Today has been gorgeous - clear blue sky, hot sunshine.. proper summer weather :)

 

None of us felt like revising after supper, so after our discussions sorting out fancy-dress wear for the college summer photo on Wednesday (don't ask..!), we decided to go for a walk in the bluebell woods. You go out of Trevs, across the main road, up through the top of Grey, then past the Botanic Gardens and turn left onto a footpath.. then you're in a mass of trees and footpaths, with bluebells covering every grassy surface. They are all in flower at the minute and unbelievably beautiful! After racing down the paths, dodging people because of the silly hats we had all decided to wear ("It's fine, we won't see anyone we know," Rhiannon reassured us, shortly before we passed the first-year contingent of Trevs' CU), we came out onto some fields, overlooking the countryside around Durham to the south (I think). The setting sun was shielded by some trees, and everything was glowing in that late summer evening light that one associates with campsite holidays in France. The insects were buzzing in the long grass. It was fantastic!

 

 

Tomorrow, being May Day, there is a welcoming-in-the-spring/summer dawn rite being held by the Folk Society, down at Prebend's bridge. 'pparently it's going to involve Morris dancing, St Cuthbert's choir and burgers. Helen and Annie are talking about going and swimming in the river! *shivers* I'd love to go, but I have a summative bench test in Programming later in the morning, and trust me, I have a feeling that I will be more than capable of failing it on a full night's sleep. Ah well. Maybe next year.

 

I think the evidence speaks for itself! (Photos taken at last night's Formal)

 

 

The people in my tutorials are a depressing bunch. They wait outside the classroom in silence, staring at the floor, file in silently when the tutor arrives, then sit in a stupor for the hour, occasionally writing a few notes and only speaking when the tutor asks them a question directly. Then come the end of the hour, they pack up their bags and leave again, staring at the floor. It's awful!

 

The root of the problem is that no-one knows each other. Unlike the Oxbridge system, where your academic tutor is also a member of your college, all our subject learning is department based - so the chances are, you won't know anyone else in the group of eight. You probably won't even recognise them as doing your subject as most of our Maths lectures have 300 people in (theoretically, at least!). However, I'd've thought that it was the perfect opportunity to meet some new people from other colleges - even if you only end up as friends on a "Hi, how are you?" level, it's giving you links to other colleges, something which is quite valuable if you don't want to live in a Trevelyan-bubble for the three/four years of your degree.

 

So at the start of the year, making a real effort on the social front, I tried to say hello to some of my fellow tutees, be friendly, find out a bit about who they were etc.. And most people responded on a basic "I'm Nick, from Cuth's" level, but hardly any of them have actually made the effort to sustain a conversation or anything since. And I don't *think* it's anything that I did or said - they just seem determined to be generally antisocial, which I find bizarre, given that most of them are probably more extroverted than me as a matter of course. There's one lad in my Core A tutorials who I can hold a quick conversation with (aided by the fact that for various reasons, that tutor group has ended up at only four people, and also by the fact that one week I turned up very very cold.. it was sleeting outside, and I'd been evacuated mid-shower by an unfortunately timed fire-alarm. Nothing like making a prat out of yourself to put people at ease!). There's also a girl in B1 who I sort of know 'cos she also does the Programming module (where us girls have a habit of sticking together..!), a lad who sorted me out in the first term when I arrived at the class on the edge of tears (tiredness, homesickness etc.), but out of the.. 20-odd people who I could have made friends with.. That's not great.

 

It's the same during the tutorials as well. As people who have been in my classes at school will know, I'm not afraid to make an idiot of myself by asking questions. Even then I was one of the few who did so and I may have looked thick at the time, but as a result I understood the material better and then come the exam, proceeded to kick the asses of half of the people who had sat in smug superioty during lessons. Unlike in GCSE Maths (where a good proportion would rather have been in History. Or PE. Or assembly, for that matter.), I am not at the top any more. I am average. I may even be less than average, but it's really hard to tell when no-one will talk to you. I've kept up my practice of asking questions - as far as I'm concerned, that's the whole point of having tutorials - but my, is it demoralising when you're the only one. And I may not be super-whizzy as some of the people in my groups, but I can't believe that I'm the only one who doesn't understand everything the first time round; the only one who ever has any questions. *sigh*

 

In yesterday's Reasoning revision tutorial, we were asked to express the following statement in formal mathematical notation, then negate it (express the opposite): "At least one person in Durham owns a copy of every book published in 1970.". As my mother's daughter, I found this quite funny.. "Hope they have a big house then!" I remarked to the girl sitting next to me, in a renewed attempt to be friendly. She sort of stared at me..

 

 

Here goes the plan for exams: my Geometry brings up my Calculus, my Algebra brings up my Probabilty, and my Dynamics brings up my Reasoning. And I fail the Programming. It's all good! :D

 

"Expression is the breaking and bending of rules."

 

That, paraphrased, was the gist of today's Music lecture, with a new lecturer for the new term. I don't know about anyone else, but I found it really interesting.

 

In a musical context, this makes complete sense. Music has a grammar, if you like, a set of conventions that most composers will learn when they set out. It is generally accepted, for example, that parallel fifths in the harmony of a piece are a bad thing - that a piece will begin and end in the tonic key, and that a perfect cadence (V-I) is the strongest way to finish a piece. These 'rules' have developed over time, but your standard composition technique will depend on them - at A-Level and similar, you will be actively marked down for parallels or an undeveloped motif. The point of our lecturer (in the context of a Schubert piano miniature) was that it is the deviations from these rules that allow creativity - music composed to a set pattern may be 'correct', but more often than not, it does not have the same spark of inspiration, the imagination of a well-timed move from Ab major to E major (two very distant keys, for those who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of music theory).

 

I think that that is why I sometimes find Mozart a bit, well, boring to listen to. Don't get me wrong, some of his stuff I love to bits - I also really enjoy playing his music because he wrote fantastically well for the clarinet. Just listening to, I dunno, one of his symphonies or something.. there's something about the eight-bar phrases, the iib-V-I chord progressions (the very definition of a cliché in Classical music), the balance and neatness of it all that makes me want to listen to something else. He follows all the rules, to the very note. But then you suddenly realise that that's because it's his and his contempories' music that most of the rules are based on (and the likes of Bach a bit earlier, I guess). When he was writing, he was breaking the rules - because the rules as he knew them were very different, an earlier form of 'serious' music. In comparison to Renaissance music, to plainchant, even to Bach and his relentless counterpoint, Mozart was doing things that were new and exciting. The same eight-bar phrases, the neatness, and the balance that I sometimes class as boring and textbook - this was expression, because it was something different from what had gone before.

 

So once the Mozartian rules were established, creativity meant doing something else. It meant using three- or seven-bar phrases. It meant contrasts in dynamic or texture where they were not expected. It meant that the Classical antecedent-consequent (question-and-answer) patterns sometimes got altered - maybe the consequent to one phrase would act as the antecedent to another, maybe the consequent would be extended and developed, removing the neat eight-bars-followed-by-another-eight-followed-by-sixteen structure that the likes of Mozart and Haydn had exemplified. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, breaking the rules meant experimenting with the standard concepts of harmony and tonality - enter Schoenberg et al.. This latter is an experiment that I personally wish had never happened (serialism does nothing for me. Nothing!), but without it, perhaps the likes of Elgar and Britten and Copland would never have stumbled on a middle ground, and that would be very sad indeed.

 

The obvious comparison is with language. The English language may have evolved at a much slower rate than Western music, but that does not mean that the same rules do not apply - the rules of breaking the rules. Just as in music, writers are constantly searching for new ways to express things. "Style is expressing your meaning in the fewest words possible" - I can't remember who said that, but I think that it's a fantastic rule to work by.. but then what about the extended metaphor? Homer, Virgil, and later Milton all swore by that to add colour to their writing. And while teenage slang can be dismissed as a 'dumbing-down' of culture (probably with a reference somewhere to the Youth of Today in the same breath), how else do new words get introduced into a language? And yesterday's slang is today's dictionary reference, another example of the rules being broken to create new ones.

 

That's one of the things about Maths. You can't break the rules, only manufacture new ones.

 

 

 

I failed. Undue fucking hestitation. Excuse the language. I need to vent.

 

I was on one of those country roads out near Wythall (- I think they took one look at the traffic in Kings Heath and turned tail), not one I know, and I got to a junction. I stopped, checked both ways, realised that in fact what I had stopped at was a slip road to a dual carriageway. There was loads of traffic coming, and it was obvious that if I had gone, I would only have had to slow down again anyway, so I waited for a minute. Nothing around me, nothing behind me, a clear view. But that's clearly irrelevant.

 

The guy even said to me, after he'd told me that I'd failed, "I can see you're a good driver, it's obvious you're a good driver. You should take your test in Durham, because you've demonstrated that you can drive on all types of roads." (and with that test centre, it really is all types of roads.. 70mph dual carriageway, country lanes, 30/40mph suburbia, 20mph speed bump zones, busy roundabouts, the Alcester Road..). After a quick search on the DSA website, the Durham test centre is, in fact, in Hallgarth St - nice and convenient, but I don't really see the point in taking my test on unfamiliar roads, in a city that is a nightmare for cars in the first place, in the middle of term when I have actual exams, and when I won't actually get to drive again until the summer anyway. For hell's sake, though.. "It's obvious you're a good driver.."

 

Ron's prophecy has been fulfilled. He said to me, a few weeks after I started learning.. he said to me, "I can see that if you fail for anything it'll be undue hesitancy!". I thought he was making it up at the time!

 

*sigh*

 

 

Gotta go pack.

 

I've just had my driving test. But oh wait, I haven't, because they ****ing cancelled on me. Again. This is taking the mick now. In the words of Mr Trigger, I am not a happy bunny.

 

I just want to be able to drive by myself, is that so much to ask for??! I started lessons at the start of U6, for hell's sake..

 

Bastards.

 

 

Ron wouldn't let me drive home from the test centre. After last time's cool-off at 80mph on the dual carriageway, I don't think he quite trusted me..!

 

 

Update: So I've just had a phone call from them. Due to the unfortunate circumstances of this being my second cancellation, and due to the fact that I return to Durham in two days for nine weeks, and yada yada yada, they've given me a rescheduled time. Tomorrow afternoon. It happens to be 3.27pm, which isn't great 'cos it'll be school rush-hour and the roads will be chaos, but I guess that I have to be able to drive safely in Kings Heath school rush-hour just as well as on quiet roads at 11.19am.. *grumbles*

 

'part from anything else, I've just wasted the better part of a morning bumming around Kings Heath. Yay.

 

Anyone who's been near a news source recently cannot have failed to have heard about the Virginia Tech shootings. The gunman and his motives, the list of the dead, the horror around campus and in the town. My heart goes out to them, well and truly. I must admit to feeling slightly sick when I heard that some Professors were among the victims. It just brought it closer to home, I guess. Fourteen years ago was when we were in America and Dad was working at Stanford University.

 

A clip of George Bush was broadcast, giving an address about the "terrible tragedy", mourning "those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time". I do not doubt his sincerity.

 

But then today on the news was a 45-second bulletin about a car bomb in Iraq. 118, I believe, was the death toll, nearly four times that of in the Virginia shootings. And while I would not for a moment want to lessen the significance of the deaths of those students to their loved ones, their friends and family, I couldn't help feeling that a deep-seated hypocrisy was going on somewhere. Those Iraqis were, after all, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Accents are funny things. They are one of the first things you register when you meet someone new, and are probably one of the most immediate things from which assumptions and prejudices are formed. I was considering this as I walked through town the other day.

 

To my mind, at least, I don't really have an accent. Generic English, I guess, with short vowel sounds and a bit of Brummie thrown in on occasion - but when people ask me where I'm from and my response is 'Birmingham', one of the first things they often say is "Really? You don't sound like it!". This is probably something to be grateful for. I remember Ellen saying about how Ted was so terrified of his kids growing up with a Brummie accent that he corrected their speech even as pre-school children. One has to admit that the dulcet tones and lilting cadences don't exactly inspire... well, much... ennit... In a way, though, I am jealous of people with a Brummie accent - 'cos like any other accent, it acts as an identity. Something to link them to their home, even when they go elsewhere - for the same reason, I guess, that Rob occasionally plays the Wurzels at full volume. Nothing like A Brand New Combine 'Arvester to be linkin' yous to Somerset!

 

What it amounts to, though, is that while I have lived in Birmingham all of my life, I'm not what you'd call Brummie born-and-bred. Dad was born not far from London, but grew up in Yorkshire (before moving back down to London for sixth form. And then Cambridge, and then a year at Southampton I think, and then Cambridge again, and then Birmingham..). His accent, like mine, could probably be described as generic English, with a bit of Yorkshire thrown in occasionally. His parents come from elsewhere, too - his dad from Plymouth, and who knows about his mum? I know six things about her and where she grew up isn't one of them. My mum.. she grew up in Norfolk (and then to Cambridge, and then Bristol for a year, and then Cheshire, and then Mansfield, and then Cambridge, and then Birmingham..), but needless to say, neither of her parents are from there either. Granny lived in Hertfordshire as a child I think (and then Suffolk, and then St. Andrews, and then Bletchley Park, and then London, and then Norfolk..), while Grandad was a born-and-bred Cockney, born within the sound of Bow Bells. He left school at the age of 14 to work in the East India docks! ..so I don't really come from anywhere, and my accent reflects that. My brother sounds more Brummie than I do; my sister more southern, but all of us are funny mixes of I'm-not-quite-sure-what.

 

University's another one, mixing with people from all over the country (and indeed, countries). I adore the locals' Geordie accents, and would be very happy to pick up one of those along the way.. but I'm probably less likely to do that than I am to pick up a posh accent, or a southern one at the very least (and yes, there is a difference. To my mind, anyway!), simply due to the crazy proportion of people from the south of England. I've probably mentioned this before, but I reckon that 2/3 of the university's students come from south of Birmingham? When you consider Durham's location (go look it up on GoogleMaps if you're not sure), and the fact that Birmingham's not exactly northern itself, that is actually quite ridiculous! And Paul and Eleanor and I take the mick out of Rhiannon and Helen and people for their rounded Berkshire vowels just because.. well, because! They know we don't mean it! But I do find myself judging people if they sound like they've come out of a prep school, just as they judge people who sound like, well, chavs.

 

It's just not what you say but how you say it. At times, that's quite annoying!

 

Y'oroit mate?

 

 

That's one of the funny things about talking to people over MSN. You can't hear their accent..

 

What with Kat and Cat back off to university today, and my siblings nearly back at school, it is slowly dawning on me that in a week's time, I too will have gone - back to Durham. And slowly, slowly it has been dawning on me that over the past four weeks of holiday, I have done no work! As in, actually no work. As in, nothing!

 

I'm not too worried about the Maths revision - not 'cos I know the stuff, but because for the past three years and for the next three years I have been/will be stressing out of my tiny head over exams that actually matter.. so this year's my year off. In other words, it doesn't matter if I don't get firsts, or even 2:1s, I guess - I'd rather have had a good holiday. I *am* worried about the Programming, but I'm not convinced that there's a lot that I can do to change that.. and priority at the minute is going to the 50% summative Music essay that's in for the start of term. This one's on a Beethoven string quartet movement - I'm not entirely sure what I'm talking about, but I wasn't on the last one either, and it would seem that half the marks go for arguing convincingly that you don't know what you're talking about, if that makes sense! And I only need 4%, anyway.

 

*sighs contentedly*

 

I feel like a cat who's stretching out after having been sleeping in the sunshine.. it really doesn't feel like mid-April! 26°C, says the BBC weather site for this area, and our thermometer in the sun is registering 31°C. Mmmmm! We had lunch in the garden, and I've been wandering in and out, having breaks from the computer. My brother is currently having a water fight.

 

 

 

Playing at the Gala Theatre in Durham, two days before I go back!

 

NOT FAIR!!!

 

(http://dur.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2232763073)

 

Anyone got, like, some spare train tickets and the strength to help me get my stuff up without Dad?!

 

(OK, the Durham one's sold out, but she's playing at the Moseley Folk Festival - yes, in Brum - in September, the 1st and 2nd. Anyone up for going with me??)

 

We've just had Easter, I believe. I know this because my family have been off school, and it's Spring, and we went away on holiday to Norfolk. And we got given chocolate. It didn't feel like Easter, somehow, but I think I know why. It's 'cos at no point did I sing 'Thine Be The Glory'!

 

 

It's funny how I associate music with stuff. Maybe everyone does it? I don't know. Just certain songs, certain composers, certain albums always drag me back to a particular time. Like.. like Justin Timberlake's 'Cry Me a River'. Not a great song, by any stretch of the imagination, but whenever I hear it, it takes me back to when I was ill in bed, February 2003. Or maybe it was March? No, 'cos it was February half-term.. I do remember that Rachel and I were meant to be going on the protest march in London, just before the invasion of Iraq, but we both went down with some bug, so I stayed in bed all day. It was bitterly cold, I think. I was still listening to BRMB at that stage in a desperate attempt to familiarise myself with the contents of the charts, and it was on that day that I realised quite how often those chart stations repeat the same songs! 'Cry Me a River' was one of those at the time, and the association has stuck!

 

It's the same with choir stuff, school or otherwise, Wind Band music, orchestra, albums that friends have given me.. I still get slightly teary at the Beatles' 'Here, There and Everywhere' even though I love it to bits, 'cos when we sang it, it was Dave's and Steph's and Ali's and people's last school concert and I think that I was going through a generally low patch at the time. And I will always associate Mark Knopfler with Dickie (thanks for that album!), Dido's 'No Angel' album with Tom Woolley, and Muse's 'Black Holes and Revelations' with Callan, all for completely different reasons. It confuses me *no end* when I've come across something in multiple contexts.. when I've sung a piece with two different choirs, generally.

 

Similarly I associate occasions or places or people with music. My favourite part of Christmas, if I'm being honest, is the music - carols particularly, but also other Christmas music that we've done with choir, and of course those classics that get wheeled out on the radio each year.

 

 

So not singing 'Thine Be The Glory' this Easter has confused me! We've often gone to church on Easter Day in the past - we've generally been on holiday, and even if there has been a Meeting in the vicinity, for some reason we've gravitated towards a local church instead (- Mum, I guess, has more of a Christian background). Even if we haven't gone to church (we went for a walk along the coast this year!), I've always sung hymns at school, so have got the association in that way.

 

I don't know why it's worrying me so much. It's not even like I believe it when I'm singing it! It just, well, doesn't feel like Easter..!

 

Earlier on this evening I watched the Durham University Challenge team get fairly comprehensively slaughtered by Manchester! Well, 240 to 90, anyway, which I think just about counts as 'slaughtered'. It certainly feels like it in the amount of time they have to answer the questions. In all fairness, the Manchester team were pretty awesome, although I did think that given the level of most of the questions, gaining points for identifying Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' (yes, the famous bit) was pushing it a bit!

 

On one of their rounds, the Durham team were asked to identify which regions certain wines come from. They hadn't a clue, so guessed 'Tuscany' for all three - the third one was, in fact, Tuscany. "Teetotal university!" muttered Jeremy Paxman.

 

Mum and I just came out of the garden centre to find that someone had made off with one of the magnetic L-plates, which we had naïvely assumed would be safe left there (- we do take them off at home, and at school, and in Northfield, and at the supermarket, and at just about any other place we go. We're not stupid..). This is mildly annoying, because I now can't drive until we go to a garage and get some more, but I am laughing in the face of all those anti-alcohol campaigners, trying to protect our 'quiet village community and traditional neighbourhood'. Where do they think they live?!

 

They could have at least made off with both..! What use is one L-plate? Tch. Roll-on test day!