Sign me up.

It's been a long weekend of work here, but it's felt good to get back into essay-writing mode again. Sometimes I forget that this is the fun stuff: when the tens of books and hundreds of pages of notes littering my room come together to make something coherent, and all the passive absorption of facts, arguments and narratives gives way to active synthesis and creative presentation. Yeah, this grad school thing is a pretty good deal.



This afternoon, Matt and I took a little break to have a proper English high tea. We had the obligatory sultana scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, as well as cucumber finger sandwiches with the rind cut off the cucumber and the crusts removed from the bread, and cut into dainty little triangles. I almost gave poor Matt a heart attack by getting ready to put mayo on the sandwiches. I should have known by now -- the all-purpose British condiment is butter. At least here in the house, they slather it on absolutely everything. I wonder if the queen eats butter-and-cucumber sandwiches? Very posh, I'm sure.

Tonight I took my first step towards starting a pro-life society here, something I've been slowly working towards since I got here. We had a great talk after Mass this evening by a woman who's the head of public health in Southwest England, talking about a lot of important issues including the shockingly high abortion rate (200,000 per year -- and the NHS pays for 90% of them!), and Fr. Robert let me stand up after to recruit students to start doing something to change things, or at least get people to start thinking about the issue. It is truly amazing how little abortion is actually on the political or moral radar screen in this country. You just never hear anything about it. Out of 30+ people who attended the talk, I had only three interested people sign up. And all three guys -- no women! There's a lot of work to done here, especially with changes to the Abortion Act being debated right now. But starting small is better than doing nothing at all. Thumbs up for life!