Day 7 (3.vii.08)

Today was given the best start possible (even though I got shaken out of bed at the unholy hour of 07:30 by a text sending my mobile through the roof) by the news that I alone among the first-year PPEists at Magdalen achieved a first in my Prelims exams (which for those unfamiliar with the Oxford system means a ’summa cum laude’ or ‘academic distinction’, and entails all sorts of juicy rewards like a scholar’s gown and a fancy meal, that sort of idea). I’d actually stayed up yesterday evening till 02:00 (07:00 British time) on the assumption that they would publish the results online at 06:00 as scheduled. They didn’t, so I went to bed entirely in the dark about whether I’d passed or failed. Funnily, the first I heard of it was a Facebook post from Josh R saying “Congratulations only first” – this threw up so many grammatical ambiguities that I had to ask him effectively what he meant. At 11:30, however, the results finally arrived online, and the big fat D next to my name confirmed what I’d barely dared to hope was true. UPDATE [8.vii.08]: James S also found out today that he’d got a ‘first’ as well – he wasn’t on the original list for privacy reasons, so not even he knew for sure.

I was, and still am, absolutely ecstatic, and soon lost any lingering irritation about the lack of progress on the summer school front as I planned how I would suitably celebrate this Result. Bearing in mind my sports-based entry yesterday, I decided as I watched the tail-end of women’s Wimbledon, followed (because iPlayer chose to work briefly) by the last episode of Top Gear, that I would treat myself to a ticket to a Blue Jays home match (against NY Yankees), which I duly went and bought at the Rogers Centre, along with about £30-worth of Blue Jays merchandise. Treat acquired, I wandered round the Toronto Music Garden on the seafront (which was designed, among others, by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma to represent J.S.Bach’s ‘First Suite for unaccompanied cello’), then decided to take a circuitous route via Queens Quay (West and East) and Parliament Street back to my residence.

You know, for future reference, I should probably just use Yonge Street as an impregnable frontier beyond which it is ill-advised to say the least to venture. Not only was the route along the sea-front not along the sea-front, but actually the most boring array of disused warehouses and derelict factories amidst entire spaghetti-coils of redundant railway tracks, but I hadn’t gone up Parliament Street for long at all before I was slap-bang in the middle of Toronto’s equivalent of Harlem or the Bronx. Cabbagetown, as it’s called, is obviously a good deal larger than it looks on the map – and for the first time my Frommer’s guide was actually spouting complete and utter Ballacks when it claimed that the area had “undergone gentrification” since the 1970s. Its idea of gentrification is evidently the presence of one satellite dish between every 10 or so houses, which is of precious little comfort when you’re being pleaded at by the most proactive black beggars on the planet, not to mention being shrieked at by random deranged old women for no good reason (guess what, I had both…).

I rapidly abandoned my plan to give the district a closer inspection, and resolutely turned left at the first street name I recognised (Dundas Street East), continuing on past some large cinemas with the word ‘ENTERTAINMENT’ spelled out in lots of little red lights, over the sort of lurid pictures one finds if one strays casually into the less reputable sections of the internet. By the time I’d reached the intersection with Yonge Street, almost sensing the rising living standards as I gradually neared the financial district, I’d noted with resigned satisfaction the proximity of Cabbagetown to the Gay Village (which makes it easier to avoid both of them), and with some equally resigned dissatisfaction the proliferation of rainbow flags on Yonge Street (given that Church Street was, at least in theory, at a comfortable distance). Once back on familiar turf on Charles Street, I stocked up on fruit juice at Rabba, bought some supper at Subway’s (where I acted as a sort of guinea-pig for the training of a new employee, like all but one of the others Iranian and with an incomplete grasp of basic English), and headed back to my room to deal with my day’s congratulatory correspondence. That done, I now have the usual Toronto Star reading to be getting on with, after which I might get a bit of an early night.

~ by Marius Ostrowski on July 4, 2008.