Local rituals

This morning was Graduation Day at the University of York. They have two of them every year, one in winter and one in summer. It is the occasion at which everyone who has earned a diploma in the half-year before can have it ceremonially handed out, in rented robes and with Mom and Dad present.

At the U Twente we have almost done away with massive central award ceremonies. Up until last year there used to be one for the Propedeuse, meaning the first year of the Bachelors (which is not even a proper diploma), but that is abandoned as of this year. Then there is the Bachelor diploma award ceremony: that's really the only collective one left, but even there it is organised per subject, the psychologists are not mixed up with the physicists (God forbid!). For the Masters you typically get your diplioma at the final presentation of your thesis: family is present, ready to be amazed at the stuff their kids now know, but it is a small, individual affair. Well, not so small if you have a lot of friends, but it never goes above fifty - except in the case of Mark Timmer, who has a lot of friends. At the top of the ladder there is the PhD defense, which I had occasion to blog about before (Viva la Viva): for this, in the Netherlands at least, the ceremonial function has all but taken over.

Anyway, two (ex-)PhD students I got to know here have graduated in the past half year: Chris Poskitt (whom I am trying to set up a collaboration with right now, and in fact turns out to be one of Mark Timmer's friends!) and Simon Pould (who helped organise the Computer Science Quiz in November last year). They were due to receive their diplomas today. I seriously considered going to the ceremony just to see how this is done here and to be able to compare, but it turned out you had to have tickets, which of course I didn't. There is a second location with a live stream on a big screen, but even for that you had to have tickers, which I also didn't. In the end I wasn't even very sorry, as they decided to have the ceremony at the to me very odd hour of 9:30 on a Saturday morning: attending would have meant giving up my last chance at another parkrun as well as my last body pump session.

In training

So I went to those instead. I can say very proudly that I achieved an average of 12 km/h over 5 km of horse race track! For me this is very fast. At high school we had something called the Cooper test, which consisted of 12 minutes of running and trying to cover as much distance as you could. Then, at the age of 16 or so, I was glad to get to 2400 m, which is also 12 km/h but over a much shorter stretch. The sporty types got as far as 3000 m, and indeed among the hundreds of parkrunners there are also some who finish in way under 20 minutes. Just consider: professional marathon runners cover 5 km in something like 15 minutes, but then they do this 8 times in a row... ouch! (To make the picture complete, the world record stands at slightly over 12,5 minutes, which is twice as fast as I can do it.)

I can also report that running followed by pumping is actually too much of a good thing. When I did this two weeks ago I had to take a nap in the afternoon, and today I very nearly did the same thing. I was kept awake only by the need to take care of some urgent work-related things that I had neglected during the week, as well as the last batch of washing I will do here.

The plan for the evening consisted of seeing Inside Llewyn Davis, the newest movie by the Coen Brothers, with dinner at the cinema first. I chose to go for the 19:15 screening as I expected that to be relatively quiet, but nothing could be further from the truth: I got about the very last seat, way up in a corner.

The Coen Brothers (Joel and Ethan) are directors of incredible diversity and usually very high quality, and this particular movie has about the best reviews you will ever see. Had I known what a bleak picture it paints, however, I probably would have given it a miss. The main character, the folk singer Llewyn Davis, is really going nowhere but down. How many bridges can you burn? It felt a lot like The Wrestler, another much-praised movie about an end-of-career performer who makes nothing but bad choices. I heartily dislike this kind of story, both in movies and in books: I'm looking for edification not despair. I think I wrote it before: I am an escapist at heart.

Tomorrow I will not go for a bike tour, last chance though it is. The weather is too changeable, like today's as well: sunny but windy one moment, pouring heavily and even more windy the next. The Yorkshire Dales will have to wait for another time and a more clement season.