oxford lights

Happy Diwali from Oxford, where light is suprisingly abundant; it has been a warm, golden autumn day, an odd contrast to the icy rain I left behind in İstanbul. But it gets dark much earlier--ah, the short English days--I'm sitting here in the yellow glow of the Bodleian's upper reading room and it's nightfall out the window now, at only 5 o'clock. It's very strange to be back here in this transient fashion; to feel everyone bustling around in the midst of Michaelmas Term, and for the first time in three years, not to be a part of it. Dinner in formal hall at University College tonight--the same hall where we stood on tables rehearsing Carmina Burana in Michaelmas 2002--but I sold my academic gown for ten quid in August, so I'll go and dine in the guise of an interloper, as if I never belonged to this place at all.