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Thursday 13.5.04 | IT was my birthday party last night, and I got rather shit-faced at it. Was very enjoyable, despite getting one or two rude presents (even if I could bring myself to write about them on here, they defy words) and being in the company of my foulest friends :-) One very useful gift was a Profanisaurus, from which I shall list one or two entries below. My vocab's really going to be taking a swim in the sewers in the next few weeks... Becksfart (noun): Brand-specific lager hangover flatulence. Has an aroma a bit like egg mayonnaise. PUMA (acronym): Pants Up My Arse. To be suffering from cleftal discomfort. These are two of the less unspeakable entries, trust me... Friday 14.5.04 TWO thoughts today, the first of much less consequence than the second. I have an exam later - English-German, German-English translation, and for some reason, I have an bad feeling about it. It's not something I can do a great deal of revision for, and, while I'm not a born translator, I can bluff my way through transposing a text from English into German and back again without too many problems normally. So why am I getting jumpy about it? My German is far from perfect but I have faith in my own ability - it's much better than my French, and I think I passed my French exam a couple of weeks ago, which was largely the same thing. Hmm. Not good. The more important thought concerns the situation in Iraq. It's just hit me that, with the correct historical distance, people are going to look back on the phoney search for WMD, Bush's division of the world into good and evil, his blatant islamophobia, the terrible photos of Americans and Brits torturing Iraqi prisoners (which are true, though, and which are false, remains to be confirmed) - in short, all the lies, all the hate, all the anger, all the cold-blooded revenge against Saddam Hussein, all the death the two men have been responsible for between them - and I wonder whether they might shake their heads in the same way people do when thinking about genocides and similar atrocities. Please, America, don't re-elect him in November.He's a liar, a cheat and a coward, and he needs to go. Sunday 16.5.04 THE translation exam on Friday was very, very testing but not the calamity I had been predicting. It wasn't unfairly hard (giving us nonsense-verse to translate would be unfairly hard) but they certainly handed nothing to us on a plate - the paper threw around names of trees, Thomas Mann's thoughts on life and religion and a piece from Doris Lessing, amongst other things. But never mind, it's over. This left me to go out with Ed and his work-colleagues on Friday night and become inebriated for the second time in a week (oops, finals not finished yet) but it was an excellent night, so rah. Now sitting here, contemplating my last two exams: Tuesday which is my French literature exam: various works of Montaigne, Molière and La Fonatine. The course is very nebulous and philosophical (balancing body and soul, dahlings, golden means and Aristotle and all that crap) but I know the texts reasonably well, so I think I should be able to battle through. Wednesday is German literature: comes under the broad aegis of 'German Fiction and German History' but it concentrates on the works of one of the first German novelists, Johann von Grimmelshausen who is, may I just add here, bloody marvellous and very funny. Writes all about shagging, bollocks, farting, eating too much, belching, getting drunk and being a generally enormous character whilst subtely revealing the Christian message under it all. Amazing stuff, great fun. And then, once that's over, the celebrations begin. The end is in sight :-) Tuesday 18.5.04 IN approximately 25.5 hours, I will have finished my degree. I'm beginning to think that while on the one hand I shall of course be delighted to have finally slogged my way through the scholastic quagmire, it will be on the other rather an anticlimax. For a start, the only other person finishing tomorrow is Mike (with whom I shall therefore decamp to the pub), but more importantly, I've quite enjoyed this degree on the whole. It's shaped me in a most odd way, stretched me in directions I had never thought possible and made me look at myself and others in a very different light. I know I've bitched about it (especially the French side, which I've just completely finished - last exam went well) and done, on the whole, not enough work to merit getting a decent result, but on balance, it's been an amazing, and amazingly formative, few years. I shall miss it. I shall be back. | ||
