the start of Freshers' week

Hello,

Freshers' week has officially started now so most people are back or will be very soon. I've been meeting the new international students, who have been coming in dribs and drabs throughout last week, and going to evening events arranged for them. We've had a quiz, a trip t to an ice cream parlour, a cafe, and a film night so far. The fun continues until Tuesday, by which time there are enough things going on in colleges to keep the early arrivers entertained. I had a day off carrying bags from the station on Saturday, when I went to Ledbury to help cook at a training weekend for bible study leaders at my church. It was a long day becase Ledbury is an hour and a half drive from here but was good fun, with a walk in the Malvern hills being the highlight of the day.

I've got my timetable now, which is scarily empty after the full timetable of the last two years - we've only got 3 lectures and a seminar each week now, so there'll be much more emphasis on directing our own learning and organising our own time to get the right balance of reading papers, writing essays, doing project work, and having fun. Unfortunately, I've got to miss my first lecture because I'm going to the Cambridge clinical school open day on the same day. My project is plodding along slowly at the moment. There's not a lot I can do apart from experimenting with different techniques on the chick embryos when they are available. I've started marking them with carbon now although I still need to perfect the method I'm using to visualise them. I'm going in to the lab tomorrow to see whether the experimental marks I made last week have moved at all.