What sort of instruction is 'semi-formal', I ask you? 'Smart but casual' I can cope with, but this seems to make no sense. Is it supposed to be the top or bottom half that's formal, or maybe the front, back, left or right.

Anyway, I donned my suit with a pale yellow shirt and Wallace and Gromit tie and went to call on Rachel, an English lass in the same residence building as me. She had plumped for simply trousers and a nice purple top, so I worried that I'd be overdressed. Together we made our way to Celebration Hall, which during the day is The Wokery, serving freshly cooked Chinese cuisine, for the International Student's Club end of year dinner and dance.

The hall is located in the basement of one of the university buildings, so we went in, descended one level and promptly got lost. After a while of wandering the corridors, we turned round and bumped into some people who seemed to be following us, though it turned out
that they had a better idea of where to go than we did, so we switched rôles to become the followers.

Thus we eventually arrived, in plenty of time to have a talk and a beer before the meal. A very nice meal it was too and self-service so you could have as much as you wanted from all sorts of different dishes. Wine was placed on the tables later on, in time to go with the second helping of roast potatoes and beef in gravy.

When desert was just about finished, we were called upon to sing the Twelve Days of Christmas competitively¹. Our table's Ten lord's a-leaping was fairly good, but we couldn't compete with those who had Five golden² rings, four calling birds'. After this, we were visited by a decidedly short and thin Father Christmas, who had presents for all those who had been good enough to own winning raffle tickets.

It was now time for the aforementioned dance, so over to Rhythm Rob, the DJ, who had an unfortunate penchant for putting on weird rappy music that no-one could dance to. Still, it was fun when he managed to produce some decent hits, though would you believe neither Slade nor the Pogues featured in his collection? More happily he failed to produce Sclub 7 or someone like that when Rachel asked.

On the following day, the IVCF³ had a Christmas pot-luck supper (which means everyone takes a dish along with them to share), starting at seven o'clock. Unfortunately the late night caused me to oversleep, so my use of Saturday to do some shopping that really needed doing meant that I had not got very long to prepare my dish - a crumble. Unfortunately my habitual supermarket, Ken & Sandy's No Frills ⁴ was unable to provide the caster sugar mentioned in the recipe, even after an old lady had told me it's called 'fruit sugar' over here (why didn't I use an American search engine instead of Ask Jeeves?), so I headed for a larger one in a mall called University plaza, at which I bought some tinned apple pie filling (rhubarb being unavailiable) and some cream, entirely forgeting about the sugar.

It was rather disconcerting that I was sat next to someone on her way to the event on the bus when I hadn't even begun baking, but she must have been twenty minutes early, so it wasn't that bad. Of course, it takes distinctly longer than twenty minutes to make a crumble and I had a fifteen minute walk ahead of me. At seven, the thing was happily in the oven and I decided that Rachel, with whom I was again walking down, would be wondering where I'd got to, so I grabbed my keys and started to head out. I say started, because before I reached the door, there was a knock at it.

Whilst Rachel waited in our rather bare lounge area, I got dressed up. Feeling my garb the previous night to have been well judged and bearing in mind that this event had a similar dress code, I put on a new pair of black trousers⁵, a white shirt and waistcoat, reasoning that with a longer walk than yesterday, I would want to wear my winter coat rather than my flimsier suit jacket.

So, gathering the hot dish into my backpack, which provided a small amount of insulation, we headed to the church hall where the gathering was taking place. I was, predictably, rather overdressed and got some comment about a comedy character from Carol, which I didn't understand. I requisitioned an oven to let my crumble complete its baking process and helped myself to some meat and pasta. Please note that when using a paper plate it is unwise to take too much gravy.

Once we were all well and truly stuffed with food and had had a little time in which to digest it, games began. Firstly, a line or two of a Christmas song was read out and the idea was to sing the next line. Unfortunately, many of the songs seemed to have had their play limited to just one continent and even on the ones I did know, I was never picked as having been first. Still, I won't sulk. Much. After a game involving rolling dice and stealing presents from people, the British contingent headed for the pub, though no-one else could be tempted to join us.

Guess what, I was dead cultured on Saturday, me. Went to Toronto to see a performance of Handel's Messiah. Using a special young persons offer, a bunch of us got tickets for ten dollars each, which meant that the bus fare was more than the entry price. The booking system was over the internet and turns out not to be automatic (they're working on it), but to merely record information for the staff to look at. Therefore, if you haven't registered properly you arrive at the theatre to find you haven't got a ticket. They were very nice about it and sorted out another for me. It took a few minutes, but we didn't miss any of the singing, arriving during the instrumental bit at the beginning, presumably causing rich besuited folk to mutter about 'youngsters'. Not that we were the last to turn up; some people came in during the gap after the first chorus, I think the staff had kept them waiting outside so as not to disturb us.

I enjoyed the performance and afterwards I got to show off by explaining to the bemused pair in our party exactly why we all stood up during the 'Hallelujah' chorus.

That's why this article refers to events of weeks ago. In order to get this done reasonably quickly, instead of more long stories of what I've been up to, here's a few short comments on Canada and stuff.

Many people are interested in Britain, so I often find myself being asked questions, one of the most bizarre was, What's a 'chuffing Nora'?, not a phrase picked up from me, by the way. I just about managed to convince Laura that whoever had said that hadn't been insulting her.

We've finally had some snow. Only an inch or two, so I'm still waiting for it to be proven that there'll be more than I'm used to. Apparently in an average year it comes to above your knees. Well, we'll see.

Bagpuss

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