To Oxford for Cat's wedding on Sunday. Transport turmoil - when I was assured that the trains to Oxford were running normally, I must have missed the bit where the mannie muttered "... oh except for the replacement bus service from Didcot of course, which will add almost an hour to your journey time" - but we made it by dressing fast and getting the Oxford Tube instead. Brought back many foggy memories of the 18 months I commuted on that coach every day, and we even went past our old house in St Clements. (This weekend was our sort-of anniversary, in that we moved into that house together this time five years ago, spent two years there, one year renting in Ealing and two years now in our flat.) Mel was doing sterling bridesmaid duty, Cat looked beautiful, I got to see a few old faces from OUSU days and chat to some of Cat's uncles and aunts. We nipped out before the boogying got too wild and an enormous low yellow moon lit our way home.

M is very nearly there with the book; he dropped a printout of the core chapters off for his former supervisor while we were in Oxford, and this week he's finalising through the introduction and conclusion. Even so, we had a good weekend off - on Saturday we had lardy snacks from the French market and saw the Simpsons Movie.

It's been at once busy and bland the last few days - I've been to two Proms (the Striggio/Tallis/Lassus one was great despite the soupy Albert Hall acoustic, but I wasn't so convinced by the Verdi Macbeth this week. The singing and conducting was wonderful but I found the semi-staging confusing and obscure and sort of wished they hadn't bothered. AJ and I were too stingy to buy a programme so we were very baffled too; can't the RAH manage to do surtitles somehow?

A good week or so... lunch with K; dinner with Gareth who's just off to Syria; whizzy new disposable toric contact lens which for the first time corrects my astigmatism as well as my myopia so I can actually, yknow, see properly; bit o Shakespeare at the Globe with my sister; American diner Sunday brunch for six. Then this week just gone I've been doing a bit of teaching and a bit of learning. The latter is advanced Latin, which has been great and will come in very useful for work - how many people can say that?!

Last weekend (sorry, tardy blogging) we saw Gunny and went to the V&A to have lunch, a potter round the cast galleries, then tea and cake. This Norwegian door is something like 10th century - Gunny is the brown-clad figure to the right, for scale. Then on Saturday we headed for Oxford for R's ordination on Sunday morning. I spent a few hours with Mel (visiting from Toronto) then we met R's parents and fiancee O for a couple of drinks while we waited for him to emerge from his retreat. Which was lovely, but it seemed ironic that I haven't been in a pub for months, then I get to experience one the night before the smoking ban, which can't come too soon, kicks in. We also got to see our friends Chara and Pete and their daughter before heading home.
Here we are with R and O at Merton after the deed was done. We had a great view of the ceremony from where we were sitting, though the bishop was most inconsiderately in my line of sight for most of it.