Ruby wedding anniversary

Husband's university friends have been married much longer than us. Today a couple celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary by inviting loads of their long term friends for a trip on the River Isis from Oxford. The boat was covered with ruby red balloons and streamers, with around 80 friends. We ate, we drank, we talked. The weather was great, neither too hot nor too cold.

One of husband's friends from college (see reunion here) is partner to a fellow post-graduate student at the Open University, so we spent some time happily comparing notes on our progress, our supervisors, theory (Bourdieu if you're interested), and we admonished anyone who dared ask, "When are you finishing?" That sort of question is one you just do not ask a post grad student - it's as rude as asking a woman how old she is - as this grad comic illustrates.

And just to add to that insult, someone asked me if I'd used my bus pass to get there today. I'm not only too young to get a bus pass yet, but they've raised the age at which I'll be eligible for it. So insults, unintentional insults flew round the boat.

These insults were not as bad though as those in today's Times Style magazine, in which AA Gill slated The Oxford Ashmolean restaurant and Oxford people - calling its female students "lesbians in blue stocking", and the restaurant "full of very old people. A sea of thin white hair." As the director of the Ashmolean met fellow PG and FPG's partner this morning, he was railing about the review. FPG's partner has something to do with the Ashmolean museum so the encounter meant they nearly missed the boat, and then they wouldn't have been able to tell me how rude the Times was.

It was a lovely day with lots of lovely intelligent and cheerful people to talk to. Perhaps AA Gill of the Times doesn't know what intelligent conversation can be about.

I wonder which college rejected him.