1. You and your friends make only the highest quality birthday cards.
(Such as the example on the right.)
2. You play with layers of meaning.
“He’s such a Riddle 25 in the Exeter book.”
“I’m a what?”
“She says you’re an onion.”
“Yes… That’s what I meant.”
3. You get all essayed out and forget how to use your words.
“Hey, we’re watching a movie. Do you want to come?”
“Go away, ‘m studenting.”
“You’re studenting? Do you mean you’re studying?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“I wonder what pictures of bookcases are called.”
“Shelfies?”
“Are you even going to read over your essay before submitting it?”
“I like to live dangerously.”
“What’s in a name? That which we call a nose by any other word would still smell. Oh, fiddlesticks.”
Greetings from your friendly neighbourhood Oxbridge reject.
That’s right, I can claim membership to that very exclusive club. Like many others, I fell in love with Oxbridge – I won’t say which university – on my first visit there. I was fourteen.
I still like Oxbridge. Pretty place, nice reputation. The people aren’t half as snobby as TV makes them out to be.
I might never recover from my Oxbridge interviews though. I had two, both at the same college, and both for English. One interview was a marked improvement on the other.
Let’s have some background.
I took an ELAT (an aptitude test) and scored an interview at my chosen college. My interview was in December 2012. I chose a rather old college, with the best academic records in the business. The room was lovely though – I’ve included a picture. There was a problem with earwigs in the taps, I recall, and they had to give us cans of coke because we couldn’t drink the water. Imagine a college full of nervous potential candidates hyped up on caffeine. You don’t understand the meaning of competitiveness until you’ve played Articulate with a room full of emotionally unstable teenagers.
As I’ve said, one interview was quite nice. The professors shook my hand, told me they valued my views and everything. The other – not so much. The girl just before me ran out crying, sure she wouldn’t be accepted. The professors sat me down right across the room from them, so I had to shout to be heard. They didn’t smile. It began.
(An updated drawing from my best friend, who drew the lovely image on my ‘About’ page. I’ve changed in her view, evidently.)
“And so the difference between sex and gender is in the mind. No, I didn’t mean to say that. What I mean is that sex is about genitalia and – no, forget that. What I really mean to say is – oh, for the love of my job, just ask your parents.”
“Of course this is only one interpretation of the Bible. There are many interpretations – unless you believe that there’s only one. This part is clearly metaphoric, but it can be taken literally! There’s nothing wrong with that either.”
“He’s backpedalling so much that I’m not sure which way is up any more.”
“I’m pretty sure he said that heaven is up and hell is down, unless you believe otherwise, of course.”
“Me no know how to sudoku. Me forget how to maths.”
“Have you heard the news? The library is going to let us bring food in with us.”
“Oh god. I’m going to die there, aren’t I?”
“Baby, you’re just like the books in this library. I love checking you out.”
“You’re an oxymoron!”
“Yeah, then you’re an idiom!
(Also, note the recurring bad pun in the picture to the right. Oh yes, that’s all my work.)
“I am hungry and I fancy some cake, but my mum didn’t show me how to bake. Maybe I will have dinner first tonight, but my parents aren’t watching to see if I’m polite, and cake is just too hard to resist, and will this awful rhyming please desist?”
“It’s not the clear sheets for the old projector what-you-call-’ems today!”
“It’s not even VHS.”
“What is this sorcery?”
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
The story
Firstly, let’s raise the tone. This play is lively, witty and has some of the snappiest comebacks in theatre (if you can survive the Americanisms).
Now I shall drop the bass.
Mundanity. Shame. Bitterness. Can we keep our spirits and our spirits (preferably whiskey) up when beneath the surface we feel so much more than our light-hearted jokes can say? What we get to see in O’Neill’s most personal work is a play that takes place in an American family summer house over the course of a day. Two parents; two sons, and something has been corrupted in each one.
Why should you read Long Day’s Journey into Night? Because the demons we face are sometimes in our head, and sometimes in our loved ones. There has never been such an apt study of this fact.
The back of the book informs us:
