I had four accounting and finance classes with the head of the MBA program here at Cambridge. I found it truly interesting. Accounting is such a limited yet powerful tool. After the classes had finished, I sent an email to the lecturer, pouring forth all the questions I had wanted to ask in class.

Why does a company exist to increase value for shareholders? What is the function of a high share price? (To ‘do better’ than the cost of capital, to prevent takeovers…) Does it matter to a company’s day-to-day operation if the share price falls? (I suppose the share price should reflect operation rather than the other way around.) What would happen if a company’s first allegience was to its employees? When wages are an operating cost, is there shareholder pressure to reduce them? Is there some way to modify the accounting system to reflect social costs? (But these are difficult to price and are not levelled against the company.) Perhaps it would be more workable/sustainable for the government to internalise such costs so that they show up in the balance sheet as part of a company’s normal operations. To what extent is a company’s behaviour shaped by its balance sheet and accounting practices?

I felt like I just had to get the questions out but at the end of the email, I backed away and said the equivalent of, ‘You don’t need to answer these questions. This is just me thinking.’

Against all reasonable expectations, the lecturer replied. ‘Joan. These are all very good questions. I would be happy to discuss at some point if you would like.’

Do you know how excited I was? I was very excited — in an absolute flap, really. Why? I would have access to someone who knew the world’s financial systems, someone who I believed didn’t have a left or right wing agenda, someone who would listen to me and answer my questions. I’ve been looking for an opportunity like this since reading The Divine Right of Capital.

I met the lecturer yesterday and we chatted for half an hour or so. He answered all the questions I had in my email, and more. I’m still processing some of what we talked about.

He must be a very busy person. He didn’t have to speak to me: I’m not in his course, the discussion was essentially recreational, I gave him an easy way out in my email. Yet, he did and in no way made me feel like he was doing me a favour. I’ve met people less important than him and far less generous with their time.

Such graciousness is something to aim for.

Don, Tommy and I were preparing for our final presentation for the Systems Dynamics class.

“You know, this will be my last class,” Don remarked. “…ever.”

I have another module to do next term, but for most people in my course, this Lent term was the last term with taught classes.

“Ever?” I laughed. “You mean you’re done with the MPhil? Done with postgrad? Done with school?“

“That’s right,” Don declared. “I’ve decided. Learning Stops Here.”

I sometimes have pretend conversations with myself. I don’t plan them. I just say something, then I’d say the next thing that flows on naturally or that I think will prompt an interesting turn in the chat. I guess I end up with the kinds of conversations that two Joan-like people might have.

Anyway, I was doing this while washing the dishes today and I made myself laugh.

Forget climate change, human rights and Save the British Library… THIS campaign speaks to my heart!

I have seen people on Facebook who have joined dozens or hundreds of groups. I have been much more choosey. ‘Campaign for a faster X5′, having been judged joinworthy, takes my group memberships to four.

The X5 takes 3.5 hours to travel between Cambridge and Oxford. That’s about the same distance as Melbourne to Shepparton. If you take the train between Cambridge and Oxford via London, it takes 2.5 hours and costs about two or three times as much — that’s £34 or A$85 return with a student discount. Frightening, isn’t it?

I’m going to a formal dinner tonight and a dance ball next Friday. The strap for the left shoe of my black heels broke. I need to get it fixed or buy new shoes. In the mean time, can I wear (light) brown leather boots (they go up to my thigh just below my knee) with a black skirt?

Edit on 12 March 2007: Based on your feedback and an email from my personal fashion consultant (mum), brown boots with black skirt was a dangerous proposition. I ended up wearing the boots with black pants, which means that the brown space on my outfit was smaller and less distracting.

I asked a few people how it looked and they said that it was fine. Regardless, I made it through last night with my self-esteem intact. I will try and get my shoe strap fixed today.

I am happy. I just came back from my first ‘GD’ or General Dancing, which is the Friday night social run by the Cambridge Dancers’ Club. I danced most songs (avoided tangoes, foxtrots or Viennese Waltzes, though).

I think… I am starting to get over my dance shyness. I have been out of practice for perhaps two years and my confidence has been quite low. At the Winchester Ball, I huddled in the corner, paralysed unless someone asked me to dance. I felt guilty for not being brave enough to ask, and scared that I would impose a horrible dance experience on someone else.

I remember my first swing social. I hadn’t even had one dance lesson but still asked people to dance. ‘Hi. I don’t really know how to do this. Do you mind dancing with me?’

Somehow, being able to lower expectations made it easier. I guess I’m now in a situation where I am aware of my deficiencies as a dancer and not able to make up for them. Ignorance can be bliss.

Tonight, I danced with a man wearing a shirt, tie and waistcoat. I asked him to dance a quickstep, warning him that I was quite ‘rubbish’ at it. He replied that he was as well, and proceeded to lead me through a lovely quickstep. He was clearly not rubbish and had thoughtfully matched my level of dancing.

When the song finished, he gently hooked his arm through mine and walked me off the floor. It was very gentlemanly. I was surprised and really quite charmed.

Near my house, there are two hairdressing salons. They look very similar, with the same minimalist white and silver decor, fluorescent bottles of hair product in the window, skinny and stylish female hair artists waiting to do your bidding.

The difference, though, is that one salon is often full, with customers content to wait in line. The other one is almost always empty. The empty one only opened a month or two after I arrived in Cambridge in September.

Whenever I walk by the new salon, I feel sorry for it. They don’t seem to have done anything wrong (after all, they are copying a successful recipe). Will it survive? Will it fail? I will monitor the situation and let you know.

A snapshot into the mess that is Joan’s brain.

The final version (after four major revisions).

For one of my assignments, I chose to look at glass recycling in the UK. The UK has an interesting problem — namely, it exports too much whiskey and imports too much wine! Whiskey comes in clear glass bottles, while wine generally comes in green glass. This means that UK glass recyclers have to deal with mounds of unwanted green glass, while UK industry is clamouring for the clear type.

The imbalance is made worse by mixed recycling systems. Councils in the UK have been putting lots of money into kerbside recycling to help UK meet its EU recycling targets (60% of glass packaging to be recycled by 2008). However, to ratchet up the recycling rate, households want the convenience of not having to sort through different coloured glass or having to provide space for bins for each colour. Colour contamination can muck up a batch of clear recycled glass.

What are the solutions? If you look at the relationships that I’ve drawn in the causal loop diagrams, you might find the right points in the system to poke. These are the options I’ve come up with:

• Separate colour glass collections;
• Developing other markets for yucky coloured glass (like crushing the glass up for use in roads);
• Exporting green and mixed glass to other EU nations for reuse in containers;
• Persuading importers to use clear glass containers or lightweight coloured glass (to reduce the amount of coloured glass being thrown out);
• Increasing UK consumer acceptance of coloured glass containers; and
• Increasing the collection of clear and amber glass (e.g. by encouraging recycling of jars).

I’m using this systems dynamics framework in my MPhil dissertation. It’s an interesting way to analyse cause-and-effect, feedback loops, and stocks and flows. At the moment, the title of my dissertation is, “A systems view of government policies to promote environmentally conscious housing design: comparison of The Netherlands, UK and China”. It’s a little unwieldy, I know. Coming up with a sexy dissertation title is not easy.

I was doing a mega-shop at Sainsbury’s. It was my turn to cook for our Sunday food group. The moussaka recipe called for one kilogram of lamb mince. As fortune would have it, I could buy 2x500g boxes of mince for £4, saving me 30 p!

I like budgeting, so receipts hold a special fascination. As I left the checkout I mused over it, trying to calculate how much I was spending to feed four people in grand style.

Then I saw:

Lamb mince        £2.15
Lamb mince        £2.15

Jibbed! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Unlike the shops back home in Melbourne, Sainsbury’s has never let me down before. Despite the constantly changing landscape of discounts, they’ve never gotten the price wrong… until now.

‘It’s only 30 p, Joan,’ I said to myself. ‘Let it go.’

I slowly started walking to the exit.

‘It’s a mistake. They should know that there’s something wrong with their system,’ my other self argued. ‘Someone else might kick up a big fuss. You can save them the trouble.’

‘It’s 30 p!’ I protested. ‘Who else would complain? I’ll look like a loser.’

‘It’s Sainsbury’s job to deal with these things,’ the other self replied. ‘And you can buy a chocolate bar for 30 p.’

Before I knew it, I had done an about-turn and was headed to the customer service podium.

‘Hi. Would you mind checking the lamb price?’ I said, handing over my receipt. ‘I think there was a special on it.’

The two assistants didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Of course,’ said the female. ‘Peter, could you go down and check the lamb? Ma’am, do you have the item with you?’

Another Sainsbury’s employee heard this as she walked by and stopped. ‘The lamb? It should be £4 for two. Saving of 30 p.’

‘So it’s not recognising the code,’ Peter said, examining the box of mince I had handed over. ‘I’ll have to fix that.’

They highlighted the mistake on my receipt, took a 20 p and 10 p coin out of the cash register and gave them to me.

‘Sorry about that,’ they said.

‘That’s okay,’ I said. I was just happy that they hadn’t made me feel like a skint.

I did two good things today. I was walking through the park and saw two women taking turns to stand in a patch of daffodils while the other took a photo. I waved them down and asked if they wanted me to take a photo of both of them. They were delighted.

I went to the computer lab after hours and found a wallet on the table. I flipped it open and discovered that its owner was one of my classmates, so I called her. She was very happy to get it back.

I have not ridden my bike for six days. I’m trying to slow down and enjoy life a bit more. I’ve been feeling stressed and unhappy for the past few weeks.

Yesterday, we went into London to present our project to the client. We’ve been working with an architecture firm on a renewable technologies toolkit for the past six weeks. The presentation went well and afterward, they took us to dinner. The food was from southern India and was delicious. But now I feel like I won’t need to eat for a week.

Because I’ve been avoiding doing laundry, I had an especially large batch to do today. I think I must have overloaded the washer because when I came back to check, the wash cycles were done but the clothes were still saturated with water. I put them through the dryer for longer than usual but the 70 p was wasted because the dryer didn’t dry the clothes at all.

In the end, I lugged the waterlogged clothes back home (stopping about twelve times to rest), then spent half an hour in the bathroom squeezing out the excess water. The skin on my left thumb has been worn away. I guess the wringing took some of the skin off. It hurts when I put on gloves to wash the dishes.