I was excited about going back to Oxford - the summer apart from
my friends was long, and what was more, I had a kitchen! There
were eleven of us living in 4/5 Holywell Street (houses joined
together many years ago) - a house owned by College, that had a
reputation for not being very nice, due to previous occupiers. We
soon changed that - by offering to paint the kitchen ourselves, we
had College come and do it for us, by putting up posters/signs
(showing where each room was - 4/5 has quite accurately been described
as a rabbit warren), we covered up the worst of the walls and by
fitting light bulbs in all the corridors we brightened the house.
Since we'd taken Law Mods at the end of Hilary we had collections
at the beginning of Michalemas (unlike the rest of our year, who had
taken Mods/Prelims at the end of Trinity). This made it very difficult
to enjoy Freshers' Week, because we were revising, while everyone
else was enjoying getting to know the Freshers. I seem to remember
volunteering to sit in the JCR to talk to the Freshers on the Tuesday
morning, and I was a good 'mother' and went round to find my
'children' to check they were settling in.
My admin collection went very badly, my contract one wasn't quite
so bad, but not particularly good, and this term was the true
beginning of academic worries that stayed with me throughout my degree.
Was I actually capable of a 2.1? We did the second half of contract,
with an absolutely adorable tutor from Wadham, and we did trusts that
term. Neither of these were particularly easy: the second half of
contract had a lot of reading and touches on bits of tort eg. in order to
understand misrepresentation you need to know how it works in both
contract and tort, and trusts, very much like admin, is an extremely
difficult subject to get a real world handle on. For instance ask the
question 'What is a trust?' and no one can give you a particularly
straight answer (essentially, it's when you separate the beneficial
ownership of an item from the ability to chose what to do with the
item) - so, I might create a trust of a sum of money in favour of
myself: I retain the right to the beneficial interest in the money
(and can chose to end the trust at any time), but control of the
money is placed in the hands of my trustees. What? Why would anyone
bother doing that? I hear you ask - the answer to *that* is simple -
tax avoidance (not that that particular scheme would necessarily
allow you to avoid much tax - that's just a simple example). I found
trusts extremely difficult that first time round - when I came to
revise for finals I found that I'd understood much more than I'd
thought and the whole subject finally began to make sense.
I was persuaded to stand for Charities' Rep in the second
JCR meeting of term: I was the only candidate, which was both a
blessing - I didn't want to take the job away from someone who
really wanted it, and also quite scary. Losing to RON, while being
the only candidate standing would have hurt - husting by myself
scared me too. It was fine in the end - I'd already 'proved myself'
a suitable person to hold a JCR post with my previous husts, so
everyone was very gentle with me. As I recall, I won with an absolutely
overwhelming majority vs. two votes for RON.
It was that term that I finally learnt how to dance/move to music without feeling like an *absolute* freak. I stayed in Oxford for 9th Week, because I wanted some time in Oxford without work. 4/5 took me out to clubs and stuff that week and I learned that if I've had enough to drink and I can stare at the ceiling (so I don't have to watch my body) I can dance. It's not something I expect I'll ever be very good at, but it was that week that taught me enough to feel comfortable having a go at it.