Community is...

...being thankful for meals that are other people's favourites but not my own.

Don't get me wrong - the cooking in this community is awesome: we have some very talented cooks. It has also become multi-cultural with a decided emphasis on Mexican. But the meal I am thinking of could not be described as foreign. It is certainly not my favourite, and yet I overheard someone observing that it was their favourite. There's no accounting for folk!

Graduation

Long, long ago, mid 1974 to be more precise, I graduated from Oxford University with first class honours in Natural Science (Physics). This should have been a great occasion I suppose, but my memories of it are all fuzzed. The whole affair rather horrified me.

There was this tradition that your scout should adorn you with the graduation gown at the appropriate moment for which he expected a tip and this arrangement frightened me - how much, why, etc. I have always abhorred tipping. Partly because I am tight with money and partly because I get embarrassed. I think I neither asked my scout to do the honours nor tipped him - but my memory is hazy on this point.

I have only two pictures to record the event, both very poor quality. I suppose my father is behind the camera. The backdrop is the Sheldonian Theatre, venue for all graduation ceremonies. What had just happened inside its walls is totally gone from my memory. As with my wedding day, I was glad when it was all over.

Aunty Mary on the left and Nana and mum beside me

My mum in her dress purchased for the occasion

I hate public affairs in which I am on show.  Earlier in my life I was sent to Sunday School and every year there would be an anniversary event which the mums and dads would attend and at which the children would perform and then be given a prize - perhaps a sentimental Christian story book.  The quality of the performances was awful but even more awful was being expected to stand up and deliver such an awful performance. I still cringe just thinking about it. Perhaps my whole life has been jeopardised by those anniversaries.

It's this being expected to be what one is not that gets me. A bit like a Mexican meal - zillions of pots of this and that, some hot and some cold, which you have to dump on top of a dank circle of dough and mix it all together and somehow get it to one's mouth before it succumbs to the law of gravity, by which time the whole thing is stone cold and thus lost some of its appeal. And to add insult to injury you then have to wash and dry up all those zillions of little pots. Why not just mix it altogether before serving it? At least that way it might stay warmer.