It was a particularly low blow, all things considered. The bastards had followed me all the way to the outskirts of Paris, probably making use of the paper trail of Russian Standard bottles and cashiers and bartenders who'd been made to listen to the same odious spiel about how any other vodka just didn't cut it. Some had probably even been made to attempt to say "Cheers!" in Russian and fish out some decrepit bar snacks to do things The Russian Way. Or maybe the combination of vodka and Mini Cheddars had mercifully wiped the whole experience from their memories. In any case, they tracked me down.
What I'm laboriously getting to is that my faithful laptop that I'd had since about GCSE year finally bit the dust when introduced to red wine in a particularly vicious sting operation a few weeks after my last post on here. I managed to recover my files at a local computer place, but to all intents and purposes my chronicling activities had to be put on hold (I bet you were so disappointed, eh...) I came back to uni, realising midway through one of my first lectures that I hadn't actually had to concentrate intently on what someone else was saying for fifty minutes in quite a while, and began the slog towards F****s (I'm allowed to say "Finals" once here, otherwise the degree gremlins (also known as the Proctors round here) will fly out of my nose and fine me for wearing the wrong type of socks).
I thought my activities for [REDACTED] were concluded, and I'd be allowed to return to the usual arts student life of pretending to read set texts, staring at reading lists like I expect them to magically disappear, convincing myself that vodka will allow me to learn Russian by osmosis, and living off omelettes and toast; how naïve I was in those heady days! Instead I've found myself being required to take a year off from my studies in order to conduct a series of investigations into the actions of [REDACTED] in a dastardly attempt to set up dill as the English condiment of choice. I get the feeling I should probably be making some feeble joke about the situation in Ukraine, but really, I can't find much to laugh about where that's concerned.
Anyway, I thought that this blog could do with at least some kind of an afterword. Looking back over it I'm actually quite proud of the (ridiculously small number of) posts, in a perverse way. I mean, there were more worthwhile things I could have been doing (like the previously mentioned forty novels, for one thing), but I think it stands up. If it interests you, I recovered drafts for a few more posts to each half, but I think the moment for them has kind of passed. Rest assured the bits that I think are funny will probably be recycled into something else, because for us arts students laziness is quite far ahead of godliness...
As I fully intend to carry on spending time abroad when I've finished my degree you may just see more attempts at insightful pisstaking over here. If you miss getting slightly wonky dispatches from the inside of my head, I've recently started up a new blog under the same profile. I warn you, though, there's a good deal less attempting to be funny and a fair amount of expounding my Deep Thorts on stuff, but the same rambling sentence structure you've probably grown to know and resignedly tolerate is very much alive and limping.
It's been fun, guys.
Tarrah!
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