Goodbye Oxford

So it's goodbye Oxford, hello Slough.

Goodbye unbelievably high speed internet, hello sluggish mobile internet on the boyfriend's computer that's not even fast enough for BBC video.
Goodbye access to any book I want and every single online journal, hello Slough public library.
Goodbye gourmet chocolate shop that gives 10% student discount, hello Lidl.
Goodbye a whole room to store my stuff, hello a single wardrobe, drawer and 3 shelves.
Goodbye quiet, hello living on a main road.
Goodbye university parks next door, hello 20 minute walk to the woods.
Goodbye being able to walk to the town centre, hello too far to walk/ £2 bus ride.

Slough is no substitute for Oxford in general niceness of the experience of living there. However, if you are penniless, as I am, there are a lot more discount shops, and at least you can park in most places (cars are more or less banned from Oxford town centre and if you want to park overnight...you just can't). And I have left out the most important thing of all about Slough...

Goodbye single bed, hello being able to squeeze the boyfriend every night.
There are compensations.

Last minute

And so the deadline for handing in my master's dissertation passes, and I am completely relaxed given that I handed it in 4 days early. This is the end then. Some people on my course never came back to Oxford after leaving in May, and most of the rest seem to have been writing up to the last second. Thus, they are all too tired to celebrate, and we will all disperse to the 4 corners of the Earth and the whole thing ends in a terrific anti-climax. In a few days I will be unemployed and living in Slough.

I know it was for 3 years rather than 1, and therefore friendships will have been stronger etc., but my undergraduate degree had a very definite end point and proper goodbyes. I remember closing the door to Caius porter's lodge at 3am, saying goodbye to the friends gathered inside, because I really had to leave as I was graduating at 8am the next day. And so I graduated the next day (you really can't tell from the pictures that I had 4 hours sleep) and my parents drove me home to Essex. This masters has no end point, no closing of the door, no grand goodbyes, and I can't help but be angry with everyone who is too exhausted to celebrate because they were still writing their thesis all last night. I want to shake them and yell "YOU DO KNOW THAT IN REAL LIFE YOU CAN'T DO THINGS THE NIGHT BEFORE, RIGHT?". If they hadn't all been so bloody disorganised, we could have had a last day of fun. Instead, they're all asleep and I'm reduced to watching internet TV. I should have charged by the hour for the proofreading I did for some people. I don't think I can even be bothered to say goodbye now, I feel like slinking off into the east, quietly, into a somewhat bleak-looking and very penniless future.

Jogging round the park

Since coming back to Oxford I've really enjoyed running around the University Park, along with just about every other runner in Oxford, on these nice summer evenings. It's peaceful, shaded and about 1.4 miles around the perimeter which is long enough to do circuits around without getting too bored. I'm starting to feel like I will be ready for my return to half marathoning on September the 27th, but I'm slightly nervous. I really want to complete the course. If you end up walking in a half marathon, it's probably for one of four reasons:

1) Your strategy is run-walk, so it's what you've trained for.
2) You started too fast and exhausted yourself.
3) You didn't train hard enough.
4) You are a pussy and deserve ridicule.

Number 1 is obviously fine. I've met some people who love the run-walk strategy. It's too slow for me, and I'd never get on with it, but if it's what you set out to do then it's perfectly honourable. I am quite scared of number 2 and number 3, although I have been keeping up with my training plan and even doing slightly more than it suggests when I feel good. I am scared that I might end up doing 2 or 3 and looking like 4. I was tough about long distance running. I once ran a whole marathon, and a half marathon was no more than a moderate training run in those days. That was years ago though. I am nowhere near that fit now. In a way I can't wait to challenge myself, but I have some underlying nerves. I'll suppress them. Fear of ridicule is going to get me round.

Stuff: or, how to live with just a waxed paper raincoat and not much else

I have returned to the UK, where I know which side of the road the traffic is coming from, where my electrical items have plugs that fit and where tea tastes nice instead of strange and wrong. I have also returned to my stuff.

Sigh. I have written about stuff before. I think about it even more than that. It's getting to be slightly tedious. I've been thinking about the guy who is living with only 100 things. It's a bit of a cheat (all his books count as one thing, for example, although for some reason his 3 Bibles are counted separately). With this in mind I counted my things in the Azores. There were less than 60, and I was pleased (I had my own rules, like my camera plus its case plus its battery charger only counts as one). Now, I'm back and my stuff has multiplied 100-fold. There didn't seem to be too much of it at the blue-eyed boy's house, but there was a lot more in storage in Oxford, and there's even MORE at my parents' house. It's going to be an unsolvable problem until I settle somewhere, but who knows when that is going to be as unemployment becons once I finish my dissertation.

I'm going to live with the blue-eyed boy, which is a happy thought, but the fact that I will also be living with his Mum and his sister and his nephew as well is a less happy one. I want to have as much space as possible, since there will be five of us in a smallish three-bedroom house (only four of us are adults) and the more stuff I bring with me, the less I will have. So, I've been reading about stuff, and making small piles of things to give to charity, and recycling and chucking. I'm still going to have to store many things in my parents' loft. Depressingly, these are all the household things, like saucepans and quilts, that need to hibernate until the blue-eyed boy and I can make like adults and move in together to Somewhere Of Our Own. It seems like a distant dream.

The people who choose not to have stuff make me curious and I'm a bit jealous of their freedom. Like this guy who lives in a cave (in the U.S.A., where else?) and doesn't use money at all. There's an excellent essay on the having of stuff here.

This train of thought also always leads me to Basho. Matsuo Basho was a 17th century Japanese haiku poet, probably the most famous haiku poet of all. I don't speak Japanese, and I think a lot of the beauty of his haiku is lost in translation, but he was also a wanderer and a travel writer in a time when that was an extraordinary and dangerous thing to do. He went all over Japan on foot on several journeys and wrote at least three short travel books, which are published together in the edition I have as "The Narrow Road To The Deep North". Isn't that a beautiful title? They blend prose describing his travels with haiku composed on the road.

Basho is a worthy hero just for his writing, but even more so for his adventuring. He didn't really expect to return from his last trip and it seems he was a bit disappointed not to die on the road. I don't have the book in front of me now (Where is it? Could be anywhere...), but I remember that he talked about what he was taking on his journey, for thousands of miles, and it was so little that he could basically wear it (he had a PAPER rain jacket) and put it in his pockets (writing materials). Whenever I think about stuff, I think of Basho, wandering all over Japan in his waxed paper rain jacket, being inspired by the natural world and writing poetry.

Wagon wheels: nonsensical

Blue-eyed boy: "Why does everything always have to make sense?"

Me: "I like things that make sense, I like to understand."

Blue-eyed boy: "Well there are thousands of things that don't make sense..."

Me: "Give me a list of five."

Blue-eyed boy: "Wagon Wheels...and belly button fluff, it's always blue no matter what colour your clothes are...."

Me: (laughing hysterically) "Wagon Wheels genuinely don't make sense! The components on their own would be disgusting! The biscuit is disgusting and the chocolate is really fake."

If asked to think of a list of things that don't make sense I don't think I would choose Wagon Wheels first. I think I would take it too seriously and think about the unsolved problems of science, like a theory of everything for physics, or I would think about things that don't make sense to me, like why you would choose to live in a house with eight smelly dogs. The blue-eyed boy broadens my mind. I am also now dying for a Wagon Wheel.

He knows me

The blue-eyed boy and I will be reunited in just over a week's time. I land at an incredibly awkward time, too early for him to come and pick me up. This isn't too terrible, because to get from Heathrow to Slough you only have to get one bus, though it takes just about forever and I'm not even sure which terminal it goes from. However, he was disappointed to learn that I won't get home before him.

I said (a touch sarcastically), "Well, sorry I won't be able to meet you at the door, wearing a floral summer dress, my hair blowing in the wind...."

He said, "I imagined that I'd find you in my room, opening all your parcels and reading New Scientist".

He's absolutely right, and frighteningly so.

On returning to running

I am training for this year's Windsor half marathon, on September the 27th. The last time I ran anything over about 2 miles was in 2006. I used to run a lot, enough to have completed the London marathon in 2005 and about 6 or 7 half marathons (I lost count because I did some of them several times in successive years). Then I met the blue-eyed boy, who doesn't like running, and prefers cycling and climbing, which keep you fit if you do them very intensively, but dabbling a bit now and then, unless you have a kind of genetically inbuilt fitness and stay skinny no matter what you do (not naming any names, ahem), is not going to do anything to keep you fit.

I decided that I was never going to get fitter and slimmer unless I went back to running, and (as a long-term dream) I will never run an under-2-hour half marathon or an under-5-hour full marathon before I get too old and crusty and seize up altogether, unless I get going. So I entered the Windsor half, and started following the training programme on their website, which is for "getting round" rather than for a particular time, which is probably wise for someone who hasn't run much at all recently. I'm up to my longest weekly run being about 50 minutes and I'm remembering how much I like running.

I like it a lot despite the hills and the dogs I have to contend with here. It's a bit too hilly for me here on Terceira, though running up them is probably good for me. I'm not sure if the uphills slow me down more than the downhills speed me up, so we'll see what happens to my times when I go back to the flat home counties. And the dogs. Jesus H. I didn't like dogs much before I came here, but now I despise and detest them after having been barked at and charged and chased every time I leave the house. If all the dogs in the world spontaneously evaporated tomorrow, I would be ecstatically happy. Despite these disadvantages, I get to run on some quiet-ish roads for about half the time, and along the coast for a short while, which is very beautiful.

I am remembering the peace I feel in my mind while I run. The endorphin glow that means it's almost impossible to be stressed after a while of being out running. I like that it's some self-indulgent time alone. I like being able to explore much further afield than I would bother to walk. I like semi-blankly watching the scenery go past. I'm remembering how much long-distance running hurts. I remember thinking after I'd run a marathon that it was 10 times harder and twice as painful than a half marathon, so I had the impression that half marathons weren't too bad. Not so, they still hurt a bit if you're unfit. I am remembering how much I like exercising without being too out of breath, and how much I hate interval and hill training, when you gasp for breath and when your leg muscles burn.

I like the challenge of driving myself on for slightly longer than my body wants to. I remember being on Greenwich heath in 2005, before the marathon and KNOWING that I was going to get round, even if I had to crawl, because I was that determined. In general I'm usually easily stressed and scared of things that seem difficult, but I turn into a different person on the starting line of a race. I'm so slow that there's no-one to compete with, just myself and the miles ahead. I'm really happy to be recapturing that.

In brief

My supervisor's comments on my first draft bordered on sarcasm.

He strongly suggested that I should use Times New Roman, the ugliest typeface in the world, for my thesis. Ugh.

My first draft was a bit rubbish because I don't have any results yet.

I can't articulate very well why my project is interesting, in part because I suspect that it isn't.

I am bored TO DEATH of all the music on my computer. Even Billy Bragg, Joy Division and the Specials.

I suspect that I've forgotten how to write coherent English after so spending so long as the only native speaker around.

It's a rest day on my half marathon training plan, so I can't even go running.

I am feel half manic-obsessive dissertation panic and half total boredom. It's an odd sensation.

Guess what I saw yesterday?

Yes, an ostrich. Not really what I was expecting to see on the Azores. We hired a car and went driving around the north and west of the island, because that was where we hadn't been at all. We were near Serreta, when we saw an large male ostrich in a field, looking over the fence. We stopped to take photos and marvel. I've never seen a real live ostrich before and I was very impressed, and also intimidated. They have gigantic feet and thigh muscles and a slightly malevolent look in the eyes. They are quite magnificent in their own way. We didn't get too close, even though there was barbed wire between us and the ostrich.

Worn thin

Some humongous fangs would have come in handy today, so that I could bare them and show how generally displeased I am with the universe.

1) I've been away from home a long time. Well, long for me. Long to be away from one's beloved too.
2) I have 2 weeks left and I haven't got my complete data set yet. My fellow students have finished their analysis.
3) My two fellow students left the lab without me today without saying a word.
4) The dogs are driving me NUTS.
5) The municipal collectors haven't emptied the recycling bins in too long, so the contents are spilling everywhere.
6) I got home to find that there was unexpectedly no water from any of the taps, at all. So I am thirsty and hungry, with no way to cook or to drink water.

The last one nearly broke me. I was already cross at having been ignored in the lab. I turned on the tap to put some water in a saucepan and nothing happened. My thought process went like this:

"No water!? Oh NO! I only have food that you can cook, this means no dinner! And nothing to drink. No good crying about it, that will just waste water on tears. I will eat cheese, and drink my nicely chilled bottle of wine, there's nothing else for it".

It's really trying to be slightly stressed by numerous small things. I'm not good about that, I end up being filled with rage. The blue-eyed boy has a phrase for when you have been on a long trip with someone and lots of tiny things have mounted up to make you furious with them. He says, "How can you tell someone that you hate them because of the way that they hold their spoon?". I feel a bit like that, worn thin with the stress of a long trip, frustrated and wanting to come home, and liable to bear my fangs at any moment!

Fangs for sale

Favourite spam e-mail of all time, is this one I received today offering me "HUMONGOUS FANG POWER!".

Sounds intriguing don't you think? You'd be able to chomp your way though anything at all, and you'd never be scared by barking dogs again, because you'd open your mouth and show your HUMONGOUS fangs and go "grraaah!" and they'd run away.

I know better to click on spam e-mails, because then they know that your e-mail address is real and that you are reading their spam mails. I'd love to know what the story behind this one is though. Are they offering fangs of any description, or is it a misleading title to get you to read about what selection of drugs they are actually selling? Or is it a very dubious double entendre?

This is why I'm looking forward to going home

"I bought you allergy friendly pillows!", said the blue-eyed boy. I'm very impressed. I didn't really mind the pillows that he had, but I appreciate the thought behind the purchase of dust-mite repelling ones.

We had many l-o-o-o-n-g conversations about how, when I moved back in, he would have to make space for me, because there wasn't enough space before and it will be all messy and cluttered with two people's things where there is currently only his.

There's more than two weeks until I return to the UK, and when I do I'm only going to stay with the blue-eyed boy for a few days, then I'm leaving for another few weeks to hole myself up in Oxford and write my dissertation. Nonetheless, by the sound of it he has cleared a LOT of space for me already and even (against his will) packed away some of the things I said I couldn't stand. Like the bamboo b0ng made some homeless guy in L.A. It's never been used as a b0ng (because neither of us do that), but as a decorative object. I think it's hideous. He thinks it's folk art. And now it's packed away, but only on the tacit understanding that if/when we ever have more space, it's coming out again. I can cope with a bamboo b0ng in my future if it means no bamboo b0ng today.

Flowers die and chocolates make you (or keep you!) plump, but the romance behind hypo-allergenic pillows and packing away one's ugly bong goes on forever!

Culture: traffic and not hearing

There are culture shocks, and then there are culture niggles, things that you understand, and don't feel surprised or really mind too much, but can't stop noticing.

Things I'm still not used to include:

1) I'm used to the traffic being on the wrong side of the road, but I haven't got used to the passenger and the driver being on the opposite side of the car to that which I expect. It's disconcerting, especially in oncoming traffic, when the person that you expect to be on the driver's side is clearly not watching the road.

2) Portuguese speakers saying "What?" when they haven't heard what I've just said. It's a direct translation of what you'd say in Portuguese, but it sounds really rude and abrupt, and a bit interrogative, like they are saying, "WHAT did you just say?!". I wonder if I should tell them, and teach them to say "Sorry?" instead.

Travel tips for Terceira island, the Azores

I thought I'd share the benefits of my weeks of experience on Terceira:

1) Don't go if you can't drive, or won't have access to a car, because you won't see anything. The airport is near Praia da Vitoria, which is pretty much a beach and not much else. Angra is very pretty, but it's a 20 Euro taxi ride from Praia. Buses come once an hour at most, stop running at 5pm, and only cover particular routes. The roads are very unfriendly to pedestrians, the pavements are non existent or very small (and are made of stone) and people drive fast. If you have a small child in a buggy, or are in a wheelchair, don't expect to get out of the car much. Having said that, you could spend several days walking around Angra quite happily, but if you want to leave you'll need a car.

2) Don't expect the summer weather to be like the Canary Islands. The Azores have a temperate maritime climate - don't expect it to be sunny all the time, or even most of the time. It might be sunny and beautiful, but it might pour with rain, probably on the same day. Bring an umbrella as well as your swim suit. One thing you can rely on is the humidity - it hangs around between 80 and 100%.

3) If you want to see anything native, go upwards. The residential zone in the lowlands and the intensive pastures a bit higher up have NOTHING native. Those trees you're seeing are probably Metrosideros, Tamarix, Araucaria, Eucalyptus or Pittosporum and none of them are native. And Hydrangeas are not native to the Azores, no matter how many times you've seen them on tourist brochures or what people may tell you. They are from south-east Asia. The real native forest survives in tiny patches in high altitudes. It is very very dense (you couldn't go for a stroll through it) and the trees are only about 4 metres tall.

4) Eat a lot of cheese. Dairy farming is their only industry, so they really know how to make cheese. It's amazing.

5) I highly recommend the restaurant called "Copos" in Angra. They are the only place on the island that I've found which have a vegetarian section of their menu and the food is delicious. They season everything really well and their chocolate mousse is fantastic.

6) Don't expect a beach holiday outside Praia da Vitoria. Praia has a reasonable size beach, Angra has a really tiny one and everywhere else is rocks. I'm not talking pebbley, I'm talking big rocky boulders and cliffs. Terceira is essentially a big spikey black basalt lump in the Atlantic, so the coast is mainly steep cliffs with really jagged-looking scary rocks.

7) Apparently it's a good place for birding (if you want to add some Neoarctic birds to your Western Palaearctic list), but for that you have to come at times when birds are migrating (i.e. spring and autumn, not summer), and the birding spots are all near Praia da Vitoria. If you want to see the only native bird species in the Azores - the Azores bullfinch or pirolo, you need to make a trip to San Miguel, because that's the only island they are found on. You can see some endemic subspecies (like the buzzard) pretty easily on Terceira though.

8) Since you've come all this way out into the mid-Atlantic, you might as well see one or two of the other islands. I have only been to Terceira (student finances and a research project proved too much), but I've heard good things about Pico in particular.

9) Drink vinho verde, as chilled as you can get it. It's a wine region in mainland Portugal and readily available for about 2 euros 50 on the Azores from any mini-market. It's a very light and drinkable white wine which is always slightly fizzy. Delicious!

10) Use the recycling bins: blue for paper/card, green for glass, yellow for plastic and metal packaging. Terceira only has 10 years of landfill space left, so make sure you leave them with as much as you can.

11) What to see:
Go and wander around Angra (it's very lovely), and if you're up for a steep walk, go up to the yellow obelisk high above the city (you get to it by walking through the public garden), because the view is amazing. The other must-see is Algar do Carvão, the volcanic pit cave in the centre of the island. Serra da Santa Barbara is a mountainous region in the central west of the island with a caldeira and native forest, but if the weather is anything less than blazing sunshine you won't see a thing. Biscoitos, a town on the northern coast, is supposed to be nice (I haven't been yet) and it has rock seawater swimming pools.

12) What to buy:
There isn't much in the way of spectacularly unusual souvenirs, just the usual tourist rubbish with "Açores" printed on it. I've heard that there is some sort of embroidery and lace-making tradition, but you probably have to go somewhere special to view and buy it. There are lots of fairly fancy clothes shops in Angra, catering to yachting people and tourists I suppose.

Some brief bullet points

The Good
1) We seem to be seeing the sun a bit more.
2) Copos (a restaurant in Angra) does the most AMAZING chocolate mousse.
3) I've written quite a lot of words for my dissertation.
4) The blue-eyed boy misses me.
5) We're going to see a bit more of the island at the weekend.

The Bad
1) I am going to be heartily sick of this dissertation by the 1st of September.
2) It's very isolated out here in the mid-Atlantic.
3) It's not even remotely like a holiday, because it involves a 9-6 working week and living in a house with cockroaches, stinking dogs and a control-freak landlady.
4) A lot of fun summer things are going on back in the UK
5) Grants that reimburse you rather than giving you the money up front are very very annoying.
6) There's 3 weeks left, and a lot to do (I haven't started analysing my data yet), but I think I'll be quite happy to go home.
7) I miss the blue-eyed boy. A lot.

The Ugly
1) Cockroaches. I am so glad they have only appeared recently.