SECTION 2: REPORTS ON THE YEAR
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their help in organising social events. We had successful Dessert Nights both in Michaelmas and Hilary terms as in the past few years, but I regret my plans for a Farewell Party with strawberries and bubbly had to be cancelled this year. I also wish to thank our Admissions Officer, Scarlett Nash, for her excellent work for us to attract and being able to admit Visiting Students of the highest calibre. We hope to be able to welcome a new cohort of excellent Visiting Students in Michaelmas term 2020 despite the exceptional circumstances we are facing this year. Outi Aarnio
FROM THE WRITER-INRESIDENCE Sophie Jai (nearly) completed her debut novel Wild Fires during the 2020 Hilary term, before and during the UK lockdown. I had been awake for almost three days straight, both of travelling from another writing residency in India to Teddy Hall, and from knowing that I had sixty days to finish my novel, which, at that point, only had thirty-one thousand words to its name. On the top floor of the Besse building, I woke up two days after my arrival. I didn’t know where I was – I had not heard bells tolling in my sleep before – and I didn’t care. The bed was warm, and the room was cool. In my sleep I dreamt of my novel missing its deadline, crashing and burning. My characters scolded me, nagged me, loomed over me at eight feet tall in blackness. I thought to myself, I was running out of time to write and here I was – sleeping! The gall. I slept for two more days. When I awoke, I wandered outside to the backyard cemetery and in careless, bad posture sat there for a long time. It was a brilliantly beautiful day; though a little cold and the bench wet with dew, the sun was out, the sky was blue, before me was a library that was open 24 hours, and I had not heard a single voice but my own telling me I had to write a novel – my first novel – in fifty-six days. News of the virus began filling up my phone, fast. From early-February to mid-March, I tried to write every single day – that is, I showed up to the keyboard. Days on which I wrote ten words counted just as much as the days I wrote a thousand words. Those were thinking days, simmering days, hallucinating-in-front-of-the-keyboard and coping-with-the-hourly-news days. I wrote at the Radcliffe Camera and Duke Humfrey’s Library as much as I could for inspiration, but instead found myself sitting there, smiling. Such beauty was not good for writing about grief. I took to returning to my Teddy Hall flat and drawing the curtains.