New Year in Derbyshire

Now back from a wonderful week away. No internet for seven whole days! I coped by doing a serious amount of coursework, and by associating with friends from long ago university-the-first-time-round.

We were occupying an enormous mansion in the Peak District, with 14 bedrooms, a large number of bathrooms, an enormous dining room, a similarly enormous and well-furnished lounge (as well as a smaller sitting room that I appropriated for academic purposes), and a ridiculously small H-shaped kitchen. In fact, the kitchen was well-equipped and worked fine, but it really was stupidly small, about a third of the size of most of the bedrooms (and smaller than at least one of the bathrooms).

I managed to finish the two enormous coursework assignments (which Lola II did a good job of proof-reading), made an enormous vat of soup made from leftovers, but only went out on one walk, on New Year's Eve. It was a nice walk, and we stopped at a magnificent pub for lunch, but still. We were going to squeeze in a morning walk on the last day, but woke up to pretty consistent rain and decided to make a video of the house instead.

Poor Mr M went back to bed because of having the flu pretty badly, so he only appeared in one room, but Mr A and I featured in all the other rooms, and I have to say Lola II did a good job of the filming. We rarely manage to upload video successfully to this blog, and the completed work is nearly 15 minutes long, so you'll have to take my word for it that it's a very fine effort.

This is definitely the last holiday period that I will have to spend working instead of being on holiday. It's the sixth year in a row, if you count the two years of Human Biology A level, and looking back that does seem incredibly trivial compared to the fourth year of a Masters-level degree. Unfortunately, the amount of coursework means that I haven't yet looked at my notes for the exam we have on Tuesday, and I feel incredibly unprepared, so this is all you're getting from me until that's over.