Girl on a Hot Tin Roof: Where have I been?

Good question. I last posted in January of this year, and since then I have, lived. 'Living' you say, isn't everyone living? In my opinion, this is not the case. Living is learning, and learning comes in many forms.

Formal education is certainly one of these forms, and in honour of this esteemed treadmill, I have studied in great depth and duration. An Oxford education is demanding. It requires intellect, certainly, but also the ability to go without sleep for a stretch of time deemed normal only for Maggie Thatcher. You must produce essays with production-line efficiency, execute elegant formal attire and witty conversation at the drop of a hat, and occasionally raise your eyes to the skyline and appreciate the surroundings with an air of bewilderment and hint of charm that is quickly eclipsed by the next essay deadline or tutorial.

Left: Our library skeleton, rumoured to be an ex-student who overdosed on cheese and port

Right: Our college ducks, a charming duo of drakes.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken objects. Yet, instead of simply fixing objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold in an attempt to retain or increase the aesthetics of the object. This analogy has often been used to suggest that the process of mending broken things increases their worth or beauty. I strongly believe that the process of learning from the things that don't go quite so well, from the pots that fall off the shelf and break, is the most formative experience of all. I shan't go into my falls from the shelf in the past year, but I assure you that my intention is to fill in any cracks wisely. I detest the notion that 'everything happens for a reason' but I attest to the belief that some good can be salvaged from any event.

Image of Japanese ceramic mended with kintsugi technique, from the Freer Gallery

Challenge: can I pick a song that encapsulates my last year?

The National, Fake Empire

Tiptoe through our shiny city

With our diamond slippers on

Do our gay ballet on ice, bluebirds on our shoulders

We're half awake in a fake empire

I would say that this song exemplifies much of my time - trying to extract meaning from within files and files of banality and superficial details. I also like the image of people walking around in a dream-like altered state of consciousness, and the prospect of us drones waking up to our fake empire. It then all gets a bit Matrix-y and Inception-like. Would we know if we were dreaming? Is reality only a notional concept? Ah, headache.

Over the past year, I have read... a few novels, and not nearly as many as I would like. Including, Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro (wow), Consciousness Explained by Dan Dennett (my conclusion: philosopher's can't answer questions of science), Dead Man's Grip by Peter James (as entertaining as you can expect from a crime novel), and I forget the many others for the moment. I've also read what has felt like a googolplex of academic articles, enough to destroy a small forest in paper-weight. I am certainly destined to return ironically in another life as a tree or a recycled artist to pay penance for my crimes against the environmental effects of printing so much. (Although in fairness, this term I have often printed articles double-sided and two-pages to each A4 side, reducing the text to a magnifying-glass necessity.)

My sincere apologies to trees, the climate, and the environment. It is all in aid of furthering my knowledge so that I can discover the NCC, win a Nobel Prize and save mankind. #Promise.

I'm currently reading Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Despite having a whole shelf of Barnes' novels at home, I have shamefully never picked one up. Although I'm actually only on page 87 of about 150, Barnes' use of language is great and he distils jolly sentences with deeper meaning that evades you and then taps you across the back of the head like a sharp aftertaste. Two basic tenets of the novel seem to be discussed early on, one concerning the passage of time and the second concerning the subjectivity of history of which I will transcribe: (Disclaimer - I usually wouldn't talk about a novel until I had read and finished it completely, but let's throw caution to the wind and I'll try and post again when I finish it!)

page 3. "We live in time—it holds us and molds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."

page 12. "That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us."

As the novel recounts the history of a retired man named Tony, I guess that these two concepts will be important in understanding his musings. To be continued...

I have been watching The Killing (Forbrydelsen in Danish, and I would suggest you stay a barge-pole length from the apathetic US version of the drama). It is long and drawn-out, but fiercely gripping and very well-made. If anyone is short of a Christmas present for a friend or relative, a box set of the drama will be a wise investment (or even better, a replica Sarah Lund jumper!) Series 2 is currently airing on BBC4, and is on my to-do list.

I have been wearing whatever I have been able to afford on my student loan! However, I did adopt a Barbour jacket for my birthday this year, which I've fallen completely in love with. It has a Liberty print lining, which you can choose to show off on full by turning up the cuffs or collar, or let it flash opportunistically at passers-by. Yes, you might call it old-fashioned, but as my Mum says, you can never go wrong with a classic.