Mormon Replacement Therapy

I'd like to share some advice: if you are female, don't tell almost spherical drunkards in bars that you are a polygamist. This is even more pertinent if you are not actually a polygamist at all, and are standing between two of your male 'friends' at the time.

Oh yeah, and this.

I arrived late to my own talk because someone had arranged their car on the rail tracks, but overall this was doubleplusgood, because I can't pay attention to what I'm saying for a full hour anyway, and eventually slide into scornfully describing much lauded discoveries as 'the second coming'.

There is a standard format to talks in my field, which goes something like this:

1: With the help of the seminar organiser, spend 15 minutes pissing around with the projector, rebooting the computer and jabbing buttons randomly. Only really necessary if your computer bares the sacred sigil of Gates.

2: Start by insincerely thanking the seminar organiser for inviting you.

3: Go through an unnecessarily detailed talk outline slide, which people will either immediately forget, or use to plan the time of their escape.

4: Attempt to explain what you've been doing while simultaneously fielding questions from the demented, the firm graspers of the wrong end of the stick and worst of all those who understand better than you do what's going on.

5: Finish with a clear summary slide for politeness' sake, so that everyone can pretend they understood something. This helps avoid awkward silence when the organiser invites further questions from the audience.

I think it went rather well. When I got back, I met a man on the street who asked me for money so that he could buy hot water. Then, on recognising my accent he sang me a song by his favourite English punk band. And he threw in some bad jokes for free. I think he said his name was Dope.

On Saturday I went to a birthday party, where I listened to couples talk about houses and children. Afterwards we played one of those games where you have to describe a famous person without using their name and the rest of your team has to guess who it is. In the spirit of continuing equality we were split into boys versus girls. The boys won round one, demonstrating their superior descriptive and interpretive skills. In round two we were only allowed to use three words to describe the person, and I was the first, though not the last to demonstrate an inability to understand simple rules. The boys won again, though by a far smaller margin, demonstrating a similar ability between the sexes to recall tawdry celebrity information. In round three, no words were allowed and the name had to be guessed from actions alone. Performances of 'Monica Lewinsky', 'John Edwards' and 'Rihanna' were especially moving. The girls dominated this round, demonstrating their far superior abilities at pretending to be people they aren't. Then we wrapped up with a display of basic innumeracy.

Term has started and the students are back, writhing through the streets and choking the bars and coffee shops. As always, I am above all dismayed by the return of the joggers; ponytails, tits and knees ricocheting everywhere like marionettes hewn from enraged weasels.