There is a lot of stuff around online about productivity; there was a recent xkcd about the typical cynical view of all this. While I have read some of this stuff, and can see that people with less traditional working schedules than a student’s may find things like GTD allow them to make better use of their time, but in general I tend to be rather cynical (wow! what a surprise!) about it all myself because it’s wonderfully easy to read about this stuff and feel better about yourself rather than actually do whatever it is you need to do. And it’s vital to recognise that these things might have a small motivational effect (setting yourself up properly to do something means you’re more likely to do it) but they’re not going to help motivate you in general. But as I intend to write properly about soonish, I do not have issues with motivation in a big way. My current issues are more focused than that and while a lack of success does feed back into my motivation to keep going and my tendency to procrastinate, it’s secondary to the issue itself.

So why do I spend a great deal of time setting up my organisational systems? My perfectionism is a factor, and as I have said there is some small motivational boost from having a list of things to tick off, as we are all familiar with. The two main reasons for me are because I don’t trust my memory, and because I want control, and this is rather directed and specific. The first reason is self-explanatory. Org-mode allows me to tie everything together electronically and does what I can’t trust my memory to do. I am slowly getting better at taking the decision not to trust my head and to leave it free to try and figure out how to study Philosophy again, and instead let the computer keep track of pretty much everything. While it might be more romantic to have nice notebooks or the ruled refill pad that screams conscientious-and-unpretentious (you should hear the conversations I have with myself on these things), it isn’t actually as good as storing things in a system one has built oneself that one understands, a system of plain text backed up and synced between computers (not “devices”, computers). I don’t need to remember what I’m supposed to be doing because Org-mode can tell me, and I don’t need to remember what’s going on because I read my e-mails/wrote things down and pumped them back into Org-mode — anywhere in my Org files, and they get brought together and organised automatically — and it tells me what I need to know. I over-exaggerate here. I still know what I’m doing and can tell you what’s important to me this week, and whether I’m on track, and I can give you an idea of what that e-mail said about that upcoming event. But I fall back to something that is complete and tailored to suit me and my life like a glove.

My second reason is about control, and it’s about control of my own time and life in the face of the distractions that hit at us from all sides in this world of the consumption of gratifying activities to fill the hours between sleeping. I am fortunate that I am already removed from cheap social gratification, choosing quality communication with friends over constant electronic connection via phones and social networking websites, so I avoid a certain amount of banal chatter, egoism, ranking of one’s life against others etc. Not being materialist I’m not surrounded with toys of various descriptions. But the Internet beckons, oh how it beckons. There are many fascinating websites out there and one can get a great deal out of browsing around the place, but the issue for me is more specific than just spending time reading because, unless one has something else to do, that’s fine. It’s very rare that I allow my browser to distract me from working on something in this way. Instead, I find myself possessed with a need to know or to make use of pieces of knowledge on specific areas of interest for me. Perhaps this will be best illustrated by examples relating to the present: Emacs, Org-mode and Gnus feature prominently. Page with some keybindings from Emacs, not all of which I know? Must spend time absorbing them. Page with a Gnus feature that I’m not aware of (happened today with tree mode)? Must evaluate and assimilate feature into workflow. Article on typography about how one should typeset footnotes? Must see if my LaTeX templates need updating right now. Article on a philosophical topic that I have a strong opinion on? Better read it now. And so on.

All of these things are valuable. I’m pursuing the things that interest me and learning more about how others see the same subjects and that’s great, but the issue is that when one goes off down the rabbit hole for a while one hands over control of what one things is important to one’s surroundings and less conscious inclinations. There is already too much in my life, and I can’t do everything. My Org-mode setup helps me with this in two ways. Firstly, it tells me what I’ve already decided is important to do today, and it tells me the projects I currently have in progress, and it reminds me that unless I want to make a decision to change my mind, this is what I’ve committed to and this is what the real Sean wants, not the temperamental Sean possessed by the excitement of the ability to join two lines and remove the indentation or whatever. Secondly, Org-mode keeps track of interesting things for me and allows me to bring them up. Not sure if I should be reading this but don’t feel comfortable just throwing it aside, and need to get it out of the way in order to focus in on the day’s tasks? No problem, hit a few keys and store it away in my Org files, tagged so that it can be brought up in a list with a few keystrokes.

The response to this, if you don’t like it, is to talk about how a certain flexibility and spontaneity is lost when one rigs oneself up to a schedule when one doesn’t strictly need to. Productivity in the sense of ticking things off on a list of tasks that are considered good doesn’t have to come first, and if you’re at a time in your life when you can be a little more free and perhaps achieve less then you should take advantage of this and float a little more. I don’t think any flexibility goes anywhere though, it’s merely made more thoughtful. If I decide that something else is genuinely more important, running things via my Org-based system forces me to evaluate my own inclinations of the moment critically against the other things I’ve said I’ll do. I can still decide to change things up in any way I like and Org is flexible enough to make this very easy to do. But I’m back in control, which is good; saying otherwise is probably just over-romanticising life in the modern world. And secondly, I am made very unhappy if I feel I am unproductive. With Org-mode I can see my productivity, am happier and thus more productive and indeed everything else goes better.

My goal right now is to take things to the extreme by rigging myself to Org-mode in all my dealings. For the next 30 days I’m forcing myself to make it almost an obsession, so that I can reap the full benefits. Then to regain some flexibility I will be able to slack off, but hopefully I’ve have figured out what level to go to in order to gain the above-described benefits.

I’ll end with a brief description of my system, since I keep referring to it and as I say I’ve put a good deal of time and effort and thought into it lately to grow it up to my needs and ways of working and the kind of things I do. I have a number of core Org files relating to various aspects of my life; the main ones are Academic.org for degree work and related, Oxford.org for all the other stuff I do during term time (so not got much going on at the moment), the almighty TechNotes.org which contains so many notes, links and plans for computer geek stuff and then my catch-all miscellaneous Sean.org which has errands, political notes, ideas for TV shows, films, music and books to look into and the like. Deep in my directory hierarchy there are things like ~/doc/work/philos/history/Hume.org which has all my notes and tasks on Hume. It’s hard to get the balance right between how much one needs to organise and separate one’s files (an interesting blog post on this is to be found here; this is amusing by the same author), but things are made easier because Org-mode is at its heart a piece of outlining software, and outlining models how you think, so a certain amount of organisation just happens automatically as long as you remember to use the keybinding that inserts headings as well as the keys that type text.

But the bigger reason why this doesn’t matter that much is the other component of the system which is Org’s agenda view. This thing is amazing, pulling together tasks from across your Org files, arranging them according to useful metrics such as tags, scheduled dates and deadlines, adding warnings for upcoming deadlines and the like, and then pulling in appointments from either Org-mode itself or an external calendar program, birthdays and wedding anniversaries from your address book and finally it even adds results from Google Weather if you have the right elisp. The key thing I’ve done recently, perhaps, has been realising the significance of the agenda and how building one’s system and customisations around that view rather than around the Org files themselves, which organise themselves as much as is necessary, is the key to success.

The word “agenda” doesn’t do this tool justice. I have four blocks to mine, and you can view something that looks a bit like it here. At the top I have a list of the tasks I’ve marked as in progress. This has two kinds of things in it: tasks that I am actually working on right now/today, and also so-called “stuck projects”, which come out in a different colour (not so on the above-linked export, unfortunately). Below that I have a list of tasks that are waiting on responses from other people. It’s important to look at these each day to see if people need reminding or can be relied upon to just get it done, and it wouldn’t be so good to have these show up as ordinary TODOs. Below that I have my appointments/calendar events, weather, scheduled tasks, daily “habits” or things I wish to accomplish regularly and repetitively, accompanied by coloured progress charts, and then at the very bottom I have a list of all undated TODO items.

Hidden from view are items marked as SOMEDAY. This is a task that doesn’t actually need to be done, unlike a TODO, but that it would be nice to be done — this is Org keeping track of interesting things for me. I bring these up in different categories with other agenda keybindings. And last of all there is my buffer of tasks to refile. These are links and notes I have shoved into Org-mode quickly and unceremoniously and without organisation, and once per day I move them into the appropriate .org files.

Let’s talk a bit about Emacs itself and what I’m finding so great about it already, with the partial switch I’ve made (to be explained). In Emacs, everything is text, and everything is linked together. You have one (set of) clipboard(s) to share between your organisation/scheduling software, e-mail client, shell and chat client, and all of these things are just large amounts of text with specialised key bindings, and it’s then easy to feed this text about. You might run a command in the shell, piping and globbing as usual, and then redirect the output into any of your buffers, where you’re writing an e-mail, composing a poem or goodness knows what else; you could just send it straight into a chat session with someone. It’s very easy to move things around, and plugin authors who have written extra things for Emacs have exploited this well. Org-mode is a phenomenal package that allows you to draft pieces of writing, take notes or make plans in an outline structure, and then it allows you to drop TODO items throughout these. Whenever you have something unfinished in a document, you can just make it into a TODO with some plain text and org mode picks it up. Hit a few keys and all your tasks get scooped up and arranged on a timeline-like display, that is, a schedule for the upcoming week: you barely have to think about storing your information and then org mode brings it together for you. With org mode capture mode, you can yank links from all over Emacs and make TODO items out of them, and this even has a protocol to link to outside applications. In my usual web browser if I want to look into a comment on a blog more carefully, say, I can select it, hit a key combination and then over in Emacs the comment will be waiting, with a link to the original webpage, and a TODO header just waiting for me to summarise what it is I need to do with the comment. Then it gets filed into my org files and filtered into the agenda view and task lists and all the other useful ways org gives you to extract information. And all of this works for everything in Emacs. You never have to put aside all your usual tricks when you’re reading e-mail or something, it’s all there.

Then we have the wondrous world of elisp. Almost everything you do in Emacs is in fact nothing more than the execution of lisp code. Typing letters just calls functions in lisp that insert characters into the buffer; splitting the window is again just a lisp function. And lisp is a magical language because you can change it up as you go. The lisp sitting in memory that’s running your editor is changable as you go. Type some lisp into any document, and hit a key binding to tell Emacs to evaulate it, and change the way things are going. Add a new e-mail client by telling Emacs to load a bunch of lisp into memory. Don’t like what happens with a particular lisp call that you make a lot, but don’t want to rewrite it from scratch? No problem, just write some lisp around the function with the simple concept of advising a function. Want some time-saving code to execute whenever the editor does something in particular, such as getting it to check your e-mail every time you load up you send a new message? No problem, just hook your code into the existing elisp. I don’t know what a list is in elisp, but I’ve been able to hook basic macros in all over the place. Truly, one can construct one’s perfect editor – and by proxy, one’s perfect e-mail client, chat client or PDF viewer. It’s hard to get this across here. But when you realise that you can make this thing do whatever you want, and that your entire life can be organised and recorded in something like org mode, Emacs gets very exciting very fast. You take a fresh look at the likes of rms and friends who set this stuff up. They’re absolute geniuses.

Vim doesn’t have anything like this. Vim’s scripting language is very hard to work with, and does not infect the editor in the way that lisp does Emacs, so all it really allows you to do is (slowly and painfully) add to vim, rather than moulding it to suit your needs.

All of these things excited me when I read about them and so I started looking at how I could take the vi editing philosophy and put it together with Emacs, and of course, you can. Vimpulse pulls together a few things that gives you vim modal editing with all of Emacs’ clever features too, and I’ve been happily using that for a couple of months. I edit text the way I always have and I feed it around the place using lisp, and I feel like I have the best of both worlds. All until things start breaking, and certain modes don’t work at all. People writing cool extensions for Emacs are writing them assuming that the Emacs editing keys are being used, and they’re assuming that you’re not flipping back and forth between insert and normal modes all the time, and it starts to show. You get weird lisp errors popping up and it always feels like the fact you’re trying to cheat the system is at least in part what’s causing it. And then I started to find Emacs bindings slipping in. I would fix errors with M-b, C-f and C-d rather than doing things the vim way – it just suddenly seemed like the right way to fix a certain problem. I started to think that it might be worth the switch to an admittedly inferior and less clean approach in order to get more out of Emacs the operating system (there I said it).

So I’ve been thinking about where I am right now. I’m a competent vim user – when I used to correct hastily-typed transcripts of JCR meetings, I could zip through with a combination of commands that other longterm vim-using friends of mine didn’t even recognise. I found myself getting very cross very quickly when forced into a non-vim environment, furiously hitting escape and messing up the online shopping I was doing or whatever. But then, on the other hand, I was always capable of adapting. Faced with the prospect of doing some work on someone else’s machine, without an easily accessible vim installation, it never takes long before I find myself using Home S-End DEL in place of ESC dd, C-S-> DEL in place of ESC de. I seem to pick up new bindings quickly, and there are many things I do in vim with little more speed than I would in another editor, suggesting that I’m not really that high up the ladder. So, I’ve been thinking, if I were to make a decision to switch to the Emacs bindings now, I could get faster than I now am with vim, and I’m not really throwing away much: I’ve been using vim for two years, I’m hardly seasoned by any real estimation. I’ve made dramatic changes before, throwing away built up effort and invested time in configuring a program to work well for me, and it’s tended to be good. After having an opporunity to evaluate both sides fully, the Emacs side of the editor war appeals more.

So onto the New Years’ Resolution. All my raving about the power of Emacs has not gone unnoticed, and my friend Jonathan has decided to give it a try, so we’re getting ourselves set up with a 30 day Emacs challenge for the New Year. For me, the challenge is removing my crutch that is Vim emulation, and starting the long process of getting fast with Emacs, really wiring it into me. Jonathan’s challenge is to get a text editor more fully integrated into his life, since he’s finally switching from Windows to GNU/Linux, and he’s starting with Emacs – but since he hasn’t had the evaluation time I have, we’ve agreed that Jonathan can simply ramp up his vim knowledge instead if the Emacs experiment goes badly. My challenge is substantially harder: this is something I have worked with day in day out for two years and now I am to use a completely different tool for the same tasks. It is going to hurt, a lot, for the first few weeks.

If he fails at this or I fail with Emacs, and end up slipping back into Vim, there are going to be forfeits – suggestions welcome. I personally have two further stages of the resolution to carry out later in the year once this part is accomplished: firstly, to learn to touch-type properly rather than the weird idiosyncratic style I have now, which is slow and bad for my hands, and thirdly to learn elisp and lay the power of Emacs bare before me. I’m making an investment of my time now to reap the rewards later. I’m going to have absolute mastery over my perfect editor, carefully constructed. It’ll take time, but it’ll be worth it.

So there we have it. I am not pleased with the quality of my expression in this piece, so I’ve got here a few inspiring and amusing pieces written by others on the subject, that got me thinking this way.

• Emacs v. vi is rooted in the love of Lisp | stevengharms.com
• Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages | Codeulate – the challenge I am to face
• org-mode In Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil | dot unplanned – down the rabbit hole, this is my life since I discovered Emacs
• A Tough Pill to Swallow | GrumpyMeerkat

Camping gear set out in a temperate area

Then we have mods, and so many more hours of interesting things are opened up. Sure, so many mods are extremely unpolished (you should see the houses I built – very basic), but there are some classics that I’ve got a huge amount out of. The Private Mobile Base – huge floating stronghold that teleports to cities around the world; the Dragon Riding mod – just what it says; many many houses. I want to stay away from these with this character for now because I think they distracted me, in the past, from the core quests which I ended up neglecting, and ended up levelling my character inappropriately for. So I’m going to try to rise to the top of the various factions and develop my character that way. But there are two mods I want to use that I don’t think break anything, and make things more fun. Firstly, we have Acheron’s Camping Gear, which provides you with a movable camp site. This is cool from a roleplaying perspective – when I’m raiding a dungeon (ew WoW terminology has infected even me) I like the idea of setting up a little place to come back to in a nearby hollow. This makes the game more fun and doesn’t give you any advantage at all, considering that you can just dump loot on the ground instead if you want to. Then secondly there is the Ashlander Tent mod, which gives you a tent you can put up with rather a lot of stuff inside. Since you also get a teleportation necklace to jump back there it gives you a huge set of advantages as a starting player: you can get back to town without yet having developed the requisite spells or acquired enchanted items. But I’m not going to use it like this. I’m going to set it up in whichever town is my base of operations at that stage of the game, and use it as a base like that, and then I don’t think it has much potential to spoil things.

The Ashlander Tent in snow

A challenging thing about keeping Morrowind fun is getting round the game making things way too easy at certain points. I know a trick (e-mail me if you really want to hear about it) that means you can basically earn limitless cash for doing a certain set of things over and over again; this is how I bought my way into things like the Private Mobile Base (which, to balance its epicness, costs something like 1.1m gold to fully purchase and equip). But this trick removes any balancing costs in mods, and removes a lot of challenge. There are other things that you can pull off too to level yourself quickly. And there’s a point at which you can either win a fight incredibly quickly or lose it every time you try (until you get a bit better) if you’re a standard melee character, which takes a lot of the challenge and excitement out of completing quests. But I’ve played an awful lot of Morrowind, so I know most of these flaws and I can avoid them to get the most out of the game.

Perhaps most notably there is the number of positive, constructive and pragmatic things that I’ve been involved with or de facto in charge of. Various things within Freshers’ Week are the obvious example. Throughout the week I was always there, popping up and getting things done that needed to be done. Having not yet started academic work, my enthusiasm knew no bounds: I got excited by every new face, every aspect of Oxford that I introduced them too and every room that I hauled their suitcases into. And then when the enthusiasm of other Committee members faltered, I ended up making sure that things happened that might not have otherwise happened. There’s absolutely no reward for this sort of thing, of course – no-one seems to notice half the time (except the freshers who asked if I was being paid at one point…) but to me the opportunity to both express my enthusiasm for Oxford and Balliol and then further to make myself useful in this way to others is all the reward I needed.

I’ve realised that the position I’ve been in through all this is the same position as those JCR figures who I looked up to and spent all my time with last year; the third years who I ate in Hall with, the second years who I formed the new Committee with as Secretary. When we stood on that stage on Tuesday morning and went round all the different Committee members introducing ourselves to the freshers, I realised that I was doing the things I admired others doing last year. But it’s very hard to believe that all that was only a year ago. This thought is further evidenced by the hero-worship shown by the freshers towards the likes of me (though admittedly it’s mostly worn off now): you’d be making conversation, spouting some little story about the porters or about an unusual tutor or some silly Oxford tradition and then suddenly you realise that ten faces are staring at you in rapture and there is absolute silence. Very odd – and mostly undeserved!

Once term got back into full swing though it’s back to the solitary life of someone who really isn’t cut out for his degree. As a more encouraging way of looking at it, I’ve got this thought that I could be described as “punching above my weight” – half of the degree I’m doing is something I’m not really cut out for but that I’m doggedly pursuing anyway. What is frustrating me though is that it is so easy to be thrown off kilter with each week’s work when one makes the smallest of misjudgements into how to spend one’s time. Make an error of time management one day, and you’ll still be feeling it three days later – or at least I will with the amount of time I have to sit in the library, hacking away at the mathematical salt mines. So I still don’t feel, almost half way through the term, that I’ve had a successful week despite being by far one of the most organised of students.

The academic problems I’ve been having have been mostly the same as ever. My reading speed in Philosophy continues to decline; last year I was on about twenty pages an hour (still too slow) and now I’m down to ten. This is completely impractical and it’s making my overall work suffer. Is it lack of focus? No idea what I can do about it. Maths is the same as ever, of course. I think I can be successful at Maths if I really try to spread it out more. If I interleave my Philosophy and Maths in hourly intervals (made longer when I’m stuck into something for once) then I can achieve more, and this is of course the best way to work. But as already noted this can only be successful with a great deal of luck and no misjudgements because once you make a mistake, all these nice ideas of constructive study habits go down the drain.

But now onto the positive academic stuff. I’ve got some fantastic Philosophy lectures this term, and my new technique of taking notes on my laptop instead of by hand means I gather huge amounts of well-organised information while still taking in the interesting parts of what the lecturer is saying. And I’ve been having some great tutorials in Philosophy and in Algebra, which I feel I’ve got a lot out of. So my tuition has been better than it was at many points last year.

That’s a hastily slammed out summary of the most recurring and important themes of the past month. I’m going to keep trying different work strategies to try and get over my problems academically – or rather, to try and make it so that I’ve done all I can and can therefore be happy about it. This next week I’m going to try going to bed earlier, to see if my tiredness is caused by lack of sleep or simply the fact that Oxford is very tiring, and I’m also going to try and work in the 8-9am slot instead of spending that time on administration/e-mails; I plan to move these to around 11 because that’s the time when the day’s flood of messages mostly come in – this is about making most of the time when I have most focus. Perhaps I’ll let you know how it goes.

The whole idea of making an interesting essay that illustrated its points and flowed along nicely really appeals to me. What’s also great is that I’d got to the point (with this particular topic only I note) where I was spontaneously quoting from other books and then having to go find the attribution rather than the other way round: searching in those books for something to quote. So I remembered a good way of expressing something and then grabbed a book and started flicking through to find the line in question. I assume that this is what university Philosophy will be like to some extent, reading various sources and bringing together some form of argument. If it is, I very much look forward to it. The problems begin to arise for me when it comes to changing the essay in order to make it more suitable for the exam. I was told that while my content was fine and the essay was elegant it wasn’t structured clearly enough to be marked by an examiner, despite being a good read. So over the past two days I’ve been working on making the argument clearer and clarifying some examples, but in the process I’ve completely overshot my word limit. This has really made the whole exercise seem a lot less worthwhile since I liked (and my teacher liked) what I had originally. But unfortunately I remain stuck in the grip of national exams which I must pass to go where I want to go in October.

So I now wonder how good I actually am at studying a wordy subject, unlike Maths which I am generally happy to just sit down and do. History last year was awful for me because I really didn’t know how much work to do at any one point and I was constantly tied up in wondering how much work to do for exams. But I am really hoping that that will change after this summer. I hope that at university exams really won’t be the constant concern or checking point for everything academic I do and that finally I can be free to explore subjects as fully as possible. I really hope that I can actually become good at being a scholar: reading (at a reasonable speed, which I fail hard at at the moment and this puts me off doing any reading at all) others’ works, working out what is useful, and building something of my own. Someone said to me recently that they thought I’d go down to Oxford and never leave. While I’m not convinced I’m good enough for that, I would now like to just be an academic, a lecturer of some form probably, as a career. There’s nothing that I care about enough other than my subjects to put my lif e towards.

One reasonably major change that happened recently is that I’ve stopped living at my father’s house during the week. Since my parents split up about ten years ago, my sister and I have switched between the houses with a very complex system that no-one else seems to understand, spending time at both during weekdays and then alternating over weekends – and carrying or sending piles of stuff (mainly school books) back and forth. For years I have got on poorly with my father and have tried to get away from living there whenever I can, and now that I’ve turned eighteen my mother says she isn’t going to stop me anymore and is happy for me to live more at her house during the week. So now I only go to my father’s alternate weekends. I’m obviously not entirely happy with this turn of events: it’s a bit rubbish that I dislike living with one of my parents and my sister thinks I’m being very selfish. I don’t think this is a very fair assessment. I’ve done it because the general atmosphere in the house is rarely pleasant as my father and I clash continuously over trivial things and this is especially true on week nights when I’m dashing off to ringing, coming home late due to after school activities and trying to get homework done. My sister and I have an even worse relationship (always have) so to me it makes sense to try and defuse this situation where I can by spending less time together. You may well disagree, and as I say I don’t think it’s ideal. But given that I think in the long run people will have a pleasanter time during the week, and it’s not as if I’m leaving entirely, it makes sense to me.

Something else that has happened is that I’ve been asked to leave freenode‘s staff team because I clearly don’t have the time these days. I think I should have voluntarily given up the responsibility given that I knew this myself, but I just loved the place and the people too much to do that. So now I’ve been retired and told that if I do have more time in the future, I can always reapply. I’ve had a fantastic time with freenode. I’ve met some great and dedicated volunteers who I am definitely not going to lose touch with, and I’ve learnt a great deal about dealing with the more difficult users of the network. I do hope that I’ve been useful in the other direction and freenode has benefited somewhat. I will be sticking around the place and I am still on the network for SilentFlame and Wikimedia channels. I am going to try and focus more on my Wikimedia responsibilities with the extra time: I have jobs that are ideal for the amount of time I have and I shall very much try to do them effectively.

Far more exciting than the above notes is that I received a letter yesterday to inform me that I’ve got a place at Oxford at the college I wanted (Balliol) to study Maths and Philosophy for four years starting from October 2009. I just need, of course, to get the three As at A-level required but assuming I don’t do anything really stupid I think I’m on target to get this. This is fantastic news for me – I feel like I can do anything if I’ve managed this. After going down there to stay for three/four days to be interviewed about ten days ago, I really could imagine myself having a great time there. All the students looking after us were very nice, even if the sixth formers were loud and constantly trying to show off a lot of the time (I befriended two quieter Maths and Philosophy students and lo and behold all three of us got in!). The environment is of course very impressive in terms of the buildings, and the college library is such an amazing place to learn in. Accomodation is basic but fine and the food is okay but is served in a hall of epic proportions. The Balliol tutors who interviewed me were also lovely and I can imagine learning a great deal from them. And of course there are things such as the Oxford Union Debating Society, THE place for debating; all the usual university societies such as gaming and lots and lots of ringing; and it’s not at all a bad city to live in. After such a long time of waiting around and wanting to know I can finally imagine myself there with reasonable surety that it’ll happen.

The interview experience as a whole is a very convoluted affair. The amount of variation between Oxford and Cambridge and between the individual colleges is pretty astonishing at first. I stayed from Sunday evening until Wednesday evening and the vast majority of this consisted of sitting around and reading or revising material for interviews. Everyone gets an interview at the college of choice that they applied to and then at least one other at another college in order to try and give no disadvantage to applying to particular colleges which may, in any individual year, find themselves oversubscribed compared to others which may not have ‘enough’ applicants. The problem is that such extra interviews are arranged in a very haphazard way. When I arrived, the noticeboard holding interview details was about a metre wide and hadn’t extended too far with sheets of paper covered in names and times for various subjects. However, with people arriving and departing all the time and more and more interviews being arranged, the board spread out to the right rapidly, filling the common room’s noticeboard gradually across – including duplicates making it necessary to read everything to ensure you didn’t miss something aimed at you. I was also rung up when further interviews were arranged. By the end there was a dismissal notice up for all the maths and related courses but there was a special section at the bottom asking me to stay a bit longer to be interviewed again.

I ended up being interviewed by three colleges, but two of these had seperate interviews for maths and philosophy so I was interviewed five times in total which was rather a lot. Interviews themselves varied very widely. In maths, in one I was asked reasonably difficult but not exactly brain-mashing questions; in the second I merely chatted about recent topics studied and about the entrance test (which apparently I did pretty well on but I wasn’t told my percentage score); and in the third I was guided through a very hard problem (attempting to define a function of n that would tell you the number of zeroes on the end of n!; got there too). In philosophy, I was asked several technical questions relating to the problem of induction, and some interesting political and linguistic questions that I probably shouldn’t share on the web as they do like to reuse them.

And now it’s Christmas day and thanks to the above I have the best present possible. It’s been a very eventful year and it’ll likely be an equally eventful January, but I’m enjoying the fact that I have an absurd amount of family members over for Christmas right now before I start thinking about such things. In our tiny little three bedroomed semi, we have fifteen people: two grandparents, three aunties, two uncles, five cousins, one father and one sister to give their relations to me. My father’s girlfriend’s house is being used to house some and others are staying in a local bed and breakfast. I went ringing this morning while they all strained at the leash of present opening (I pointed out upon entry that calling people to worship is the whole point of the day *nods*) and now I’m at home writing this and am going to put the turkey in the oven for the non-vegetarians (i.e. the other fourteen people) while they’re out for a walk, which after walking all the way up to and back from my mother’s (fifty minutes each way) to get my Oxford letter yesterday and walking all the way to the cathedral this morning (about an hour) I think I’ve done enough.