Dining with the Admiralty

most nerve-racking night of my life. When my tutor asked me to come to dinner after the lecture on thursday, i thought it would be a whole crowd of pgrads and profs out for a curry. i did not think it would be me, my tutor, another prof of english, a visiting prof from spain, and an Oxford Don around a table in a very posh resturaunt. I was the only student there! I was, by several orders of magnitude, the most junior member of the party. i wanted to paticipate in the polite converstion, but i just kept thinking about how there was not a single thing i could say about anything medieval that every one of these people doesn't already know. talk about intimidating. But they were all very friendly. The department paid for my dinner (thank god - mains started at 15 quid, never mind starters, pud, and wine that flowed like niagara fucking falls) as well as the cab ride from the lecture to the resturaunt. I had an absolutely lovely evening, aside from being scared out of my pants the whole time. I only spoke when spoken to (better to remain silent and have people think me a fool than to open my yap and remove all doubt), and managed to contribute a couple personal anecdotes to the conversation. But here's what baffles: I have NO IDEA why I was invited.