You can tell it’s suddenly turned winter: the sky is slate-grey, the air is stinging cold, the canal is wearing a thin layer of ice and, oh yeah, there’s SNOW EVERYWHERE. Alex has struggled heroically with various freezing pipes to get the washing machine functional; the snow, now throwing the world into a tasteful Brummie monochrome (and greyscale slush), presents me an interesting dilemma regarding my travel options in the morning:

– cycle (in my nice snug polo-necked birthday cycling jacket from Jez and Sue), as I do in more even-tempered temperatures: this adds more than a little risk to the equation, as the pavements and cyclepaths are murderous and I need to use the (thankfully well-gritted) roads. I’m out in the cold for much less time, but with cycling airspeed adding to the fast winds, the convection cooling is the cold equivalent of a blitzkrieg, massing overwhelming force at weak points. I’m tempted to get a scary terrorist balaclava from the milsurp store down the road; I mean, if you’re going to wear a balaclava, may as well make it a skull-print one worn with red sunglasses, right?
– walk (in my gorgeous, warm, intensely comfortable birthday greatcoat from zer parentals), which is marginally surer and safer, despite the pavements being foot-pounded ribbons of black ice, but much slower – it thus a) pulls me out of my nice warm bed into the loveless icy misery of the world a good fifteen-twenty minutes earlier and b) has me out in the winter much longer. The cold is less intense; it’s more of the brr equivalent of a Maoist insurgency, swimming like fish in the sea of the world, impossible to keep out, inured to failure or setback, wearing me down at all angles.

I reckoned my 2k Vietnam essay (Rolling Thunder, Linebacker and the bombing offensive in general; oh, Johnson, did you get anything right in ‘Nam?) for Rob Thompson was pretty good; had it basically done on Tuesday afternoon, for a Wednesday morning deadline. Then I got an email saying two of the books I had tried to reserve had *finally* come in, so zipped to the library and back for extra referencin’; these two books then caused me to question my conclusions and, um, stay up all night rewriting the essay. It’s probably worse now, but much more honest; and if it’s not first or high 2:1 material, we’re only assessed for one of them (plus an exam), so I get a second stab next term. Something I’m very much enjoying with Vietnam is that all our resources are digital, so there’s none of the scarcity nonsense getting in my way. Since ‘Nam is going to be an ever-increasing proportion of my reading, I’m seriously tempted to ask for an e-reader for Christmas… James showed me the Kindle his dad gave him in ROMW a couple of weeks ago, and I was dead impressed by it.

The same unnecessary scarcity is, however, damaging our Critical Analysis module. As with Practising History last year, there simply aren’t enough books; while our excellent tutor Simone is willing to slave over a scanner all day churning out hundreds of pages of .pdf so that we can actually get the reading, the department would gig her for copyright, so instead she’s having to spend two, three times as long at the photocopier, making deadtree copies that we still have to fight over and then give back – which is still illegal, just the department will overlook it. (This story at least does have a happy ending, but not one I’ll admit to here; IM me.)

Speaking of Critical Analysis, I got back my 1500-word book review (which seemed to be far, far less work than the 2,000 word essay) – 77! I think that’s my highest mark ever for an individual piece, and a good omen as it’s my first piece of work which actually contributes to my final mark, though it’s worth a mere 6 credits. That’s… 1/40th of my degree, though, so not to be sneezed at. I have plenty of other reasons for sneezing.

On the theme of department bullshit, Aisha Benachour has been replaced by David METCALFE-CARR (as he signs his emails, must be an alpha male thing) for admin; still no BCC, still get dumb spam, overall seems a bit SSDA. But I went and asked him about it, and it turns out the outdated junk software they’re using doesn’t even support BCC, and they’ve been trying to get on the horn to IT for a while and IT are giving them the cold shoulder. It’s all very Wire-ish: trying to do more with less, running on a shoestring as the uni takes away most of the fees for arts students; the department is failing us, in numerous important ways, but they in turn are being failed by the system, and good, well-meaning people (if I give them the benefit of the doubt) are unable to do their jobs because the institutions they’re trying to work through have different pressures. I suppose it’s tough all over. Tomorrow is the first Staff-Student Committee I’ve actually been invited to; I’ll try not to be too hard on them.

Right. Rise of Modern War questions have come through, and I’m going to do my level best to get this essay done before the Christmas hols start, to avoid having it hanging over my head by a procrastination horsehair like a 20 credit Sword of Damocles.

Unfortunately, they are bastard questions. WTGAW = Way Too Generalised And Wanky, my catchall “don’t like this one”: it’s not a question which (I think) has enough decent historiography arguing over it, or it’s too vague to be well and easily answered without neglecting a good part of the question, or it’s just a crap question.

1. How did the recruitment of Thirty Years War armies impact on the societies that they drew upon?
WTGAW. The Thirty Years War lasted THIRTY YEARS (it’s in the name) and involved a huge number of different European societies which it affected differently; plus, this is social history, and I’m crap at it. It would probably end up as a comparative case study of Sweden, Scotland, Swabia and Switzerland, and I’m uncomfortable with that much alliteration.

2. In what way did military theoreticians of the Eighteenth century attempt to resolve ‘the recalcitrant indecisiveness of warfare’? Refer to at least two writers in your answer?
I’m probably going to do this one, because it follows on nicely from the Military Revolution stuff and lets me use the excellent Roger of Orrery quote for a third flipping time; but while there are plenty of books on the changing face of war at the time, it’s going to be annoying nailing down with good references references exactly what those Theoreticians actually said. I’ll go for Maurice de Saxe and Frederick the Great, I think, two of the period’s great characters.

3. Account for the fact that the war for the Spanish throne from 1701 to 1713 was primarily fought in the Low Countries.
HOW THE HELL DO I SPIN THIS OUT TO FOUR THOUSAND WORDS
“BECAUSE PRETTY MUCH ALL THE BELLIGERENTS SHARED A BORDER IN THE LOW COUNTRIES”
QE FUCKIN’ D

4. What impact did technology have on war at sea in the Eighteenth century?
I have no idea, but this is my backup plan; should be an open-and-shut one if the reading is good.

5. ‘Napoleon was no great innovator; he merely adapted what he found to his purpose.’ Discuss.
WTGAW, a question which first requires me to define “innovator” and will result in endless semantic bollocks. Denied.

6. What determined the strategy of Louis XIV’s wars? How successful was this policy?
Interesting, but verging on WTGAW. Biggest issue is that I don’t know if there’s a simple answer; was it an early balance of power thing?

7. Was colonial expansion between 1713 and 1815 driven my military opportunism, or vice versa?
WTGAW; a hundred years on a topic covering the entire planet in 4k words?

8. Many writers have focussed on the failure of British strategy in the American War of Independence. Have these been fair or accurate judgements?
WTGAW, holy shit. Do not make me define “fair” and “accurate” in an essay, that’s philosophy, not history. The question boils down to “Are you a revisionist? Justify your revisionism in 4k words with references. Also, lol the wretched colonials won.”

9.‘Prussia’s rise to Great Power status was entirely the product of its military machine.’ Does this strike you as a valid proposition?
WTGAW, too many factors flying around.

10. How far was nationalism a driving force in the outbreak of wars before 1815?
OH GOD NO ARE YOU SERIOUS WHAT THE CHRIST

The eight separate fortified positions at the infamous French not-quite-strong-enough stronghold Dien Bien Phu were given women’s names, starting with the first eight letters of the alphabet (skipping F): Anne-Marie, Beatrice, Claudine, Dominique, Eliane, Gabrielle, Huguette, Isabelle. (These were rumoured to be the names of the base commander Colonel de Castries’ mistresses.) The movement of Groupe Mobile 100 from An Khe to Pleiku, which saw them all but annihilated at Mang Yang Pass, was known as “Operation Eglantine.” Dien Bien Phu and Mang Yang Pass were the last engagements before the French bowed out of Indochina; I’m going to miss their naming conventions.

Not that the Americans are going to let me down on that particular front. Names like Arc Light and Rolling Thunder hearken back to when the name of an op was meant to sound good in the history books. These are good, meaty, threatening names, much better than sad, confused creatures like “Operation Desert Snowplough” and “Operation Ivy Cyclone” and “Operation Gothic Serpent”*, names which sound like there’s a Camelot machine buried somewhere in the Pentagon with assorted words-some-desk-jockey’s-wife-thought-sounded-cool on all the balls.

I spent most of the weekend making/eating flapjack, chatting to a certain enchanting young lady on Skype, and doing reading for my 2k Vietnam essay that comes in on Wednesday. Olly was terribly ill so my planned trip to Cov to watch cheap films with his friends was cancelled. Essay is… interesting, the question is whether too much political meddling hobbled the air war campaign, and while the recommended reading is really really good on exploring both intricate and Presidentially-manged ROE and huge phallic high-speed bomb-dropping things, it’s no great shakes on the wider political/strategic context, ie whether LBJ et al were justified in thinking that escalating the bombing would trigger Soviet/Chinese intervention, with connotations of global thermonuclear war. I can still pull a decent essay out of it, but the result would be appallingly even-handed and inconclusive – which is exactly what A-level essays want, but I’m not doing A-levels any more. Rob Thompson likes you to pick a point and argue for it. And this time yesterday I didn’t think I could.

Tried and failed to go to sleep at midnight, my mind and bed piled high with books about bombers. At about four in the morning, gave up, turned on the desktop for a bit of Minecraft and played with mob farmers and TNT until I was properly tired. Set my alarm for the anticipated Vietnam lecture at 11.

Unfortunately, the alarm didn’t go off, and I very luckily woke up at 10:40 to look at my clock and swear loudly. Tore myself out of bed and raced down to the uni; cold air at high speed is at least extremely good for waking me up. Made it on time (just!) – another chap in my group had a problem with his bike lock, so I secured his to mine and we went in together. Lecture on Operation Eglantine was as interesting as expected, and for a change it wasn’t just me and Nick Prime talking; the possibility was later suggested that with an essay deadline looming, feckless student types are actually doing some reading and finding it fun. Not that they’re doing that much; one of the regular contributors kept saying that the people at Dien Bien Phu and Group Mobile 100 were Americans (for those who don’t know anything about the French Indochina War, here is a hint: “French Indochina War”). But that could just be a bit of honest confusion, and is certainly not on the same level of derp as the girl last year talking about satellite photography on the Somme.

Unlocking the other bloke’s bike meant I missed catching Rob after the lecture for dissertation stuff, so I rolled down to his office to try and ambush him there. McLeod (he and Rob share the office) showed up, and we made war-related talk; pissed as I often get at Toby’s often haphazard approach to admin (though he ain’t alone in that by any means…) he’s a very nice guy, and definitely knows his stuff. Then Rob appeared, and we talked about Vietnam and War and Iain Banks and the fiercely optimistic Sixties American love-of-technology-as-a-panacea-for-everything quite a bit, and he gave me lots of PDFs full of cool books and DARPA notes on field tests of mad supervillain gear. I really like talking to academics about things like this, it’s always incredibly interesting and I learn a lot, but the short version is, I’m now much more certain about both dissertation and essay.

Then I came home and had a huge lunch of bacon and eggs and tiger bread and fried onions. This week is going extremely well so far, and I’m only a few hours into it.

brb repaying sleep debt

*The first two are actual operations conducted in the current Iraq scrap. The last was the 1993 op in Somalia that led to the Battle of Mogadishu, widely known as simply “Black Hawk Down.”

One-third of our marks in the third year – one-sixth of my degree – come from the 40-credit dissertation module. This is an essay of 12,000 words. Third year is a way off, but this year we have a dissertation prep module of 20 credits that it at least helps to know your subject for, and one of the more important aspects of dissertatin’ is to court a tutor. Each tutor can supervise five students.

My primary target in this was Rob Thompson, true bro among academics and my favourite tutor of last year. It emerged today after my Vietnam lecture that he tends to get around 40 applicants for his five slots (as, like the other war-academics, he does popular fun subjects involving stuff blowing up, rather than gender studies of medieval literature or the Counter-Reformation from a post-feminist perspective or whatever.) So after my group research and lunch of prudently made sammiches, I sat down at a table in the Starbucks in Muirhead and bashed out some potential ideas. Rob’s office hours are 5-6.

Plan A was on the development of small arms and infantry tactics in WW1. I threw out a bunch of tentative ideas that could be expanded to as much or as little as I wanted: the introduction of explosive infantry weapons for assaulting trenches (grenades, minenwerfer, Stokes mortar), the employment of close-in weapons such as shotguns and machine pistols, the use of “walking-fire” light machine guns, and how all these devices went hand in hand with developments in small-unit fighting and infantry tactics. Then, backup plans included the development of infantry weapons in the British/Soviet/US military over the 20th century (pick 1, or comparative analysis) and a few other interesting arguments and stereotypes.

I met Rob having a fag-break with Toby (he who still hasn’t given us the essay questions we should have had two weeks ago – for the 4,000 word essay that’s worth 20 credits) outside Strathcona. I outlined Plan A to him and said “right, is this dissertation material, or just 12,000 words of gunwank?”

He told me that the subject was fine, gunwank was not a drawback and I clearly know what I’m talking about, but that the point of a dissertation is to argue – what was my argument? I’m interested in WW1, but not sure I know enough about the later stages to not end up looking silly. So, I started outlining aspects of Plans B and C. “I could argue that the American infatuation with the legend of the frontier marksman affected their procurement and weapon designs in the 20th century?” I offered.

Then we talked cheerfully about dissertations and guns for about twenty minutes.

Options that presented themselves:
– a take on my original WW1 thing, but using weapon changes to argue more specifically for developments in fluid warfare at the time – units at Passchendaele begging for Lewis guns over grenades – the necessity of precisely targeted infantry firepower as flexible defence in depth became more in vogue and artillery bombardment was less effective in overcoming a line
– arguing for the AK and M16 as evocative of a national philosophy of war – the AK’s selector switch goes safe-auto-semi and has crap but easy to use notch-and-post sights at 100m graduations, the M16 is safe-semi-auto and has good aperture sights (with dials!) That is to say, the M16 is designed for accurate, aimed shots, in line with the American philosophies of individual marksmanship. The AK is for suppressive fire while closing, reflective of Soviet doctrine to always be fluid and always on the offensive.
– the use of small arms in Vietnam and the idea that, at a squad level, US/ARVN forces were actually undergunned. I reckon I could do this well; I avoided going for Vietnam because I was worried that would just end up as an AK-47 vs M16 HURR STOPPAN POWER thing, which has been done to death a thousand times, but apparently there’s still ground to tread. Rob says that the AR-15 (as opposed to the AR-10) was designed specifically so that small-statured ARVN soldiers could use it, and though airborne at LZ X-Ray used it to great success, its general US adoption wasn’t planned – which is an intriguing line…
– arguing the whole American infatuation with the idea of the frontier marksman (tied to the success of the Garand) kept them in overpowered 30-06 rifles and slowed the adoption of effective assault rifles in intermediate cartridges, in particular .280 British – and how 5.56 was too far the other way, and is biting them even now in Afghanistan…

We talked, and while I’m not certain, I’m most attracted to the platoon-level firepower thing in Vietnam. However, Rob has said that he knows what I’m capable of and will provisionally offer me one of his places, just to be certain what I want next week. So after all that, I’m still not certain what my actual subject will be, but the securing a tutor part – the biggest load on my mind – is now off it.

And if all else fails I guess I can do this…

(Philip, if I get a 2:2 my because my dissertation mark ends up saying “subject matter clearly result of fevered delusions, suggest counselling and possible custody”, I’m… going to steal your overcoat and attache-case of Bad Jokes.)

Last week things gradually settled down. My presentation for Thirty Years War went pretty well, as did the meeting with Group Research people on Thursday. I seem to have become the organiser/admin bitch for Group Research, sending around the emails and taking the minutes and such – which is fine, if the rest of them will carry me through the actual work. Hope springs eternal.

Nick came over on Sunday, and I made curry for him and Olly. Unfortunately, Rob didn’t show up to the Monday Vietnam seminar, so we basically just pootled aimlessly around campus, and he hardly got The Student Experience. Still, it was good to have a bro around.

I sent an email a week ago to Dan Joplin asking him (nicely!) to explain the miserable shambles that’s the Redbrick site, but he’s not replying. On the verge of saying “sod it” to this whole Redbrick thing. I can’t maintain their website if the idiots who made it last year won’t even talk to me, and I don’t have the skills (or time, or inclination) to rebuild the entire website from scratch, which is what it needs.

I’ve been looking too much at careers/advice/graduate stuff/activism websites like Graduate Fog and Jilted Generation, which seem to say that basically if you’re my age and want the relatively comfortable middle-class existence your parents had, you’re FUCKED mate prepare to fight tooth and nail for the next decade. They’re probably accentuating the negative, but it seems that even the ones studying a worthwhile subject will be saddled with immense debt and have to do unpaid internships for months upon months to get into their field. Because everything in this failing, directionless pimple of a country is “competitive”, which means “exploitative,” or “the ones who lie the hardest on their CVs win,” or “plain bloody luck.” And our benefits are gone, and our house prices are insane, and there aren’t any jobs, and we’ll be paying the pensions and paying off the mistakes of previous generations, and that our politicians are clueless imbeciles just breaking the system further, and that in a time of greater supposed productivity and “wealth” than ever before, we’re going to have to fight harder than any generation alive to get the same security, prosperity and peace of mind. So yeah: they’re accentuating the negative, but from here it’s easy to believe, sitting reading depressing news in the grey rain.

Back on the smaller scale of university, War Studies are getting the short end of the stick anyway. We compete on the same playing field as the regular History students for our options, without getting first stab at the war-related modules. I was fast and lucky with the online signup, so it wasn’t as much of a problem for me, but a couple of the war guys have their option (one of the three regular contact hours – yes, three – we get a week) – as something totally useless and unrelated to their degree. So it could be worse for me.

I don’t know who I can complain to, because while last year it was run by the politely competent Mike Snape, the War Studies majordomo this year is Toby Mcleod, who has, in my admittedly limited contact with him, been rather less use to me. At the start of Rise of Modern War this year, he told us that we couldn’t afford to miss anything; that it was Getting Serious Now and that employers would look at every module; that if we needed help with anything, ask him, it’s what he’s for. So today when I felt horribly ill and incapable of even getting out of bed, I sent him a polite email asking for help catching up. His response? “Ask a colleague for their notes…” That one patronising, useless sentence, with an ellipse tacked on at the end like a condescending drawl. He hasn’t even put the lecture powerpoint on WebCT, or the one from last week.

And the rest of the History department are certainly no better. As mentioned previously, a while ago I sent an email to various people asking to become a student rep, because the department are failing us in a lot of ways. I got thanks and assurances from various academics. There was a meeting last Friday, but I didn’t go to it, because despite the promises nobody told me about it. I got, by email, an attendance question and the minutes. But no inkling the actual meeting was going to happen. And no replies to my requests for such.

Some days I really wish I’d done a real course. Not just because, in this shitty economy and collapsing country, I won’t be able to afford to rent on the miserable shelf-stacking job this arts degree – this laughable excuse for an arts degree – will get me, but because I’d love to know what it’s like to have a faculty that seems to give a toss about its students, to get more than four contact hours a week for the same three grand as an engineer or medic who works five times as hard and will get ten times the payout. I can work, when I have to, I’m doing my reading and book reviews, but I don’t feel like a full-time student; I feel like I’m on a correspondence course. And I’m confounded at every step by the very incompetence I really want to overcome.

But the grass is probably no greener outside the War Studies ghetto, and I don’t know what I’d even do if not this (Law?) because making up essays is the only thing I seem to be capable of. But that’s not the point, really. I just want to feel like I’m working towards something worthwhile, and at the moment I absolutely don’t, because I’m not.

I’m going to bed, and I may be some time.

Time goes more slowly when you’re learning a lot of new things. That’s why the world seemed barely to turn when I was a little boy, and how it’s been spinning faster and faster as I get older, knowing the world around me better and better until I can barely be bothered to see it.

Vietnam went well! In a strictly seminar sense. Besides managing (with a little help from a Viking friend) to find the correct origin of “chickenshit outfit”, I’m learning lots about the country’s last two thousand years of being invaded, though I’m wary of these sweeping generalisations about the Vietnamese culture being an immensely fatalistic one. Fascinating reasoning behind it, but seems a bit too simple, a bit to convenient and a lot too inhuman. I asked Rob whether Nick could sit in on the seminar next week, for his learning-about-universities thing, and he gave an enthusiastic yes. My course-related analysis of associated sources (ie, watching a bunch of Vietnam films, then asking Rob how accurate they are) is also proving satisfactory. The Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now, as it turns out, is pretty solid, except that there would also have been artillery.

First Critical Analysis seminar also went pretty well. Of my subjects, it’s probably the one I’m least educated about, so it’s all exciting and new. We did the usual introduction stuff, the four War Studies chaps made a decent showing, and we did our best not to be put out by the protesters outside banging and shouting. They never seemed to get bored (or hoarse. I wonder if next budget review, I could make a packet fencing bootleg Strepsils and Covonia to the angry young men of the campus.)

They were protesting the Browne Report, which seems fair enough. If my parents want to go and be students again, they should probably apply now… The whole despicable reinvention of class-exclusivity aside, wasn’t “universities will charge what they want and create a market where quality education costs more” the whole principle behind the introduction of top-up fees, which totally failed when the unis all went and charged the maximum £3k? At least my degree is now going to be worth twice the nothing it used to be, but if my class year ends up paying interest I had probably better start putting my pocket money into it (except that I heard some jabber about paying it off early costing more somehow; did I hear wrong? how the hell does that work?)

Then I (like all other Brummie students) got this unbelievably smug email from the vice-chancellor coming down hard in favour of Browne’s conclusion and what “value” it offers students. I was tempted to go back onto campus and start banging and shouting with the do-gooders. Not least because two years ago the VC earned £320k plus various benefits including a chauffeur, a free house and expenses-paid trips everywhere – he sent the email from China. I am filled with righteous disgust, and I’m wondering how one gets to be a vice-chancellor.

Rise of Modern War lecture/seminars are also interesting. I was going to do a presentation with Flash and Jon on the armies of Louis XIV, but Louis asked to swap with me so I am now doing Thirty Years War infantry tactics instead (this Wednesday), which I’m really good on. I’m still not terribly impressed by Toby Mcleod (he of the duff Roman Strategy lecture last year), especially when a polite email asking for guidance on the presentation (that I hadn’t had, because I wasn’t the one originally doing it) and a copy of last week’s powerpoint was answered by a single tetchy sentence of marginal guidance value and no powerpoint, but what can I do?

Using a recipe Bill sent me, I made a Thai chicken curry and it was AMAZING. The coconut milk cost a pretty penny but the result was so creamy and flavoursome and delicious that I found myself actually liking coriander. If I could afford to, I would eat like that every night. I’m trying to make a Lebanese-style garlic sauce, like the one Cedars used to serve, but we don’t have a hand blender of the right calibre. I’m feeling open-minded, throw me your crazy recipes from the ends of the earth.

One of the many pieces of worthless spam the History department hands out to me was for a Green Tea Study, asking for males of a given age range (which I fell into), moderately active (which I also fall into) and who were interested in £100 for their time (which I do not fall into so much as do a running jump and a swan dive.) So I fired off an interested email, to which they replied with a couple of extra inclusion criteria, including not drinking (or having recently drunk) more than 3 cups of tea a day. No amount of money is worth tea-deprivation, even retroactive tea-deprivation.

Things are settling down a bit, but time is going crazy slow for me right now. And yet there’s still not enough time in these giant days to do everything I want.

Outgoings:
£51 on new quilt cover
£46 otherwise

I’m on a normal, regular sleep schedule! I go to bed not long after midnight and wake up in the morning and it’s great.

Early on the Monday I made myself delicious chicken sammiches and rolled into uni, for what I hoped was my option. I say hoped, because I wasn’t sure; NOTHING of use was on WebCT, the History office apparently being unable to find their arse given an atlas and a Tomtom. My primary source of course and time information at the moment is Flash Glenwright. Who, as it happens, is extremely capable, just this ain’t the way things ought to be. The noticeboards said I was indeed in Rob Thompson’s Monday Vietnam module, in ERI G54. What the hell does that mean? Asked at the helpful reception office and they told me it was in the ghetto off by the Sociology department (is that now defunct? I’m not sure.) Met a pretty international student from South Korea at the ankle of Muirhead Tower and gave her directions to the Business centre, then found the dark red-brick building I was supposed to be in, big and modern and nearly empty. Then Rob Thompson told us lots of fun things about Vietnam and how much we were about to learn. I hadn’t realised how much the marines in Aliens (and their demise) were styled after the American experience in Vietnam. He has offered a prize for anyone who can find the original source of the line “how do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”

I’d been exchanging messages with Samuel Lear, who has become editor of the student rag Redbrick apparently by sheer force of will, and arranged to come in that afternoon; wandering vaguely towards the Guild, I met fellow war-studier James along the way and discussed Socs (societies, not those blokes who beat up greasers). Found Redbrick offices in the basement and found Samuel doing his thing, his thing in this case being Editing And Running Everything, and looked at their stuff (Macs) and site (ugly) before I was called away to a brief but in-depth War Studies orientation thing from Rob and Toby McLeod, who is now apparently running the show and seems a great chap despite the very discouraging lecture I had with him last year. Back to Redbrick, discussing alterations to their site with their other techy/creative types, setting myself up user accounts and privileges everywhere. Visited Zoe in TC that evening, met her flatmates (who were great) and went to a pub quiz (which wasn’t) before wandering home to florp in my own bed.

(I wrote this at the end of the first day and realised there was no way I was going to have time to do a similarly in-depth account of all the rest, so here’s a much vaguer account of the main points of the rest of the week.)

For the societies fair on Wednesday, I went to the sci-fi and TTG joint thing to sign up, but it was exactly the same bunch of people as last year having exactly the same conversations with no apparent desire to be anything else. It’s not that any of them are anything but nice people, but it’s terribly cliquey, affirming of the worst nerd-cliches, and apparently determined to stay in its little neckbeard ghetto forever (this was borne out by people at Redbrick later talking about how utterly unwelcome they’d felt as newcomers). So I spurned their walkaround to see the Redbrick people do their presentation, and the Guild Council Chambers (the size of a decent lecture theatre) were utterly packed; response to Redbrick has been massive and overwhelming. That went very well, and I spent much of my spare time for the rest of the week hanging around the Redbrick office, getting to know the editorial folks and trying to winkle keycodes and necessary credentials out of the collapsed mine that their IT situation currently resembles. The Redbrickers are nice people, in control of what they’re doing, welcoming and generally seem a good crowd to hang with. I think I’m going to get to know a lot of new people this year. Flash is working hard to get Warsoc running, and while the Guild’s absurd nannyish movie-vetting system have confounded his attempts to get film nights going and the debate next week doesn’t really appeal to me, we had a great and very sociable Warsoc pub lunch today. All nine of us that showed up. Baby steps.

The total confusion I was in about my course at the start of the week has resolved itself into a (surprisingly small) set of certain hours a week all over campus, and a couple of appointments with special tutors for next week. I’ve sent a few emails to history higher-ups with a view to becoming a History student rep, simply because the existing system (of lectures, timetables, noticeboards, emails, WebCT and so on) is a total shambles and needs reform. If I can’t get that I can at least get catharsis from shouting at people.

Lectures have so far not given me any sinking feelings. Vietnam with Rob Thompson promises to be great fun, The Rise of Modern War relates strongly to the Military Revolution stuff I did well in last year, and the Critical Analysis module (read: book reviews are serious business) seems tolerable if not wacky fun. The overall tone of “more work, less help” isn’t getting me down. I know I can do anything here if I put my mind to it and give myself time.

I think I’m going to enjoy this year a lot.

Outgoings this week:
£51.80