Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Happy New Year!

Hogmanay this year did not involve anyone trying to blow me up, so that was good. Instead Julie and I went on a mini party crawl, starting at Jamie's (where I was almost cuddled - or something - by a man who hates me, but nearly mistook me for his wife. He seemed quite shaken by the experience). After that, we watched Jamie mull wine, sang Auld Lang Syne and then headed off to Morag's, being serenaded along Thornwood Drive by a piper playing Scotland the Brave from a balcony.

At Morag and Colin's we narrowly missed being savaged by a dog attending the party downstairs, but were wished a happy new year by a couple of students who were leaving the party protesting that they had another four to get to. It's a hard life... We then spent a couple of hours mocking Alasdair for being so drunk he could only talk in words of ten syllables and dodging the stars being thrown around the room.

Other than that, I met up with Satnam for a drink and heard about how he ate one of the Midsummer Common cows and managed to annoy the man who discovered the ozone layer (although not a whole cow, and the two events were unconnected);went round to Jane and Wolf's and found out: how to roast chestnuts on an open fire (on a shovel); how the chestnuts taste (horrible, if you ask me); how to reconstruct vanished ancient languages from less vanished, slightly less ancient ones ; why the founder of UCL is a mummy; and what the German word for "the shadows cast on the ceiling by the dying candles of the Christmas tree" is (Laube - surprisingly short, really).

1 comment:

Graham said...

Hello

I've got to agree with you. Having grown up reading Enid Blyton novels and overly-romanticised Victorian stories, I was unprepared for the reality of roasted chestnuts. When I finally did see them being sold in Edinburgh one winter, I was vastly disappointed in the true taste of them.

Graham