Well, I'm not able to connect to the Queen's WiFi. Looks like I'll be hunting down some technical ninjas after all. I don't know what I did wrong, though - I followed the instructions on the WiFi handout they distributed yesterday so it should have worked... I probably faffed up somewhere. Maybe chose the WiFi program for the wrong operating system or something. I'll have to try it again tonight, when I'm at home.

I've just had my first ever Philosophy lecture! Contrary to yesterday's worries, it wasn't a tutorial - I forgot that there are lecture halls in the PFC that aren't on the ground floor! Anyway, it was a strange experience - the lecture was an introduction to Philosophy, which I'd assumed would have been the one I missed last week; I'd expected to come to the lecture completely clueless as to the course structure, to be thrown into some hardcore philosophising.

Academically, then, all is well in the world. I feel on top form in all subjects. English Language is a joy, English Literature is a dream... and from just one Philosophy lecture, I can tell I'm going to enjoy this next year very much! I managed four pages of notes, which I'm quite happy with, and got a good feel for what was going on.

Next up? My English Language tutorial. This will be after an hour of sitting in the Students' Union, harnessing all my willpower to resist the smell of coffee, the hunger in my gut and the colourful displays dotted about advertising a poster sale that's on. Must... resist... urge to spend!

As you can expect, I've already thrown myself into the creative writing side of my course, despite the fact that I haven't managed to attend the workshop yet. It's tying in a little bit with my English Literature module as I'm learning about forms of writing (for example, a villanelle or a sonnet in poetry) and then writing my own. I've already written two sonnets and I'm working on a villanelle that I'm not particularly keen on; it's called 'The Fuss' and it's more an exercise of the villanelle form than a good poem.

A villanelle is a very rigid form of poem which only has two rhyming sounds throughout. It consists of five tercets followed by a quatrain, and the end line of each tercet has a line which repeats in alternation with the end line of its predecessor. Both lines are then used in the quatrain to conclude. So what I've done is very much what William Empson did in 'Missing Dates' - chose a rhyme scheme and two lines to repeat first, then wrote my villanelle around them.

The result is a poem that's obscure (another feature of the villanelle is its beautiful clarity), jarring, awkward. I won't scrap 'The Fuss' entirely, but what I can now do is learn from my mistakes and hopefully come up with something a bit more fluid. I'll finish 'The Fuss', identify exactly where I went wrong and try it from a different angle.

Hah! I've just helped a young lass from Leeds out with her WiFi, despite my own failed attempts to penetrate its Internetty depths. She's popped off to the library now to get the program you need to install/speak to the IT Ninjas there; I hope it works for her, at least!

As for me, soon I'll be off to my English Language tutorial. And to be honest, I think I might get some food first...