Chapter 10: Keeping The Streak Alive

Keeping The Streak Alive

Sunday 24th November 2013

This is going to be quite short by my standards. I am writing primarily because I have posted something every Sunday since term began, and I refuse to let this week break the streak. Also, I have an assignment that is currently taking up most of my desk and an unreasonable proportion of my thoughts.

So ... Hello. A week happened. Here is the evidence.

Orchestra

Rehearsal went well. The Christmas concert is now close enough that small mistakes that nobody worried about six weeks ago are beginning to be treated as personal betrayals.

The conductor has mostly stopped correcting major structural problems and has begun focusing on smaller details. This presumably means we are improving. It also means we can spend ten minutes repeating four bars because the second violins are slightly too loud or the cellos are not placing a particular note precisely on the beat.

The Dvořák sounds rather wonderful. There are moments now when the cello section begins to breathe through a phrase together, and you stop hearing separate instruments and start hearing the section.

I continue to enjoy Fourth Desk more than I expected.

The Celestial Quartet

We have news. Actual news.

Someone from the Arts Centre heard us rehearsing. This initially caused some alarm because we had not realised we had an audience. Apparently, we were not dreadful, because we have been offered a slot in the foyer performance area early in the New Year.

It will be a short, informal performance rather than a full concert. Probably thirty or forty minutes. There is no date yet, but we said yes immediately, which means we now have to decide what we are actually going to perform rather than repeatedly saying how nice it would be to perform something one day. Beethoven, almost certainly. Por una cabeza, because apparently I have lost control of my life. Shostakovich, if we become brave enough. We’ve been working on Andante Cantabile, the second movement from Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet number one, as well.

Finn has suggested adding something new. We have told Finn no.

This will be our first public appearance as the Celestial Quartet. People may deliberately stop and listen to us. Exciting. Terrifying. Mostly exciting.

Badminton

We practised on Wednesday, and it went well. My knee behaved, Paul behaved, and I behaved. Mostly.

Our semi-final against Ross and Gemma is this coming Wednesday. We know what we need to do, and we have trained as well as we can, but I am not making any predictions.

Ask me again on Thursday.

Moving on.

Law

I had one of those seminars this week. Legal Foundations, which remains my least favourite module despite its continued insistence on being compulsory. I’d done the reading. The tutor was good. It was simply difficult. It was the kind of seminar you enter reasonably confident you understand the subject and leave an hour later wondering whether words have fixed meanings after all.

We spent most of it applying different approaches to statutory interpretation to legislation that appeared to have been drafted specifically to ensure that no sensible interpretation was possible. Then, just as we were packing up, we were given an assignment. Due at the end of next week.

It is horrific.

That is my considered legal analysis. It also counts towards the final grade on this module. Horrific and unavoidable.

It’s a statutory-interpretation problem followed by a case analysis, all within a word limit that somehow seems both impossibly large and completely inadequate. I have made a plan. The plan is already four pages long.

This may indicate a problem with the plan.

Broadly, it involves reading everything again, working out what the question is actually asking, researching, writing, discovering halfway through that my original interpretation was wrong, rewriting, submitting, and pretending this was the plan all along.

There is also provision for a brief period of panic.

Or maybe not so brief.

Lily’s plan for the same assignment appears to be to ask Paul to see the one he did last year. There are two things wrong with that plan. 1) We’re looking at different legislation and a different case, and 2) Paul has repeatedly said, “no”, every time Lily has asked him the same thing since the start of term.

Law. Wonderful.

One Other Thing

I have been given an advance copy of a book that will not be published until the New Year. It is an economics book. I cannot give you the title, identify the author, or quote from it, so please do not ask.

Yes, I realise several of you have just become extremely interested. Behave.

I intended to read the introduction and perhaps the first chapter on Friday evening. It was a good plan.

I finished the entire book.

That was not the plan.

The problem is that the book is unbelievably good. That is not qualified praise. Economics books are usually written as though anyone attempting to understand economics ought to be punished for their curiosity. This one is clear without being simplistic, ambitious without pretending to solve everything, and willing to confront the strongest objections to its central argument. It explains the theory, then asks what would have to be true for the theory to fail. Which I obviously enjoyed.

There are things I disagree with, things I am still thinking about, and several pages now covered in pencil notes. One chapter addressed precisely the problem I had been worried might undermine the entire theory. I put the book down, stared at the wall for approximately five days, then read the explanation again.

The answer seemed obvious once it had been explained. I was annoyed with myself for not seeing it.

I am very much looking forward to discussing it properly after publication. But, for now, it’s very good. Annoyingly good.

That is all for this week. Orchestra. Quartet. Badminton. Law attempting murder. A book I accidentally read in one sitting.

A perfectly normal week. I’d forgotten they existed.

Now I must return to my horrific assignment.