I've been less than good at updating this thing recently, but now I should have a little more time on my hands. I'm currently beavering away at my final essay of this term (not counting the jazz project due in after the holidays) and am 1,000 through 3,000 words of my first draft. I have a tutorial tomorrow at 11am with Steve to discuss it, and I kinda want to have finished all 3,000 words of my first draft by then, so he can look through it, tell me what's crap and I can redo it. I got a good 2:1 for my first piece of Early 19th Century Studies coursework (the only piece I've got back this term, actually) so let's see if I can keep it up. I'm pretty pleased with how the academic stuff is going this term - I'm managing to fudge my way through without the powers that be realising that I have no idea how to do a music degree - though I need to get myself sorted out over the holidays and do some composition. Violin practice also needs to be increased. But since I've been spending many many hours per week on barefacts, I think it's fair to say I'm doing a pretty good job at organising myself at the mo.

Next weekend I'm doing an all day session for DAVE - the Union individual development training programme, and by the end of the day I'll have my silver award - woo hoo! There will be under 10, if not under 5 people who have got that, so it's quite groovy. The sessions are fun (though getting up at 10am after a Union night out isn't!) and you get lots of sweeties. A couple of weeks ago Adam, Ian and I did an all day session to get the final credits for our bronze award, and it was good fun - I really enjoyed spending all day with a group of people I'd never met before, as well as Ian and Adam.

On Wednesday I'm going up to London with an (as yet quite small) group of UniS students and sabbs for the National Demo Against Top Up Fees which should be good fun. It's a pity cos Emma has a rehearsal for her final concert up in Cambridge that afternoon, or else she would have come on it too and we could have met up. Her term finishes at the end of this week - I can't believe it - we don't finish til December 20th!!

I'm editing the final version of barefacts this term - a purely online version (so I can have lots of colour - woo hoo!) - so, any ideas as to what you'd like to see in a fun Christmassy barefacts would be really welcome. Just drop me a line and I'll love you forever!

But for now I must push all thoughts of that to the back of my head, and get on with the hard stuff - a comparative essay between the final movements of Beethoven's 6th Symphony (pastoral) and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique....