Plus ca change

A timeless scene: men enjoying dinner in an Oxford dining room.

Hang on, I'm sure I was at College with lots of women, in fact I'm sure I am one. Who says photos never lie?

Lovely long sociable day. This morning we took the car to Qwik Fit as dad had spotted that the tyres were, erm, not entirely legal. The nice man not only was awestruck by Mr B's car (it's one of those cars that 'does something' to people who know about cars. Not me.) but also agreed that he'd keep the car until the tyres arrived the next day - saving us 24 ruinously expensive hours of Oxford parking.

A quick wander, a bit of shopping, then we headed off to join an alumni tour around a library, but were sidetracked at the last minute into a talk about samurai, given by Michael Jay - the only westerner to currently hold the samurai rank, and the second ever after William Adams (apparently). Fantastic stuff, with a demonstration of samurai fighting by a couple of his students. And he showed us how to disable an attacker with a 4 inch stick. I think that's probably the most useful thing I've learned to date. Or it would be if I had a 4 inch stick to carry around.

Then off to the Ashmolean museum, whose doors I barely darkened in all the years I lived in the city, but we heard they had a good restaurant, so headed up there to wait for our friends to arrive in from London. Lovely lunch, and we even had a quick peek in the museum on the way down, including a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition. Some interesting comments there about art and photography - basically that painting was better at capturing detail in a scene than photography. But then they didn't have 12 megapixels.

Off to get ready for the big night, via our old local, and then we were pitched into a world of yesterday, with everyone just slightly larger and wrinklier than before. I had a brief spell of the ghosts of boyfriends past, but then got over myself and just had a lovely time. I'm not sure going up to one of the aloof guys in the year above me and saying "I heard you on Radio 4" was my coolest moment, but he seemed briefly charmed (or it could have been embarrassment, who knows).

But all in all a success: I didn't offend anyone who didn't pinch my bum first, I didn't get too drunk, and didn't fall over in those ridiculous heels. If only I'd managed all that first time round.