The simple things.

I am feeling expansive and warm; my linguine bolognese (I prefer linguine to spaghetti just because it cooks faster!) dinner was one of those surprisingly satisfying ones (every so often my cooking astounds me and sadly it is always by pure luck) followed by a healthy 'king of crunch' Braeburn, leaving me feeling particularly smug about my well balanced and very cheap student meal. Go me. Also I am looking forward to the 5 week holiday that I've just embarked upon in gastronomic terms, having just bought Gary Rhodes' 'keeping it simple'. Lots of pretty pictures and very usefully laid out. As a student I really cannot be bothered to make things which take 4 hours and about 30 ingredients to make, and am much more concerned with learning to roast the perfect chicken than how to dress it in the celebrity chef's equivalent of McCartney and Manolo -- usually involving spices which I can just about spell but don't have a faintest idea about the taste!

Forced myself to the library this morning to meet a friend for something after 6 hours of sleep (Yahoo! arcade games are too damn addictive), then sat fairly productively there for about 4-5 hours with a lunchbreak at my beloved German cafe. It was a pain struggling very slowly through all these papers, what does intragenomic conflict have to do with behavioural ecology anyway, blahdeblah, but I persevered with the help of a 35p mug of coffee from the tearoom when I found myself watching the bloke next to me falling asleep over Albert's The Cell more than my paper (and no, he wasn't a very interesting sight either). Ah, we scientists. So sacrificial. So damn keen. Another friend came into the library which was being used as a holding room for PhD interviews and looked so bored I found Dr. Seuss' The Lorax for her to read (it is on our overnight loan shelves -- recommended Conservation Biology Module reading!), unfortunately then her interviewer came to get her while she was reading Dr. Seuss, I hope I am not the cause of a bad impression!! Oops. She was trying to read the current issue of Nature before Dr. Seuss I think; obviously it failed as stimulating pre-interview reading material.

Doing several hours of work -- after multiple botched attempts on previous days when I got up about lunchtime and then didn't get to the dept so did no work whatsoever -- made me feel positively angelic so I wandered around in Borders and bought myself Mr. Rhodes (whom I shall always know as the perfect poached egg man having first seen him on telly making one) and also Ian McEwan's Saturday. Read a few pages before dinner, there is something incredibly emotionally and intellectually satisfying and pleasurable about sinking into a great book. Like many other authors whom I enjoy he is a master at the detail of a life (extra)ordinary, I don't pretend to understand why the sentence "The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic - cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls." can make me smile, pause to think, enjoy -- but enjoy I do. The simple things: food, books, the lack of study related guilt.

Spring is being very reluctant to arrive and I dearly hope it changes soon. I want to sit out by the Cam with my book and feed the duckies and feast on the sight of the daffodils in bloom across the bank. I am aware now I think that my time in Cambridge may well be fast drawing to a close (I am leaning ever more perceptibly towards Princeton, for a new start) and I suppose like everybody else I want my fill of this beautiful town before I uproot myself to another one.

Oh yes, thanks for the comments everyone. :)