Life on a bike

Today was one of those winter days when it never gets properly light and it feels like dawn all day; a particularly grey dawn, the sky low and heavy and full of rain. I spent another good day at the novel, writing up the bits I wrote yesterday longhand onto the laptop, and then going off to the coffee shop to mingle with the students and bask in their particularly studenty white noise - conditions, weirdly, that I find really good for writing in. This is the habit I seem to have acquired. Typing in the morning, writing longhand with a latte in the afternoon, in pencil in big notebooks.

When I couldn't concentrate any more, I wandered round the town in the dusk and found myself going through the ironwork gate into St Mary's quad, home of the divinity faculty. There's the most wonderful old tree there, with bikes parked underneath. It's a fabulous life, that of a university student, isn't it? I wish I'd realised that when I was 19 and came here first as an English undergraduate, instead of being so hesitant and feeling so lost.