[I have the following saved on my computer as “very ambitious plan.txt”. It’s really a sort of list-of-things-I’m-not-getting-around-to-doing-at-Oxford, with the implication that I ought to take advantage of next year’s twelve-hour working week to get them done. Well, some of it may happen.

PS Sorry for overreliance on arcane Oxford terminology.]

Academic
Learn: medieval French [for paper VI, medieval literature], old Occitan [for paper XII, old Occitan language], Italian [for the other paper XII, Romance linguistics, where you’re supposed to know two major Romance languages], Cornish [because my knowledge of it is that old cliché, “patchy and inconsistent”] , Breton [because I’m going to Brittany I mean COME ON] (in that order of priority?)
Reread paper VI texts, read secondary texts for them, read general works on medieval thought & ideology [I really didn’t pay much attention to paper VI the first time round - papers IV and V, which I did at the same time, were on French linguistics and hence managed to attract 90% of my interest.]
learn Romance sound change rules [maybe not all of them … but this would certainly be helpful for about four of my papers, which sounds like enough for it to be worth doing]

Other
NaNo? [I loathe that abbreviation to be honest. Also, every scrap of novelistic imagination has been drained out of me. But it might be now or never, so it’s something to think about.]
learn heraldry properly
learn counterpoint etc. [this is intriguingly nebulous. Did I mean species counterpoint (which is an enigma)? Can I add Guido d’Arezzo’s fun stuff? And the modes (although I’m told they didn’t really exist)? And mensural notation? ok]
(learn early European history) [why is this in brackets?]
note down French usage/keep a record of experiences [here, I hope …]
learn about trains [I think I mean engine classes and track gauge sizes and stuff, which sounds quite fun]
learn syntax (LFG?) [so I can go beyond prelims syntax trees …]

Coming very soon. I have three essays left this term and I love procrastination but ok

Just found out where I’ll be next year. Well.

Candidates should also be aware that at this stage their allocation is a provisional location. It is unlikely but possible that the final appointment may be to a different area altogether within France.

Anyway, provisionally, somewhere inside this polygon:

I will be less opaque later (i. e. when I haven’t got half an essay about Sturtevant’s Paradox to write). Bis dann.