Life has been as wonderful as Oxford always is of late.

1) Colin Pillinger
2) Ambassador from Albanian
3) Sunday
4) Today

1) Colin Pillinger. He's a British physicist who more or less organised the (failed) Beagle 2 project to Mars. I went to an interesting talk by him. He seems convinced that there is life on Mars, and I guess he's kind of convinced me on a question I was reasonably ambivalent about before. I so hope the question gets settled relatively soon - and it won't be hard to settle, as long as we can get the appropriate equipment to Mars.

2) Albanian Ambassador. He convinced me that Albania is full of shiny happy people having fun. My friend, who has been to Albani, confirmed this. There are Orthodox and Catholic christians in Albania as well as a majority of Muslims, but they all seem to get along really, really well. This is encouraging and adorable.

3) Sunday was beautiful. I went with a friend to get ice cream (FREE!) from the Oxford Union. This deliciousness was followed by a phone call in which it was decided that we would have an impromptu barbeque. So we went to Sainsbury's, bought meat and a disposable barbeque, and went to the parks by the riverbank to have a small barbeque of four. It was beautiful. I chased a moorhen. Many friends from college came up and two of them fell into the river; one, meanwhile, voluntarily took a dip therein, although this is largely because he is mad. After this I hosted a mead-tasting event in which people tried some of the mead I brewed. Responses were overwhelming positive, which was great; I feel vindicated in my mead-brewing, and will definitely do so again in future. After this, pub quizzing occurred and my time came second.

4) Today, more mead was tasted by a different set of friends (the Amnesty lot). At 5pm, we held a commemoration march for the Tiananmen Square massacre which was exactly 20 years ago today. I always feel in two minds about these kinds of events. I love letter-writing because I feel like I've achieved something, whereas commemoration doesn't seem to actually do much. However, I came out of the event profoundly moved. While we were there with our large "Remember Tiananmen!" and "Human Rights for China!" banners, two huge groups of (I think) Taiwanese tourists separately came upon us. They were incredibly, incredibly supportive of us - they took photos, came and stood with us to have their photos taken, told us to continue the good work and even corrected some of the faulty Chinese on our banners. The response we got from them - and from a small number of people from the PRC - was really heartwarming; it was so nice to know that these Chinese people knew and, more importantly, cared about Tiananmen.

Today, one of the colleges also decided to give out free pizza and alcohol to gays, lesbians and bisexuals. I took advantage of the offer, but also invited my straight friend, which was nicely subversive - I don't approve of segregation of gays, just as I disapprove of segregation of women (who get their own chocolate and strawberry parties in my college, infuriatingly) or ethnic minorities.

Finally, today was also the day of European elections. Europe tends to evoke strange feelings in the British, who tend not to appreciate what it has done, and does, for us. I voted Lib Dem on the basis that Tories are intrinsically evil (not to mention their fucking nasty Euro-allies), Labour are authoritarian gits, the Greens are ridiculous, and everybody else is mad, Eurosceptic or racist. I was sorely tempted to vote for the Roman Party though - Ave!

In other news, I fixed a bike puncture ALL BY MYSELF* a couple of days ago.

Work is going well - high 2:1s have occurred, and my tutor accidentally told me I was good at linguistics. Diderot is turning out to be far more interesting than he at first seemed.

As for my year abroad, I am definitely going to the Centre region, hopefully to Orléans or Tours, although I wont find out where I am - city or village - for a while yet.

Plans to work at Vauxhall appear to have gone down the shitter. Alas.

*Well, one person helped slightly.

Despite my best intentions, I failed at updating regularly while in Oxford... sigh... In my defence, it was a manically busy term. Here's what I was up to:

I brewed mead in my room. I found a recipe on the net and kind of had to do it... so when I get back, I'll have 3 litres of mead ready to drink. I've sampled some and it's not bad. Also, it's really easy to do, so I encourage you to experiment with brewing.

I went to see the following people speak: Romano Prodi (ex-PM of Italy), Vuk Jeremic (Serbian Foreign Minister) and Ko Aung (former political prisoner in Burma). Prodi was too quiet to hear properly, Jeremic seemed like a reasonable guy, Ko Aung is amazing.

Amnestywise, Letter Writing Week went awesomely well. Also, we had another week of action shortly after, focusing on political prisoners in Burma ( which is why Ko Aung came to speak at the Union). I'm on the committee again next term as Liaisons Officer, should be good.

Last weekend I went to a kind of Amnesty activism/training event in London, basically teaching us how to run a better group and all that. Ko Aung was there and I got to speak to him. He told me how, when he was in solitary confinement in prison, the actions people committed and the letters they sent from far flung countries really had an effect on his situation - not only did they give him hope (which is important in itself), but after receiving several hundred letters, the junta ordered the prison guards to stop torturing him. That was incredibly inspiring, seeing in the flesh somebody whose life had been changed by the simple writing of letters.

I am now learning Spanish and, Rune might be interested to know, Norwegian! Unlike former broken promises to learn Quenya/German, I will actually do these because I have audio courses. That means my lessons are structured for me, w00t! Spanish is going well, Norwegian I will only develop to a basic standard and seems alright at the moment.