Closing up for Christmas is a very complicated process. It seems to take several days and comes with a variety of food and drink substances, and above all a large amount of ritual. For someone who hasn’t grown up with the British Christmas traditions — even with a tradition where Christmas is definitely subordinate to the much more important feast of St Nicholas, the original Santa Claus — it takes a bit of getting used to, I guess.
Thursday morning was a meeting of the prospective organizers of the LEL Postgraduate Conference, which is to take place in April. It used to be TAAL (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) but after the merger and the creation of the One Big Happy Family of Linguistics and English Language, it’s now LEL. I think we’re quite nicely divided among the subject areas. Anyway, I seem to be the only one comfortable enough with computers, so I got myself involved in doing website stuff and making the abstracts look nice on paper. KM and I were surprised at the absence of VP, very unlike him.
Thursday evening was the final night of dancing for the year. Extended social, with a lot of the year’s favourites. I had some difficulty calling Hooper’s Jig from the Green Book — which ones are the squares again? — but I did Midnight Oil perfectly so that made up for it. ZB’s English dance was manic, even at half speed, but can we please do that again? RK was slightly stressed throughout the night, for a variety of reasons: [a] she had exams the next day, [b] her reason for living chose the Big Monkey Movie over her, and [c] CI had buggered off to Romania without notice. Quite interesting to keep my cool and calm and pretending to be saving the day...
Friday morning was another chapter in Benedict Anderson’s Forestillede fællesskaber, after which lunch and some general tidying in the office. Friday afternoon from 3 was the departmental Christmas party. Organized by MB, the tech support guy, who really put his heart and soul into it. This involved a treasure hunt connected to pass-the-parcel, and an attempt at the world record shortest Strip the Willow. I think a bar and a half of music and not even getting beyond the spinning bit qualifies as ‘world record shortest’, but maybe not as ‘Strip the Willow’?
Friday evening was departmental Christmas dinner, organized by the postgrads themselves. Well, by LC and AP really; quite impressive as they had prepared this after the undergrad lunch on Wednesday, which for the two of them involved drinking from half noon to 2.30am. We went to Buffet King for dinner, all you can eat Chinese for £13 — but they charge for tap water?!
Saturday was the New Scotland Christmas party at TtT’s. The themes were Y and H, which bonus points for combining the two. It was impressive how inventive people were at combining Y and H as an excuse not to dress up. The reactions to the salmiak were interesting, especially YK’s face, but in the end it was about 50/50 positive and negative reactions. The After Eight Game — work an After Eight from your forehead into your mouth using only your facial muscles — was amusing. Congratulations to JW for getting at least three or four of them into her mouth without any problem!
MG seems to have caught a stomach bug from one of the little ‘snot monsters’ at Cameron Toll. They should be glad to see Santa, not infect his elves with nasty little viruses! Food came out of pretty much all holes, not pretty; and we narrowly avoided CM vomiting by-proxy.
The most memorable event seems to have occurred after we left, when JH (in clearly intoxicated state) swapped costumes with NM (also not quite sober, we can assume). There is photographic evidence which was obtained from LF via AF, but for obvious reasons it seems wiser not to publish that here.
Yesterday consisted mainly of playing nurse to MG, who could hardly keep in water. Buying the rehydration drink thing was difficult, as pharmacies aren’t normally open on Sundays. Later in the afternoon I got a visitor, so I spent some time with LG before she went to church. And finally today is a matter of cleaning up, tying up the loose ends, packing etc. I brought out a load of paper for recycling, done most of the ironing (except for the bits that aren’t quite dry yet), and with this also the item ‘update blog’ can be stricken from the To Do list.
Tomorrow morning is the cheap Easyjet flight home. Get up at 5.30am to be home by 4pm. Then it can start snowing.
Thursday morning was a meeting of the prospective organizers of the LEL Postgraduate Conference, which is to take place in April. It used to be TAAL (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) but after the merger and the creation of the One Big Happy Family of Linguistics and English Language, it’s now LEL. I think we’re quite nicely divided among the subject areas. Anyway, I seem to be the only one comfortable enough with computers, so I got myself involved in doing website stuff and making the abstracts look nice on paper. KM and I were surprised at the absence of VP, very unlike him.
Thursday evening was the final night of dancing for the year. Extended social, with a lot of the year’s favourites. I had some difficulty calling Hooper’s Jig from the Green Book — which ones are the squares again? — but I did Midnight Oil perfectly so that made up for it. ZB’s English dance was manic, even at half speed, but can we please do that again? RK was slightly stressed throughout the night, for a variety of reasons: [a] she had exams the next day, [b] her reason for living chose the Big Monkey Movie over her, and [c] CI had buggered off to Romania without notice. Quite interesting to keep my cool and calm and pretending to be saving the day...
Friday morning was another chapter in Benedict Anderson’s Forestillede fællesskaber, after which lunch and some general tidying in the office. Friday afternoon from 3 was the departmental Christmas party. Organized by MB, the tech support guy, who really put his heart and soul into it. This involved a treasure hunt connected to pass-the-parcel, and an attempt at the world record shortest Strip the Willow. I think a bar and a half of music and not even getting beyond the spinning bit qualifies as ‘world record shortest’, but maybe not as ‘Strip the Willow’?
Friday evening was departmental Christmas dinner, organized by the postgrads themselves. Well, by LC and AP really; quite impressive as they had prepared this after the undergrad lunch on Wednesday, which for the two of them involved drinking from half noon to 2.30am. We went to Buffet King for dinner, all you can eat Chinese for £13 — but they charge for tap water?!
Saturday was the New Scotland Christmas party at TtT’s. The themes were Y and H, which bonus points for combining the two. It was impressive how inventive people were at combining Y and H as an excuse not to dress up. The reactions to the salmiak were interesting, especially YK’s face, but in the end it was about 50/50 positive and negative reactions. The After Eight Game — work an After Eight from your forehead into your mouth using only your facial muscles — was amusing. Congratulations to JW for getting at least three or four of them into her mouth without any problem!
MG seems to have caught a stomach bug from one of the little ‘snot monsters’ at Cameron Toll. They should be glad to see Santa, not infect his elves with nasty little viruses! Food came out of pretty much all holes, not pretty; and we narrowly avoided CM vomiting by-proxy.
The most memorable event seems to have occurred after we left, when JH (in clearly intoxicated state) swapped costumes with NM (also not quite sober, we can assume). There is photographic evidence which was obtained from LF via AF, but for obvious reasons it seems wiser not to publish that here.
Yesterday consisted mainly of playing nurse to MG, who could hardly keep in water. Buying the rehydration drink thing was difficult, as pharmacies aren’t normally open on Sundays. Later in the afternoon I got a visitor, so I spent some time with LG before she went to church. And finally today is a matter of cleaning up, tying up the loose ends, packing etc. I brought out a load of paper for recycling, done most of the ironing (except for the bits that aren’t quite dry yet), and with this also the item ‘update blog’ can be stricken from the To Do list.
Tomorrow morning is the cheap Easyjet flight home. Get up at 5.30am to be home by 4pm. Then it can start snowing.
