was jam and then deciding it was so lovely he wanted to eat the rest of it with a spoon, which he promptly proceded to do. One pot of Marmite, gone in less than 10 minutes. Strange bunch of people, the Swiss. At least he got to the bottom of a pot though, which is more than I managed to do until the grand old age of 35!

PS

... male, apparently!

Gender Genie

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

This is a new toy. You cut and paste text on to this page and it tells you whether it was written by a male of female. My blog is 50/50 (so far - I've only tried a few). My entry about James being deported was written by a woman but the following entry on my blog was written by a man. Apparently, I'm well androgynous - who'd have thought it. The strange thing is the key words they use are mainly things like "and" or "with" rather than words like nipples, periods, spankies or front-bottoms. I'm now going to cut and paste this text and see what sex I am at the moment....

Deportation

I haven't blogged in a few days. I hope you'll all forgive me when I explain that I have had other things on my mind. I was genuinely worried there that those "lovely" people at the Home Office were going to confiscate my shiny new husband. But they didn't. Instead, they extended his student visa until January 2008. So I can at least keep him until then. In fact, by then he'll probably be so sick of his constant tea-making and general lookingafterBecky duties that he'll be glad to be deported!

So, yes, we spent yesterday at the Home Office in Croydon. Croydon - what's that all about then? Is the walk through its soulless streets meant to demoralise visa applicants before they arrive? Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here? As James so astutely pointed out, town in which the local McDonalds removes all its seats has to be pure class. It wasn't an effective move - the chavs just loitered there in a standing position instead. But enough Croydon-bashing...

Well, not quite enough. I think the world needs to know my opinion on this matter:

Croydon epitomises everything that is Wrong about suburbia. Go and visit - you'll see. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. (Mad Irish Julie - please get in touch with Layla and ensure that "Croydon" is put on her Wrong List)

I now have to go and write two essays. That's my punishment today for taking a mini-break in Croydon yesterday. But at least I get to keep my husband!

I'm not here!

This is Becky's conscience writing. I'm afraid Becky is currently unavailable in the world of bloggism as she is writing a rather complicated essay about the intellectual isolation of the hero in Greek tragedy. This is made more complicated by the fact that she's not entirely sure that the plays she is dealing with actually have heroes as such, let alone ones who are isolated, intellectually or otherwise.

Becky notices from her site meter (which she checks during her many moments of procrastination) that her friends and sisters are checking her blog with alarming regularity. So she'd like to wave to you from beneath a sea of tragedy cricitism and let you know that she'll be back soon. Sod Ajax, Antigone and Philoctetes - Becky is the one who is isolated at the moment, both physically and intellectually. Please send chocolates. As soon as possible. Nice ones!

Year 3: The Holiday Ends Here!

One week down of Michaelmas term in my third and final year. I needed to get back to some sort of routine after a long and lazy summer holiday. But this year is going to be busy, reeeeeally busy. My head hurts from the amount of reading I'm doing and when I actually think about the amount of work I have to do to even get to the exam revision stage, I want to reach for the gin bottle. This term, I am:

- Having Greek tragedy supervisions, and writing weekly essays
- Attending 2 lectures each morning, again mostly on Tragedy
- Having practical criticism supervisions, and writing weekly essays
- Trying to do the reading for my dissertation, with the aim of doing draft at Christmas
- Worrying that I haven't read nearly enough novels, Shakespearean tragedy or Chaucer for next term and feeling guilty that I don't have time to do any reading on it at the moment
- Attending French tragedy seminars (no essays, mercifully, but lots of reading)

This doesn't sound that much when seen as a relatively short list. But the reading! At the moment, I have on my desk 9 books on Greek tragedy that I need to read in order to write my essay. Big books full of stuff that is almost beyond my comprehension. 9 books that are all going to contradict each other and make my head hurt. What I really want to do is have an afternoon nap. I've applied for the London marathon too, so who knows I may have 50 miles a week to run on top of all this come December!

On a shinier, happier note, I started tap dancing lessons on Monday. I went to the improvers' class and was by far the worst one there! There's an end of year show at the Corn Exchange. The theme is "The Movies". Our dance teacher told us our group would be performing a dance to the music from "The Mask" wearing .... wait for it.... yellow cat suits! When I told James this, the mouthful of coffee he had just sipped nearly came out of his nose.

V odd supervision!

I'm going to have to blog this in the vaguest of terms, because I don't want anyone to google this and recognise who I am writing about. I had a supervision yesterday at one of the old, old colleges. The supervisor is the world expert in his field and very much the epitome of the Oxbridge Don. He took me for lunch at high table (with a cavalier disregard for the college's rules which state that undergraduates are not permitted at high table) and then we went to his office for a supervision. He thought I was studying history, not English. Then he thought I was a PhD student, not an undergraduate. Then he started a sentence with the words "If I were your supervisor, which I'm not - am I? - I'd recommend...".

I came home very confused. Did he just give me a supervision or didn't he? Has he forgotten that he had agreed to supervise me? Did he think he was just doing me a favour and recommending some reading? What do I do now? If I ask for my second supervision (I'm entitled to four) is he going to think I'm being a nuisance when he's already seen me once and told me what to read? I don't know where to go from here!

As an example of how eccentric he is, he was telling me that a woman had written to him on his specialist subject and had asked for recommended reading. He immediately fired an e-mail back telling her what to read. Once the e-mail had gone, he looked at her name again ... and realised he had recommended two of her own books to her!

Sometimes Cambridge is just so ... Cambridge!

The mother of all hangovers

Well, not quite the mother, but yesterday's one was a particularly bad one, made all the worse since I really don't think I deserved it. Let's start at the beginning, shall we, children? Sitting comfortably?

Once upon a time, there was a little Princess called Becky. One evening, Prince Not-Always-Entirely-Charming-but-Gorgeous-Nonetheless decided to take Princess Becky out to drink some beer. Prince Gorgeous really loved beer - it was a comfort to him in times of trouble, super-happy juice in times of celebration, medicine in times of sickness and basically his second best friend in the whole wide world. Over the course of the evening, what with long-missed undergraduate friends returning after the summer vac and all, Princess Becky managed to drink three pints of the stuff.

That's all. Nothing mad - no mixing of drinks, no tequila slammers, not even any chain smoking.

Fast-forward to the following morning. I woke up, felt okay, had a cup of tea and then made the fatal error of eating a chocolate button. Just one. Chocolate. Button. Mayhem ensues. Vomiting Veronica returns. Then I was okay for a few hours and asked James to go and get me a can of lemonade from the vending machine. Big mistake - huge! It was a calorie-free lemonade (why? why would he buy that for me, when what I obviously needed was SUGAR?). And suddenly, Veronica's at it again. Big time.

Glen arrived at 5.30, ready to accompany us to the Finn's surprise birthday party (why, oh why are there always surprise birthday parties on days like these?). I answered the door in my dressing gown, having been in bed all day, apart from a brief awakening when I had to make the Finn's sodding suprise fecking birthday cake. Glen was, admittedly, about half an hour early but that really didn't excuse my attire. So I arrived at the party like the walking wounded. The screams of "surprise!!!" (complete with multiple explanation marks) hurt, really REALLY hurt. I drank coke. Glass after glass of coke. And then I felt better.

But I didn't sleep, oh no, because by the time I went to bed I was loaded full of caffeine.

And today I had to go to work. Not surprisingly, nobody wanted to buy any expensive clothes from me.

I think it's time to go out for a nice glass of beer now. What harm could it possibly do?