I have the world's biggest cup of hot chocolate. The cup is the pink one I'm using for everything - noodles, breakfast cereal, tea - which makes me feel self-sufficient and like a person of few, but vital possessions (I'm not). The hot chocolate is Green and Black's. The chocolate has settled a little, so as I drink it it gets increasingly dark and rich.

And now it's all drunk. ("What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water.")

It's been a nice week, though I'm having difficulty wrapping my mind around term actually starting, which technically I think it did today - but our DOS meeting is tomorrow, and lectures start Thursday, and we Victorianistas don't have our first seminar for another week. Tomorrow is also an informal Engling dinner (as opposed to the formal ones with all the supervisors, which generally end with Will breaking world records for drunk), with just the third-years and some new grad students, and I hope it will be an evening of affectionate light banter rather than (which is perhaps more likely) twitchiness over dissertations and grad-school applications. I'll be making affectionate light banter, even if into thin air. Then Saturday is the "twentieth century" bop, for which I'm being Edwardian: silk camisole, Vicky's lace skirt, pink and black corset. Also, though wearing feather boas for bops is very overdone, it might actually be historically accurate; Elizabeth Robins wore one to play Hedda Gabler. Hmm.

I don't know why, but I wake up almost every night around four - three last night, but then I'd gone to bed a little earlier than usual. It doesn't particularly bother me because I fall asleep again almost right away, but it gives me a little glimpse of that most jarring time of the night. (In Sarah Kane's play "4:48 Psychosis" the main character wakes up every night at 4:48, but that seems too close to morning to be really worrying.) Tonight I woke up sharply after a nightmare about being at a New Year's party, discovering a girl lying in a snowdrift outside, and having to think how to save her. I dropped off again after a little Thackeray (my eyes were so sleep-dry that I had to close one to focus on the text), and had another dream about failing a job interview. Then when I got up in the morning and checked my email, I found that I'd gotten the alumni phone campaign job! I am assuming this means I will NOT find a girl in a snowdrift?

This is becoming Too Long because I am Avoiding Work. The next book up now I've finished Vanity Fair is Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is going to be an orgy of industrialism and labour relations, all set in Manchester of all places. I will be lucky if there's any love story whatever to enliven it.

Off, off -