It looks like Michaelmas term is wrapping up here in lovely Cambridge. I've been pretty busy this past week. Part of it is that I had a couple of friends over to visit, a colleague and his wife. They were in the process of moving, but something had gone wrong at their new place, and they couldn't move in until a week after schedule. Meanwhile, they had to be out of the temporary place where they were staying. Of course, you can't let friends be suddenly homeless in December (even if Cambridge isn't nearly as cold as Chicago), so I had them come and stay at my place, which turns out to be plenty big enough for three adults. I declare my first experiment in having houseguests in my Cambridge cottage a rousing success!

It was also mightily convenient, because Colleague and I are working on putting together a proposal to host a conference at Cambridge possibly next year, and we're at the stage where we have to brainstorm themes and go look at potential venues. It was nice to be able to plan these things out with someone who was in the next room rather than the next town over!

The Christmas Season is in full swing, as it apparently has been since early November (no Thanksgiving to slow people down!). The Christmas thing here seems to be mulled wine and mince pies, which have no meat in them. I've had at least three or four invitations to gatherings where this combination of food and drink is served. The next one is on Wednesday. There's also choirs singing carols everywhere you look, and big turkey dinners being advertised. I wouldn't have guessed that English people eat turkey at Christmas, but I guess you learn something new every day. Anyway, there's lots of music going on, so I am a happy Pony.

I also got to see a panto! I'd heard about them, and then it turned out that the graduate students of Corpus have a big Christmas turkey dinner and put on a panto, so I went. The turkey dinner wasn't really anything to write home about, at least not compared with the food that Corpus is capable of producing, but the panto was hilarious! It was a parody of Frozen, and I'm now really glad I watched that movie on the plane to SEM in Pittsburgh last month. My fellow . . . Fellows said that the graduate-student panto wasn't quite fully traditional, but it did include two performers getting dressed up in drag (including the Reverend who is the warden of the graduate campus), and everyone seemed to be having a fantastic time.

And then there was the Benefactors' Feast. I'll write more about that later. For now, all I'll say is that it was spectacle beyond spectacle. O.M.F.G.