Who needs more than one tense?

Well, my term is pretty much over.

Oxford works on 8-week terms, while most normal universities prefer 10, or even a leisurely 12. What this means is that we live the life of bees, or maybe beavers. In fact, perhaps members of the worker caste of some dytopian Communist Beaver society modelled on a beehive. So now I'm somewhat at a loss as to what to do with my time. Of course, that's a symptom of my lamentable lack of foresight rather than any real indication of my diary. For example, there's an e-mail in my inbox asking me to prepare a ten-minute speech for next wednesday, and so far I'm appraoching this with a problem-solving method more normally associated with ostriches or armadilloes.

Life being what it is, it's not that unlikely that ostriches are well known for their prudence, or that beavers take 14 bank holiodays a year. I'm about as much a zoologist, I admit it. Even I am a little taken aback when I read medieval bestairies, though- for example, the beaver. I mean, not even a mention of bank holidays.

I'm up to the French Reveloution in the New Internationalist history of the world. It's not a big book- I think it's 40 000 words, and that limit was some kind of self-imposed intellectual challenge by the author. In a similar way, I'm trying to use only the present tense in todays' blog. As you may remember if you're one of my treasured Archive Readers, I try to justify spending anywhere up to 4% of my life sitting online as practiuce at the art of written communication. The trouble is, I'm not all that sure how many tenses there are, and whether my sentences qualify as "Conditional plu-perfect" or something. Like most people of my generation, everything I know about grammar comes from GCSE French, or saying "Hold on, that sounds wrong".

This kind of self-imposed constraint reminds me of The Five Obstructions, a film about film-making by some Danish directors. That is, it reminds me of when Carrington Vanston reviewed the film. Das Boot and The Minority Report are about the height of my cinematic sophistication, I'm afraid. Anyway, in this film the lead is a director who is set a series of challenges: You may Only Film in Cuba, You May Only Use Scenes of Half A Second Or Less, and so on. The nearest equivalent to this in my experience is being just on the periphery of a lackadaisical secret project by some of my English student friends. They're the kind of people who will one day be discussed in more obscure sections of the Sunday Newspapers. The project is called Write Club, but I'm not really supposed to talk about it.

Song in my head: That secret track on "O" by Damien Rice.