What To Buy Your Postgrad For Christmas

It's been a long term. But somehow, finally it's over, and your pet postgrad has emerged blinking into the dim, watery December sunlight, shivering and mumbling, "What, it's Christmas? No it's not. What day is it?"

They are too busy and confused to write their own Christmas list, so here are some suggestions of my own about what to buy them.

Paperblanks: because you need to feel important

A nice diary

A hardback one with an attractive cover, good quality paper, and lots of space per day for writing ESSAY DEADLINE!!! in pink highlighter and underlining it five times. Paperblanks and Moleskines are reliable favourites, and luxurious enough to make a really nice present. This diary will save your life (or degree, which at this point is essentially the same thing), because it will help you keep track of what day it is.

Collections of poetry and short stories

Because you don't have time to read whole novels any more, but maybe you can fit in a poem or two in between The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Photographs Objects Histories: On The Materiality of Images and Photography, Anthropology and History. Sob sob. These are on my list:

Coffee syrups

Anything to make your seventh coffee of the day go down easier.

Grad school breakfast.

Literary prints posters

These will make you feel like an intellectual in front of all your smart new PhD friends, and inspire you when you think 5000 words is impossibly long and you'll be writing this essay forever. Take "Write drunk; edit sober" to heart as thesis advice; it can only help.

RELEVANT.

Non-rustling library snacks

After hour 5 in the library, you will need more energy because you are starving and on the edge of tears, but whipping out giant bags of Doritos and popcorn, while emotionally satisfying, will swiftly turn you into the most hated person in Oxford. Consider decanting some yummy, energy-releasing snacks into cute portion-sized jars and pots from which they can be surreptitiously eaten under the desk. I can recommend these peanuts and dried cranberries drizzled with dark chocolate by my very own hand (it looks impressive, elegant and Christmassy, and took all of five minutes) - also try other dried fruit like mango or pineapple, bite sized brownies (although avoid crumbly foods), jelly babies, and caramelised nuts. Drizzle it all with extra chocolate, because really, I've been in the library for five hours. Have mercy.

A graze box subscription would also work perfectly for this.


Cookbooks
Because if you're going to take stop working long enough to eat something that takes more than 0.5 minutes to prepare, it had better be worth it. Failing that, you can look at the pictures and dream of the day you will have enough free time and money to make any of it. Here are some I have my wistful eye on:

Is this not the most beautiful cookbook you have ever seen

Earrings

Because sometimes they let you out of the library and require you to interact with other humans, sometimes quite important ones at quite fancy occasions, and you need to impress them with your good taste in classic rich lady jewellery. I'm into gold knot earrings, and tiny ones with elegant, non-sparkly stones like these gold and garnet ones from Pia.

MAC lipsticks

Because feeling pretty sometimes is helpful in avoiding a total meltdown. I personally am hoping Crosswires (left) will give me a youthful glow, to help me blend in with all the 18 year old Brasenose freshers in the Radcliffe Camera.

A Spotify Premium subscription

Because nothing - NOTHING - ruins your essay writing flow faster and breaks your concentration more irretrievably than loud, inane adverts for Sourz shots, Ford dealerships, anti-wrinkle cream and Christmas compilation albums. Please just let me listen to the calming sounds of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach in peace, Spotify. Please.

Stuff with pugs on

It's the little things.

Urban Outfitters

Etsy

Etsy

All I Want For Christmas Is MORE STUFF

1. This adorable set of flavoured vodka minis from Sainsbury's. I will be the queen of cocktails! (Read: I will mix them all with cranberry juice and I will like it..)


2. This beautiful Frida Kahlo t-shirt. She is my totally-not-caring-about-conventional-norms-of-femininity hero, and this shirt is all kinds of cool.

3. Benefit Lemon-Aid Eyelid Primer. I'm always trying to get rid of my undereye bags, and the yellow colour of this primer looks like it'd be good for covering up dark circles. Plus, it's called Lemon Aid! I want to be aided by lemons!

All I Want For Christmas Is...

It's November 15th, that means Christmas is coming! It's not too early to make a list, right? Right? ...Right?

1. A fancy diary like a fancy lady

I like pretty notebooks, I like organising things, I like writing notes. Fancy diaries are a match made in heaven. Right now I'm using a £2.99 one from Rymans, but Paperblanks are sooo lovely that it hurts to look at them in shops. And because they're diaries they last a year! Price per use comparison? £12.99/365 = TOTALLY WORTH IT. Plus, you can find them a little bit cheaper on Amazon.

Things I Am Doing Today

1. Wearing my new blue dress.
2. Wearing some new blue nail varnish.
3. Going into Cambridge for the day.
4. Going to the Fitzwilliam to see the Tomb Treasures of Han China, which was spectacular.

Gold seal

Jade dragon ornament

5. Having lunch with my mama and finding our waiter was the most beautiful man I've ever seen in real life. Seriously, he was so pretty I could barely stumble out "Bacon and brie panini and a Diet Coke, please" without bursting into tears when he looked me in the eye.
6. Going to the Anthropology and Archaeology museum, which is also an utter delight.

Can I move in here?

7. Listening to Paul Simon's Graceland for a World Music class and drowning in white guilt for enjoying it so much.

8. Having a barbecue and eating strawberries. Yeeerrrmmm.

9. Packing for a weekend trip to Scotland.

10. Reading Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. I'm on page 70. So far: intrigued. Reminds me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Totally Awesome Women in Fiction

            It’s hard to find novels with female characters who read like actual women. In this list, I’ve tried to present women who lead their own lives, who aren’t sidelined for men, whose stories don’t revolve around other people. That meant I had to cut some obvious candidates (sorry, Hermione).

This cover is ugly, but come on, that is one
 memorable flying corset lady

1. Fevvers – Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter.

Carter’s novels are glorious messes of womanliness, sexuality, hope, magic and delight. Sophie/Fevvers is a big, tall, cheerily vulgar and secretly revolutionary aerialiste with a pair of enormous wings growing from her shoulders. The star of a very strange circus, Fevvers knows the value of her body and with astonishing agency is prepared to milk it for all that it’s worth.

Fave moment: The spot-on description of her as a “celestial fishwife”.

2. Jo March – Little Women, Louisa May Alcott.

Confession: my favourite was always Amy, because she was arty and a bit of a princess. I might be the only person ever to have been pleased when she married Laurie. However, Jo is clearly the feminist hero of the book, questioning and challenging the expectations of gender in society. Tomboy Jo longs to run away and be a drummer in the army, and goes merrily through life whistling, running around and burning the backs of her dresses. She cuts off all her hair midway through the novel. By the end, though, she’s matured and adapted into a woman and a writer, without losing the wilful temperament and questioning personality which make her unique.

Fave moment: When Jo marches into a newspaper office and has some short stories secretly published in the paper.

3. Precious Ramotswe – The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith.

The beautiful Jill Scott being Precious
in the pretty good TV adaptation

            Mma Ramotswe is a badass small business owner in Botswana, a self-declared detective relying solely on one stiff textbook, one secretary, red bush tea and her own intuition. She has a sharp mind, a kind and forgiving heart and a core of steel, and builds up her business with her honesty, love and intelligence, finding missing husbands, dogs and children. When she gets married  and adopts some children, it is on her own terms. Mma Ramotswe carries her traditional build with a sense of her own worth, and backs down to nobody.

Fave moment: When she shoots a crocodile dead, then cuts it open to rummage through the contents of its stomach.

4. Elizabeth Bennet – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

            What many readers of this text (and many modern romance writers) miss is that this is not a novel about Mr Darcy. It’s barely even about their relationship. It’s a novel about Lizzie Bennet, who is spirited, observant and independent, and spends approximately zero time moping around pining over Darcy.

Fave moment: The pages which detail Lizzie’s thoughts after she reads Darcy’s letter in the grove of Charlotte’s house. It’s a triumph of realistic thinking, honesty and self-criticism. She cries, “Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly… Till this moment I never knew myself.”

5. Orlando – Orlando, Virginia Woolf

            Okay, it’s a bit iffy having Orlando on the list since she starts the novel as a man, but there can be no denying that once she transforms into a woman, her life becomes a rigorous examination of sex and gender, so she counts. Based on Virginia’s bisexual, cross-dressing lover Vita Sackville-West, Orlando skirts around and occasionally smashes through gender boundaries across several centuries, accompanied by her biographer’s ironic notes on gender and society.

Vita Sackville West

Fave moment: On the ship on her way back from Turkey, when Orlando stretches out her legs and consequently a sailor falls off the mast, causing her to realise that she must learn how to ‘be’ a woman acceptably in society: “She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires’, she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging from my own short experience) obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.’” Also, to get in the spirit of being a woman properly, she bangs the ship’s captain. Ahhhh yeahhhh.

6. Moll Flanders – The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe.

            How many novels with whores in do you know that are written from the whore’s own perspective? What about one of the earliest modern novels ever written? Like Carter’s Fevvers, Defoe’s Moll Flanders is an excellently vulgar indomitable spirit, “Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, as last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent.” How can you argue with that?

Fave moment: Moll’s low, low point of robbing a family as their house burns down. Dastardly genius.

7. Offred – The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.

            Offred, faced with an unimaginably bleak situation, refuses to become what Marcuse called “one-dimensional” – someone who cannot imagine society being any different from the way that it is. Unlike Ofglen 2, Offred never stops dreaming of another, free life.

Fave moment: When Offred steals pats of butter to moisturise with. So small and so heartbreaking, and explains so much about the world in which she lives.

8. Matilda – Matilda, Roald Dahl.

The Terrifying Trunch. Srsly you guys, look at
those arms.

            I wanted Matilda to be my best friend as a child. Hell, I still do. Matilda is a smart, bookish little girl whose brain is so highly developed that having her creativity stifled means she gains actual magic powers that let her move things around without touching them. Matilda is perky and hilarious and she likes going to the library, and she knows how to get the better of her horrible parents and Miss Trunchbull with a series of ingenious tricks, like supergluing her dad’s hat to his head. Matilda is my hero.

Fave moment: When the newt in the jug of water falls onto Miss Trunchbull and she goes flailing around the classroom. Also, when Matilda gets to move in with the delightful Miss Honey. Also, when the children recite the Mrs Difficulty rhyme and Miss Trunchbull says “Why are all these women married!?” This is all-round an incredibly satisfying book.

Thoughts, kittens? Who are your favourite women in fiction? For discussion purposes, here are some of the other ideas I had:

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Fermina Daza (Love in the Time of Cholera), Clare DeTamble (The Time Traveler’s Wife), Winnie Louie (The Kitchen God’s Wife), Dora and Nora Chance (Wise Children), Sonmi-451, Luisa Rey (Cloud Atlas), Cordelia (This is All), Molly Bloom (Ulysses), Sophie (Sophie’s World), Rosemary Hoyt (Tender is the Night).