i’m bleary-eyed: the professor just worked through an equitable tracing into mixed funds breach of trust problem. i am watching his lips move, i see the marker flying over the whiteboard, but they are underwater motion pictures merely. around me, listlessness, sluggardly incomprehension. it’s not that many law students are bad at maths (they’re mostly not — some of them do double degrees in business or accounting, and many want to go into banking/insolvency/corporate law), and, moreover, i realise quite well this is the kind of problem that is merely tedious (because of the calculations) rather than actually difficult (it is mostly primary school fractions, isn’t it?), but all of us are exhausted. in the canteen to get coffee (fourth cup today) i keep overhearing the same thing: a mid-sessional exam plus two research papers within a three week period is too much. most people were still working this morning, making final pre-submission tweaks before the jaws of the deadline closed upon us. fortunately that was the second to last major paper — from now till the exams there’s only one more drafting assignment: and then it’s just the exams to go. for the last three weeks i’ve worked through my weekends, all the time craving to read things that have nothing to do with work — literary criticism, new poetry, new essays; to go to the cinema and the theatre, to exhibitions, and to see friends, to have dinner out at interesting restaurants, to go on long walks, to simply be.