What goes with wine and conversation?

Cheese! I can't believe how much I love Stilton cheese! It all started with a heavenly pear and Stilton salad, and I just keep thinking of more things to put it on. I'm a fussy eater, meticulously mindful of expiration dates, and therefore generally repulsed by the idea of wilfully consuming mold. But somehow that odd, slightly metallic flavour has overcome my inhibitions. The only thing better than a fine Stilton? Oxford Blue, a local variant we've just discovered. Yum.

I hope everyone had a great Easter weekend. We wandered around the Magdalen College deer park (they still raise them to serve at High Table) and Christ Church meadow on an absolutely gorgeous afternoon. We did housework. We played squash. Sunday night we were invited to dinner chez Christina and Mike, fellow Canadians who are living in Oxford until early June. They made a fantastic meal, complemented by plenty of red wine from their recent weekend in Lisbon. It was so nice to spend hours chatting with old friends - we've known Christina since our year in Edinburgh. (I've been experiencing friend withdrawal symptoms such as talking to myself and making jokes that noone here gets because they haven't known me since the 1980s or grown up watching The Beachcombers.)

One of the cardinal rules of blogging is, of course, that you don't talk about your job. So I won't go into specifics, but I'm going to be a Senior Editor (woo-hoo!) in educational publishing. I'm excited and nervous, and dreading having to wake up early again. If you want more detail, you'll have to email me! In the meantime I have two weeks to perfect the art of idleness, achieve an immaculate floor, and build a professional wardrobe in a country where my shoe size and pant length exceed all bounds of normalcy.