Party pris

addedentry and I had a party, and it was great! It was lovely to see all the people who were there, & we were sad not to see the people who couldn't make it. I'm not going to try to list you all, or list all the lovely presents we got (though I hope I thanked everybody at the time!) but fivemack gets a special vote of thanks for bringing us lots of fab wedding photos and making fried breakfast for seven people (without the aid of forks) on Sunday morning. :-)

I would also like to apologise to khalinche and timeplease for failing to wake up in time to say goodbye (but I hope they slept well on our sofabed), and to juggzy for failing to be awake when she returned to fetch some things she'd left here (but I hope she found everything in the end without too much trauma). I am not very good at mornings, sorry.

I was pleased with the way this year's cake decoration turned out, though I'm afraid the actual cake was a bit on the 'meh' side -- too dry, not enough jam.

Late on Saturday night my ridiculous 15" boots got an impromptu airing, so that I could prove that they existed (that's the first time I've taken them out of the box since moving to Oxford -- I had to cut the packing-tape to get them out). If anybody took a decent photo of them I'd love to see it: a flickr link would allow me to prove the existence of the boots without risking breaking my legs. :-} On the other hand a flickr link would not have given me the rather fun experience of being nearly as tall as htfb.

I hope "a good time was had by all", but I can only really speak for myself; I spent most of last week feeling fairly fail-ish and not at all partyish but was much cheered by conversation and silliness and singing and cake and port, so thank you again to all our guests for making an old-ish woman very happy. :-)

[More posts to follow on Oxbridge limericks, singing, decluttering, and running... watch this space, tonight is LJ-catchup night!]

A shocking young punster from Enfield

At some point during the mildly-hungover post-fryup party-recovery session on Sunday morning, a new game was invented (or perhaps I should say perpetrated) by hairyears and aardvark179 (I can't remember precisely where to lay the blame, which is probably for the best), ably aided and abetted by covertmusic, fivemack, taimatsu, addedentry and me. What is this new jeu du jour?

Oxbridge limericks.

It's not an aimless or endless meme: unusually, it's a meme with a publishable goal. The aim is to come up with limericks for each of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Most of the examples so far have been scurrilous in the extreme; I offer this most recent contribution phoned in (well, txted in) by hairyears as an exemplar:

The delicate dons of St Hilda's
Were shocked by the bill from the builda's
They charged for the water,
The bricks and the mortar,
And labour, replacing the dilda's.

The only rule over and above those dictated by the form is that the limerick must use the name of the college as the primary rhyme (commonly used shortened forms are acceptable, e.g. "Catz" for St Catherine's).

The ultimate aim is to create two full sets of limericks for each university's colleges: one 'clean' (if you could tell it to your mum -- no, not Your Mum -- then it's probably fine) and one, er, not (see e.g. above). We'll collect the best ones (all entries will be subjected to rigorous peer-review through the media of LJ polls and shouting) and hopefully put them together into something on paper that people can keep (think of this as the Viz to Pocketful of Lies' LRB).

For the time being, just post your limericks as comments here or in your own journal with the tag 'oxbridgelimericks'; in time I may be able to find a better home for them, but I don't want to delay the fun because of boring information management issues. Examples have already been sighted in the wild; it's possible that we may be seeing the start of a limerick pandemic (popularly known as 'rhyme flu').

Go forth and versify!