Super Cres

My room

2012-02-11T00:01:00.001+01:00

The wonderful world of tabehoudai and sweets paradise

2012-01-30T17:25:00.002+01:00

'Tabehoudai' was one of the first words I picked up when I arrived in Japan, it means eat-as-much-as-you-like. One of our guilty pleasures is to go to tabehoudai. Not too often, we aren't complete animals, but just once a month perhaps, when the new scholarship arrives, we will feast on tabehoudai.

There are various tabehoudai available in Japan. It's quite popular because I suppose, In japan at least, it's an effective business model. Japanese portion sizes are the equivalent of western entrées. That is, until a large group of westerners come into your restaurant and consume ungodly quantities of food. You can also get nomihoudai (all you can drink) but it's fairly expensive (about 4000 yen per head).

One Tabehoudai we found was a pizza one (very Japanese, I know!). You pay a thousand yen and eat as much pizza as you can handle. My favourite has to be Sweets Paradise though (also known as Suipara).

It's a cake buffet. They have some savoury things (like curry, soups, pasta, sandwiches, salads). But the real crowd-bringer is the cake. They usually have around 30 or so cakes on display (which are regularly replenished!) - cheesecake, mousse, berry cakes, baked banana cake, chocolate cake, chocolate soufflé, fruitcake, apple bake cake, carrot cake, tiramisu, pudding roll, flakey pastry and custard pie, crème brulees, choux puffs, puddings, lemon creams, jellies, chocolate fountains, ice cream, fruit salads, waffles - help yourself!

You pay 1400 yen and you get 70 minutes to pig out, then they turf you out. The best part is the frenetic, panicky music playing the whole time to panic you into eating faster, but the trick is to pace yourself.

This was (one of) my plates last year. Look at all that cake. No regard for presentation whatsoever. I ate five of these plates and I felt bloody FANTASTIC afterwards. Don't wanna think about how many calories are in that. It was decadence itself.

You know you've been listening to too much Two-Tone when you've bought yourself a hat

2012-01-05T23:29:00.003+01:00

Rightio, haven't blogged properly in a while.

I have been going through a cultural crisis. Finding it really difficult to make substantial personal connections with people... I miss being able to sit over a pint and talk for hours and hours about music, films, comedy, politics. Its difficult to do that stuff without a shared cultural context between you. I know it's only been three months blah blah...

I've had simultaneously the best and worst of weeks. On the upside, my family came to visit me over christmas, and I love them loads and missed them loads and it was great to catch up and it was honestly one of the best weeks of my life that I'll remember forever. I miss my family so much SO HOMESICK IT'S UNBEARABLE. You think a year abroad will be amazing, and it is, but after a coupla months the excitement wears off - it's laundry days, colds, doing the washing up, commutes, buying groceries, doing essays - same old same old. The language and cultural barrier is really isolating sometimes. I think I'm just really feeling it at the moment because my family have gone back home and I'm all alone again. haha

On the downside, I lost my wallet, it had 8000 yen cash in it, and my banking card, and my gaijin card and my rail pass. I had to go through the stress of cancelling cards, reporting it missing to the police, declaring my gaijin card as missing and reapplying for them all over again IN JAPANESE.

Then when I thought I was kind of on top of things I've broken the valve on the rear wheel of my bike, and need to get that repaired but I don't have the energy at the moment. I'm staying in bed for now, I'll sort it out next week.

Every time I'm going to go and do something scary in Japanese (like ask for a bicycle repair or cancelling a card or reappying for a gaijin card), I spend a good couple of hours beforehand with my dictionary and a pen and paper writing out the questions and key vocabulary to expect in the conversation - usually it's quite helpful. I was doing this last night and realised it was 6.30am (whoops) and I hadn't slept, so I went for a run. First run in a long time so my time was awful, but it got the blood pumping, oxygen in my lungs to clear my head and some exposure to sunlight so it's all good for you right?

I reckon the rest of my day will be: Shower - light meal - nap.

Then wake up and finally get some work done, cause I have just conveniently forgotten the fact I'm at university over the last coupla weeks haha.

2012-01-03T14:07:00.002+01:00

Okay I'll be the first person to admit I am completely, totally homesick.
It's difficult to type, my hands have all stiffened up from the cold. Just took a 30 minute walk to the supermarket with the ipod on, listened to some decent British music: Editors, Biffy Clyro, Manics, Enter shikari. That cheered me up.

Can't fucking type! stupid stiff hands

2012-01-02T18:29:00.001+01:00

Had a really good christmas with my family. Then felt crazy homesick.
Then spent 38 hours in bed.
Then shaved part of my hair off.

Been a productive week.

Things I have learnt from my year abroad

2011-12-03T17:06:00.003+01:00

IN PROGRESS!!!

1. Plastic chopsticks are more difficult to use than wooden ones.

2. Youtube videos don't play until they are entirely loaded.

3. Chocolate bars are less than 5mm thick! D:

4. All milk is full-cream milk. It's like liquid cheese, no semi-skimmed or skimmed business here. FULL FAT!
5. No diet coke here either. Full fat or coke zero, they just don't taste the same D:
6. Chilled gyoza are both cheap and awesome.
7. Yakitori sauce = instant chef skills
8. Bicycle riding laws here are insane. It's utter chaos. I fear for my life every time I commute.
9. Alcohol comes in jars.

10. If you don't have an oven, having a freezer is totally pointless. I waste so much electricity powering that thing just for ice cubes.

11. Cakes here are so much more fluffy! (they're like 90% air) - and come in all-you-can-eat style!

12. Wearing a blanket as an item of clothing is totally acceptable

13. No such thing as diet coke

14. Mushrooms taste like butter

15. Apparently, Christians in England worship the rabbit as a holy and sacred animal, (because Easter. Duh)

16. 100-yen socks are a surprising win!

17. OH GOD I'M SO INESCAPABLY BRITISH AND NEVER REALISED IT.

Unexpected life skills gained on my year abroad

2011-11-30T09:02:00.005+01:00

Everyone clearly expects language skills to be earned on a year abroad, but what are the other, less expected skills that we can pick up?

1. Insane bicycle skills.

Yes, the 4 mile daily bicycle run (usually at top speeds because I'm always late) have toned my thighs into something even Chris Hoy would be envious of.

2. Incredible culinary skills, for example, how to use a rice cooker, or the ability to peel a potato without a potato peeler! Or debone a fillet of fish! Who knew?

3. The inner workings of a cistern. I am a qualified plumber now.

Procrastinating in a patriotic kinda way.

2011-11-16T13:39:00.002+01:00

I have now been in Japan for 7 weeks. The first couple of weeks I was completely homesick, would cry a lot and missed my home country so much. But then I adjusted, I settled down into a routine, I found my feet. Classes started and I had a lot of work to keep me occupied and I was comfortable, you know, I still missed home a little but I was enjoying myself so much that it didn't upset me. I just appreciated the opportunity in being here.

One thing though, that has really been upsetting me recently is being told by old students from the programme that "You won't want to leave by the end of the year". Maybe they're trying to excite me when they say that, but it makes me feel really depressed. I don't want to be a person who doesn't want to go home. I love my home and my family. I'm incredibly lucky to have a strong family that loves and appreciates each other. Not wanting to return home makes me feel like a traitor to them.

And it's not a point to disrespect your host country. As amazing as any country could ever be, as breathtaking as any spectacular scenery or delicious as any new food, as fun as any new friend or as beautiful as any new language is - and believe me, they are incredible experiences - nothing can replace a family, surely? I don't understand how anyone's loyalty could be wavered from their family, especially after such a short time - 10 months is nothing, your family have been there for years and years.

I'm trying to articulate how I'm feeling, but basically I think what it is, is that I enjoy that feeling of missing home because it reminds me that I love my home. That aching longing in my heart for my family is there because I love them, and that's a good thing. So for someone to basically tell me "you won't have that feeling anymore soon, you'll want to stay separated from them in favour of this new place" just feels ...awful to me. It sent a chill up my spine.

Am I making any sense at all?

I met an old student from my university today, he went to the same uni as me, and on the same year abroad as me five years earlier. The year abroad ended and sure enough, he didn't want to go home. He returned home for a year to finish his degree then moved back to Japan (for realisies this time). I had expected to be really excited to meet another British person but he didn't feel British at all. There was something unrecognisable about him, his accent had changed and no longer sounded English, all his mannerisms were Japanese, but he wasn't a Japanese person. He wasn't one nor the other, just a halfway that didn't belong either place. And I'm sure he is a lovely person, but it's not what I want for myself.

I've realised that I was really happy this Summer in the UK. Absolutely everything was perfect and I was a contented and happy person. Have I risked jeopardising that comfortable stasis in coming here? Is it absurd to not want to change as a person? (Yes it is). But I'm genuinely worried that I might change and become someone who I don't want to become. You suddenly realise how much of your personality is contingent on your home country. There are so many aspects of my personality I can't express here, for example being British Working Class, that's part of my personality I don't want to relinquish, but it is completely meaningless here, so all the parts of your personality that doesn't translate are just lost.

2011-11-10T16:56:00.004+01:00

Because I keep getting distracted,

On Friday mornings, I have a three-hour long Japanese session. I usually prepare the night before. So it's Thursday night, and I have been preparing for seven hours now.

This includes:

Writing a short essay in Japanese (just a side of A4).

Memorising 30 kanji (and all their onyomi/kunyomi).

Going through two pages of a handout on conjunctions, completing the exercises (so I don't fluster when asked the questions on the spot during class), and going through the worksheets writing translations for the words that I don't know (and there seem to be a lot!)

Going through another 8-page handout for speaking exercises, again filling out exercises and going through all the vocab in the page.

Filling out a sheet of vocab for a role-play exercise that we will do tomorrow.

Writing another short essay (just a side of A4) that was suddenly set as overnight-homework during todays' lesson.

It certainly is an intensive language class! But I'm really enjoying it.

On top of that I've also written a presentation (1hr30mins long) on a book we read for another module.

SO TIRED.

blah!

2011-10-21T17:21:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I can't be bothered to blog so I just pointlessly update songs I like and stuff.

今こそ一致団結の時である!

2011-10-20T19:33:00.002+01:00

How awesome is this?! no effects or anything, this is exactly how it came out on my camera!

I feel creativeness so I drew a big picture for my bedroom wall.

2011-10-19T07:16:00.002+01:00

Since I moved to Japan, I have been using 'u' a lot in texts and emails. I do not know why. It's most unlike me. It is a mystery!

Student Halls in Tokyo

2011-10-14T17:29:00.001+01:00

Initial observations!
1. Tokyo Dorms are crazy cheap!
Tokyo is supposed to be one of the most expensive places to live in the world right? However we've got a fantastic deal at the student dormitories here. Compare my old halls in England - You get a single room in a hall, communal toilets and communal kitchen: £80 per week (about 10,000 yen per week) - so 40,000 yen per month. I only pay 15,000 yen per month in Tokyo, so it's a 1/3rd of the price. The Tokyo room includes a kitchenette and ensuite though! (An ensuite room in the UK would be much more expensive than £80 a week).

So yeah, the rent is FANTASTIC!

2. Friendly, communal atmosphere!
The dorms have a common hall, and many parties and gatherings are arranged by students and mentors to facilitate friendships and socialization in the halls. I am really grateful for this, and you don't see this type of thing at halls in the UK, perhaps it is because in Tokyo the halls have all years of student - 1st years to 4th years, so some students have been there for a while and can organise things for the younger students. In the UK everyone is a first year so you're all as lost as each other.

3. Much quieter and peaceful
No drunken girls running down the coridoor screaming "ALE ALEJANDRO ALE ALEJANDRO" at 4am here. Unlike in the UK......

4. So much safer
A general reflection of how safe Japanese society is. Bicycles are left outside and not stolen. Futons and clothes are hung outside on drying rails without being stolen. It's a very safe and peaceful atmosphere, and I don't feel scared at all walking outside to the vending machines alone at 11pm!

Are there any bad points? I don't know. Perhaps the individual kitchenettes are a mixed-blessing. In the UK the kitchen is a communal area where friendships are made and you can find someone to talk to all the time. because your kitchen is in your room here, that opportunity to make friends is not there.

So Anyway I have attached a few photographs of my room. It's a bit empty as I only really moved in a week ago! You might have noticed the mattress on the bed is very thin! It's not a western-style mattress, it's a futon matress. It's the same thickness as a heavy winter duvet really. A bit hard! But you get used to it fairly quickly, and I'm so exhausted after 12 hour days at university that I fall straight to sleep! I'm glad I brought my own duvet cover from home, as it saved me a lot of money buying sheets on the first night haha! And it reminds me of home :) Other students have a lamp installed in the bookshelf alcove by the pillow but my room didn't include one :(

I also have a Genkan - a feature absent from western rooms! A genkan is the area beside the door where your shoes go. You slip off your shoes and step up onto the wooden floor. So the floor always stays clean and homely. It's a sign of respect to remove your shoes before walking into someone elses room. It's nice :)

In the UK, having a fridge in your room is a luxury. Many halls in the UK ban them, as they're a drain on electric power. Having a fridge in my room means I can have cold drinks whenever I want! Yay!

I have also inherited a rice cooker. I have never had a rice cooker before! I never understood why all the international students at Warwick loved their rice cookers so much, but now I know! They're so convenient! You pop your rice in, then just leave it alone, and you get perfectly cooked, fluffy, glutinous rice every time! It's really moreish and delicious rice, nothing like the rice in the UK!

I also have air-conditioning and a radiator. So far the weather has been really pleasantly warm, so I haven't needed to use either. Apparently they drain the electricity very fast (and we pay utilities by the kilowatt here so it can be very expensive!) So I'll try to be economical with the heating when winter bites. That's an experiment for another day!!!

Accepting the shock of moving overseas for the first time

2011-10-12T16:28:00.001+01:00

Usually every day I wake up feeling optimistic then by the time it's the evening I feel homesick. But the last couple of days I've dreamt about "escaping" or running home, or returning home. I blogged about one earlier today, but in another one a couple of days ago we were all out cycling (we cycle a lot to get to dorms) and we found a place that looked european, with all cobbled streets. I was so sure I was back in Norwich and started to get excited, then it turned out we had gone to a European city which was twinned with Norwich instead.

So anyway that's normal to dream of returning home anyway, right? I'm fine with that. But this has subverted the 'wake up happy, go to bed sad' thing because I'll be in the grip of a dream of returning home then I'll wake up and I'll be back in Tokyo again. So that happened this morning. It took me an hour and a half until I was feeling energised to leave the room.

I got my ipod on, took the garbage out to the recycling area, and walked to the local supermarket. I bought all sorts of gubbins, including my new favourite find: chilled gyoza. It's really cheap! I got a packet of 12 gyoza for 98 yen today. You just cook them and they're delicious! I also bought envelopes and letter writing stuff, so I'm currently writing three letters back home. Need to crack the mystery of airmail soon - I only just learned to use Airmail in the UK a month ago, now I have to do it in Japanese!

But yeah, after I returned I felt good. I had had a nice walk with some music and exercise, and I had a fully stocked fridge again. I've even prepared a packed lunch to bring to university tomorrow :D and for the first time, I felt like I had accepted that I have arrived here and will be here for another 10 months.

I didn't completely feel it, but I could just sense it, with the very tips of my fingers, out there somewhere the vague sense of acceptance and comfort. So it took two weeks for me to even register the shock of moving overseas. But yeah, I definitely feel much better today. Having time to yourself does help a lot. It gives you time to think things over in your head. I'm looking forward to university tomorrow.

2011-10-12T06:14:00.001+01:00

Last night I dreamt I was out walking alone and I found a bridge over the ocean. It wasn't really a bridge, it was made of various bits of wood, cardboard and trash tied together, and it was bobbing on the ocean about to break apart any second, I started to cross it and my feet were so uneasy on the precariously wobbly surface that I could hardly keep my balance. At the end of the bridge it was incomplete, and suddenly stopped in the water, as if whoever built it had run out of things to desperately scrap together to continue building. But perhaps ten feet after where it stopped was the concrete slabs of a riverside, and beyond that London. So I jumped into the river and swam the last few metres to the other side, once I got onto land I started running to find a tube entrance, and from there I figured I'd get to Liverpool Street Station and go back to Norwich, but I woke up before anything else happened.

Comparing Japanese university and English University (part one)

2011-10-11T11:33:00.003+01:00

It's still early days, so I've tentatively put a 'part one' as I feel I'll be adding to this later on. And of course my experiences are limited to the universities I have attended.

1. Far more contact time

'Contact time' is an annoying phrase. In the UK, many students demand more contact hours because they feel it is equivalent to better teaching, or more value for the high tuition fees. If you have low contact hours, your course is seen by many to be easier than a more 'demanding' course with high contact hours. This is correlated with sciences versus humanities, as sciences generally have more contact time than humanities, and is seen as more intensive by many.

Of course, this doesn't mean you do less study - humanities students are expected to top this up with independent reading and study. However I have never met anyone who seriously reads for more than 6 hours a week outside of classes (or reads effectively anyway, for six hours a week).

At Goldsmiths College I had 6 hours of taught time a week.

At Warwick university I have had on average 10-12 hours a week.

At Todai, Japan, I have 24 hours a week.

It's a massive difference eh?

Including the lunch hour and 40 minute commute each way (same as in the UK, except its a 20 min bike ride + 20 min train journey rather than a 40 minute walk), I'm at university for 8-9 hours a day on average (we get Wednesdays off though!), so it's much more hands on.

2. Grading methods are different

Usually, in the UK your grade comes from some kind of written assessment such as an essay or project, or a final exam, or perhaps some combination of both. In Japan your module score is heavily weighted to include attendance and contribution to class discussion. You must attend a minimum of 70% of classes to qualify to earn credits for it. You hand in a short 1-page written summary of the weeks reading every week. So there's no way for lazy students to not turn up/turn up without doing the reading and remaining silent. Personally I'd love it if this feature was introduced in the UK, as non-committed students are the bane of my existence.

Also I've noticed that oral presentations to the class feature heavily in Japan, something that's fairly uncommon in most uk degrees.

3. Reading lists

Obviously to accommodate the larger number of modules, the reading lists are much more confined in Japan. In the UK you get a massive sheet each week with perhaps 30 titles to read, one or two are core readings, 5 or so are highly recommended, and 20 are just optional ones to develop an interest if you like the topic or choose it for an essay topic.

In Japan the reading list for each week is just 2 or 3 titles, but you're expected to read them all, so everyone is 'on the same page' as it were.

This totally sums up how I am feeling right now.

2011-10-10T16:01:00.003+01:00

Expectations

2011-10-10T10:15:00.002+01:00

Okay so forgive the massive gap in posts, I have been so ridiculously busy, having 12 hour days at the moment! Today was my first day to myself since I've arrived here. I was out at Karaoke until 4am last night. I checked my emails before I went to bed and my parents were online, so I had a webcam chat with them (which I really needed!), so I got to sleep at 7.30am, and woke up at 3pm. Haha, I've only been here 10 days and I've already messed up my sleeping pattern! Typical me.

'Typical me' - It's quite pertinent that I said that actually. You can move halfway across the world, but you'll still be you. You don't leave your personality behind at the airport customs desk.

Make realistic expectations

I said to myself I'd blog everyday but I've been far too busy, and judging from the academic curriculum I will remain 'too busy' for the entire year. I'll still try as much as possible. But I've had to reassess my expectations. I also thought I'd be taking thousands of photos, but I've taken perhaps... 150? in a week? It's not that much when you consider some people upload that many from a single night out. It's sensory overload. Everything is so different here, if you stopped and thought "woah that's so weird" and took a photo, you'd be taking a photo of literally everything around you. The sheer sensory overload kind of numbs you to it. That said I've been taking more and more as time goes on. I think it was just a case of settling in the first week, I was so busy that photography didn't cross my mind.

The biggest unrealistic expectation for me was language. I had hoped that I'd achieve some kind of proficiency in Japanese by the end of this year, but that's not looking too hopeful right now. However advanced you think your level is in any given language, half it before you move to the country. Everyone here has agreed that while we can usually understand what people are saying, as soon as you're put on the spot or asked a question your mind will go totally blank. Then there's a long silence and that panics you even more. You will embarrass yourself a lot. People are going to think you're stupid. You have to be prepared for that to happen. I thought it wouldn't affect me but it has, and I've found myself becoming more nervous about talking as the week has gone on, put off by some horrendously excruciating encounters in the first few days.

I started my formal lessons a couple of days ago though, so I'm optimistic that from hereon I'll be able to study a lot more and get talking more to the other students.

Don't hype it up beyond all reason

From now on, I've now decided to ignore people who say "X is the best time of your life!" - it might have been the best time of their life, but people are all different, and because you don't have the first clue where to start with your expectations you just take their word for it.

The best analogy to the year abroad experience is when I have been told that Freshers/first year at university was going to be the best year of my life. I've been a fresher twice now, and both times it was just you pot-luck stuck in a flat with people you may or may not get on with who all insist on drinking to camouflage the lack of mutual interests between you. You know, its fun. You enjoy it. It's a good experience. But it's not the best experience I've ever had in my life. Not pessimism, just statement of fact. C'mon.

By no means is this a pessimistic post, just a realistic one. When people say "oh it was the best year of my life!" take it with a pinch of salt. It is a worthwhile experience. It is incredibly rewarding. You will enjoy it a great deal. But don't take it to wild extremes. I am guilty of taking it to extremes, I think it was because the sheer prospect of moving abroad was so incredibly daunting that I was in denial about the whole thing, and didn't really want to be realistic about the difficulties and stress of it all, because once I started thinking about it then that's it: I'd be terrified to go.

I feel the first week here for me has been a bit of a bump down to earth, and already I miss my family, pets and friends a lot. The prospect of the next 10 months without them makes me really upset, and that upset isn't really being displaced by the exhilaration of being abroad.

2011-10-03T09:12:00.001+01:00

So woke up today at 7.30am, I am NOT adjusting to Japanese-style futon mattresses well. My body aches so badly! at 8.30 we went to the city hall to register as a foreign resident, then we went to the Bank and opened a Japanese bank account, then we went to Softbank store and bought a mobile phone contract each.

I am getting more self-conscious about my Japanese language ability. I can understand perhaps 50% of everything spoken here. Administrative stuff and filling out forms is impossible in a second language. I am grateful for the tutors here for guiding us through the process. But it is very difficult, and you feel almost like a child for not being able to understand everything.

I feel a little worn out and spaced out. I can't really process information well in my brain. Maybe it's jet lag.

After all this we went to eat, and then me and two other students wandered the streets looking for stuff. I want to buy an electronic dictionary, but I am unsure whether it is too expensive.

Movin' to Tokyo and all that.

2011-10-02T09:12:00.001+01:00

I'm sitting in my room at the moment (in Tokyo) entirely dumbfounded and overwhelmed. Maybe it's jet lag, I keep staring out the window blankly. The last two hours I've sat here at this desk and they've passed by in the blink of an eye. Yeah I think it's just fatigue, but I'm struggling to type.

So after months of anticipation it finally happened. Even in London Heathrow airport I was in denial, and it didn't 'feel real'. It was sad saying goodbye to my family, I'd had the best summer with them.

The flight was pleasant. Hardly any turbulence. I've booked a window seat for my return flight so I'll have a wall to lean against! I can't sleep on planes.

I arrived in Narita, and was greeted by many friendly Tokyo students who kindly guided us to a bus to Kichijoji, from Kichijoji more students took us to the halls by taxi, where we had a bajillion forms to fill out! The students here are so welcoming, they've helped me move all my stuff up and I feel so humbled and indebted to their assistance and friendliness. I feel like I was perhaps a little quiet because I was so jet lagged. So from now on I'll try my best to be upbeat and peppy and friendly to be around to make new friends :D

Oh god I can't believe I'm actually here... This is like a joke that has gotten waaayyyyy out of hand now.

Oh god I'm so overwhelmed with stuff. My language skills leave a lot to be desired. I've been able to understand a lot of conversation but replying is difficult. So exhausting!!! D:

Reading was awesome

2011-08-30T02:43:00.000+01:00

I've just returned from Reading Festival, one of the UK's largest music festivals. It was four days and three nights of bands and camping. Absolutely fantastic. I was most excited about seeing Muse and the Bosstones, who were both brilliant live acts. I was pleasantly surprised with a few bands who I had never really listened to before but turned out to have incredible performances: Enter Shikari, The Bronx and Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Anyway, four days of drinking and severe nutritional deprivation/sleep deprivation have taken their toll, and I have a stonking cold right now. I am looking fairly rough. So I'm currently sleeping that off and getting back into a lot of fantastic music .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaLjwSpZ6Cs

Last minute splurge of creativity before bed.

2011-08-26T11:27:00.003+01:00

SPLURGE!

True story

2011-08-23T03:00:00.000+01:00

My parents have recently acquired a new car so have decided to dig out the front garden into a little driveway so the car can be parked off road. Fairly natural a decision to make. So it's 10am on Saturday morning and I am woken by the sound of a pneumatic drill tearing up the pavement in front of our house. Mum and Dad are both toiling away, filling a skip up with topsoil and rubble.

I pull on some old clothes and go out to the garden to ask if they want a hand. Mum says "You don't have to". This is a clever use of words - "you don't have to" is a very misleading phrase - I am not seriously believing that they'd rather toil alone while I sat indoors with a nice cold drink and a book. "You don't have to" here is actually secret code for "you couldn't if you wanted to, look at your puny arms! you are a feeble girl!"

So I protested "I'm not some weak little girl I can help!" and charged into the ever-expanding hole in our front lawn, spade in hand, and thrust the spade into the earth. It went in about an inch. The ground was incredibly tough.

Undeterred, I raised my left foot and stomped it as hard as I could onto the top edge of the blade to push it deeper into the ground. Except that didn't happen. Rather than the weight of my foot driving the spade deeper into the ground, the spade stayed put, and instead I drove my foot into the top corner of the blade. The sharp corner of the blade went straight through the rubber and leather of my trainers with a satisfying 'puck' sound, and into the arched sole of my foot.

So within 20 seconds of protesting that I wasn't a puny girl I had injured myself. Well, obviously I couldn't admit that aloud, what a complete embarrassment, so I said "I'm just going to put some better shoes on" and walked back into the house. I ran upstairs, gingerly removed my left shoe and peeled off my now quite bloody sock, and proceeded to have a quiet, private little panic attack in my bathroom. After I pulled myself together I washed the little wound and put a dressing on it. I put on some real shoes - some boots - and spent the next two or three hours quietly helping dig the garden. Later on in the day while we had a cold drink and admired our new driveway I admitted what had happened. I am an idiot.

Panic on the streets of London...

2011-08-13T21:30:00.005+01:00

Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again?

Haha, all Smiths Lyrics aside, the recent riots in London and other English cities is worth having a think about, so I'll write a very short piece with my thoughts.

Before I even begin, I need to draw a line between explanation and excuse. Many feel that an explanation of behaviour is a 'justification'. This is nonsense. Many historians have sought to understand and rationalise the social and ideological engines behind various wars and dictators. Does that mean they legitimate them? Of course not. To understand something is not to agree or condone it.

This conflation of explanation and excuse has led many to quickly isolate all blame to the culprits alone. Cameron called the violence 'criminality, pure and simple'. London Mayor Boris Johnson said "It is time that people who are engaged in looting and violence stopped hearing economic and sociological justifications for what they have done".

Honestly I am really quite despondent at this attitude from politicians. Is it really surprising that the current government are rejecting any economic or sociological explanation for the rioting when it is directly their responsibility to maintain social order? Admitting any social factors behind a riot would be admitting their own failures as a government for catalysing (or at best, failing to deal with) social issues.

So according to them we are supposed to believe that last week; hundreds of youths all made the independent decision to thwart social order and rampage in their own communities of their own free will, it just so happened by sheer coincidence that it happened now, and not last year, it's just coincidence that it was located in specific socio-economic demographics and geographies. It's just a coincidence that the rioting occurred in Hackney and Peckham, and not West Kensington? COME ON! Poverty and relative deprivation clearly served as a backdrop to the violence.

There's an interesting book called "The Spirit Level" which demonstrates, quite rigorously with statistical data, that rather than simply the poorest societies being riddled with social problems, it is actually the societies with the largest income inequalities that face social unrest.Healthy societies do not riot. There is no excuse for criminality, but this criminality is cultivated by an absence of rational connection between effort and reward.

There is a massive gulf between rich and poor in London, according to the Telegraph and Guardian, the richest earn 273 times more than the poorest. I'm not advocating equal incomes irrespective of work output, but is any human being actually capable of working 273 times harder? Does a banker work 273 times harder than a cleaner?! sure, maybe he works twice as hard, perhaps even four times as hard - but 273 times harder? That's an absolutely obscene amount for anyone to be paid. No one earns that. Wages have absolutely no relation to output. The lowest paid job I ever had (at £4.77 an hour) - working in a sandwich shop - was the most physically and mentally demanding, I would work 11.75 hour shifts and control all the day-to-day running of the shop, from serving the products and providing good service, to training new staff and estimating the need for and ordering in new stock. On the other hand I was paid £120 (over 25 times higher) an hour to be on a radio play once. Is whimpering into a microphone for one hour a day 25 times harder than manual labour in a busy shop? Hell no.

Anyway, I digress. Of course the rioters were criminal, and there is no justification for destroying peoples' homes and business and loot expensive items. But there is a reason why criminal behaviours come to exist. I feel a lot of what happened was exacerbated by the sheer scale of the disorder. You only need to look to Stanley Milgram's behavioural studies of obedience to see how conformism can turn a perfectly normal citizen into a hooligan when swept up in massive disorder. In many cases the rioters were in groups alongside their friends, family members, even alongside their own parents.

And it's no coincidence either that the police response was so ineffective when the government plans to cut 16,000 police jobs? They insisted this didn't mean anything because the cuts hadn't happened yet - ignoring that the met are pre-emptively putting in place measures to prepare for this inevitability - those cuts are making an impact already.

I feel that certain pockets of society live in a state devoid of any connection to wider society. It is the governments responsibility to rectify this problem. Putting their heads in the sand and insisting that there's no social factors that lead to riots is completely unhelpful.I can't help but be reminded of Thatchers' famous epithet: "There's no such thing as society, only individuals and their families". WHY go into politics if you don't believe in the concept of a society?! That's like me behind head of the Church despite being an Atheist.

Governments have so much responsibility to society, they have the power to completely obliterate social order or reconfigure social structure. If you're militantly solipsistic that's fine, but politics is the wrong career path for you.

So unhelpful, you'd think it couldn't get worse. It can. Parliament reconvened for an emergency debate. They've decided that BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and twitter was responsible for a large portion of organisation of riots, and they've called for powers to monitor and even 'shut down' social networking in times/areas of civil unrest.Where have they got this information from? Seriously. Do they have any figures supporting BBM/Twitter as a contributing factor to rioting? Or is this a knee-jerk reaction to total speculation, in a move to grant the government powers of surveillance and restrictions on freedom of speech through the back door?

I am utterly ashamed of the rioters' behaviour.I am equally ashamed of how the political sphere has responded.

Cleaning

2011-07-08T00:31:00.003+01:00

With results the year comes to an end and our rent contract expired so there was a massive operation to move all my stuff back to Norwich. Our house has five people sharing and three of them just left without doing any cleaning and leaving all their shit everywhere (we can't just leave it because we will get fined) so me and my other housemate had to wake up at 7am to bleach the mould off the walls, hoover and clean the entire house, make 8am trips to the rubbish tip, we were cleaning for 6 continuous hours!

So then a couple of days after we had moved out we got an email saying "We're charging you fines for leaving a mess in the property" - I thought "Fuck, they've discovered the toilet lock is broken". It traps you inside (not our fault though, it's always been like that). You have to phone someone from inside the toilet to unlock the door from the outside to let you out. God help you if you needed the toilet when you're home alone. Obviously if the house inspector has discovered the broken lock that means he must have been locked in himself. Brilliant mental image of the inspector phoning a friend and getting them to drive to the house and let him out of the loo... that or he kicked the door down.

But it was not the toilet lock. They sent a photo of evidence - they wanted to charge us to hire a professional cleaner to clean.... one drawer with a bit of dirt in it.

I was expecting a massive mould stain or a water leak or a trashed house, an insect infestation, a serious condensation problem, stains on the carpet, burns, smashed glass, a muck-encrusted oven, a freezer with rotten food left in it?

I spent six hours furiously scrubbing that house and then went to work and did a shift afterwards. They want me to pay to clean out a utensil divider? Pay a little work experience kid minimum wage to do that, he only needs £5.90 an hour, and it won't take a full hour to clean that. It takes 10 seconds to tip the crumbs out of that and give it a quick wipe with a damp cloth. How much does 10 seconds of manual labour cost at £5.90 an hour?

3p. Alright. Split that between the five of us. I'll pay 0.6 pence to have that cleaned. In fact my lazy ex-housemates can pay my 0.6p. I've already spent 6 hours cleaning their mess for them.

We replied to their email saying (more politely than this of course) "Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?"

They've repealed the fines. Ha.
But if we hadn't said anything they'd have charged us about £40 to clean that - and trust me, there are plenty of meek students who daren't speak up. Landlords and housing associations think they can exploit students because they don't know anything about their rights as tenants.

Students houses are bloody spotless. Especially if you lived with unemployed people. My housemate and I worked during the term. But our other housemate didn't have a job, so he became all maternal and housebound, and would clean during the day to make it seem like he had done something productive. I've been back in Norwich for 2 weeks and my family house is shocking. I found maggots squirming and festering in our bin a couple of days ago. My parents used to make out that I was the slovenly teenage cause of all the washing, but if anything it's got worse in my absence because I did the dishwasher when I was there!

Left work :(

2011-07-03T03:20:00.000+01:00

Blogger has all changed! I'm all disoriented now.

Anyway, I got my exam results a couple of days ago. Personally I'm not one to broadcast my grades but I did better than I was expecting to get. So very happy.

I am really touched by my colleagues at work, we had a leaving smile with delicious foods and drinks, they made me a cake with my name iced on it :) and I got a card that everyone had signed wishing me luck. It was one of the nicest cards I have ever received. I will miss them all so much!!

Exams are over!!!

2011-06-26T19:33:00.004+01:00

Now begins the painful 7-day wait for results.
Out comes the squirty cream.

DOODLING

I don't understand the premise behind 'Bad Teacher': who in their right mind would pick Justin Timberlake over Jason Segel? He's too attractive to make a believable 'underdog'. The verisimilitude is all off. Still going to pay to see it regardless.

2011-06-19T03:37:00.000+01:00

Ugh I've had to finally hand in my notice at work. Life no longer has any meaning! :(

2011-06-15T17:11:00.000+01:00

Pro's and Con's of an amazing epic year abroad. Will update as I think of more things.

Pro

It's amazing
It's epic
It's a freakin' year abroad.
It's funded!!!!
It's in freaking Japan the country of all countries!
It's at an amazing university with an incredible reputation.
My language skills will be awesome upon return.
The course looks really interesting and I will learn a lot.
It will be a memory I will keep with me for the rest of my life
I'm really lucky to be chosen to go.
I have successfully delayed graduating for another year!

Con

It's very far away!
I'm worried my Japanese ability will let me down
I've successfully delayed graduating for another year
I won't be able to afford a visit back home at any point during the year
I had to leave my job (IT STILL HURTS) :( :( :(
I won't get to graduate with my friends, when I return back to England they'll have graduated without me
I will miss my family and pets so much while I am there
It's going to play havoc with my accent.
My porcelain-white skin will melt away in a non-temperate climate.

The fear.

2011-06-15T03:32:00.000+01:00

Urgh what a horrible feeing! I've suddenly got The Fear.
Yep, this year The Fear struck me at 03.14am. Wednesday 15th June 2011.

For those who do not know this phrase, "The Fear" is when you finally start to really freak out about your exams and results. I hope I've done okay this year... I'm really worrying now! I haven't done as well this year as I did last year. I know my grade will be lower this year. I am prepared for that. This year I have had a part-time job working 12-20 hours a week, I'm living 2 miles away and the 1.5 hour walks to and fro every day are exhausting (you really don't feel like working when you've just walked 50 minutes uphill in the rain!) I had extracurricular meetings, employer events, I was being sent back and forth from hearing tests and the pharmacy for antihistamines and applying for the year abroad involved writing another essay, preparation for the interviews and the ensuing paperwork, funding applications and visa applications after I was successful. So it's quite understandable that I haven't been able to really throw myself into my degree in the same way I was able to last year.
Fair enough.
I am mentally prepared for my results to be somewhat lower than last year: it's just a scary question of how much lower they will be, and will they be 'recoverable' if I did well in my third year?

In the first term I had been getting the same sort of grades as my first year, but around Christmas there was a dip where I couldn't get a good mark no matter what I tried. I got an essay back with a low grade because I hadn't cited enough and it was too abstract, then I got another bad grade because I had cited too often and been too dependent on the texts. From one extreme to the other. I had a terrible listening exam that I only just barely scraped a pass in (although everyone found it difficult, not a single person in the whole class got a 2.1 for that exam). But when you apply the percentage weighting it will only affect 0.25% of my grade, so I can't blame it on that.

In your second year you get into a lull. You no longer have the adrenaline of being in your first year, but neither do you have the terror of an impending graduation either. Output begins to slip. Now I am nearing the end of the year and have the benefit of hindsight I will accept that I overstretched myself this year. I took too much on board. If I manage to still get away from this year with a high grade I will be incredibly proud and surprised. But to do that I will certainly need to sign off blogger and do some revision!!!

Allergic to life

2011-06-13T05:02:00.000+01:00

I am not normally a complainer, (sshh!) but I have just started to recover from a nasty cold IN JUNE. I am in a permanent state of phlegminess from allergies anyway. My housemate said he could tell that I was awake because the sneezing begins, that is, of course, unless I have woken up at 5am just to sneeze, which isn't a rare occurrence. I replied that I could tell he was awake because you hear a pepsi can being opened for his pepsi breakfast - true story!

But yeah! This was a actual proper cold, for realsies! I had chills and night sweats and headaches and tunnel vision and everything. I was laying in bed hallucinating that I needed to go to work again at 2am at one point. It wasn't the flu though, last time I had the flu I stayed in bed for 4 days eating neopolitan ice cream and lost half a stone through lack of appetite - (Illness is such an illicit way of dieting, I shouldn't be glorifying that.) Really inconvenient time to get a cold when you've accepted a ton of overtime. But I soldiered through it LIKE A BOSS. I've never had a day off work sick yet and I don't plan on having my first one any time soon - the average in the UK is like 3 sick days a year?! I'm like one of those people who has to break a limb or suffer a severe haemorrhage before I'll call in sick. That's either a good thing (for being super strong and committed) or, as is most likely will result in me contributing to infecting every human being I'll come in contact with that week. BUT GETTING PAID FOR IT.

Here is a handy nugget of life advice that I strongly suggest you commit to memory: if you are severely allergic to dust, do not get a job in a Library. I have definitely found this out the hard way. Why am I allergic to everything I love? It's like god is a malicious bully following me around, watching to see if I develop a fondness for anything, then he'll smite me with some biological intolerance for said loved object.

I like the outdoors! NO! HAYFEVER!

Oh well, being indoors is cool too, NO! ALLERGIES!

At least I have my doggies, NO! ALLERGY TO DOG FLUFF!

Well there's always some calming music, NO! DEAFNESS!

Maybe I can occupy myself with a good book, NO! MYOPIA! ASTIGMATISM! (Combo breaker!)

At least I can drown my sorrows with alcohol, NO! IT WILL MAKE YOUR FACE ALL ITCHY AND PUFFY!

I like cheese and yoghurt and milk, NO! DAIRY INTOLERANCE!

Being alive, NO! ASTHMA!

As I said, I don't complain much but I can't help but feel like I ain't exactly looking like a very lucrative catch for prospective males right now. It doesn't help that my nose is so bunged up that I sound like a female Ronnie Corbett, or that I cannot stop sneezing in a Library: one of the only locations where you specifically need to be silent (other than church services and military stealth operations) so now I'm the crazy TTTCHHOOOOO! Library lady now. People like me shouldn't be allowed to reproduce. I obviously have weak, recessive inferior genetics.

At least I have my feisty sense of boisterous and antagonistic humour, NO! YOU'VE BEEN BORN FEMALE, EVERYTHING WILL BE MISCONSTRUED AS IRRATIONAL EMOTION OR A FRAGILE GLOSS OF SELF ESTEEM!

I will blog about something serious next week I swear. I am revising for exams at the moment so my brain can't handle anything else requiring intelligent thought.

Go to bed!

2011-06-09T04:28:00.000+01:00

I am all too aware that too many of my entries here are written at some ungodly hour in the morning. It's a habit I've bashfully kept alive for the last couple of years in writing this blog. I am terrible for keeping a good sleeping pattern, and it affects the (admittedly poor) quality of my writing. It's stupid. I have all these irrational feelings right now that I know would easily be solved by a nights' sleep but instead I am compelled to write 600 or so words of fucking... rubbish for the whole internet to see.

Ugh.
Go to bed.
I don't want to go to bed.
But you're tired Holly.
Being unconscious is really boring though.

I am feeling really worried about my year abroad at the moment. I just sat up for three hours reading various blogs that other people with on the same exchange scheme have written while they're in Tokyo. Every morning I wake up terrified about going, then as the day goes on I become accustomed to the idea, as I rest my head upon my pillow last thing at night I am keen and excited to go.

Then I will sleep a heavy, dreamless sleep, wake up in the same awkwardly unnatural position I fell asleep in, (on my back, legs straight, knees together and arms by your sides like a Barbie doll) aching from head to toe because I haven't moved in 8 hours, to start the process all over again - back in 'scared' mode. I am moving without seeing a change in the landscape, I am a swimmer lost at sea.

It has been 2 years, 6 months, and 29 days since I started this blog. 940 days. It's strange to contemplate how much has changed in that time. I do feel relatively happy and secure in the choices I have made. Three years ago I was a much quieter person, I was so unsure of myself and so worried about the future. Now I am more confident but perhaps more impatient too. I wonder if I can make as radical a change over the next three years.

Okay I am feeling much better for typing that out. I should probably go to sleep now, need to do a lot of revision tomorrow.

Sat my Japanese exam today

2011-05-18T01:42:00.000+01:00

AND It was a whirlwind of fragile emotions, euphoric highs and crushing lows.

Nah not really, it was just a 2 hour exam in a quiet little room nestled in Warwick University campus. It wasn't so bad. I was fairly lucky with the questions that came up being the things I had most recently revised. My brain is now totally mashed. I'm having an early night tonight I reckon.

Soon after leaving the exam hall, I spent my weeks' food budget on cosmetics. Vanity binging. Good for the ego once in a while - it's not often I buy mascara.

So with Japanese out of the way, tomorrow is my first ever day off in three weeks! I will be happy to snooze for a while. I've deserved it. I was chatting with a colleague of mine at the Library, and we both work a 7 day week, and agreed that "2 lie-ins a week count as a weekend". I can endure a 7 day week for a couple of years while I am at university (for extra income, to make savings, to get experience for when I graduate etc). But I don't think I could do it for an indefinite period of time. It's like running a marathon, you have to pace yourself!

I genuinely think I'm going mental.

2011-05-15T04:11:00.000+01:00

I remember sitting in a lecture in my first year of university.

I wasn't supposed to be there. It was an engineering lecture. But I had a free period so I followed a friend to their mechanics lecture. Naturally I didn't understand a word of it, but I distinctly remember the opening dialogue, the lecture was about oscillation, and the lecturer began by describing with passion the natural oscillation in every aspect of our lives - love hate relationships, mood cycles, cycles of weight gain and loss.

What was I writing about again? Actually ended up embarrassing myself by drawing a caricature of the lecturer with an inexplicably long arm standing on top of the globe, and trying to trade it with the lecturer himself for a biscuit. Why did I do that? Ha.

Anyway yeah - oscillation: there's definitely a natural cyclical rhythm to life (not in an emotional, womanly lunar way). I have definitely been feeling that recently! After a lull, where you don't really.. know.. why you're doing anything - then that turns into a frustration, and now I'm in this place where I have such a massive energy and my heart feels like it is aching, I want to read Kafka and Murakami, I want to watch classic films, I want to paint, fill up diaries, take photographs, walk the coastline. I've got this massive impulse to create something.

But the problem is, it's the middle of exams. I can't really begin on a spree of artistic exploration that would gladly absorb hours, days of my time. By the time my exams are out of the way, this feeling will have passed. In fact I reckon that this is all a psychological mechanism to distract me from my revision.

Oh god and now its 04.10. I need to be up for work.

Get in!

2011-05-15T01:16:00.000+01:00

You know how a couple of days ago I was moping because I couldn't go and see Stephen Merchant's stand up because I'd be out of the country? Well I got tickets for an earlier show! I was lucky enough to find a couple through getmein (a partner website) - Two tickets, a couple of rows from the front on the first night of the tour. I was absolutely chuffed to bits, I was even smiling about it at work today. It will be a great night of course, but it is extra special because it will most likely be the last time I get to see my a few of my friends before I leave them for 10 months. What a way to send myself off though! ha!

Anyway, I've been thinking about balancing between fun and living happily, and not being impulsive. (In hindsight, blowing a weeks wages' on stand up tickets is a poor example of this, but I still have no regrets.)

My boring day

2011-05-13T21:57:00.004+01:00

That's a lie. It wasn't boring. It was pleasantly average. I went to work, sat at the desk putting stickers on books and suchlike (very official business) and took a photo to prove to my house-mates that I sit at a desk. They don't believe me. All good jobs involve a desk at some point, that's a fact. So yeah, the shift went by nice and quickly so that was good. Although I've been working there for nearly 6 months (in a week or so) I am still firmly in the honeymoon period where I actually quite look forward to going to work when I wake up. The sun was being bastardly bright and warm outside while I was sitting at that desk scanning books. But it was quite a nice moment in time to be. It's a good place to work, I'm a bit upset I'd have to give it up to go to Tokyo in a way.

Strangely, I really enjoy the walk to work. I have been moaning quite a bit about how we live over 2 miles away from campus, and the walk itself isn't picturesque by any means. But I have this cathartic thing about walking with my ipod on. I HAVE to do it. Even though it's a 40 minute walk (1hr 20 minutes to get there and back - this is 7 days a week). Even when my housemates offer to drive me onto campus I will still opt to walk, even if I am late. I have to have my walk. I need those 40 minutes of motion and music and time to myself.

Anyway, as I left work, and began my walk back home, I put on The Kooks (don't know why I'm in a Kooks mood this week) and snapped this lovely sight on the way home. Unfortunately in this picture you can't make out the half-dozen or so Canadian geese meandering about the water.

I like being at Warwick. I don't know why I've been feeling so down recently. Probably exam worry.

It's getting real!

2011-05-10T06:20:00.000+01:00

So this week I attended this talk for people going on exchanges overseas next year. There were nearly 90 of us, and that's just the non-erasmus exchanges (so it doesn't include anyone going to Europe). It was terrifying. I noticed that everyone was sitting next to the people they would be with next year, it kind of hit home to me how I'd be the only person from my entire country on this exchange. I don't know, is that a bad thing necessarily? I'll definitely be out of my comfort zone, hopefully it will force me to interact with the local community a lot more - I don't want to become insular and isolated from my own peers in a little England bubble.

Anyway, they took this lovely photograph of us all:

Honestly, I seriously considered trying to photoshop my tiny 30 pixel face to look more attractive for a moment. That would be an impossible task though, (being able to do something with such a tiny photo - not that it's an impossible task to photoshop some attractiveness into me!)

My own vanity is appalling. hahaha So anyway on the flip side I am feeling awesomely sleep deprived at the minute. My sleeping pattern is so messed up. I'm dreading to think what my project reads like now. In less than 4 hours it will be submitted and out of my hands! Then I can just concentrate on exams and catch up on my sleep.

Oh yeah and Portal 2 came out last week - so good! - typically they picked the week before assessments are due in to release it! So the house has gone a bit Stephen Merchant mad - really wanted to buy tickets to see him at Warwick Arts centre but of course, I won't be in the country on November 8th so I couldn't go :( (Argh I'm getting upset just thinking about it now!)

Next Door's Baby.

2011-05-03T07:37:00.000+01:00

Holly?! What are you doing awake at 7am on your day off?

When they built this house, I can only assume they run out of money halfway through, and decided to build my joining wall out of cheap plywood, fuzzy felt and newspaper. That's the only explanation I have for how thin these walls are. Bricks would be more soundproof than this. Thank goodness I am moving out in a few months. I don't think I have had an uninterrupted nights sleep here yet.

Okay, babies cry. That's about all they are able to do really. They cry and cry for no reason and there's nothing you can do to stop them. I can accept that. But here is the annoying thing: if you google "Next door's baby is keeping me awake all night" and you'll get thousands of hits, because there are literally thousands of innocent people being kept awake at night by screaming infants. But the response is always the same:

"YOU SELFISH BITCH. THINK ABOUT WHAT THE MUM IS GOING THROUGH, IF YOU HATE IT SO BADLY WHY DON'T YOU MOVE OUT"

I sympathise with mother. But this is her baby, and when she had that baby she should have been prepared for getting no sleep for the next three years. I am not a mother. I am trying to study for my exams. When I have a kid, I will gladly endure the sleepless nights. I do not need a 'trial run' now.

Well anyway, I am fairly used to being kept awake by this baby. But tonight there has been a new development. I can hear what sounds like a phone vibrating - as if it's ringing but on silent mode, so all you can hear is that VVVVVVVRRRRRT VVVVVVVVRRRRT. I thought it was snoring, but it's too quick, and too consistent. Have they bought some kind of machine to mimic the snoring sound of a parent beside the baby's cot? Do those things exist?

Well yeah. Imagine it's 7am, the week of a massive 13,000 word project deadline. And someone's phone is vibrating against your wall for hours on end. Welcome to my hell. I am never having kids. Dogs are where it's at.

"You look really tired"

2011-03-13T02:37:00.000+01:00

WHY do people say this? Tell me. If you have ever said this phrase, explain yourself, immediately.
I hate it when people say this to me, it's so annoying because they're trying to be nice. They say it because they are concerned and just want to make sure you're okay. So I can't hate them for it. But they are just essentially saying "you look like crap" to my face, and it hurts. I don't like being told I look run down - especially when I'm not! This has happened to me three times this term.

I have deep-set eyes, it's genetic, that is the unfortunate skeletal structure of my face, it is the same with my parents' eyes and my grandparents' eyes, and my great-grandparents eyes.

If I saw a friend, and they looked awful for some unknown reason. I'd ask "Are you okay?" in a sympathetic manner, if they say "Yeah I'm fine" - this means that they don't want to talk about it, or aren't terribly upset. If they reply "No, actually...." and then confide in me their upset, then I have been a good friend and everyone is happy. But DON'T say "you look tired" to someone. WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT? It's just an insult!

I've made a habit now, when someone says this to me, to make it as awkward as humanly possible:

So I was at work the other day:
Girl: "Are you okay? You look really tired"
Me: "Thanks! No actually I got 10 hours sleep last night, I'm feeling pretty lively actually!"
--- (awwwwkward silence - I relished every awkward second) ---

I knew the girl in question felt bad because about 10 minutes later she was really complimenting my top.

I remember last year I was sitting on my bed in my student halls, the door was open (I am sociable) I was just sitting on my own bed, in my own room, in my pyjamas, it was about 10am.

A girl walked past and said:

"Oh my god! Are you okay? You look really tired!"
"No, I'm not tired, I'm just not wearing any make-up - this is what my natural face actually looks like, but thanks for noticing!"

I know I sound like I am being cranky. But seriously. Do not say this to people. It's insensitive.
As I said, I can't hold it against the people who say it, because they're trying to be nice, they just want to ask if you are okay because they have noticed that you look disproportionately more ugly and hideous than you usually do.

AMAZING NEWS!

2011-02-23T22:26:00.035+01:00

Today I had my interview for a kind of scholarship scheme run by the University of Tokyo in conjunction with my university.

I was incredibly anxious about applying, the competition is intense, as there is only one place available each year - I had kind of assumed the position would ultimately go to some high-flying economics or law student with a host of A* grades and a fancy internship at Deutsche Bank. I applied anyway with my fingers crossed. You have nothing to lose by applying, and nothing to gain by comparing yourself to an imaginary hypothetical perfect student. Anyway, a few days later I had received an email inviting me for an interview.

Those two weeks flew past and that terrifying interview was today. The time of my interview clashed with my Japanese lesson, I didn't want to miss the lesson so I went and paid attention and made my excuses to leave 20 minutes before my interview.

In hindsight, I wish I had left half an hour earlier, just so I could sit down and go over my notes and prepare a little bit. I went to the reception desk and they asked me to sit down and wait before the interview. My heart was pounding like a jack hammer. I was shaking! I don't know what came over me, I have had interviews just as scary as this one before and been fine, but for some reason I was in tatters. I had been sitting down for the whole of 20 seconds when I was called in for the interview.

I was talking so fast I actually had to stop to inhale! Nerves! I wasn't being as concise as I wanted to be and it was frustrating me. As I left the interview room, I instinctively knew I had messed up, I was certain that I had blown it. I met with a friend on my course, and I got it off my chest, she was a fantastic support for me and said "It probably didn't go as badly as you thought!"

Now here is a lesson that I will never forget - even if you think you've had a terrible interview, you might be wrong. A mere few hours later I was informed that I was successful. I will be spending next year at the University of Tokyo! I am utterly elated. gob-smacked, freaked out, shocked, speechless! It is going to be a fantastic year!

Nahfok

2011-02-18T04:00:00.002+01:00

Just come back from visiting family, spent two lovely days in beautiful Norfolk. Loved it.
Since returning I have come to realize a lot of words I use are actually quite peculiar to Norfolk, and as such I must have sounded like a complete prat to everyone else since moving to uni!

So for future reference, here is a handy guide:

lugs = ears, if you have hearing problems or aren't paying attention, you're luggy. (As I have been recently diagnosed! There's a post for another day!)
rummun = an unfortunate or unexpected occurence "What a rumm'n!"
pingle = to pick about with food or snack. (In my family it is traditional, on Christmas day, to eat the traditional christmas dinner at about 1 or 2pm until you are stuffed, have a post-dinner nap, then at about 8pm we will lay out a shmorgasboard of little snacks (such as nuts, breadsticks, picked onions, relish, a selection of cheeses and biscuits, grapes, cold meats, pringles etc) to "pingle on".)
on the huh = at an awkward or jaunty angle, i.e. "That painting is on the huh" or "Have you seen him walking? He's a bit on the huh" you could also say it was skew wiff but I'm fairly sure that's used elsewhere in the UK too.
jiffle = to fidget or alternatively, to fudge about
dudder = to tremble, an unsettling scene might 'give you the dudders', you can say that old people "dudder along"
craze = to nag "craze mum for sweets" or "Facebook crazes me, I hate it!" - I'm sure I've heard this one outside of Nofolk though!
Get on your wick = to annoy you immensely.
put your parts on = have a tantrum, get all fussy and obstinate about something
blar = to cry, esp. said of children "blarhing on and on".

Also, although not words in themselves:

Thass = "It is"
Shew = showed
suffun = something

That's just the accent coming through :P

OH MY GOD NORFOLK

Ya dun goofed

2011-02-04T00:32:00.002+01:00

Here's a bit of a lulzy update; turns out, I've been deaf for the past two years.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. I've had a very very mild conductive hearing loss (-25db in one ear, and -30db in the other, (decibels don't really convert to % perfectly but it gives you a rough indication!).

I'd never noticed because in Norfolk, everyone shouts. My family shout, there is lots of laughter and squealing and banter, my dogs bark, I am woken up most mornings by DIY, Petrol lawn mowers or music. However I have recently moved into a student house full of normal people, and for the life of me I can't understand a single word any of them are saying. Especially you Andy. Mumble mumble mumble. WHAT? SPEAK UP?

So I went to a doctor and he tuned me with a tuning fork, nice to know that I am in tune. Then he sent me to another clinic and they did a hearing test. They offered me a hearing aid, I laughed and said "not a chance" (have you seen how expensive they are?!) They think it was due to severe allergies, I've been given a steroidal nasal spray and I've bought a metric fuck-ton of cetirizine we're all good to go. A few weeks later and I have noticed a massive improvement, but haven't had a second test to confirm it. So glad I didn't buy that hearing aid! How dare they push it on me so quickly when all I needed was some anti-histamines!

So lesson of the day: you can be so allergic to pollen that your runny nose clogs your ears up. Isn't the human body delightful?

Essays: writing offensive

2010-12-31T05:04:00.053+01:00

I am actually going to reveal my super secret essay method. This is top secret. So pay attention!

Okay, so you're an undergraduate, it's essay time! They give you that crisp, fragile sheet of paper, with a list of 20 baffling questions or statements from which to chose an essay title that you're gunna write about.

RIGHT, which of these topics looks the most appealing?
You might see one that jumps out at you immediately, if it seems slightly more straightforward, or you feel strangely familiar with the kind of essay the question wants you to write. You're probably best to DISMISS IT, because everyone else will have chosen it.

You know those 'revision sessions' they hold two weeks before the exams, that no one bothers to attend? Attend them! Last year one of the more revealing, delicious chunklets of information given to me was in one of these session, where the tutor said "Every single year, everyone answers questions 3 and 4". Not that there is anything wrong with answering the same question that everyone else chooses, but unless you write something BLISTERINGLY good, the professor marking it will have grown wearisome of reading through 60 essays about the same thing, and any flaws with your argument will be really obvious.

That being said, you'll write a better essay if you pick a familiar topic, so don't neglect a topic you recognise for something you're unfamiliar with.

Okay, now for the essay writing. For most people the method is tried and tested: Introduce the topic, present points back up your argument, supplemented with evidence from texts, draw all evidence up in a succinct conclusion.

In my head, I am imagining what everyone else will write for that essay. So I can dismiss it in mine. I know it sounds slightly over-competitive and cruel. But I think you'll appear more intelligent if you make everyone elses' essays look stupid. I've used sentences such as "At first glance, one might be tempted to write an essay about " or "for many undergraduates, a gut reaction might be to write an essay about....." and then you go BUT that would be inaccurate for these reasons...

So essentially you insult everyone elses' essays. Oh I am so harsh. Be competitive and secretive and evil.
Don't worry and think that you're being psychotically over-competitive, because EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT. Here's an experiment for you: ask a random classmate what they are doing for their essay, THEY WON'T TELL YOU! They will vaguely outline the topic, or say some deceitful lie like "Well I don't really know what I am going to say". I've sat in seminars where the seminar leader actually tries to make people say what their project is on, no one would. They'd vaguely outline the kind of thing they were doing without ever saying what it was.

I had another seminar where you had to write down your essay title on a list, and even when it was a few days before the deadline, the list was empty. Not because students don't start the essay until three days before the deadline (although many do) - but because they didn't want to be the first to reveal to the whole class what their essay choice was. So secretive!!

What on earth is that noise outside? Am I being burgled?! It's fireworks?!

Anyway, so once you've got an idea in your head about what everyone else's essays might look like, succinctly sum up all their key points, and use them in the introductory paragraph, so it's as if the other students are just covering the basics, and your essay is going into real depth.

Of course, one massive drawback of this tactic is that you then have to generate an essay of points that they wouldn't have made. So you're going to have to write a good essay anyway.

Okay, so here is your revised essay layout:
1. Present the title question
2. Completely disagree with the title question, make outlandish and outrageous claims that the question is misleading and neglects vital aspects of the debate, sum up everything that anyone would have said their essays in a short paragraph, as if it is rudimentary and basic.
3. Back it up with quotes from obscure texts, and reinterpret core readings to say what you want it to say (chillax, that's how the academics roll!).
4. Conclude with an optimistic and progressive tone.

It was fun, but I feel like my luck will run out when one professor fails to tolerate my waffle. May I rue the day that ever happens!

2010-11-17T22:35:00.006+01:00

Being students, we can't afford to use our central heating. So I'm keeping myself warm around a malty cup of Assam instead. Listening to Roygbiv by Boards of Canada through very large headphones (doubling up as ear warmers - getting my money's worth!)

And no - none of this is uni work, it's too cold, no one gets a degree in this weather!

Lollercoasters!

2010-11-15T01:10:00.000+01:00

I have a phobia of Elevators. There, I said it.

When I was 12 years old, I would wake up every morning at 6am to do my paper-round before I went to school. One of the first addresses on my round was a flat on the 15th floor of a tower block, and I was too scared to use the elevator, so every morning I would huff up 30 flights of stairs with a massive messenger bag FULL of heavy papers to the 15th floor to deliver ONE paper. Just because I was scared of elevators.

Fast forward 8 years and I'm sacrificing my ONE day off a week to get up at 7am and go to Alton Towers for Jim's birthday.

Rollercoasters are just glorified elevators! It was a mega day out though!

2010-10-05T13:17:00.001+01:00

my home-made greek salad isn't as moreish and delicious as the professionally made one from birmingham :(

Back to Uni

2010-10-04T18:52:00.000+01:00

So today was the first day of term! I am now a genuine second-year student at the Universitaire de Warwick. I'm full of apprehension and excitement at the moment. I did well last year, but I'm determined to up my game this year. Ready to really throw myself into it and do as well as I can So in very very high spirits today! (How long do you reckon that will last?!)

Some mental bastard cloud decided to rain all of this week. Then it was suddenly scalding hot today. So hot and sunny I needed to walk to Uni in just a t-shirt!
Which was double ironically lucky because in the biting winds and freezing cold rains of yesterday, I got in touch with my inner-girlie and I bought some lovely SPF 15 foundation from Max Factor, and some SPF 15 moisturiser lotion as well; And lo and behold! Today it was mega sunny! That can't be a coincidence!

I got honked at by three separate cars on the 30-minute walk towards Uni as well, I reckon it's the new foundation. 'coorrrrr! Look at the clear complexion on her! *Toot toot!* her pores are so small!!! *beep beep!*' That's how truck drivers' brains' work. I reckon.

The reason why I bought a load of sunscreen in the freezing rains of October was because I am fast approaching the age of 21, and therefore I have recently developed a phobia of crumbling and becoming old. I hear the sun is responsible for 90% of visible skin ageing! So therefore I am sunscreened!

Speaking of ageing crumblies, Jim's birthday tomorrow!

Leaving home

2010-09-08T01:02:00.001+01:00

D: eeek

I'm actually leaving home, moving out. In two days. Not just for a few months in student halls, but into my own home, with my own utility bills, and my own actual neighbours.
So many mixed emotions swimming through my mind right now: obviously there's excitement, for my new bedroom, my new garden and my new kitchen, and another great year at Warwick!
There's sadness, I'm going to miss my family, miss the peace and calm, and the lack of stress, the company and my doggies.
There's terror: the new semester, the workload, the part-time job, the internship applications, they're all looming overhead. I know that once I'm there and I've started getting on with it, it will be manageable, but right now I am standing here and anticipating it, and it's terrifying.

2010-09-03T21:46:00.004+01:00

I'm currently in the process of packing all my belongings into tiny boxes to move into the new house, underneath my bed I found a box full of ephemera that I had hoarded over my holidays last year. Including a small log that I kept of some of the days of my holiday. So I'm going to copy-type them up here so I have a nice digital copy!

Day 10: Takayama

Woke up extra early at 6.55 for breakfast at 7am, which was a very traditional Japanese breakfast of fresh fish, vegetables and very fluffy, glutinous rice (onomatopoeically described as 'fwaa fwaa' because it's so fluffy and sticky). The full-on Japanese style traditional breakfast was quite a shock to the senses, I suppose the Japanese tourist in England would be similarly confounded by the full English breakfast!

At 9am we went to the morning market along the riverside in central Takayama, most stalls sold vegetables and fruit, but some had handmade wooden carvings and folk crafts, lots of nice scary Oni masks but they were too expensive, although in retrospect, I wish I had bought one. Strangely, whilst we were looking out onto the river because at the shoals of wild koi karp, we were approached by a man from the NHK(!) who was filming a documentary about the swans on the lake!!! That was a fantastic experience. We took a bus from Takayama to the hida folk village, immediately you are hit by the natural musk of the hearth fires: the thatched cottages were centuries old but perfectly preserved due to the fires they kept lit inside the house, which prevented rotting, decay and insect infestation, and kept the thatch dry. Very clever! each cottage was filled with artefacts, we were free to wander for a while, it was very peaceful.

Afterwards, we took the shrine walking course around Takayama, each shrine had a massive bell that you could strike with a suspended log! The noise was very different to an English Church bell, I can't even describe it, it was a softer, deeper, richer tone, less metallic. We stumbled through the residential graveyards and up into the woods, where there was the ruins of a castle, and climbed a massive tree-covered hill with a fantastic blue view. Coming down the other side of the hill we found a park with a small cafe, I ordered some toriniku and ice cold green tea. Was very intimidated by the Japanese-style toilets in the park! We walked back through the inner city and finally back to the hotel by 4pm, where we rested. At 6.30 there was a fantastic feast of sukiyaki downstairs in the minshuku. Afterwards we all sat around the irori hearth and chatted, watched some Japanese television.

2010-08-29T20:52:00.001+01:00

You know you've gone nocturnal when...

2010-08-29T16:20:00.000+01:00

... you keep accidentally turning the lights on when you leave the room. Because you're so unaccustomed to daylight, that you think the lights are on, and habitually hit the switch when you leave the room.

2010-08-26T18:39:00.001+01:00

I have never seen a movie twice until now! INCEPTION. I saw it today and I really enjoyed it, and that in itself freaks me out because I usually hate Hollywood blockbusters with a passion, it is very very rare that I enjoy an action movie. I remember being dragged to the shakycam-fest that was The Bourne Ultimatum, I never knew 3 hours of gun fights and explosions could be so monotonous! Kinda walked into Inception expecting something similar but BOY WAS I PLEASANTLY SURPRISED! I went with Claire, Jim and Andy after a nice BBQ Weekend.

With regard to the cinematography, it was aesthetically very well constructed, it was beautifully shot, you've gotta give Nolan credit. I liked the long cityscapes, the expanses of architecture, I thought it was a nice visual motif: although they are real locations, the mind boggling scale and complexity makes real locations seem dream-like. They were really inventive with the shooting of it and that is very refreshing. I love it when you can't figure out how they filmed something: the zero-gravity fight scene in the hotel corridor. (Not when Arthur was fighting in a spinning corridor as the van was rolling, but after the van left the bridge, and he was floating in zero gravity) how did they film that?! I know it was probably using wires, but I still just can't understand how they got the actors to move like that. When they use wires you can still usually tell the direction of gravity from their movement, but he was in proper free fluid movement in three dimensions of movement, the movement wasn't restricted to one or two planes of motion as you'd expect with wirework, ah I don't know, they swore the production crew to secrecy!

A lot of people fault the chemistry of the cast, but I thought the concept of the film took precedence over the characters, nevertheless the humour of the supporting characters was a nice touch, I hate an action film that takes itself too seriously. I liked the Yusuf, the Chemist's sneaky finger to the attacking projections as he pulled away in the van near the beginning.

Ah I want to go see it again! the night after you have really vivid near-lucid dreams, which I have never experienced before! Trying to drag my mum to it with little success at the moment :D hahaha

2010-08-26T01:53:00.000+01:00

I've had the xylophone solo from Cardiac Arrest by Madness stuck in my head for the last three hours arrrrghhh!

YEAH!

2010-08-21T04:04:00.001+01:00

I am bursting with positivity this week! I think my family are slightly confused by it, they keep remarking how I'm so uncharacteristically cheerful and noisy, and there I was thinking I had settled in nicely to being a curmudgeon!

Ooh I can't articulate myself without sounding terribly pompous. It's a mixture of clarity and unbridled positivity. Ah I am in such a good mood!! My brain feels awake and productive, like I could sit down and write an essay right here, right now! I really hope I can keep it up. So yeah. POSITIVITY!

I can't wait to move into my dinky student house and crack on with another fabulous year at Warwick! In the meantime, I have the pleasure of attending a barbeque party tomorrow held by one of my best friends' family. Hopefully the weather will be as bright as my mood!

Being productive

2010-08-19T02:09:00.001+01:00

So I've been pretty bored this week, and have been getting in touch with my creative side!!

The first thing is actually quite embarrassing. YES I'M 20 YEARS OLD! I made a charm bracelet hehe!!! This was only the result of an afternoon's tinkering, so... I might make some more charms (it's looking pretty bare) or completely start again and make them look a bit more professional! Boredom does crazy things to you!

Each little charm is less than a cubic centimetre in size, so it was sooo fiddly, and I've never done anything like it before, which is why it looks like a 6 year old did it! Don't judge me! It's REALLY HARD.

Clockwise!
1. Pen nib, because I do like to write!
2. (supposed to be, but I realise doesn't look very much like it) United Kingdom, land of my birth!
3. A book, because I do like to read!
4. An edam cheese! To commemorate the Europe times :)
5. A mortarboard (But I suppose you can't see it from this angle) to celebrate my studentdom.
6. A heart... kinda cliche... I was getting bored of charms at this point!
7. A stamped, addressed envelope. Because I am a fan of pen-pal-ation and snail mail.
8. A camera, because I photograph things.
9. A torii, to commemorate the Japan times and my love of Japanese language!
10. A sub of the day!! To represent my gap year.
11. A can of coke, because you can't have a sandwich without a drink, and I'm addicted to coke.

I've got 10 gaps, so I need something to represent Sociology, my dogs, my family, music, fears, goals etc. (Suggestions welcome!) Lots left to do! If I can muster the patience to fiddle about with tiny bits of clay again.

Then I had a sandwich, then I came back and painted a picture of my BIG SILLY FACE.

HAHAHAHA

Brushing your teeth with absinthe

2010-08-12T16:07:00.001+01:00

Woke up at a reasonable hour for once! (10am... not that reasonable) but still wrestled with dysania for a little before finally wrenching myself from the warm bedsheets and forcing myself into respectable clothing for a little trip to the doctors. I've become one of those people who makes small talk with strangers now... it's really weird, wishing them a good day and stuff, am I that deprived of human contact?!

I've developed a full-on dentist phobia. I had a nightmare last night that four of my teeth fell out. I quite often have dreams about my teeth crumbling apart or coming loose in my mouth... maybe like 6 times a year. I went to the supermarket to buy my own personal tube of extra-awesome Colgate, because my mum has gone insane. She's gone on an animal-testing, local, pure, organic, non chemical product spree, and replaced our toothpaste with this natural local brand made in our home town, that contains no chemicals and is made from FENNEL. One of the primary ingredients of absinthe. If you'll recall I had a baaaaad time with absinthe, and had passed out on my own birthday by 10pm, and was sick 9 times (possibly more, I can't remember... oh the follies of youth!).

So I TRIED to use the absinthe toothpaste for two days, but it made my eyes water and I was gagging so much using it, I couldn't keep it up for two minutes of continuous brushing! It tastes so strongly of sambuca, absinthe, aniseed... so strong it makes your eyes burn. So I finally walked to the shop and bought my own toothpaste, which my sister and dad are really keen to steal because they don't want to use the absinthe toothpaste either, so I've hidden it in my washbag, and this morning while I was in bed with my back turned to the door, I heard someone sneak into my room and poke about the empty toothpaste box. hahaha

Then I went to the library. I wanted to use the library when I first arrived back home in July, because I was at uni, I let my family have my library card, my dad used it quite often and the whole time I was at Warwick, I'd keep getting emails from them reminding me that various books on historical fiction were going overdue soon, which I'd promptly forward to my family so I didn't get a fine. When I got home, they'd lost it and they insisted they'd returned it to me, dad found it 6 weeks later in his wallet.
So today, I walk 4 miles to the library and found two books that looked really interesting on sociology, but when I went to check them out. I couldn't. Because there were £7.00 of fines on my card.

:( fml!

The joys of camping

2010-08-07T05:20:00.002+01:00

I realise it dinky and kooky, but if we can't find pleasures in the most quaint and predictable things in life, then we're just making it more difficult for ourselves, and my blog updates leading up to the end of July might have betrayed the fact that I had been digging myself deeper and deeper into such a rut over the most trivial of things, or conversely, over the most existential of concerns without stopping to think pragmatically about what I was getting so swept up in. Sometimes the only way out of ruts like these is to just take a break and reset. Just getting out of that room, the house, the city - can give you the space and short time needed just to reassess or clear your head.

So last weekend I went camping for a couple of days with my housemates-to-be, and I can finally tell you about it because I have finally found the USB cable for my camera!!! We drove all the way down to a little place called Weston-super-mare, which is a lovely seaside resort on the west-coast of England, just south of Wales. (In fact, you can see Wales from the coast!) The weather treated us well, and it was two days of sun at the beach! Got to say, the coast there is bizarre: when the tide comes out, it goes out for nearly half a mile, leaving a huge expansive stretch of mud flats at the shore: sinking mud! Jim gleefully ran about barefoot in the mud for a good half-hour, he was properly stuck in up to his knees at one point! I should imagine that can be quite dangerous... It's such a shame everyone is so spread out over country in the summer. The mild post-exam euphoria has long since worn off, and everyone is intensely keen to move into the fabled new house! But, moving-in day is still something like 32(possibly?) days away, so we broke up the expanse of summer with a little seaside camping holiday. On the second night there we cooked ourselves a delicious Tikka Masala over the little dinky camping stove, oh my days it was one of the most delicious things I have eaten in such a long time!

It was really pleasant, and quite cheap for a short break, seeing as the purse strings are quite tight these days. The hilly panorama of Somerset surrounding our campsite was really beautiful to wake up to in the morning. You know what, the thing I really enjoyed the most was being with my friends, I didn't care too much about the surroundings or the weather or the tacky English seafront, but to stay up to the early hours in a little tent, huddled around a lantern playing word games and chatting was really relaxing. It's just a really welcome break from the monotony of the summer break. (Does it really need to be 15 weeks long?) It really brought up my mood, and I really can't wait for next term to arrive now! Plus, the success of the camping trip meant that we're making a little more headway with planning the "Warwick Road Trip Society" - so hopefully there will be more little excursions like this to follow!

On the way home, me and Andy stopped in London for a couple of hours. I got to see a friend from Halls briefly, and that was really nice. We also tracked down a Japanese Speciality store where I bought myself a little bento box! So expect a stupid Bento update in the future.

Stay off the crack!

2010-08-05T23:13:00.000+01:00

After last night's update, I found myself marching towards Sainsbury's, thinking about that chocolate bar. But halfway there remembered about my fear of sugar and dentists so instead ended up going for a long circuit of the suburbs with my headphones in. Getting back into Art Brut since I last saw them (@LCR with Maximo Park I think, must have been three years ago now!) I think that most of the music I listen to lacks a sense of humor! I don't think I laugh enough.

Agh I really want that chocolate bar again now.

think of the polar bears

2010-08-05T04:47:00.002+01:00

I think I'm developing a full-on complex about food. I've literally just spent the last 40 minutes thinking about all the delicious foods that exist and if I was less concerned about trekking across the city at 4.30am on my own, I'd be off to Tescos right now.

I feel like I'm always being nagged to get a car. My mum recently asked me and my sister why all of our friends have cars and we don't. We swiftly retorted that for the overwhelming majority of people we know, their middle-class parents paid for their driving lessons and cars. Mum replied we should be friends with poorer people. The truth is, I could have bought a car with my savings from my gap year. But it's so ridiculously expensive and unnecessary for a lot of students. My job, my friends, the city centre, all major transport links, my university are all within walking distance of my house.

So my reasons for buying a car are:

It's past midnight and I'm scared to walk alone to buy maltesers and frozen chips from tescos in an all-nighter fuelled binge craving.
It's raining.
sheer freakin' convenience-driven sloth
I randomly, want to go somewhere very far away and remote that is not accessible by train or bus.

I envy those with a car, because those things sound quite luxurious and handy right now. But the reality is whilst I have the money, I don't have the money to spend it on a car. I envy those who can afford it though. I write all this because I had my first driving experience this weekend on an empty campsite in my friends car. They taught me to pull away and drive forwards very basically in 15 minutes and I did a little lap of the field and then parked the car by the tent. It was all very fun, didn't stall once. Thought I did okay, but you'll have to ask Andy! (crap I realised I haven't made a post about camping yet! I'll do it as soon as I find my camera-USB cable)

There has been ONE occasion where a car would have come in handy, and that's moving house. But I'm kind of sceptical as to whether it's necessary to pay a grand or more for that rare occasion. If I had a car, I'd be a) significantly poorer and b) morbidly obese by now, as I'd be able to waste money on junk food at 3am and wouldn't even need to walk. Furthermore, all the baby seals and polar bears would cry at my unnecessary carbon footprint.

Logically, it's insane for me to buy a car. Yet my status as a non-driver makes me feel slightly worthless, like I'm not really a true adult. I suppose it's about independence. I was perplexed as to why all my friends were getting their first cars at 18, they all lived next to me, where were they driving to? The common reply was "well I can drive to the beach when it's summer now" and on one hand, that's certainly a pants-on-head retarded reason to buy a car, on the other hand, they have their independence, surely that's worth the bill?

Anyway back to food: here are my current cravings.
1) Freakin' massive yorkshire puddings
2) Cadbury's Whole Nut Milk Chocolate
3) Turkish Delight

And thanks to my student poverty and lack of a car, I am saving myself £15, 3 pounds on my hips and one seal pup, all at the expense of my dignity. I really enjoyed driving, and hopefully, if I can save enough money over this year through work, I'll get my license just in case it comes in handy for graduate employment (which I secretly fear it will on a major scale)

2010-08-03T04:17:00.003+01:00

I don't want to go to sleep. I'm in a really bad mood. I want to be happy again and stop feeling so crap. You can't feel happy again if you're laying down in silence in a dark room. You just wake up feeling even worse. I hate going to bed.

For the love of blog

2010-07-29T02:10:00.001+01:00

Why do you reckon blogging hasn't really taken off? My sister caught me typing today and was like "oh my god why do you all have blogs for?!." The only people who keep a blog, (to the best of my knowledge), are English students and aspirational journalists. (and they do a much better job of it than I do!) But for the average person, you don't really hear about it.

It's not like it's narcissistic to keep a blog: Twitter and facebook status updates are really popular, and most people I know easily write the equivalent of an entire blog post in sheer quantity of status updates about how they've just woken up, eaten a sausage, watched hollyoaks and gone to bed again. But no one blogs. (Screw you spellcheck, it's a verb if I want it to be!).

I write this because one of my best friends recently deleted his, because he found it a one-sided and isolating experience. It made me feel upset that he felt that way. Blogging shouldn't make you feel lonely, it should all be a reflexive and communicative experience, just one with a bit more articulation and depth than intermittent one-sentence updates on what you're up to. With status updates, you log in, and its just an unsorted torrent of information of over a hundred people all at once, and it gives you the overwhelming impression that OH GOD EVERYONE'S LIFE IS SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN MINE. Blogs are so much more coherent!

Actually, that being said: I'm imagining the hypothetical blog posts that some people I know might write. That would be unbearable on a massive scale. It'd be like being stuck inside Helen Fielding's brain. I've seen a hideous vision of the future now. Maybe blogging is evil?! Well it is fun, why else would I sit here for a couple of hours a week just going derp derp derp derp derp into the interweb otherwise? On that note I think I'll stop writing for now!

I love icanhascheezburger, it has single handedly motivated all my life success thus far. I am easily pleased.

country bumpkin

2010-07-25T03:12:00.000+01:00

Hoorah, less than a week until my fantabulous weekend of camping. Weather is still sunny and warm, and had a family day of walking in le countryside with the dog and grandparents. It was all very 90's and incredibly relaxing. Especially to have the entire family in the car at once! It's been ages since that last happened, it was like being a child all over again

It's been quite nice to spend some quality time with my family, it's generally made me feel a lot better. Mostly gratitude really, when you think about how much your parents have sacrificed for you, how they work 5 or 6 days a week and spend their wages on bringing you up, it feels slightly ungrateful to be questioning the point in things, and getting so caught up and upset by something so trivial. I should just appreciate that I am able to experience sensations and phenomena in the first place, and that I have my life ahead of me to make of it what I wish, rather than question what the point of them is.

On another note:
My long-standing arch nemesis Facebook has reached a milestone of 500 Million active members this week. This reminded me of the Sabbatical Elections at University last year. So there are a dozen students who want to be elected as Representatives for the Student Union, so they go on a big election campaign to make you vote for them.

A large group of about 12 of us were in the kitchen of our student halls, and a group of three election candidates have gained access to our halls and came into our kitchen to tell us their election manifestos and urge us to vote for them. Talking about issues like 'transparency' and 'approachability' and trying to get the university to introduce a 'freshers week' (i.e. an extra week of paying rent for no reason).

It's all quite amicable, until one candidate says this corker. "I actually have been doing a bit of snooping at the other candidates on facebook, and I don't want to bad mouth them or anything, but some of them don't even have 200 friends. I mean, I'm just saying, they're obviously not a people person. They're probably being really friendly and approachable now, but I bet that as soon as they win, you'll never see them again." People like this actually exist?! Got less than 200 friends on Facebook? You're a social reject apparently. (I actually said this aloud at the time, in retrospect it was probably rude to say it to her face, but brilliant nonetheless.) Do you know the average number of facebook 'friends' per person? 120. She didn't win the elections. Probably because she'd offended the majority of people listening to her by telling them that they don't have enough friends.

POLITICS!

2010-07-20T01:50:00.002+01:00

I'm worried that my posts recently have been a bit miserable. I'm waiting out a rut. I am okay in the grand scheme of things and it will pass. My brain just isn't feeling very switched on at all. Bleh. I have been devoid of stimulation. Then randomly found myself squealing, grinning and crying (yes, crying actual tears of pain) at Deal or No Deal. It takes me hours to feel remotely 'with it' and ready to do something constructive. But eventually I get there and achieve something with my day.

By the time I've dragged myself out of bed
...washed my face for half an hour (for something to do...I really am at that much of a loss for what to do with myself, my skin must be suffering. I've developed this meticulous Patrick Bateman skincare ritual* that involves trying out every kind of facial product my family owns in order of aggressiveness, until I have literally pulverised my epidermis into conforming to one even skintone.)
... had some impractical elaborate breakfasts (I have discovered the wonderment that is dorayaki) then washed the entire kitchen (boredom strikes again)
...laid on my bed looking at the ceiling until I literally bore myself into thinking of an activity
...gone for a 4-mile walk around the residential area listening to vitalising musics to get me going (probably helps with walking off the fatty pancake breakfast too)

...Finally, after about 4 hours of fudging about I am feeling ready to LEARN. I'm keeping myself occupied by doing just one or two hours of gentle study every day. By getting a first, I've built myself up to an unmaintainable standard now, and properly have the fear. (plus boredom) at least I am doing something productive. :)

In 2 weeks I am taking the train to Swindon to embark on my camping weekend of wonder with my housemates-to-be. I bet it will rain.

So yes. Feeling better today.

*kudos to you if you got the American Psycho reference!
Also Happy Birthday to Buster, 12 years old today!

君といるのが好きで、後はほとんど嫌いで

2010-07-18T22:49:00.006+01:00

This is not really like most of the music I listen to. But oh well, sometimes you bump into stuff unexpectedly! I was thinking if I want to pass Japanese next year I should immerse myself in it a bit more so was looking for music.

Definitely a good song. My Japanese is still pretty terrible, but I am starting to understand about 30% of the lyrics in songs now. (biggest barrier is vocabulary more than anything) and I definitely like this song a lot. :)

From what I gather, the lyrics are about love (of course) and being a 'strange chameleon' he can't blend in properly with his surroundings, not being able to properly fit in and feel at ease like a part of the rest of the world, which I suppose we've all felt at some point or another. I like how lazy and daydreamy the guitar lilt is.

My favourite lyric is "君といるのが好きで、後はほとんど嫌いで", (kimi to iru no ga suki de, ato wa hotondo kirai de", which means "I like being with you, and I mostly hate everything else" haha. ah, 90's JRock. Last Dinosaur, Climbing on the Roof, Ladybird Girl, I think I can and Runner's high are favourites too.

....yes I did watch FLCL in my youth. It was amazing. I am not ashamed.

2010-07-17T22:02:00.005+01:00

2010-07-09T21:16:00.002+01:00

I'm happy I just don't know it yet

Blahhhhh

2010-06-25T03:43:00.002+01:00

It's so odd having nothing to wake up for anymore!

2010-06-16T03:34:00.001+01:00

As of Monday, I have finally finished my first-year exams! Now is the arduous and nerve-wracking fortnight’s wait for results. Then I have 72 days of summery freedom!

After the long, hard slog of revision sessions, I don’t actually know what to do with myself anymore, now that I have all this free time! Studying is definitely my element, I can’t stop myself! Throughout my gap year, every day I’d come home from work and study a little Japanese or read a little C.Wright Mills before I went to bed. Learning is one of the cheapest, purest ways to feel better about yourself. I’m going to try my dandiest to make a good start on next year’s material, and try to maintain those good marks into my second year.

Next year I have taken the following Modules:

Field Studies (Ethnographic research)
Surveys, Secondary analysis and Social statistics (very excited about this one!)
The Sociology of Health and Illness
Learning Japanese 3

      So for the holidays, I’m going to thoroughly rack my brains trying to think of a good topic about which I could write a bloody good ethnography. I know that we have to do quite an extensive research project in the second year, and I want mine to be as good as I can. So I need to identify a topic as early as possible and start trying to make those initial enquiries about getting access… I am really daunted by this one. Can’t hurt to start thinking about it over the summer… I’m going to try and get a hold of some monographs from Norwich’s local library to read during the holidays but their collection isn’t as specialist as the one at Uni.
      I’ve already bought the course textbook for Japanese, even if I didn’t take it as an academic module, I can’t get enough of the language, I’d have been studying it in my spare time just for fun. I really can’t wait to start learning stats though!!! :D The modules this year are fantastic; I really honestly can’t wait to start my second year. I have had SO much fun in my first year here at Warwick. I feel so privileged.

      I am not looking forward to being away from my friends though. Andrew lives a good few hours’ drive from my hometown and money is scarce at the moment, so won’t be able to visit him half as much as I’d like… My old buddy Jim is on a 3 month work placement (lucky sod!) over the summer in Cornwall, so I have no idea how often I’m going to be able to see him if at all! I’m going to write to them both as often as I can! I have a whole book of stamps to use up!
      Actually, my stubborn insisting to use snail mail has recently been intensified by my email account being hacked into by some utter bastard. I can’t change the password to it either because I made the account SO long ago I’ve forgotten my arsing secret word. Will just have to painstakingly go through the rigmarole of changing my email address on every site I am registered with. Bah.

Exam cram has begun!

2010-06-07T00:11:00.001+01:00

last week I had my Japanese Oral exam, it was so scary! I was shaking as I sat down and began to speak into the microphone, I hadn't had an oral exam since I was 16 doing my French GCSE. But I think it went okay.
Rightio, got my Japanese exams out of the way. Now it's just sociology left. Three exams: 8 hours, seems pretty straightforward, just overloading my brain with information at the moment. For once I am really thankful for the disproportionate amount of revision that I did at the beginning of the year! It's made revision really stress-free :)

zzzzzzzzz.......

2010-06-03T09:59:00.002+01:00

Well this blog has taken an unexpected turn. I seem to have developed some sleep issuez.
I didn't really ever keep track of when it began but i remember it happening in the Easter Holidays. essentially I haven't had longer than 4 hours of continuous sleep for months. I go to bed tired, then after three or four hours, I wake up. I'm not refreshed, I'm still tired, but I can't get back to sleep again no matter how much I jiffle about in bed. I think its because I have a massive window in my halls and the sunrise beams RIGHT into my eyeballs, and heats the inside of the room up like a microwave oven!

So finally I got sick of it and decided the next time I got inexplicably woken up at 6.50am I would just get out of bed. I might feel awful for today but tonight I will get to sleep at least. I don't feel refreshed. I don't know why I woke up. Blah. It would have been a good plan, except the next day I had an interview that afternoon, and, like clockwork, I was woken up after only 4 hours of sleep at 6am. Dragged myself out of bed, had some cereal, and wasted hours and hours not knowing what to do.
Interview went well though. Got the role :)

Every morning I've woken later and later. 6am, then 6.50, then 7.10, then 8am. And this morning I woke up at 9.30 :)

2010-05-23T01:59:00.009+01:00

Ah, I love being at university. If I could I'd be an eternal student. Currently knee-deep in exam revision, and today wrote my speech for the oral presentation... now just need to learn it off by heart... it's not going to end well!

so easy

2010-05-21T03:04:00.002+01:00

See, after the mild bummer-low I had for the last couple of weeks I have emerged on a euphoric high. I woke up naturally at 9am today, got out of bed, chatted to the cleaners, emailed university about changing modules, which I effected that afternoon. Walked in the baking sunshine to costies for a drink and some stamps to write home with. I was walking with an incredible grin spread right across my face at one point. It was incredible, I felt higher than any night out I'd ever been on, just a fantastic euphoric burning within my chest, a roaring in my ears, an urge to run and scream and laugh! Time is passing so fast, yet simultaneously I feel able to capture a split second and just appreciate the sheer, incomprehensive complex beauty and harmony of everything.... I sound like a right tit, I realise. But agh, I feel SO GOOD! I am completely overwhelmed by everything! Life is good. I don't care if it's blatantly pointless, it feels incredible. I am so thankful for the people who make my life worth living. This entry is much shorter than I had originally anticipated, but I have my first Exam of the exam season in 9 hours, so I should probably be getting a good nights' sleep. Cheery-bye!

Say anything

2010-05-16T06:06:00.002+01:00

Hello again, I realise that I've left it a while since my last real update. I keep logging in with the intention of posting but then finding myself motivationless to type for longer than a paragraph on the same subject. My brain is a half-hearted fog.

I got back to university about three weeks ago, for the final term of my first year. There was a rather large deadline looming within the first fortnight: I had three 2,000 word essays due in on the same day. Being me, I didn't do them well in advance like a good student is supposed to, so that took up quite a lot of my time for the first 10 or 12 days I was at university. Perhaps I ran my brain into a stupor, but for the last three weeks I have found it really hard to achieve any cognitive clarity. Long periods of staring into the middle distance or out the window with a blank stare.

Perhaps I am simply on a downer, perhaps it's that simple. I can't deny I have been in an awful mood recently, my temper has been a bit shorter than it should really be, and I have said some things to close friends that tact would have otherwise usually prevented me. Mostly, I just wanted to sit in my room and do nothing. I felt like socialising was too much emotional and mental effort and wanted to be absolutely free of obligation for a couple of days, I think it has done me some good. I even finally deleted all the information and photos from my facebook, just leaving a white, blank page with my face and name on it. I finally grew sick of the whole thing when it deleted my 'about me' section, fed it through an online filter, and instead of a short paragaph written by me personally about my interests, it replaced with a selection of vaguely unrelated fan pages I should join. In one simple move, they've taken everything unique about me, my memories and inside jokes with friends, and made them just a pick-n-mix of homogenous categories just like everyone else. Boo!

I feel like I am on the cusp of a really big surge of productivity or creativity. I keep talking about starting some kind of project that will make my life feel more significant and meaningful. I don't know what on earth that might be, I feel like with my very fingertips I am touching the bigger picture, I can distinctly feel a lack of inspiration... I don't usually feel so uninspired, sometimes I'm not even really sure what I am waking up for, to call back on an old cliche.

So anyway, I spent most of this evening in my room, just being alone for a bit, and overhauled the blog and made it all pretty looking. It's pretty late so I'll get some sleep now, but I'll get back to blogging as soon as possible.

2010-05-11T03:24:00.001+01:00

It is 3.18am. I have to be up at 10am tomorrow, so I really should be asleep.

But I didn't care I wanted to just type and type for hours, I had so much swimming about in my head. I felt so insignificant, I couldn't understand people or the world I was in, I missed home, I felt lost in an ocean of information, I felt the impetus to be creative and produce, create something to be remembered by. To be able to articulate myself in a unique and poignant way and then I wouldn't feel so anonymous anymore. I could see myself typing into the morning, finding myself through expression, doing something productive and communicative with my hands and transmitting something unspoken, and I would feel catharsis, and I would feel satisfaction.

But then I came online, I wrote that first sentence and just gave up. Nevermind.

2010-05-08T03:01:00.002+01:00

Taking a little time to indulge in solitude. Boredom is peace, please I need a few moments to feel free from pressure before exams begin! Not setting an alarm for the morning and allowing myself to sleep for hours with no burdens forcing me to wake up in the mornings. Its very relaxing.

Spilling over everywhere!

2010-04-22T00:57:00.001+01:00

Ah I realise the next few hundred words will read terribly. Accept my sincerest apologies well in advance!

Monday: We took the train down to London and looked at the arts. I saw Francis Bacon again, but they had taken down Pope Innocent X and they'd moved the crucifixion triptych and I was all disoriented, which upset me, maybe it had been put back into storage somewhere, that's all I really wanted to see maybe, no amount of Dali or Mondrian or Warhol or Pollock or Lichenstein would compensate. Still, came home feeling creative, but when I sat down to sketch or draw or paint... it's so fustrating, can still tell that I still have some recollection of it, but nothing really comes to fruition on paper... there is a fogginess marring any kinetic intellect that connects my eyes to my hands. Life will arouse you and your response is so impotent, there's no catharsis in a failed picture. You just feel a bit useless and unable to communicate. I remember feeling this upset when I used to draw, perhaps that's why I stopped! Sometimes, the end result isn't worth the process you go through everything is so diluted, wish I could concentrate it down to convey something powerful.

My brain seems to have woken up a little from a stupor, I feel agitated a lot, I'm straddling articulacy and incoherence! I can't write at all. Started listening to music again, reconnected with older bands I never could pinpoint what it was that attracted me to them. Pinback. Radiohead. The Streets. (The sky is now red, My eyes reflect jest. Smiling at this blessing, this life is the best.
I came to this world with nothing and I'll leave with nothing but love)

I am on a high, perhaps its the sunny weather. I feel creative, I feel productive, constructive, energetic! I'm brimming over with joy, I want to spill over everywhere and make other people feel happy

I don't know why I have been so up and down in the last week. Hormones eh.

f4c25ng d6g!

2010-04-17T18:59:00.001+01:00

B4ster has 0anaged t6 04sh 0y 2eyb6ard, he was begg5ng f6r attent56n beca4se 5 was eat5ng ch6c63ate. He has s60eh6w 0anaged t6 *4t 0y 2eyb6ard 6n N40ber 36c2 and 5 have n6 5dea h6w t6 t4rn 5t 6ff! Restart5ng the c60*4ter d6es n6th5ng!

chee2y 35tt3e s6d.

Safely anchored back in harbour....

2010-04-07T16:33:00.001+01:00

So, here I sit in the traditional post-holiday stupor, the whirlwind wanderlust has swept me up and spat me out back at home. It was indeed turbulent, utterly terrifiying in some instances but completely and entirely rewarding and worth the scares and uncertainty. It was an experience I never thought I'd have, so I look back on it with fondness.

Arriving safely home, I have come to the conclusion I can no longer be bothered with facebook, I won't even bother deleting it. Just not using it anymore. feel liberated.

All my whirlwind romances are like hurricanes

DAY NINE: Arriving in Venice

2010-04-01T10:00:00.077+01:00

We were suddenly woken at 6am by a sharp knock on the door, it was the border control wanting to see our passports! I yawned, rubbed my eyes and reached for my bag, where all three of our passports were safely hidden. I offered them to the officer to check, and he said "Ah that's ok!" when I offered them! Didn't even want to see inside and check they were ours! Seemed quite satisfied that I was holding three passports! Well that's passport control dealt with, back to sleep for an hour. Our train made a stop at 7am, and let a few people off, we all really woke up at this point and looked our of the window through the Italian rural land, and as we sailed over miles of ocean into the floating city of venice. I admit, in my mind's eye, I had thought that popular images of venice would have been a little exaggerated, that there would be a few choice canals, but those would be absolutely packed with tourists, and walking along the open platforms towards the terminal, nothing seemed that out of the ordinary from any other european city we had visited, but you could certainly tell you were in Italy, the weather was absolutely gorgeous. At the station, we found a tourist information booth that would help us book a night's accommodation in a 3 star hotel in the south of Venice, it was a little steep, but booking at such short notice was very risky anyway. Our reservation was valid for only 2 hours, and we had to quickly dash there by the river bus through the main canal. Okay! Plan! We lugged our heavy bags out the station and as soon as we left the doors we were confronted with an absolutely mind blowing scene, the beautiful main canal and traditional venetian architecture, I was blown away. Our 40 minute journey along the grand canal was a visual delight, all the little nooks and alleys, the grandoise architecture, still exotic and beautiful even in dilapidation, the bright azure waters, the shining sun. It was all perfect, It was completely worth all the stress we had faced in the last few days. We checked into our hotel, it was quirky, with sloping floors and labyrinthine coridoors, our room was humble and the three of us were sharing a double bed. But it was fantastic. We dropped our bags off, took a short while to rest and change (we couldn't change or wash on the train!) and took our cameras outside and walked through the town for hours and hours., taking loads of photos, wandered through the historic St Marco's square, and walked an hour *back* to the station , where we were told by an Italian lady that there were NO trains available ANYWHERE tomorrow. Nothing. Nada. We panicked, on the self service machines she seemed to be right, Rome was out of the question, no trains to Paris, Dijon, Bern, Geneva, Nice, even back to Wien, in the end we took our map of europe back to the ticket station, got served by a different man, old and jolly with a fantastic italian accent. He said there WERE places on the night train to paris, but they weren't valid with our rail passes (which is what the other woman had meant, but neglected to tell us that was the reason WHY there were no places available.) We had to buy independant tickets, which was a little expensive, but it was another night's accommodation plus travel to Paris, fantastic. We bought the tickets to paris via Bologna, and could then relax and enjoy Venice. We found a lovely little restaurant by the Grand Canal, and I had a lovely seafood pasta, we ate ice cream, and sockaed up th atmosphere. It was truly amazing. Exhausted from hours of walking, we got back to the hotel and slept for two hours. Then in the dark, went back out for another round of sightseeing, where it managed to have a terrific thunderstorm! Rain! in Venice! It was beautiful though. A truly amazing day out. I loved every second of it.

DAY EIGHT: Wien and the night train

2010-03-31T22:30:00.015+01:00

We had bought our tickets/reservations from the trainstation when we had arrived in Wien the night before, so we knew we had nothing urgent to wake up for, and allowed ourselves a full nights' sleep. We woke naturally at 10am, and took our heavy bags to the train station we were due to depart from that evening, we had booked reservations on a night train from Wien to Venice, we would leave at 8pm, and sleep on the train, arriving in Venicee at 8.30am the next day! We showered and dressed, packed our bags again, and look the unterbahn from just down the road, puzzled over how to work the ticket booths for a short while, and managed to find our way back to the station. (what happened to my complimentary breakfast muffin?)

After dropping our bags off in lockers at the station, we were free to spend the day exploring Vienna. We quickly found the historic high street through the metro to Stephensplatz cathedral, which we had briefly popped inside, it was a fantastically huge, grand cathedral that was halfway through a service, organ music resonating througought the alcoves hundreds of feet above us. Then we spent many hours looking at the impressive architecture, walking through the historic aldstadt, an amalgamation of german and italian, with fantastic classical statues around the democratic buildings. We even popped into a modern art gallery... won't talk about that! But it was just something a bit different! We ate at an Italian restaurant (not very Austrian, but we were struggling to pinpoint what Austrian Cuisine really entailed!)

At about 7pm, we headed back to the station, and found a small cafe where we bought a couple of drinks each and again, conversation turned to our situation. It was becoming increasingly apparent that Easter was fast approaching, and that it would be a logistical nightmare to get to Rome during the Easter weekend, we had briefly looked at hotel prices online in the hotel last night but it wasn't looking very hopeful. We tried not to rule it out as an option, because we had all held Rome to be the real 'climax' of the holiday, the location we were all really itching to get to. We would have to see what happened when we arrived in Venic. At 8pm, we boarded the night train, which was a fantastic experience! We had a little old-style cabin to ourselves, took off our shoes, locked the door, and bought plenty of snacks and drinks at the train station beforehand, we ate and talked until midnight, then lay down on the seats and slept, it felt like a really authentic 'Student European backpacker' experience, and for the first time I felt relieved of the shackles of worrying about how we'd get home, and let the thrill of the adventure/journey take hold, and was able to sit back and really appreciate how much fun I was having, how much of the continent I was able to see, and how there were no other people on earth I'd rather have spent it with! Andy and Jim seemed quite keen to use the night trains for the rest of the holiday, since it combines a night's accommodation with travel, its a good way to save money for the rest of the journey.

DAY SEVEN: On the train from Hannover to Wien.

2010-03-30T22:19:00.001+01:00

Today was a day spent on the train. We woke up at 6am (5am English time!), I feel that I'm coming down with Jim's cold! Perhaps it was the short nights' sleep. We took a train from Hannover to Berlin, but didn't have time to really explore the capital, as we only were there for an hour, the train journey from Berlin to Wien would be 7 hours. But we had books to occupy us and there was a restaurant in the back cabin of the train where they served very good food. The time spent travelling allowed us to be able to talk at length about the whole ordeal, we agreed that hotels were very expensive, and so the holiday as we know it would be quite short - we only really had 5 days of travel (including getting home) at our disposal so it worked out quite well really. It was scary to be with trains the whole way now. Ah, It was quite a shame, the day was spent travelling. We arrived in Wien, Austria, at about 9pm, got a taxi to a reputable hotel that we trusted, we were scared if they would still let us check in at 10pm, not only did they, but Jim haggled them down from charging us 109 Euros to only 80 for the night! We would take a night train tomorrow, so let ourselves fall asleep naturally and didn't set an alarm for the next day. Strange how exhausted you can get from sitting on a train!

DAY SIX: Escape from Rinteln! Onwards to Hannover.

2010-03-29T21:35:00.075+01:00

We woke early. Had a shower, got dressed. Very terribly nervous. I have no idea what is about to happen, we might not even get a phone call and need to pay for a third night here at Rinteln? More importantly, what would the news be? How long would we need to wait? If I knew what we were doing I would be fine, but the uncertainty was killing me!

The answer was, not very long to wait at all. We had just sat down to breakfast when Jim's phone rang; 9.08am, that's pretty damn fast! However, the news was not very good, the garage is so busy, and coupled with the fact it's easter weekend next week, it would seem that they can't even look at the car until tuesday next week. So it's safe to say the road trip is off. After only five days we had been completely halted in our tracks. Jim seemed pretty down, he loved his car, and we had all hoped it'd be in good enough condition to make it round the 3000-mile route. We remained optimistic and motivated, and agreed that we should get to Hannover - where we were originally going to go from Munster before we broke down - and from a larger city we would have better resources available to us to work out what on earth we were going to do next. We checked out of the hotel, didn't have to pay, that was a surreal experience! The RAC paid, they also arranged for a taxi to take us down to the train station. The train station was deserted and derelict, for a minute or so I was worried that it wasn't in use! The only reason we knew it was in use was because of a small, A4 paper notice tacked up with the times of arrivals and departures!!! We waited for a train to Hameln, and from Hameln we got a train to Hannover.

Hannover rail station was huge and positively bustling. It was a relief to be back in a major city again, from there we dodged a tram and darted across the road to the tourist information center, who helped us to book a night in a hotel. On the way to the hotel, Jim received another phone call, it was the garage, and they suspected a cracked cyclinder head - a very major engine problem, which could potentially write off the car. Jim was more shocked than upset, where on earth had that speculation come from? I tried to reassure him and said we would sort it out when we got to the hotel - which was surprisingly very lush for the money we had paid.

There we dropped our bags off, and used the hotels free internet access to research how much it would cost to repatriate our car back to Norwich, and also looked into trains to Vienna and the prices of European rail passes. They were only 159 Euros each for five days of railway use throughout Europe! It seemed for all bad luck, we'd have some good luck to maintain the balance. Considering the money we'd save on petrol, it was quite good value! So we trekked down to the train station to buy our passes! I was a little skeptical as to whether you'd just be able to walk up and buy them from Hannover station - perhaps it was the kind of thing you need to apply for and they post it to you in 6 weeks? Or perhaps its only available from an obscure office in Berlin? But no, we could get them from the station 10 minutes from our hotel. For a moment, we were scared that because my passport was only a few weeks old, I wouldn't be allowed a pass, because i couldn't prove residency in the UK for more than 6 months prior to purchase (surely a passport was proof?!) - obviously I hadn't thought to bring my old, expired passport with me. The lovely German woman behind the desk popped behind the scenes for a moment to talk to her supervisor, but they agreed it would be okay and allowed me to have a pass! We went to a cafe in the station absolutely elated - like we had the whole of europe at our fingertips. And decided we'd travel to Vienna tomorrow via Berlin. We spent the next few hours exploring Hannover, it was quite a large city, very urbanised, but still sported a charming little old style town center. One bizarre find was a church sporting a strange, almost satanic inverted pentagram! It was scary! We took an early night that night, ready to wake up at 6am the next day to catch an early train.

DAY FIVE: Stranded in Rinteln

2010-03-28T21:07:00.001+01:00

Sunday morning, after the hectic uncertainty of yesterday's fiasco, I didn't bother to set an alarm for the morning, there's nothing to really wake up for! We woke naturally about 10am, and staggered downstairs for a continental breakfast, there was a little table set out for the three of us by the window, which let in yellowish rainy sunlight, and a platter of cold meats and cheese, fresh milk, orange juice, breads and jams, coffees teas and cereals - all on behalf of the RAC! Perhaps it's the stress or the large meal, but everyone seems very sleepy today. We actually went back upstairs and slept for another couple of hours before finally getting some motivation around lunchtime (maybe we were hungry!), pulling on some shoes and a showerproof and walking the 5km hillside road down to Rinteln.

It is Sunday in Germany, and Germans take Sundays seriously. The garage should ring us back tomorrow, but for now, we have to keep ourselves occupied in Rinteln. We speculated all the different scenarios we could opt to take depending on what news we hear on monday, and the condition of the car - if it was a minor fix we would get back on the road in a couple of days, perhaps we would fill the time with small day-trips to surrounding places by train or bus, if the problem is major we would either cut our losses and go home, or possibly continue the journey by train, depending on the prices and feasibility, we didn't want to plan too extensively, because of course we have no idea what is going to happen yet.It is an awfully strange feeling of anomie that we are currently suspended in. We are stranded, I suppose you could say, we have no car, all our camping equiptment is in the car. All we have are our clothes, passports and phones. We all phoned our respective parents just to let them know what has happened to us, the different reactions between the parents were very interesting, but all equally reassuring and comforting. I suppose we aren't completely stranded, there is nothing stopping us from getting a plane back to London that night, but it would be ridiculously expensive, and what about the car? I didn't want to think about it, it seemed like an unsettling possibility.

In the village, nothing is really open save some cafes. Rinteln is like a ghost town, not too eerie though, just extremely peaceful and quiet. It is a very small, quaint German village. We stopped at a garage for some food and explored the sunny inner village, then dragged ourselves back up the hill and ate a German Feast of a meal - Krustchen - and schnitzel, in massive, rich portions, with plenty to drink. And slumped back in bed, with the television on for absolutely no reason - it's all in German! - german south park, hahaha. Nervously awaiting tomorrows' phone call.

DAY FOUR: Disaster enroute to Hannover

2010-03-27T18:42:00.002+01:00

We woke and packed the tent, which was a bit soggy, and drove into Münster central to see the famous Saturday market in the Aldstadt. Full of lush local produce. It was one of the first times we truly felt immersed in local culture, rather than being confined to the popular tourist presentations in the capital cities. The care and attention to presentation as contrasted to English Markets surprised me, with the produce lavishly presented in copious quantities, utter cornucopias, like feasts for greek gods, it was surreal, I highly doubt they actually sell that much produce in one day?! It was refreshing though, I always got the impression from the English Markets that they were a bit cheap and sleazy, and the products weren't so much traditionally grown or culturally embedded but were shoddy or tracksuit bottoms off the back of lorries, Norwich, my home town in England is home to a marketplace, which has a few market stalls, but they are only really frequented by the elderly, and you see piles of shoddy or ugly produce in cardboard boxes piled up at extortionate prices, maybe I am being ridiculously pessemistic and Münster was no different, perhaps I was just blinded by my cultural shock. There were stalls containing local crafts, cheeses, cold meats, sausage, vegetables and local specialities. We bought a giant babybel, which you can see pictured above. It tasted just like conventional babybel, but was of the most bizarre texture you could possibly imagine, it was all malleable like very very warm, soft blu-tac! Not firm at all, it was like playdoh! We also found a stall selling odd potato fritters, they were savoury, deep fried and came with sweet apple sauce. My brain couldn't decide whether it was sweet or savoury! Very odd!

Hannover or Hamburg? Each was a viable stop on the way to Berlin, but we could only visit one. Hamburg seemed too far a dog-leg north, so we planned to take a scenic drive on B-roads from Münster, through Osnabrück, to Hannover. We got to Osnabrück without any qualms, but changed to the Autobahn from there towards Hannover. On the Autobahn, there is no upper speed limit, and we hit 120mph at one point. Then tragedy struck.

Andy was driving, he noticed the engine temperature had been fluctuating a little, but put it down to the high speeds, or perhaps the sunny weather, I noticed that the air conditioning had broken, then the temperature gauge went through the roof, and the boys panicked a little and decided to pull over into a VERY convenient layby. The engine overheated and the car stalled just as we pulled into the layby. Thank god it hadn't stalled when we were on the fast lane Autobahn, I dread to think what might have happened to us. The engine was boiling hot, we popped the bonnet open and there was steam everywhere. We had broken down in the middle of Germany.

We got back into the car and waited a short while for the engine to cool down a little. When Jim and Andy investigated, the radiator was completely empty, no wonder it had overheated. Luckily we had a four-litre bottle of water in the back of the car for the camping stove, Andy lay on the floor while jim refilled the expansion tank, and the water poured straight out the bottom again, perhaps a pipe had come loose or there was a rupture in the tank? It was too far under the car to be able to look at it ourselves, so we climbed back into the car and phoned the RAC. Thank goodness for breakdown cover. Hilariously, two more cars - both English in origin, pulled into the same layby, all overheating, in the fourty minutes we waited. And eventually a lovely german fellow with a pick up truck came and towed us and the car to a small Garage in Exertal, just south of Bad Oyenhausen. At the garage, one mechanic spoke good english, refilled the radiator direct (rather than through the expansion tank, which was clearly ruptured) and asked us to drive a few kilometers down the road and back to test it. We did, and within minutes it had overheated again, steam spilling out the bonnet, we turned around and carefully nursed the car back to the garage. It was 6pm at this point, and after a series of phone calls between Jim, Home, the RAC offices in Germany, france and England and the Garage, they said they'd look at the car on Monday, and the RAC would pay for our hotel accommodation until then. We were driven to a little guest house in nearby town called Rinteln. Which was quite splendid despite our luck! We ate there, and had an early night.

DAY THREE: From Amsterdam to Münster, Germany

2010-03-26T18:18:00.002+01:00

We woke early, and after packing and showering, we decided that rather than see Amsterdam again by morning, like we had in Bruges, we'd make an early start to the next destination straight away, that way we would hopefully arrive in the afternoon, be able to pitch our tent in daylight, and see the town fully that afternoon and evening, and it'd be much less rushed. Okay: plan sorted, we plotted ourselves a nice little route through Apeldoorn, and it only took us a couple of hours to arrive in Münster, we occupied ourselves in the car by making little sandwiches from Brotchen, Gouda cheese and Salami that we had bought in the little Mart in the Amsterdam campsite. Münster a little city in western Germany, just over the border. The campsite we found was very nice and well equipped, and from there we took the bus into the city center to explore. We quickly found the historic Aldstadt (old town center) with it's traditional German architecture, and grand cobbled roads, it had a magnificently huge cathedral tucked in between the streets, with what I could only speculate were human-sized cages attched to the belfry, perhaps for prisoners, or to atone for sins? I don't know, I really can't imagine what other use it would be for, they were blatantly human-sized cages.... Despite the heavy rain, our spirits remained high, everything was a magnificent mustardy hue to me! The architecture was quite interesting to contrast to English high streets, the buildings have many many floors and huge, grand facades on the fronts, perhaps you can see it clearer on the second picture I have included! We walked through some quaint park-like paths covered with tree canopies, and bicyle use there was astronomical, there were literally hundreds of bicycles lining the roads, many of them not even locked up. It was bizarre! Ate some deliciously cheesy kaserbrotchen, and shopped in the little supermarket for food, buying a tasty-looking Green Bean and Beef Eintopf (Stew) for that evening's meal. We struggled to find the bus timetable, and it seemed the next bus didn't depart for 40 minutes, so we went to a little pub by the train station and had a becks each to pass the time.

Our bus finally arrived, and we were a little confused as to why the price was quadruple what it had cost to get into the city. But we got on anyway, and it soon became apparent we were definitely on the wrong bus, it took us 50 kilometers outside of the city center! The poor bus conductor looked quite startled when we arrived at the terminal and immediately asked to buy a new ticket straight back in, he kindly let us on for free! Two hours later we were back in the city center where we started. Although the tour of the surrounding countryside had been pleasant, if I didn't have to have carried a massive jumbo tin of Eintopf around with me! We finally got back to the campsite at dusk, and ate the stew, it was absolutely delicious, and we had little rolls of bread to accompany it. For camping food, it was delicious! We went to the campsites little restaurant/bar and ordered some drinks, and planned the next leg of the journey on a map by the bar. That night the weather was freezing cold, but I was safely tucked between my best friends, who are like human radiators!

DAY TWO: From Bruges to Amsterdam

2010-03-25T17:39:00.003+01:00

We woke nice and early at 7am, an hour earlier than we had actually planned to wake up, everything seemed to be going well for us! It was an OBSCENELY nice day outside, we cheerfully packed up the tent into the car, my first night of camping was certainly a successful one - I got the impression that Jim and Andy were a bit keen to try and 'convert' me to the splendours of camping! We had a little breakfast round the camping stove of Chicken soup and bread rolls. The owners of the campsite had left us a little note on our car asking us to pay for last nights' camping, which jim quickly popped off to do - we took it in turns each night to pay for that nights' accomodation.

Instead of making a dash straight up to Amsterdam, we decided to drive into Bruges for a little while for a spot of lunch and some sightseeing before we moved on again. Bruges by day is a completely different experience to seeing it at night. It was bright and clean, with tidily swept cobbled streets, and still retained a quaint, quiet charm despite being quite the bustling hub of activity in the heart of Belgium. We spent over an hour simply wandering the streets and drinking in the continental atmosphere, and I found a handy little camera shop where I could buy a memory card - (I told you I'd forget to pack something!) We stopped at a small cafe at the foot of the tower in the town square for a traditional, authentic belgian Waffle - which I must say, was one of the most indulgent and delicious things I have eaten in quite a while, very rich pastry piled high with cream, strawberries, ice cream and chocolate sauce, it would keep me full for the rest of the day! I have vowed to myself to eat as much authentic cuisine as I can here - no Macdonalds or steaks, although Le Big Mac sounds quite funny, I might have to buy one just for the lulz. Poor Jim has given up chocolate for Lent, but I let him nibble around the chocolate sauce and share mine. Sitting there beneath the Tower, in the March sunshine, I had a small moment of peacefulness, I felt truly contented and pleased to be on this journey with my two best friends! It was a shame that we would only be there for a few hours, I would quite like to return here one day for a long weekend, if I can. We declined to climb the tower, as we knew we were pressed for time and needed to move on if we were to arrive in Amsterdam before dark, but again, I'd like to return in the future and complete it then!

After we felt satiated with our time in Bruges, we decided to move on, climbed back in the car and drove towards Brussels - which is where we needed to refill the petrol tank for the first time, it was quite nice that it had lasted all the way from Norwich to Brussels! Upon arriving in Brussels, it was quite centralised and homogenous, like you'd expect any big city to be: we got entirely lost in a complex system of interlinked underground tunnels and motorways and after a little antagonism, decided to go straight to Amsterdam rather than stopping off in Brussels. The journey from Brussels to Amsterdam wasn't supposed to be that long, but apparently Jim and Andy got us nice and lost and started driving south at one point. I fell asleep in the back of the car and got woken up about 5pm at some services on the way to Holland. Considering we missed Brussels we are actually making good time at this point, and the weather is 20 degrees outside! Beautiful!

We had quite the waffle craving in the car on the way to Amsterdam actually. Need to definitely include a picture of that. Stopping at services was scary - it's ok in Bruges, you can get by with a bit of French or German or English if you are lucky, but in these services they spoke very fast Dutch - and I have absolutely no familiarity with Dutch! I managed to bumble my way through paying for a drink and a waffle. We got briefly lost again upon entering Amsterdam Central, trying to get to the campsite, and made it through the gate just before they closed for the night. We put the tent up as the light began to dim, and had a cooked meal of stewed Steak and Potatoes around the camping stove, planning our course of action. The rain had begun to fall quite spectacularly, and we were forced into our little tent for an hour, looking over the road maps. We decided to make shorter journeys - todays' journey had taken us nearly 7 hours, and its just too long to be spending in the car each day, although we had got lost quite a few times today!

In the evening, the rain stopped, and we dared venture into Amsterdam, just a five minute walk from our campsite was a trainstation, and we took the light train from Gaasperplatzinto central, and explored Amsterdam's famous Red light district. It was very surreal, Cannabis is legalised there, and prostitution is rife, scantily clad women dance and strut behind shop windows like products, illuminated in violent red lighting, shops sell all sorts of taboo paraphenalia. It is difficult not to react in an ethnocentric way and feel disturbed, but you soon realise it is not that seedy, and is just a difference in culture there, I can't lie and say that I wasn't slightly intimidated nonetheless. I managed to make a major tourist booboo and severely aggrivate a prostitute with my camera flash, she started banging on the window she was behind at me! I noticed the vast majority of the population frequenting the streets were tourists, I suppose many young adults here come to have a wild night out. We ducked into a small kebab shop for a quick bite to eat then headed back to the campsite for the night.

DAY ONE: Setting off for Bruges

2010-03-24T17:04:00.002+01:00

So, I woke at 10am, pulled on some clothes and quickly double checked my bags, met with my friend Andy for a cup of tea and we chatted to my mum about the journey ahead, and then went to Jim's house to pack the car. A few double checks, last minute additions and a bit of tetris-style fitting of awkwardly-shaped objects into vastly unsuitable alcoves, and we were finally ready to leave! We left Norwich at about noon, and drove three hours through the sunny English countryside, skirting around London, being in the car with Jim and Andy feels natural to me, we spent so much of our last term on little road trips to cities around University, we had some fantastic music on, courtesy of Jim, who had painstakingly assembled a roadtrip playlist just for the journey. Some golden nuggets of wisdom on behalf of Andy included; "Wow! I have 18X Optical Zoom, I can see the future!" and ponderings as to whether Andy's Water-purifying tablets will allow him to drink his own piss, and such jovial banter accompanied us enroute to Dover, where we managed to secure tickets for the crossing to Calais. Norwich to Dover was 177 miles, taking us just over three hours, with one quick stopover at Birchanger Services. We had originally intended to land at Dunkerque, which would have been closer to our destination, but the next ferry was pretty late, and we wanted to find a campsite before 8pm. It was a terrific stroke of luck that they just squeezed us onto the ferry departing in 20 minutes' time! The ferry trip was pleasant, but it still didn't quite feel real. Obviously, you could pay for refreshments in Euros or Pounds Sterling, which evoked many flashbacks from that old school trip to Paris when I was 14, we all got a small drink and a sandwich to hold us over as we crossed the channel, with the french coast just barely visible on the horizon. Of the three of us, I'm supposed to be the one who can speak a little French - I did it at GCSE, got a B, never touched it since. So my french is rusty, I hastily found myself pushing all the Japanese I have painstakingly taught myself over the years out of my head to make room for French Knowledge! I know that's going to come back and haunt me in my exams next month.... oh well... We set our clocks forward an hour, and I was very happy to learn that in Europe, texts are only 11p to send, thank you O2!.

Disembarking the ferry and acclimatising to driving on the right-hand side of the road was fun, with Jim taking just under five minutes on the road to make the first of many false-turns and we needed to stop and get the map out. A fantastic start! But the stop meant we could take stock of what to do next and Jim and Andy could faff about with their European-Regulation flashy light reflecto-stickers. I constantly felt as if we were undertaking on motorways - because of the way they drive there - it was terrifying, but Jim seemed to adapt to it really quickly. After a few hours travel up the coast, past Dunkerque, to Belgium, we pulled into a little layby and changed drivers. We found a nice little campsite right in the middle of Bruges, we had arrived late, around 9pm, after the reception had closed, so pitched up anyway and decided we could pay for the night in the morning. I haven't really been camping much before. My family went camping for a week in Cornwall once when I was about 11 or so years old, but I can't remember sleeping or eating there, so its a pretty new experience to me. Andy and Jim are seasoned campers it seems, they brought all sorts of gadgets and fancy camping equiptment! The tent went up in a couple of minutes with absolutely no fuss, a dream! We sat around the camping stove and ate some delicious tinned curry (haha, actually quite a good buy by Jim there!) and decided to quickly dip into Bruges' central to see it lit up beautifully in the night time, we had to be quick, because the gate would close at 11pm and we wouldn't be able to get the car back in, so it would only be for a short hour, although in retrospect, the distance would have been able to tackle on foot, but I wouldn't want to walk in an unknown cirty in the dark much anyways!... Still doesn't feel real! The town square is instantly recognisable from the movie "In Bruges" which, we immediately agreed, we definitely needed to watch as soon as we get home. "Ze alcoves, you know this word? yes? Alcoves?" I couldn't wait to see it the next morning in the bleak, morning sunshine.

I suppose the reason why it doesn't really 'feel' like a holiday yet, is because we haven't gotten on a train, or a plane, gone through customs or had to sit in a strange public transportation for any extended amount of time - not your own car, it feels like home - all we did is we just drove for a few hours. A few hours' drive from your home and you find yourself in this strange, foreign place! It's such a weird thing to consider as normal and mundane, or even possible. Being in a foreign land, or somewhere exotic, to me, is something that happens only occasionally, and when it does, it's dressed up with bureaucratic departure protocol, and significant journeys - it's quite normal for the three of us to go for a drive for a couple of hours, so imagine my shock when you end up in bloody Bruges in the evening! Even the roadsigns in an indecipherable language - well, Dutch - is something of a shock to the system. Not that I was reeling in abandon the whole time, it was just a strange quirk of the trip that you never really get used to, I suppose that's one of the benefits of travelling by car, you realise the true extent of the freedom right at your fingertips (if you want to pay for the petrol)

The old town square was absolutely enchanting, it was a clear, warm night, and the old cobbles and stony-faced facades were illuminated with golden lighting, which juxtaposed against the deep blue nights' sky. It was magical. A really fantastic way to end the first day's travel. We wandered the old town a little, taking photographs, before finally heading back for a refreshing nights' sleep. Everyone was so excitable it took a while to finally settle down!

About to leave for Europe!

2010-03-23T17:03:00.001+01:00

I bought a dinky A5 Diary to document the entire European trip and... typical... I'VE LOST IT. It had the entire journey written in there. So annoying. Nevermind. I'm going to retrospectively fill in what happened... because I have a day with nothing to do.

23.3.10
"The day has finally arrived! I think I am all packed, but I just know I'll forget something vitally important. Ah well, I have withdrawn 160 Euros and got my passport and EHIC card: all that's left for me to do is get a really good nights' sleep ready for tomorrow. Andy is leaving Swindon at about 6am - or some ridiculous hour thereabouts - and driving all the way to norwich, ready to leave from Jim's house at 11am. Then we will set off! I am very excited, but simultaneously, it hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm going on such a significant trip. It still feels distant and surreal to me. I suspect that it wont be until the ferry that it really sinks in that I am going on holiday! We will see. I feel ridiculously tired right now, so I am about to go to bed. before I do finally hit the hay, I need to do a couple of last minute checks and additions to my travel bag. I am jittery and buzzing with anticipation right now, I have no idea how I'll manage to sleep, I'll keep getting out of bed every 10 minutes to pack something else I'd previously forgotten, I'll repeat this until am, get only about 4 hours' sleep and be absolutely shattered and sleep in the car.That's absolutely typical of me! I won't let it happen!

Packing took so short a time to complete, it doesn't feel significant at all. It really feels off! When I went to Japan, it was a big mammoth undertaking to pack for two weeks, this time, I've just thrown a few clothes in a bag and a charger for my phone and camera and that's about it. It seems so casual."

Franky frankness

2010-03-22T03:14:00.003+01:00

Today a few friends and I drove up to Birmingham's own O2 Academy to see Frank Turner perform for us his musical offerings. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, although in retrospect I do wish that I had memorised more of his lyrics before I went: his musical style is tied up with nuances of shared experience and camaraderie, which doesn't lend itself well to the uninitiated, and perhaps I would have just gotten much more out of it. (Not that I didn't anyway, it was still an amazing night. Sometimes with other bands you can kind of get away with just wailing and flailing about, maybe that's a bad thing!)

At one point halfway through the show it all got a bit surrealist whilst Frank broke off into a possibly conservative monologue about English 'Liberties inherited from our forefathers' (incorporating a bit of transplanted American discourse there!) and sang a song about 'sons of liberty fighting for what they own', which admittedly, first made me think about Metal Gear Solid, but then secondly made me feel a little marginalised as a lady-person, considering his exclusion of women through the political process through androcentric vocabulary and associating political change with with physical conflict which just seems a bit masculine. (shut up Andy!) It was quite funny considering that a not-negligible portion of Frank's demographic (this is a massive generalisation, just judging from the crowd present) were disproportionately students and females. But still, I respect him for vocalising some kind of political opinion. Maybe I am reading way to much into this!

It was something nice to think about though, I was interested at my own reaction to it, my instinctive gut reaction was negative, proclaiming your Englishness has been a grey area really, but I then realised that it shouldn't be that way. It made me feel English to watch it, and I do hate how our cultural heritage has been tainted by nationalist connotations. Truth be told, I had always felt passive towards the subject of nationality, I didn't chose to be born English, nor have I ever experienced being not-English, so it seemed illogical to feel pride towards it. I don't really know where my stance is on the situation really, I think I am just a lover of any cultural aesthetic, my own or otherwise, that's just my inner sociologist coming out! I suppose in a way it will be quite interesting to see how I experience this European road trip... wow I am WAY too reflexive for my own good. Introspection will be my inevitable downfall one day.

Although I realise that this isn't directly applicable to Frank Turner, I hate it when middle class singer-songwriters can't think of anything worthwhile to sing about, so they instead lay on thick this horrendous faux working-class camaraderie as a substitute for meaningful content, putting on an awful exaggerated churl's accent, singing about sitting on street corners, drinking and the strength of their friendships and life experience despite being poor. (*cough* Doherty *cough*) - of course, Turner was an Etonian himself, but some of the best writers have been highly educated, and its not fair to discount someone's opinion based on their socio-economic status as a child, at least his lyrics concerned themselves with life perspective, transience, journeys, happiness and inner meaning; very poignant.

You really can't fault his musical ability, the songs were masterfully crafted and uplifting, unpretentious without losing any of their emotional impact, I very much felt inclined to agree with his approach to songwriting, he emphasised a very grounded, simple approach to music as a communicative device; which you don't see enough of these days! It's quite possible for an artist to sell millions and live out their careers without ever saying anything worthwhile. It's just an aural cluster bomb attack to accompany that sickly homogeneous, hypersexualised imagery that is regularly bombarding my otherwise enjoyable life.

He is involved with the crowd, inviting unsuspecting punters up on-stage to take part, another common occurrence was members from the supporting acts joining him on-stage and the vibe was relaxed and friendly. The support was particularly noteworthy: Chuck Ragan! Soloist acoustic endeavour by the Lead singer of Hot Water Music. That was particularly awesome, Dicky Barrett-meets-Rocky Votolato. Absolutely brilliant music. I'll definitely get his album when I return home to Norwich.

Crowd went a bit mild but they were amicable, which is much nicer, I'd prefer an amicable crowd to an overly intense yet acrimonious one. Certain genres of band seem to attract certain types of crowd, and someones you can tell when a crowd is in fact, actually a collective of individuals who think that everyone else in the crowd, except for them, is an utter twat. Tonight was not like that. It was a nice evening out with some of my best friends. Oh my god, I don't know why I am reviewing the gig, I am not a reviewer: It's just my life is too boring for me to be able to type about anything else. I love how I have seemed to take a sociological perspective on the whole thing without meaning to. FML.

Anyway. Yes. It was a good evening, on the drive home, I sat in the back seat with a huge smile on my face. Nighty night.

Swimmers lost at sea

2010-03-20T17:11:00.006+01:00

I need to get back into the habit of posting regularly. I have wasted far too much of my life rambling away into this blog to just let it ebb away in an unsatisfying anti-climax; yet another pastime falls victim to sloth! It’s such a miserable, impotent way to let something die. This blog is now about to hit the 40,000 word mark. What an amazing waste of time! Why do I feel this impetus to maintain it? It’s not as if it’s an accurate reflection of my time here, a memory or virtual keepsake – I arbitrarily pick and choose appropriate things to remember. It has no intended audience, not even myself. I am not achieving any real catharsis in posting. I was thinking of taking it down to the post office on campus; they have a publishing service, its intended for postgraduates to bind their theses, but I don’t see why I’d be turned away if I was a paying customer? I’ll never bother getting round to it anyway, haha.

All of my creative pursuits end this way and it upsets me when I think about it. I don’t draw anymore. I don’t book-bind or knit, I don’t play piano. I started playing guitar again this year and it’s depressing to see how my kinetic memory has dulled, my wrists are weak, my hands have slowed down and the skin on my fingertips has grown thin and soft. Why do I neglect everything? What was I doing in the meantime? What do I have to show for it?

Frankly, the reason I have neglected this blog so much is that I have simply spent less time in my room. I suppose could be construed as something positive, but it came at the expense of falling out of touch with my family online and I saw much less of my hall-mates because I was spending time off campus. (Funnily, as I was typing that my mum phoned me for a 15 minute chat! I can’t wait to get back home. I have been very homesick this term. ) Two sides of every coin I suppose. If I do one thing towards someone it would involve neglecting someone else. You can’t devote yourself or your attention to one thing at a time. Life is a constant spinning plates performance. Again, this term I have found socialisation to be much harder than the academic work.

I suppose while I am on the subject, it was a heavy term as far as academics are concerned. I had,

A GCE essay – 1,800 words, I finally gave up on this module, resigned myself to the fact that I hated feminism with a passion and typed this essay in three hours the night before the deadline, all I wanted was a pass (40%) and for it to be out of my way – Got 74%
A 2 hour Japanese exam – 69.7% - I devoted hours and hours remembering grammar points and 130 kanji and in the end the grammar element of the test was only worth a few percent of the mark! (Still, 0.3% off a first! What are the chances!)
A 1,500 word SWIB Policy Research Report – a work-in-progress draft – I got “68%+”, I think this means that the work I submitted would be capable of scoring higher had the report been complete and not a draft? Still, promising, actually found this quite a challenging and engaging assignment.
One 2,000 word SII essay, I don’t receive the results until term 3, that resulted in my first ever university-all-nighter, I wrote extensively on Durkheim and Emergence, it got a bit extravagant and pretentious so I am worried about this one! High theory was never my forte!
One 1,500 word ethnographic observation, I get the results in term 3. I think I have done terribly in this one though. Wrote it on the phenomenon of teenage girls taking photos of themselves when drinking. Hilarious fun.
Over the holidays I have to complete that Policy Research Report and hand in the 2,000 word final draft. A 2,000 word SII essay and a 2,000 word GCE essay. And finally, I need to begin revising for the end of year exams which are mere weeks away now!

I didn’t work as hard as I could have worked this term: spent too much time socialising off campus and not enough working hard in my room. That reminds me, I need to pop to the library today, It’ll be my last chance to before I go home for the Easter Holidays..

Finally, Easter: In a few days I will be doing that traditional student thing and setting off around Europe for a couple of weeks. I’ve bought a little notebook (the old stationery addiction grips yet again) to document the whole journey. I don’t want to neglect that either. I suppose I want to do something productive. Other than that, I am not contributing to the holiday in any way. I’m just going to sit in the backseat whinging and causing melodrama.

Jim and Andy speak German, they’ve been camping before and can set up a tent, they are doing all the driving, navigation and planned the whole trip. They were originally going without me but I somehow managed to bully my way into being included which part of me now regrets out of anticipatory fear.

I am a sponge. The little French I knew for GCSE has been completely wiped from my memory and overwritten with Japanese. I sat in the back of the car trying to remember how to say ‘Thank you’ and for the life of me I couldn’t remember, all I thought was ‘arigatou’ until I finally decided it must be ‘gracias’, unless we bump into some knowledgeable second-generation Japanese-migrants-to-France it’s not going to come in very handy.

I am so useless. I am fickle, I am moody and hypocritical and in some instances downright malicious, I catch myself causing arguments or insulting people out of boredom – what an abhorrent quality. I eat like a pig then cry when I realise I am gaining weight, I have absolutely no control over my expenditure and yet I worry about my financial situation and I haven’t even typed up a CV yet. I am like a child, I haven’t matured in the last year, I’ve regressed, I hate myself. I ask of constant support and attention from the people around me and never give anything back because I’m simply too incompetent and incapable to provide anything. What am I even good at?

I’ve come to the realisation that I am actually quite profoundly stupid, I lack common sense, holism or maturity. I can’t defer gratification, I have no willpower. I am utterly useless as a human being, I pretend there I possess some kind of cognitive fecundity but there isn’t, and I just disguise it with a wide vocabulary or wild overreaction to disguise my tactlessness as irony. I want to change. I have wasted another two hours of my life sitting here typing another excessively long entry to a blog that no one reads, rather than getting out and doing something with my life. Fuck this. I’m going to have a shower.

I'm not being self-depreciating for the sheer sake of it, or to be annoying. I am frustrated because for the first time in a long time I have found something that actively excites every second of my existence, a real impetus, it has entered my life, taken control and eradicated all the pedantic emptiness I've ever had the audacity to ever feel and just gives me a burning desire to be truly alive. I am so euphoric. I need to be a better person. I can't afford to not appreciate every second. Sounds melodramatic, but that's just my style!

MP - PoaP: (aCT #4) 0.36-0.55/2.14

2010-03-07T21:27:00.004+01:00

smeegcoetcrumstrarewhypgteepheigsois

I has drunkeness

2010-03-06T23:56:00.003+01:00

OH YOU SILLY GIRL!

This is the hole you didn't realise you were filling.

2010-02-28T03:05:00.003+01:00

28th June 2008: In response to someone who was wondering what the point was/felt a bit suicidal, decided to chip in with my own worthless opinion, but I think it echoed my own sentiments really.....

There's a lot of help available and although there's a stupid waiting list, you shouldn't give up until you've had a chance at the CBT, besides, time can be a great healer.

Your pain is a temporary problem, and suicide is a permanent solution to that temporary problem. It doesn't resolve the pain, it won't bring relief because relief is a feeling - you need to be alive to feel it.

I felt empty for a long time, but I realised - this sadness, it's not a benign presence in your life, this emptiness, this pointlessness. This utter lack of motivation. Rather it's the absence of that one thing that satisfies your soul. Your calling. Your reason for getting up in the morning.

Sometimes I wonder, do you reckon the greatest, most talented inspirational artist of human history has lived and died without fulfilling that role because he never bothered to pick up a paintbrush? and so never realised his natural talent?
Maybe you are a prolific novellist or a world-class pianist or something. How do you know? Maybe you are destined to be the guy who invents a multi-million selling computer game or pen a cult classic film, or invent life-saving medicine or liberating legislature?

Have you tried everything this world has to offer before you decide it has nothing to offer you?

Maybe I am being overly sentimental or romanticised, but I think there is something out there that will satisfy you soul, that you will just feel... complete when you do it and it will make life worth living. Maybe it'll be your children, or your partner, or your dog, or maybe you need to visit the Bantay Srei or go mountaineering to realise what it is - the point is the fantastic journey in finding out what that calling is. Maybe that journey will change your take on life. Whats the point in not trying to find it at least?

anyhoo my rambling is over, congrats on your good days Hope you feel better soon.

Spontaneous Student Wanderlust Syndrome

2010-02-18T06:47:00.004+01:00

This is my second attempt at describing what has happened to me in the last few weeks. I failed in the first attempt. Sometimes I will feel like I am buzzing with mental energy. Like I'm as wide awake as I have ever been and all the neurones in my brain are synchronised. As if I'm capable of suddenly expelling a sheer cliff-face of cryptic, Pynchon-esque blog; simultaneously leaving me in a state of emotional catharsis and creative sense of accomplishment. It never works out that way. I type, perhaps, one or two short paragraphs then get bored and trail off. So I am guessing that a spontaneous second attempt at 5.30am is due to be successful, surely. (?!)

I've gotten into a really terrible habit of not saving these scraps, if I were more sensible I'd be able to patch them together into a coherent blog another time. But to be honest I've fallen into worse habits recently. My blogging habits aren't the highest on my list of priorities. Hence why I haven't really published anything online for nearly a month. I apologise. (As if anyone cares!) Blogs and diaries (or any creative project) that trails off into nothingness out of lack of interest are anathema to me. So I shall persevere.

University work has piled up a little. I had my first formatively assessed essay due in last week. (Pulled a terrific all-nighter at the last minute, after having a petit crisis that I'd given away a particular way of answering a question that I'd tried to keep to myself - paranoid!? I'm embarassed to have typed that!). After handing that in, I went home for four days, relaxed, I have two more essays due in next week, then a week's break, then three more due before the term dies. I think... I'm not sure! My calendar is too far away to consult right now! I have 6 this term, plus a draft. That's all I know!

In the Easter Holidays, I am going away on a road trip around Europe. In traditional Undergraduate style, the three of us (Jim, Andy and myself) are taking Jim's Nissan 3000ZX around the capital cities of Europe. The route hasn't been finalised yet, but it'd be a two to three week tour, visiting Bruge, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Piza, Monaco, Marsaille, Grenoble, Paris etc. Not too expensive either, considering we split the fuel costs between the three of us, plus accommodation and food and you're looking at perhaps £500 for the entire journey!
Hopefully, this will lead to the formal creation of the Warwick Road Trip Society. Which we are currently in the process of constructing a website for, should we be granted University Society Status in the Autumn of this year. Fingers are crossed. In the meantime, it has been a fantastic excuse to get back into web design and graphics, which as I have repeated many times in this blog, I have sorely neglected since leaving Goldsmiths last year.

I hope to meticulously document the entire thing. Hopefully, I'll be making good use of video camera, photography, blogging, physical diaries and notebooks, perhaps even a sketchbook! I just feel incredibly greatful to be allowed to come along. Considering I can't drive. I did initially feel a little like I was intruding on the road trip idea... Although I suppose I will be saving them money by taking some 17% off the costs for each person, paying my own share. I don't know. I always feel unwelcome in whatever I do, even if I am not, unless I am quite explicitly told that I am wanted, formally requested to be present, I will always feel like I am being a burden, or overstaying my welcome. Even with my closest friends. I don't know why, its not like I am massively introverted. It's just one of those things I left adolescence with I suppose!

tangle

2010-02-14T02:06:00.002+01:00

I am so confused. Seriously. At the the age of 20 I shouldn't be this confused; I'm at University, confusion is the last thing I need right now. Actually my course is probably the one thing I've got under control really. Its just everything else. I don't really feel like I know who I am.

This personality test is doing my head in:

You prefer to act immediately rather than speculate about various options (YES/NO)

You are inclined to rely more on improvisation than on careful planning (YES/NO)

Surely these should conflict with each other? I'm an impatient worrier. I am an impulsive ditherer. I have such a ridiclously low attention span that I hate deliberation, but I hate spontenaety. Maybe this is why I hate responsibility. But I feel inevitably that I'm forced with it, other people around me dither too much.

This is all conflicting.

I can be ridiculously exciteable, I've been described as bouncing off the walls when I am in a great mood but at the same time, its very hard to excite me, I can go out to clubs or gigs and feel immensely bored standing amongst the crowd. The commotion and excited whooping of other people doesn't stir me. I can sit and stare at a wall for three hours before summoning the motivation to releive my own boredom.

I'm definitely one for logic and objective rationality over gut feelings and emotions, but I am such an emotional person that I often do something that goes against logic on whim. I feel so strongly convicted of my certainty at one moment, then the next hour my disposition will have entirely changed.

I don't feel like a person, I just feel like a jumble of chemicals.

Spontaneous Student Wanderlust syndrome. I has it.

2010-02-12T23:22:00.001+01:00

europe.

fuck-a-doodle-do.

2010-01-28T20:06:00.002+01:00

Recently I find myself spending a lot of time with my future housemates. We do some strange things to keep ourselves occupied. Making Beef Trifle and baking delicious lemon-drizzle cakes, dye everyone's hair dark brown (ultimate success), trying to put on all the clothes you own in the entire wardrobe at the same time. (I reckon it could have been accomplished but Andy used an inferior clothes-organising technique and soon found himself in great difficulty.)

Argh I don't know, the last three weeks have passed uncomfortably fast and I have no holistic sense or grasp of time as it passes. I'm lost! I'm behind on work, I am behind in life, I have no motivation, I have completely fallen out of the routine of the world and its stupid.

BWAH

2010-01-28T03:43:00.003+01:00

This is my weekend.

Saturday afternoon, Me, Jim and Andy woke up early (i.e. at noon) and wandered down the Canley station to take the train to Birmingham for the day! We went to the Bullring. This is my amazing lunch. A Cheese and Ham toasted panini, lovely salad with balsamicness (which I nommed down! and I never eat salads!) and a nice glass of ice cold cola cola. Only £6.50 for the whole thing I think! Utterly gorgeous. I could totally eat that again right now. Then we decided to do some actual shopping. I antagonised for quite some time over what to get, but in the end I got some trousers from H&M, and some nice trainers from Topshop (which are admittedly a bit too small for me, but oh well! Only £16) Then I got two really nice dresses from Cult. :D Which I don't have photos of yet but I will get some! I promise!

So all in all, the shopping was very successful. Came back to Warwick and rolled around on the floor for a while. Had some pasta, started drinking (for the first time since my birthday, haha!) Saw Pendulum, glitch Mob and Plan B :) it was good. There was a filming crew in the club (promoting student events) and asked me to say a few words... I have no idea what I said. I was pretty hyped up by that point... how embarassing!

The next day I didn't get out of bed til 2pm, we ordered dominoes pizza! I attach some photos!

Fashion, and smuggling painkillers into icecream because SOME PEOPLE can't swallow tablets! and Nigel. Our adopted cat with three legs. I love my camera.

Hehe you can see a reflection of my room in the fork :D

2010-01-19T18:57:00.001+01:00

Cooking with Holly. The student method. We've all been there. You are ravenously hungry, but all that's left in your cupboard is a handful of woefully mismatched random ingredients. Somehow you have to make a nutritious and delicious meal out of a single baby potato, an onion, a processed cheese slice and pasta sauce. (Actually that could work quite well... but you know what I mean)

This is the unfortunate position I recently found myself in, but instead of there being misery. I have found the ultimate student snack. (its not that ultimate, I'd have much preferred gravy and chips, but its pretty tasty and cheap for a last minute find!)

1. Boil some noodles in the pan of boiling water. I worry about how plain noodles will taste, so for some ridiculous reason, I boiled them in Instant Gravy. For flavour! I can only assume it is the same as those flavour sachets you get with instant noodles, right? Well whatever, it worked as far as having bisto-flavoured noodles goes. (I wish I could afford bisto, it was tesco's own brand gravy!)

2. Meanwhile, dice generous helpings of garlic (3 cloves! I like garlic, leave me alone!) and fry them with a tiny pinch of those mixed italian herbs, when the oil is sufficiently herby and garlicy smelling, add many mushy mushrooms. Mushrooms are awesome.

3. Take a moment to appreciate how delicious garlic fried mushrooms smell.

4. When the gravy noodles are soggy enough, throw them into the frying pan, Leave a little gravy water with the noodles to go in the pan, because it'll just reduce later to intensify the graviness! Fry until fried!

5. Then I worried about how it looks, and the lack of nutritional content. So I add about a quarter of a tin of chopped tomatoes and left it alone to bubble while I ran back to my room for a plate, (still unwashed from the binge fest of oven chips last night. For shame!)

6. Utterly ruin it with a ridiculous portion of salt, add more instant gravy as a cheap replacement for a stock cube.

Bon apetit! No seriously. You are laughing, but it's delicious.

I am an even bigger idiot.

2010-01-17T22:12:00.003+01:00

I am so distracted right now. I can't do any work. I've got 56 pages of textbook to read and make notes on, then I have 9 Brief essay questions to complete in preparation for tomorrow's seminar. It ain't happening, I'm telling you!

I am staring at a page of text but my mind is 20 minutes away.

Okay i'm turning the laptop off for a bit.

EDIT: 25 Minutes later. Computer is back on. Willpower fail. Shortly after posting that I just shut the laptop down, climbed onto my duvet and blubbed for a few minutes then started stuffing my face with parsnips. This is not a productive evening's work.