why the JCR is awesome

I've realised, as of late, that my blog's aim hasn't involved the teach-people-about-Oxford element that some of my friends' blogs do. In the midst of the part of term where I do nothing interesting--unless you're willing to consider sitting, immobile, for ten hours out of every day in the Bodleian interesting, in which case fair enough--I have to stretch a little bit for a blog post.

However! So much of the depths of college life remain unplumbed that I have loads of blog posts ready to be written. The JCR--in which I am pictured above with some of my favourite people--is consistently the social hub of college. The term stands for Junior Common Room, and it actually refers simultaneously both to the room itself and to its constituent members: basically, every student in college. The undergraduates are really what we mean when we refer to the JCR (we postgraduates have our own middle common room, aptly abbreviated to MCR--more on that later). Consequently, we feel just a tiny bit out of place when in the JCR, which is why we have to congregate in above-pictured large groups.

Anyway, stuff happens in the JCR. A couple of times a day people gather to drink tea and chat; the college's bar is situated in the JCR, meaning that it becomes popular after dark; most Fridays, you'll find people dancing and drinking and wearing silly costumes of some variety up there. Every college has one, and every one is different. Think Harry Potter, when you finally get to read about other Houses' common rooms? Gryffindor's is all plush and cosy; Ravenclaw's is austere and impressive; Slytherin's is like a dungeon. College JCRs, and college bars, are like that too. Ours isn't the biggest or the most elaborately decorated, but it feels more like home than many of the others I've seen.

My friends at other colleges are surprised by my hanging out with "JCR people"--with undergraduates. Like US undergrads, they're mostly between 18 and 21 (though a BA here generally requires three years, not four), meaning that they're a couple of years younger than I am. Fortunately, Regent's is small enough that those divisions lose a certain amount of meaning: why wouldn't we come to the bops and the parties and the socials?

Anyway. It's almost time for Brew, which means I'm headed up to the JCR to get a muffin--right before I go back to the library for the rest of my life.