Here's a fun fact for you all: it's hot. Indeed, this may not have escaped your attention. Perhaps you're already taking full advantage, sauntering down our sun-baked streets, all a-splendour in your sultry short shorts (or skirts yet shorter still). Or, perchance, you're not because you have things to do other than sit around dehydrating all day. This post is dedicated to those in the later category, because with my first exam on Thursday I would be quite happy for nuclear winter to descend right around now.

Nonetheless, I must wish my mum a very happy birthday for today, even if she - along with everyone else in my family aside from me - is presently livin' it up in Dorset. (I'm 'there' too, in the 'pre-recorded footage' sense. Soon, this trend will accelerate and you'll be able to send an avatar of yourself to a party imbued with artificial intelligence, all in order for you to be told the next morning about all the 'crazy shit' that 'you' got up to last night and what a shame it was that you couldn't be there to see it.) Anyway, whilst we're on the subject, I should mention the lovely Sunday I had two weekends back in which mum and I saw State of Play, replayed several times the video of babyDominic falling over and dined at Strada. Hurrah.

That video really is a goldmine, by the way. There's one moment where I have clearly perfected the art of distracting attention from the issue at hand by undermining its seriousness in a flurry of exaggeration and smiles. And, several years previously, I managed to crawl over Thatcher's face on the front page of a newspaper without even stopping to read it. (Something I regret now, because it could provide great contextual material for Paper 6.)

Finally: Lucy's visit over the weekend afforded opportunities for a collective pub dinner gathering, the hunting out of milkshakes in Cambridge and a second helping of Star Trek. Following which, great discussions were held concerning the heavily armed nature of Romulan 'mining' ships. Which is, ultimately, in a fate-of-the-universe way, a far more important subject than the History Tripos. So, there