I suppose this was one of the most 'normal' terms I had in Oxford. It got off to a reasonable start with me getting 2.1s on both my contract and trusts collections and getting an academic prize for this.
We did tort and half of jurisprudence that term. I liked juris a lot - particularly because the law faculty was trying out a series of syndicated lectures to cover the core material which coincided quite nicely with what we were studying. This meant that when I came to read the materials for writing the essays I already had something of a handle on what was going on, something that hadn't happened in any of the other papers I'd studied. Unlike virtually every other university for Oxford arts/social science courses tutorial subjects do not coincide with lecture subjects - you might attend lectures in Michalemas for a paper you study in Hilary, or you might attend a series of four lectures on one week's work after you've done the tutorial for that week.
Tort I also liked, though there was rather a lot of reading to it. My first or second tort essay was the only essay I ever did where I got an alpha.
It was during this term that the large/medium sized city firms started coming to give presentations in Oxford, and we all started applying for vacation placements.
I took on the responsibility of the weekly Tesco order for the house - there being eleven of us it was much more sensible to have our shopping delivered once a week than for people to have to keep going out to bring milk/bread (56 pints of milk and 13 loaves of bread was the standard order).
This was the term that Heenal, Sacha and various others occupied the Bod in the name of campaigning against fees - which managed to upset the whole house because they borrowed my telly. Yes, folks, my telly was present in the Bod, entertaining the fees protestors. At the time I was anti fees, but also anti protesting by holding a sit in. It did the cause no good whatsoever.
I'd got a grip on the charities stuff - after being VP, I found this role straightforward and was willing to do more than the minimum. RAG wanted each College to hold an event to raise money. I looked through the ideas I'd been given and decided that a slave auction was the way to go (no offence is intended by the use of this term).
I persuaded people to become slaves and had permission to hold it in both the bar and JCR so that if there weren't many people interested we could do it in the bar where people couldn't help but watch. I got some friendly people armed with buckets to collect the money, asked Dave to compere for me (I know my strengths and that's not one of them!), put plastic sheeting in the corner of the JCR and bought squirty cream/custard.
It was a great night - I'll admit there was a bit of luck to it in addition to all the planning though. Jim had to get a nipple pierced, El Presidente Chris was sent to the LGB ball in a dress, Andrew had several custard pies thrown at him and we made over £500.
Oddly, one of the most striking memories of that night is of being left alone to do the tidying - that literally involved washing parts of the floor since we'd moved the chair Andrew was sitting on further forward so he could be seen and that meant custard stuff got everywhere. When all's said and done that event was *mine* - everyone I'd asked to help had done what they'd been asked to do, but no more, which was a shame.
Have a look at what the OxStu had to say.
Towards the end of the term I saw an advert in the OxStu for Freshers' Fair Organisers - I loved Oxford and I really liked the idea of coming back in September, but at this stage I was in self-deprecating mode and I didn't apply - though I did speak to Heenal (then on OUSU Exec and in the know about these things) about it who assured me I could do it.
I stayed in Oxford for at least the beginning of 9th Week, in order to attend the training course to become a mentor within the National Mentoring Pilot Project. This was a scheme that matched students with pupils from deprived backgrounds. Training was provided for the mentors and we were paid for our involvement. Normally Oxford colleges are very critically of students doing paid work during term time, but this scheme didn't seem to cause anyone any problems - mainly since we were only doing two hours work per week.