Day 175 - in the cold, cold night

This blog seems to have a thing for the number sixteen. I started posting on day sixteen, I recently left it sixteen days without posting, and if I'd waited 'til tomorrow, it would've happened again. Sorry. As I said then, I can only plead an influx of reading and my arrival at what I like to call Dissertation Station on this, my train journey to graduation, which is steadily coming to resemble a rollercoaster ride.

Anyway, I'm back, and capitalising on the fact that I've done most of my reading for the next week already. (When I finish this, I shall return to the last fifteen pages of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and then 'most' will become 'all'.) So I thought I'd use this new ability to speed through work as a jumping-off point to illustrate in this post just how far I appear to have come in my time at university.

Most of you, given that you live in this country, will have noticed how cold the weather has been recently. You'll probably also be aware that, for me, cold, and especially wind, is pretty much equal to spasms - spasms which, more often than not, have been known to lead to no work whatsoever being done and extension after extension on essay deadlines.

Not so any more. Last night I met Becca and Wei, two of my fellow exec members and dear friends from Warwick Writing Society, at Curiositea (the uni vintage tea shop) for hot melted chocolate (yes, really!) and a chat. 'Twas lovely - because, aside from the fun and laughter and home-made birthday cake, I was filled with a warm and fuzzy sense of gratitude that I can call these two delightful humans my friends. It's still something of a novelty to me that people enjoy my company; though, perhaps because I am learning to like myself, it's not half as much of a surprise as it used to be. Softly, softly, catchy monkey, as I have been wont to say...

Then there was the wind on the way home, and I thought it would cut my jubilation down to size in its effort to transform me to an icicle, but it failed. Instead, though I could feel the tension teasing its way up my thigh and the sciatica snatching at the nerve-endings in my ankle, I won. I made it to our front door without a murmur, let alone tears - and truly realised quite how far I've come.

As of 25th October 2012, cold does not necessarily equate to spasms. Whilst this might seem a tiny, insignificant  detail to the greater part of the human race, indeed of the readers of this blog, to me it was a huge revelation. Now, you must understand, my response to cold weather will be more along the lines of this:

 ...with the wonderful Bee riding on the back of my chair for good measure, until we can walk side-by-side.