The weather here is gone a bit mad. Friday was cold; yesterday was sunny; today is horribly grey and wet. I wish it’d pick one and stick to it – sunny, preferably.

My Shakespeare lecturer just likened Hamlet to Jackson Pollack, Kill Bill and This Is Spinal Tap. He’s some kind of genius.

I’m feeling very restless. I want to head off on a trip someplace. Boston is so cozy it’s easy to get settled in and not budge. But I’m 21, have another two months in the US, and God knows when I’ll be back. I should do stuff. My friends went to Salem on Halloween but I couldn’t because of class. I’ll start with that. It’s not too far afield. I’ll start small and work my way up. I have this mad need to start ticking off states.

Saw some good movies this week: 30 Days of Night, which I watched through the cracks between my fingers, and a documentary called King Corn, which almost made me cry. There’s this bit where they explain what happens to cattle when they eat corn, and the conditions they live in … arrgh it’s dreadful! Made me feel quite smug that Irish cattle are still grass-fed by and large, and get to romp around in the open fields. We may have BSE scares but at least they get to romp.

At the moment I’m writing an exercise for tomorrow’s Creative Writing class. We’re meant to write a one-page ‘list’ story, in the style of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I went for the most obvious theme – books on a bookshelf. (In which I lovingly describe books – it’s book porn, almost.) I bet at least five other people will have done the same thing.