I have some rather exciting news of late, which is that I have finally found a job that I want to do, and an organisation that I want to work for! (For those unaware, this is particularly exciting because up to this point, all of my career ambitions have been distinctly negative - I don't want to go into business, I don't want to be a teacher, I don't want to go into acadmia etc.) So anyway, the one downside is that this organisation is ludicrously competitive to get into, but it's a starting point. And being of the philosophy that if you don't ask then you don't get, I was browsing their website yesterday to see what sort of work experience/ summer placements/ internships they offered - 'cos it does sound like a really really cool place to work!!

 

The results of my browsing were as follows: they offer a summer placement followed by a year's sponsorship if you are a CompSci, Physicist, Engineer, Applied Mathematician or Statistician, none of which I can really answer to, having just gleefully bade farewell to Statistical Methods II forever, not to mention having transferred off Mathematical Physics II onto Numerical Analysis II. At any rate, as the course specifications would suggest, those placements are more on the technical side of things - not what grabbed my attention, and if you need a Stats degree to do a job then I'd probably rather not be doing that job in the first place. Alternatively they do a 6-8 week full-time summer placement for management training; so long as you are of an ethnic minority or have a disabilty. I don't think an occasionally grouchy back counts, somehow.

 

It's not even that I want to go into management, as such. It's just that the way that these places work, a foot in the door tends to be worth one hell of a lot. And I would love that foot in the door.

 

 

It's frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I can see the point of positive discrimination at times - you know the business with university applications, and whether it should matter whether you went to a state or private school, selective or comprehensive? Well to me it stands to reason that someone from Shenley Court will have had to have worked harder to get four As than someone at KES, say (- for those not from B'ham, Shenley Court is a large local comprehensive in a fairly run-down area which has recently been taken out of special measures. Before anyone accuses me of stereotyping unfairly, I know people who went there, and indeed one lad who got told that he had to move at the end of L6 because 'it just wasn't worth running the A2 courses'. KES stands for Kings Edward's School, the private boys' school in Edgbaston which frequently tops league tables in this and that, founded in 1552, Dieu et mon droit, yada yada yada.). That's not to say that the students at KES don't work bloody hard as well - it's just not a level playing field to start with, and to come out of Shenley with four As you have to be truly exceptional so university admissions should reflect that. That is the whole point of the UCAS form and references.

 

Equally, I can see where this organisation's logic is coming from. They are clearly under-represented in terms of ethnic minorites and workers with disabilities, and they are asking themselves why. With every diversity initiative under the sun - prayer rooms, wheelchair access, dyslexia support, flexible working hours, and a women's working policy that no feminist or mother could object to, at least from the outside - it seems unlikely that they are discriminating at interview. They even have a specific Recruitment Diversity Advisor to try and ensure that this is not the case. So the logical conclusion must be that the applications they are receiving are not from a diverse enough cross-section of the population, and that they are trying to redress the balance by enticing 'minority students' onto a specially tailored course. Only the course doesn't have anything to do with being from an ethnic minority or disabled in particular, from what I can see - it's just a leg up for those that they perceive need it.

 

The thing is, will it actually help to broaden their range of applications? I suppose that that isn't for me to say. But unless they go out specifically advertising in ethnic minority/ disability groups, the people who find the programme will be the ones interested in this organisation in the first place - the ones like me who have sufficient aspiration to look on the website for information on placements in the first place. And at that point, what have they got that automatically makes them more suitable for training than me? If they have the qualities that this particular organisation wants, then won't they get through on their own merits anyway, irrespective of race, skin colour, disability etc.?

 

People like me then lose out precisely because we haven't lost out. White, middle-class: tick. Parents went to university (or in Mum's case a polytechnic, but close enough): tick. Grandparents went to university: three ticks out of four, including both grandmothers. Live in a nice area at home: tick. Went to a good school, and am currently at a good university: tick. Parents are still married, and are fully supportive: tick. Have not been in a car crash, lost anyone close to cancer, or had any permanently disfiguring skin conditions: tick. - So sue me! We are in the majority, no doubt, in terms of the people employed by this organisation, but does that mean that we should not have opportunities to prove our worth just the same? I cannot help who I am any more than someone can help coming from Pakistan, but it is more politically correct for them to do so because they can be campaigned on behalf of for equal rights.

 

I am at Durham, which in the words of a(n Asian) lad doing comic stand-up is "as white as an albino harem". It is more difficult for ethnic minority students here, I accept that. I do not even know when Diwali is this year, which coming from an enthusiastic attendee of the Diwali Concert at school (or the Asian Arts Fest., or whatever other politically correct name that they rebranded it with) is really pretty bad, but I can't think off-hand of anyone I know from university who will be celebrating it. But should I have to apologise for not being Sikh or Hindu? Should each college wheel out its three veil-wearing students when making its prospectus? I can't help feeling that while there is clearly an issue to be addressed, penalising majority students simply for being in the majority is not the way forward.

 

But then its easy for me to say that, isn't it, because I'm white and middle-class. What right do I have to talk about discrimination?

 

In Choral Soc. this year, our big work is Haydn's 'The Creation' - that's the one that we'll do as a full concert in the cathedral at Easter, and we've already started to learn bits of it so as to do a really good concert when the time comes. Tonight, though, we only sung one movement from it right at the end of the rehearsal ('The Heavens are Telling', which is one of the few movements that I've sung before, and a particularly exuberent one!) because we concentrated on Bach for most of the two hours.

 

We're doing three cantatas for a concert in a month's time in a slightly smaller church in the centre of Durham. One of them is 'Wachet Auf', which is very famous and generally wheeled out at Christmas, originally having been written for the last Sunday before Advent, and it's famous for a reason; it's simply stunning! A lot of Bach, for those less familiar with it, is very very clever music in the way that it all works. It's polyphonic, which means that instead of one part having the tune and the other three parts filling in underneath, every part has its own (reasonably fast-moving) line, and they all have to fit together. Inevitably this is both harder to write and harder to sing - but Bach makes it work so perfectly every time. It's mathematicians' music, in a way, but at the same time, it is just so beautiful...!

 

I'm trying to be coherent here. It's not easy. I have lines of music weaving in and out of my head, and that's all I can focus on :-)

 

One of the cantatas we're doing is particularly hard. But it's just so much fun trying to sing it, working at it to get it right - and soon, when we can sing it properly, we'll perform it in a huge acoustic and it will be so satisfying and so mesmerising and sound so wonderful!

 

Yes, I am on a singing high! Yes, I think I probably should give up trying to write at this point. But if anyone wants to come and hear, then they'd be more than welcome!

 

It's been a good weekend! My moods are fairly predictable in that they improve with sunshine and time and sleep, and get worse otherwise (- or perhaps, one might say, that my given mood can be expressed as a linearly independent combination: a(sunshine) + b(sleep) + c(time), where a,b,c are elements of the reals ). In the last few days then, there has been cold sunshine aplenty, more time than usual due to it being an odd timetable week, and sleep because I sure as hell needed it after the even timetable week just gone. Add to the fact that I managed to get all my compulsory homework done during gaps at the Science Site and on Friday evening, I've had the last couple of days to enjoy myself!

 

 

Yesterday I surprised myself by doing three things. Firstly, I went to a Pilates class for the first time in months. I'd been a couple of times with the Aerobics Society last year and hadn't hugely enjoyed it - less the Pilates itself than the whole atmosphere of the thing - so I thought that this year I'd go along to the sessions run by the Yoga Society instead. It was a lot better - not that I was any less horrendous at the Pilates itself, but it was a much friendlier setup, just in terms of the other students who turned up and also in terms of the organisition, and it really makes a difference. As advised, I warned the instructor before the start of the class about my back, and she was really helpful about it - telling me when and how to modify a particular exercise so as not to do anything stupid (unlike the class leader at the Aerobics Society who left it up to my own judgement; which given that I was obviously a complete beginner, was a fairly stupid thing to do, in retrospect). I now have to persuade myself to keep making the effort to go, of course, but I'd like to.

 

I also went out last night, clubbing, for the second time whilst at university! I went with a girl I'm getting to know through Maths - we walk up home in the same direction together - and we went to Revolver, the indie/alternative/rock night which is held at the DSU on Saturdays. As suggested by a Facebook status at the time, I was fairly terrified, just because I always feel like a complete fish out of water at these things. But I was determined to do it, and so do it I did! My ears were ringing by ten minutes in; it got increasingly hot and sweaty, despite the single-figure temperatures outside; I didn't know most of the songs that I was obviously meant to know, and so I had to take cues - fortunately a lot of these songs are fairly predictable in what the next line is going to be, and it always helps to pick up a key phrase for identification purposes (a prominant "Mr Brightside" indicated that that song was probably the ubiquitously mentioned yet never heard 'Mr Brightside'). I did have a couple of drinks, which can probably be held accountable for the third surprising action of the day, but I was still able to walk up the hill back home for half an hour afterwards. I may have got in at 3am...!

 

 

And then after waking up too late to get to Meeting this morning, which I feel a bit bad about, I went to lunch with a couple from there who are doing student support semi-officially. There's a good number of Quaker students this year (about twelve), and it was a really nice, relaxing occasion on which to get to know each other a bit. The meal was sumptuous (Quorn, onions, peppers, chick-peas, sultanas, rice, dressing; peas and broad beans; crusty bread rolls; apple crumble and custard!), and we kept all discovering mutual friends from the young Quaker network in Britain, which is always good fun ("You know Ed Ullathorne?! No way!"). We ate sitting out in the sun, and it was just a wonderful slice of normality in the midst of the university bubble that you get engulfed by if you're not careful.

 

 

Now I'm sitting at my desk, the last remnants of the day's sunshine glowing through my windows. I've got a load of stupid jobs to do tonight - sewing, making soup for tomorrow's supper, a tax form - but it's all good because they can be done calmly, and I can spend the rest of the time with a hot drink and yesterday's paper :-) Yay for the rock-and-roll student life!

 

 

I love it!

(Also an article with a very worthwhile point - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7049275.stm)

 

One hour later. One bookcase fully assembled. Three residents of house PLEMP satisfied with their handiwork, the remaining two dueling with polystyrene packaging!

 

Now for the books...

 

 

 

 

(It's quite cool, I've gone from not having enough shelving space to having more than I know what to do with! And there's no need to be rude about my flat-pack abilities - just 'cos I actually read the instructions...!)

 

So! I had a flat-pack bookcase delivered this morning - there is already an odd kinda shelving unit in my bedroom, but not one that you can put small books on without them falling all over the place, and one which I'm using for toiletries and random bits and bobs. At any rate, when my Mum came up at the end of August she agreed that I could probably do with something else (which I feel is sufficient justification, as Mum isn't one for buying stuff for the sake of it!), so I've got a £20 job from Argos. I would have got it when I first came up, but needless to say they'd all sold out what with every other student in the country wanting a small £20 bookcase.

 

So, I have this bookcase and I need to assemble it! So far I have undone the cardboard packaging, observed the need for glue and tacks and gone "...Help!"

 

 

Pippa's about to come up a take a look. This should be fun :D

 

 

 

My timetable this year, as I have already whined to several people about, is a complete bitch. It's not so much the hours per week - 25 is still a lot (and still over four times that of about half of the university) - but the distribution. Take today; I have, in fact, had only had four hours. But the on-off-on-on-off-on pattern has meant that I've been at the Science Site constantly from 12 o'clock as it really isn't worth going home in a single hour's gap. I took a packed lunch - now I am college having had supper out of a thermos, and at twenty past seven I will return to the Science Site for Choral Soc.. Then I walk home, and it's ten at night. And then tomorrow, I actually have a serious run of lectures: five in a row, hour gap, and another hour. Lectures in a row aren't a lot better as my back kills after a couple.

 

Thing is, I'm not entirely sure what the solution is...

 

 

It's a sure indication that I'm tired when I get grumpy and immature past the point of reason. Today, everything descended into a 'Your Mom' resort, à la xkcd, at least in my head:

Lecturer: "So if S is a linearly independent spanning subset..."

Your Mom's a linearly independent spanning subset.

 

Which doesn't even make sense.

(Your Mom doesn't make sense...)

 

 

(That's not to say that no guy is ever upset, or indeed that other girls always handle the situation correctly. But this seems to be a recurringly badly-dealt-with situation. It applies particularly to boyfriends, though by no means exclusively.)

 

 

1. Acknowledge that she's upset. If you genuinely haven't noticed then there isn't a lot you can do about it. However, there is a difference between not noticing and 'deliberately ignoring in the hope that it will go away'. It won't, and it will just make her feel worse if you appear to be oblivious to her mood.

 

2. Don't press the issue. If she says that she doesn't want to talk about it, she probably means that. That does not necessarily mean, however, that she wants to talk about Superman/ Physics/ judo either, so if you do change the subject to take her mind off things, do so gently and be prepared that she may not contribute to the conversation much.

 

3. Allow her space to talk. A listening ear is always appreciated, and it is helpful all round if you know why she's upset. Don't pressure her by asking too many questions, and don't try and offer an immediate solution to everything as it will make her feel like she has no right to be upset in the first place - having said that, don't patronise her by acting like a nodding dog either. Understand the difference between sympathy and empathy - you don't necessarily have to have gone through whatever-it-is yourself in order to be sympathetic, but don't pretend that you know what something is like if you don't.

 

4. Concentrate on her. She does not want to hear how much worse you have had to put up with, or how much better you would be at dealing with the situation if you were in her shoes.

 

5. Be constructive. When she's gone through what the problem is and why she's upset about it, that is the time to start offering suggestions. Note use of the word 'suggestion' - even if you do know best (which is not a foregone conclusion by any means), she will still need time to work her own way round to things. Other people's hardline solutions will just feel like impositions.

 

6. Do not, under any circumstance, blame it on PMS/ PMT. This is an important one! (And on that note, if you are male and have just started sniggering at the fact that I said 'PMS', go away and feel free to come back when you have grown up.) Yes, it is true that PMS is very unpleasant for a lot of women and tends to make them slightly less emotionally balanced than normal - but the point is that they do not get upset on the basis of that alone. They get upset because they've had a row with a friend, or because they are missing home, or for whatever reason that they would standardly get upset - it's just that the hormones exacerbate the effect and make it seem ten times worse than it actually is. Equally, women on their period are more liable to mood swings, so they can be in a great mood one minute and in tears the next. On having this explained to him, one male friend of mine likened this to the effect of alcohol; not actually a bad analogy.

 

So the gist of this point is *not* that you should go around asking crying girls if they're on their period, or even assume that they are. Like illness, happiness is not directly linked to the menstrual cycle. Just be aware that you might have to make allowances occasionally, and don't mock seemingly trivial upsets if they are having a greater effect than usual.

 

7. If you can't cope, defer to another friend. Do not, under any circumstances, leave her alone to fend for herself having first made contact. She will feel doubly abandoned, and an unsure presence is better than no presence at all.

 

8. Never underestimate the power of a hug. If you aren't a huggy person then any type of physical contact - a pat on the arm, for instance - is good, but there's nothing quite like a good hug to make things better. No, it won't solve anything exactly. But it's a friendly, comforting gesture, and will let her know that you're there for her a way that mere words can't quite stretch to. And that's more important than anything else, right now.

 

I've used up a scary number of tissues in the past few days, mainly in an endeavour to keep breathing while my throat and nose do their best to dissuade me from the idea. Yes, it's that time of year again when my immune system all but packs up - I managed to go down with Freshers' Flu before a good proportion of the Freshers themselves, which as Paul points out is a bit greedy really, especially after I monopolised all those germs last autumn as well. The timing has been scarily similar, to the day.

 

Brett, my college tutor, met me staggering out of the Chemistry department on Friday morning, about to take a taxi back home (- one mile, distinctinly upwards). He suggested that I look into getting the flu jab to try and protect myself a bit. It's not actually a bad idea, although it's a close call as to which I hate more - being permanently run-down or being jabbed.

 

 

This is really boring. I was hoping not to have to start the year off on this track again...

 

I spent a couple of hours or so this afternoon helping man the Allot Soc stall at Freshers' Fair. I feel a bit bad about Allot Soc in that I'm technically on the exec ("Anyone want to be Secretary? Please someone be Secretary? You know how you want to be Secretary!"), but I haven't spent a huge amount of time organising or digging there - backs notwithstanding, they've been meeting on Sunday mornings when I can't go. But I do quite enjoy generally getting mucky when I do go, and the more people the better, really. We lost our Bedding Officer to graduation this summer, and as a new society we could really do with an injection of new people to keep things going, so we sat camped outside the DSU with Conservation Soc., trying to look appealing and friendly to the hordes of people going past.

 

 

Durham students are a funny bunch. To an extent, you get as varied a population as you would expect within any university, and there will always prove exceptions to the stereotypes - not everyone from Hatfield is a rah, just as there exist female physicists who do not wear glasses. But the fact remains that the proportion of privately-educated students at Durham is huge - I don't know what the exact figure is, I would guess at about 40% - and for the most part, by god you can tell. It's not that I have a huge problem with people having been to private schools as such - even though I disagree with them in principle, it is not for I to judge the circumstances that bring people there, and definitely not for I to judge people on their parents' schooling decisions at the age of 11 (or 4, or actually, it's 13 that people transfer from prep schools, isn't it, not 11..?). I know and am friends with quite a lot of lovely people who went to private schools, and let's face it, I didn't exactly go to Shenley Court myself.

 

But there's a large part of me that feels completely alienated from the whole culture that seems to stem from the private/public-school system - the preening, the social pretensions... and the complete obliviousness to the fact that another world exists out there where people don't shop at Waitrose. Where people don't buy what they don't need because they can't afford to buy what they do need. Where people talk to strangers on the bus, or put a hood up when it's raining, or buy something for its utility rather than its aesthetics. Where what you're wearing comes as a consideration after what you're saying, where what you're saying comes as a consideration before how you say it. Where there isn't this perpetual arrogance.

 

And the thing is, a lot of the people I refer to would probably find my world at home as weird and as alienating as I find theirs. But they tend to have a social confidence and the ability to make their presence felt in a way that my 'type' don't - and there are more of them, or it feels like it.

 

Bloody hell, some of the people in this university depress me...

 

So anyway, that's the real reason why I like being about with the people from Allotment Society. 'Cos in the main they are people from the North of England - in quite a few cases, the North-East, which is a bit of a rarity up here, believe it or not - and they are some of the friendliest, most straightforward, down-to-earth people you'll meet. Along with welcoming any interested parties, we took full delight in mocking some of the more ridiculous Freshers that went past (out of their hearing, obviously... but if you will wear a pink shirt with a turned-up collar - guys - and stiletto boots in Durham - girls - what do you expect?! Not to mention knee-length leopard-print leggings under a mini-skirt with flip-flops. I feel quite justified in ridiculing these people's clothes from the looks of utter haughty disdain that some of them gave us on noticing what our stall was advertising.)

 

 

*sigh* I hate this social class business.

Update: ...although this Wikipedia article cheered me up immensely!

 

And so second year begins!

 

It’s Freshers’ Week this week, so I’ve been doing a couple of things in connection with that – I’m manning the Allotment Soc stall at the union for a bit tomorrow, and I plan to go to the college ceilidh on Wednesday night (yay!), and the academic parenting cocktail evening on Thursday as I have both a son and a daughter amongst the new mathematicians. But mainly it’s been a question of getting used to living out in our new house.

 

House PLEMP (as it has become known after its inhabitants – Pippa, Lucy, Eleanor, Max, Paul) is in Neville’s Cross, an area slightly further out of Durham than most of the colleges and departments. It’s not too bad for the Science Site (20 minutes’ walk), fine for college (15 minutes), and a pain in the backside for town (30 minutes) and the Elvet lecture theatres (also about 30 minutes). It’s also about 20 minutes for your standard house in the Viaduct, which is the most popular student area – the area near to the centre of town overlooked, unsurprisingly, by the railway viaduct, and where pretty much everyone else is living, including the others.

 

‘The others’, incidentally, is a phrase generally used to indicate the other house of five from our original group of ten – Rhiannon, Helen, Roz, Rob, and Henry (, Henry instead of Annie. Long story.). ‘House RHRHR’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, somehow, especially when you try to say it out loud.

 

The most annoying thing about Neville’s Cross is the complete lack of anything other than houses – there is one small newsagents/ off-licence (!) five or ten minutes walk away in completely the wrong direction, but other than that our nearest shops are in town, as is our nearest cashpoint. Food-shopping will have to be done from Tesco Online in the main – we can get two buses there, but it takes an age and there’s still a five-minute hill to walk up/down with heavy shopping; for £4.10 return fare per person, we have figured that we might as well pay the £5 delivery charge. This is fine, of course, until you want something mid-week – and most of would rather go to a shop in person as doing everything online seems a bit intangible. But there’s no way that we can walk four or five hilly miles with a household’s weekly food shop on a regular basis. So that’s that. Our comparatively poor location is compensated for by the sheer size of our house, and much lower rent than you’d even conceive of in the Viaduct.

 

It should be good! We had our house Discussion (with a capital D) last night, and I think we’ve sorted out most stuff, at least for the time being while we see how it goes. The heating levels have now been agreed on, which is something that had been worrying me – basically I think that I’m used to a much lower temperature at home than some of the others, and the level that the thermostat was at when I first entered the house was making me feel really woozy and stifled ‘cos it was just too much; and that’s before you start on fuel bills and environmental responsibility. But living in a shared house involves compromise, and we don’t want to end up hating each other before we’ve even got through our first term together, so communication is definitely the way forward!

 

 

Sheesh, the backs of my legs hurt... Inevitably I didn’t do a huge amount of walking up and down serious hills over the summer – so doing four or five miles on each of the first couple of days back up here has taken my muscles by surprise, somewhat!

 

 

Oh, and yes, Lucy is now internetted :-)