Author: Joan

Dissertation milestone — Woot!

My last post gives people the illusion that I’m organised for this dissertation. What you haven’t seen are the previous versions of the Gantt chart, from which you would have realised that over time I have moved the red block representing the first milestone from March 26 to May 28 to June 4.

So, did I hand it in the week starting June 4? Of course not. I just emailed it off then, three days late.

But like the honest consultant that I am, I kept the supervisor up-to-date with my setbacks. Upfrontness is my best policy.

I’m pleased it’s in. I now have a month to write the next three sections. They’re the chunkiest and most important sections but I think I’ve gotten the hang of this now.

Express delivery, guaranteed

“This will be interesting,” Alex said, when he walked into the kitchen.

I swallowed my toast. “What?”

“I ordered the scanner from Amazon last night and they guarantee delivery by one o’clock today. I looked it up with the parcel tracking and it’s in Scotland.”

“You paid for express delivery?”

“Yes. I’m leaving for Norway tomorrow. I need to scan my books today.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s 10 o’clock! Scotland to Cambridge in three hours? No way.” I shook my head incredulously.

“They’ve guaranteed it, Joan. They’ve given their word. If it doesn’t get here by one, I get my delivery fee back.”

“Wow. This will be interesting… If it comes at two, will you still try to get a refund?”

“Of course,” Alex smiled. “A promise is a promise. One o’clock.”

“Well. Good luck to them, I say.”

Twenty minutes later, the doorbell rang.

The web is your billboard

It took me about a year to figure out why I have a blog. I think of this as a mini magazine. It appeals mostly to people who I’ve met yet the writing should be interesting enough such that more people would read it if this was the only blog in the world.

Luckily, there is plenty of good writing on the web elsewhere.

I would like your thoughts on something. I am meeting more and more people with ‘public face’ websites. These websites have their real names, contact details, CVs, portfolios (art and writing), and so on.

This blog is a different beast. I don’t use surnames, company names, contact information, photos of people at private events, or any other identifiers. I’ve done some growing up here so it’s obviously not my public face. In fact, if you put my full name in quotes into Google, this blog is far, far down in the listings. I’m not even sure how Google connects my name to this blog, actually.

What I’d like your opinion on is:

  • Why do people have public internet faces? How do they use it?
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a public face?
  • What rules should people follow about the information they put on their websites?

Runs on the formal hall board

Formal halls are a highlight of the Oxford or Cambridge University experience. Each college has formal halls once, twice, or even three times a week. You get a three course meal for anything between £3 to £16 (A$7.50-40), and it often includes sherry, port, wine, coffee, tea, chocolates and fruit. Cambridge has 31 colleges. By the end of my year here, I will have been to formal hall for at least eleven of them.

Formal halls attended or soon to attend

  • New Hall
  • Hughes Hall
  • St John’s
  • Clare Hall
  • St Catherine’s
  • Newnham
  • Wolfson
  • Sidney Sussex
  • Darwin
  • Churchill
  • Emmanuel

Formal halls regretfully declined because of other commitments

  • St Edmund’s (missed out three times!)
  • Trinity Hall
  • Downing

Lunched at

  • Darwin
  • Peterhouse
  • Hughes Hall
  • St Edmund’s

An ecology of supermarkets

The UK grocery market is bigger than Australia’s. Australia basically has Coles and Woolworths. You might count IGA, too. However, the competition in the UK is much more intense and strangely, there is a relatively clear hierarchy of ‘poshness’.

From my eight months here, the hierarchy of prestige seems to be:

  1. Waitrose
  2. Marks and Spencer
  3. Sainsbury’s
  4. Co-op
  5. Tesco
  6. Asda

There are others that I’ve heard of or walked by but I can’t place on them on the poshness ladder because I haven’t experienced them. Aldi is probably near Asda, at the bottom. There’s also Morrisons, apparently one of UK’s ‘big four’ supermarkets. I wouldn’t have known it existed except that Damjan had to go into one once to ask for directions (we got lost while travelling in Yorkshire). I’ve also been to Somerfield. There is a full list of UK supermarkets on Wikiepedia.

I’ve talked about Sainsbury’s on my blog before. Little Sainsbury’s in the centre of town is my main grocery store because I like what it sells, I like its layout and ‘vibe’, and it only takes me 15 minutes to walk there.

There are other mainstream grocery options, though. The Co-op is even closer than Sainsbury’s but I find it expensive and I’ve had bad experiences with clueless staff there.

On special occasions (when I need anything exotic), I go to a really big Sainsbury’s further out of town. It’s 2 km away. I would normally ride there. Riding home with a heavy backpack is made harder by a serious hill and busy traffic.

You might remember that I once ordered from Tesco online. I’ve never been inside the actual Tesco because I always thought it was far away. However, I’ve just looked it up and it’s even closer than big Sainsbury’s! It is in a very busy part of town, though. There’s a big road with lots of traffic. I’m a little nervous of riding there.

I love going to Marks and Spencer. It’s full of beautiful food. Often, I go just to look at the cold sections and the shelves. I might spend twenty minutes before finally selecting a chocolate or a yogurt. I visit M&S to reward myself after a tough day or after handing something in.

I want to visit Waitrose one day. Waitrose is at the very top of the supermarket ecosystem. If I love M&S, imagine what Waitrose will be like! The nearest Waitrose store is 5 km away. Maybe I’ll bike to it as a field trip or for exercise.

Anyway, the reason I started this blog post is because yesterday, I visited Asda for the first time. I found a shortcut there and discovered that it’s actually as close to my house as little Sainsbury’s!

Asda was huge and confusing. I felt a bit frightened, actually. Nothing was where it should have been. The chips weren’t near the biscuits. The fruit section was split across three aisles. The skimmed milk was hidden. I couldn’t find the honey. The meat was all mixed up instead of being organised by animal. After about fifteen minutes, I wanted to flee to my familiar, safe little Sainsbury’s.

I wandered around for an hour and had to get help twice. I eventually gave up looking for low fat mature cheddar cheese because I just wanted to get out of there.

Interestingly, at the checkout, I was the only person with a reusable bag. Everyone else was taking plastic bags. I think it’s because Asda targets people on lower incomes. I don’t know why lower income people tend to use plastic bags. Maybe they don’t care about the environment as much?

At Sainsbury’s, about a third of people seem to have reusable bags. A British friend tells me that everyone at Waitrose uses reusable bags.

Seaside weekend at Sheringham

This weekend, I went stayed at a seaside town called Sheringham, about two hours north-east of Cambridge. I went with 34 fellow scholarship holders and their friends. We played kickball on the beach, had a hog roast feast (delicious, although perhaps not politically correct), and played Scrabble until one in the morning.

Beach houses, which people can buy to store their bathing gear, deck chairs, and surfboards. Such houses can be very expensive.

It was very, very foggy. You can’t see it from this photo (I adjusted the contrast). It was funny to see someone pushing a stroller a foggy beach.

Sand anti-buckets.

The beach was very pebbly in places. Friends delighted in how smooth and beautifully patterened the rocks were. As I understand, the smoother the rock, the older it is because it has had time to erode away.

Lunch! They fed us roast pork and pork crackling (yum…), stuffing, roast potato and chicken, green salad, potato salad, mustard, apple sauce, and chives in Crème fraîche. Dessert was fruit salad, strawberry cheesecake and some sort of chocolate caramel cake.

There were a lot of big rocks. They had furrows on the surface, showing where they had been drilled out of a larger monolith. I think someone told me that the rocks were transported to Sheringham from Scotland. Maybe it was Wales.

For Cambridge students, I thought we were pretty bad at spelling and vocabulary, actually. Ian and Rebecca put down ‘sinned’, then ‘atoned’. That’s spiffy.

It says, ‘Probably the Largest Cone in the World’.

Playing blocs

When I got to Parker’s Piece* for our class football game, Anna and Chris were already there. Bettina soon joined us, and in fifteen minutes, there were ten of us.

‘Ten! Perfect! We can have two teams of five.’

‘How do we split it? Boys against girls?’

There was a short and lively discussion about the fairness of this arrangement, and how embarrassing it would be when the girls won.

‘I know! Let’s do Kyoto and non-Kyoto!’ someone eventually exclaimed.

‘Huh? Oh, you mean…? Would that work? It does!’

And so it was, that the five people from the UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, and Ireland (countries supporting the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to curb the world’s greenhouse gas emissions) played off against the five recalcitrant Aussies and Americans.

‘Okay, guys,’ said Chris. Chris is from Seattle and is obviously evil. ‘Remember, we don’t like Kyoto so we can play dirty.’

‘Nation’s right to pollute!’ hollered Ian, a stubborn Australian from Adelaide, as he charged after the ball.

‘Voluntary emissions targets!’ I yelped, running to the other half of the field in my ignorant and conservative manner.

After fifteen minutes of vicious football, Don arrived.

‘Hi guys, sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Whose team am I on?’

‘Are you for Kyoto or against Kyoto?’

Without batting an eyelid, Don said, ‘Well, Canada’s on the fence for this one. But recently, it’s been rumbling against mandatory targets…’

‘Traitor!’ someone cried.

‘You’re with us, then!’ I said, triumphantly.

With six versus five, the global tide soon turned against the Kyoto Protocol. A passerby from Kenya was invited to join the pro-Kyoto side and soon, the game was back on the knife edge.

Who won?

Don’t know. We lost track of the score.

* Parker’s Piece is a historic place, famous for being the birthplace of modern football (or soccer). There is a plaque on the ground which reads:

“Here on Parker’s Piece, in the 1800s, students established a common set of simple football rules emphasising skill above force, which forbade catching the ball and ‘hacking’. These ‘Cambridge Rules’ became the defining influence on the 1863 Football Association rules.”

Source: BBC (2006)