Into the swing again

Uni's back in full swing at last. After several weeks of dabbling in work (I know, it's shocking), the BVC/BPTC element of the degree is kicking off again this week, and as such I now have less time than a clock with no hands (a poor analogy, but I'm rushed for time before Football Focus).

It's all kicking off for real on Monday with Criminal Advocacy. It's a plea in mitigation for a (fictional) 61-year-old woman guilty of theft in breach of trust. She's pleaded guilty, has no precons and has various mitigating circumstances. The guidelines say that the starting point should be 12 weeks in custody, but I reckon that a community sentence would be sufficient (as does whoever prepared the pre-sentence report - not a bad person to have on my side).

Following that, it's Drafting for Wednesday. On this occasion, I'm drafting a particulars of claim for a 16-year-old kid who was knocked down on his bike in Durham by a driver paying no attention to the road. Apparently this should only take a couple of hours, but this is the Bar Exempting route; it'll take at least 4. But it's still better than the 14 I used to spend on writing opinions last year.

Law and Literature's started off nicely. A couple of short stories (including one from Ursula K. Le Guin), followed by another short story for the next week, and now the first novel, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. I finished it last night to a resounding meh. I was indifferent in the extreme. The lead character was difficult to sympathise with, being a woman- and child-beater determined that his sons would be men and not 'women', all because he had father issues. For 120 pages, I found that I really couldn't care less what happened to him, which probably wasn't the point. I only cared in the last 30 pages, when the English decided to impose the Empire on the small Nigerian villages where this bloke lived. Read for Law and Lit, I have my opinions on the legal structures identified, but I'm keeping those for Monday evening's session.

Away from academia, I got Moon yesterday and watched it at silly o'clock. Immediately after it finished, I felt the urge to watch it again. It was awesome, in the proper sense. More intelligent SF, to say the least. Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is on the dark side of the Moon, fulfilling a 3-year contract to provide the Earth with its electricity. He has 2 weeks left on his contract, when things start to happen. We're talking intelligent SF on the 2001: A Space Odyssey scale in the end. Deception, advanced science and a computer that doesn't take after HAL too much combine to make it a compelling film which I will have playing while I write my skeleton argument this afternoon.

And it's Football Focus time. Time for a break, lunch, and Dan Walker explaining that the Premier League is the most exciting league in the world (again).