Absent falling coal

After I don't know how many years of exams, I have learnt the benefit of writing essay plans for all four questions at the start of an exam.

No, I don't know how I ever used to manage either, but saints be praised. I even had time (actual and mental) to do my chiropractor's back stretchy exercises. Hopefully the essays were ok... I wrote stuff. After years of comments of "too much on the cases, not enough analysis!" I may have slipped the other way...

Anyway. Food now, and bouncy music, then looking at the past paper which-may-be-the-collection for this afternoon.

I'm sitting here poking cases, swearing at[1] grumbling in the general direction of my tutor for giving me the wrong citations for all of them.

One of the cases reads: The applicant applied to register a trade mark... known as "the dark mark"

Yes, boys and girls, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is alive and well, and exploiting legal measures to regulate competition and access to the market.

I need tea.


[1] Having realised that I've started swearing like a navvy, I am giving it up for Lent. I have a pot in which to put monies as a self-imposed fine when I break this...

IP (intellectual property) is a wonderful subject to study. The articles with impenetrable economic theory littering their pages aside, other academics fill their articles with quotations from Yeats and references to Les Misérables.

What I'm actually studying at the moment is copyright, which is in my opinion the most interesting area of the subject. More specifically, I'm looking into the question of the duration of copyright protection.

( Cut for what appears to have almost turned into my essay for this week. Please read and discuss? I'd love to know what people coming at it from a non-legal point of view think of it all... )

OK. More advice seeking. Sakes, I'm useless.

Here's the list of options available:

Commercial Leases
Company Law
Comparative Law of Contract
Copyright, Patents & Allied Rights
Copyright, Trademarks and Allied Rights (erm, I think this is meant to be the same as the one before...? It's not in the handbook with descriptions) - apparently it is different. So now, I have to decide which...
Criminal Justice & Penology
EC Competition Law and Policy
Environmental Law
Ethics
EU Human Rights Law
Family Law
History of English Law
International Trade
Labour Law
Personal Property
Principles of Commercial Law
Public International Law
Roman Law:Delict
Taxation Law

Ok. Ones crossed through I definitely don't want to do (have done much history already, interesting as it would be...), ones in bold I am keener on than others.

PIL seems to include some Human Rights, as well as some of the internation crimes I studied in DPI . I enjoyed DPI - do I want to do something different, though? But, do I want to do just Human Rights? Edit: According to College Father Of Joy, his PIL didn't have much HR or Crim in it. INternational Court of Justice and other such fun things, though...

I'm pretty sure I want to do the Copyright (Imtellectual Property). Or maybe something else entirely?

Help and advice rewarded with drinks and eternal gratitude...

Went for coffee yesterday, which was rather jolly, we talked about all sorts of things and it was great. The entertaining part was that we looked like drowned rats, since the moment I got out of my lecture it started bucketing it down. As usual, my umbrella was worse than useless, and we ended up sheltering under a very tiny awning watching the road flood 6 inches deep with water. After no rain for weeks to speak of, I think the drains had forgotten how to drain. It was just like England, and it was lovely.

I'm currently spending this morning writing up case notes and drinking HUGE amounts of tea as well as trying to recreate my Christmas card list, not having brought it with me this year.... it's rather fun, in a twistedly tea-drinking productive IT'S-CHRISTMAS (which is pretty and means swoopy descants of joy and also, this year, HOME) sort of way.

I shall return to so doing.

*glees*

I am in a somewhat odd cycle of tea drinking today. After realising last night that I needed tea half an hour later than I should have realised it, for tea solves everything, I am now both requiring it and using it as a reward/incentive.

I have a list of productive things I must accomplish today. I am not allowed tea until I have done at least one of these things (cunningly they are broken down into small sections). However, I require tea to be able to do them. It is a vicious circle, and I suspect I may not actually get up properly all day because, frankly, I have food here in my room and music and work and I want to dye my hair later, so getting up properly would be a little superfluous.

Possibly this tea addiction has gone too far. On the other hand, I like tea, so this isn't really a problem *nods*.

I really am doing NaNo this year. This appears to be unmitigated insanity - I'm trying to do applications and law at the same time, for goodness sake!

More to the point - I still maintain that I can't write. Up until January of this year, I wrote nothing except academic work and my diary - even creative writing in school only happened under extreme duress and it was awful. I never had ideas, I never knew what to write, and the primary school stories invariably ended up with a rather implausible situation ... "and then they/I/he/she/it woke up, and it was all a dream."

I knew various people were doing this - then, in a conversation with black_eyedgirl on the 31st, she challenged me to find an idea. She sent me as a joke to the Online Fantasy Plot Generator, which I poked several times... and then I saw something, and put it into a Word document, and over the next two hours ripped it to shreds and built a whole story. There's plot, and characters who have names, damn it!

And now I've started writing it, and last night produced 4463 words - on top of 8 fiches d'arrets, and a 2000 words French case commentary and all the rest of it - and then there were more characters, and there was description, and there was plot that went places, and I know exactly where the next 10,000 odd words are going - barely any way into the whole story, that's where, but there's an awful lot going to happen.

So, yes. See? I can't write....

4,463 / 50,000 (8.9%)

I'd forgotten how good - productive, yes, but also enjoyable - sensible working patterns should be. Like doing things a bit in advance, and not staying up to finish them out of sheer bloody-mindedness, but getting up in the morning to do them. I'm now grateful I had that imposed on my in my first two terms, I probably wouldn't have done nearly as well in Mods otherwise. Just a shame it's taken me so long to rediscover it.

In other news - tea is good, especially when I first get up; Paris is still stupidly warm; I think I'm becoming allergic to trousers; I'm wondering which point I started using everything as a mental intellectual springboard to dive into all sorts of obscure references and arguments.

I've just realised I'm recreating a scene from my first two terms at Oxford.

The window is open, letting chilly autumn air in, which is making my toes icy (it doesn't take much), even with my feet tucked under my chair, but is necessary because otherwise the room is stuffy and horrible. To counteract the bare shoulders, I've got a large scarf or two draped around me. I'm surrounded by law books and papers and abandoned mugs and a plate, and a sketch pad and pencils and pens. My hair is vaguely scrunched back in the same knot as last night, which has loosened while I slept so the weight of my hair is sitting on the base of my neck, with strands and locks of hair breaking free and falling round my face. There's a mug of tea just drunk, and one to come, and soft gentle music in the background, and the lyrics drift in and out of focus. The internet is on, to be occasionally gently poked when I look up from a paragraph, and I'm quietly working on two things at once. I've decided I'll cope with the food and milk I have for today, because going out would mean finding shoes and keys and all sorts of complicated things, and I can just shop tomorrow. Out of the corner of my eye, I keep seeing birds flying past, and the trees are turning to orange brown.

There are no time deadlines, no people I have to see, no where I have to go. I can just stay here, and it is peaceful and a beautiful day.