Would you look at
that. It’s been a WHOLE YEAR since I started my blog! Happy Birthday Blog! It’s
nice to think that this little site has now kind of tracked an entire year of
my life. And an exciting year at that. With this in mind, I’m going to try and
update it more often, so I have more to look back on when I’m old and boring
and grey.
Starting blog-year 2 off with a BANG:
It’s 9.30 on a Sunday
night. I’m curled up in bed wondering whether to finish reading Henry VI, or to watch a tv programme
before I go to bed. If I decide to watch something, I’ll have to choose between
the new Attenborough show about the rise of vertebrates, and the documentary
about giant animals with Steve Backshall…
Cosy as I am, I can’t
pretend this how I imagined I would be spending the night before my first day
back at university. My overriding memories from first and second year consist
mainly of painting my face like various different animals, and after a few
beers roaring ferociously at anyone I met. Apart from that time I dressed up as
a zebra…
Today I have divided a
100 page course-pack into sections and bound each one neatly with string, eaten
1 malteasers bar and half a bag of chocolate eclairs, read and made notes on a
middle English York Mystery Play, done lots of ambigious ‘computer stuff’, and
decided that strumming without a plectrum definitely sounds better when playing
‘Other Side of the World’ on guitar. Oh, and I walked to the postbox. It’s at
the bottom of my road.
Had I, all that time
ago back in August, followed some crazy reckless abandon and refused to
register to come back for my final year of uni, my day would probably have gone
very differently. I would have gone to work for the seventh day of the week and
run around behind a bar for 6 hours. Then, due to my living quarters being slightly
cramped, probably opted to spend the evening in another pub before skipping
tipsily home around 11 and setting my alarm for 7.30 to get up for job number 2
on Monday morning. It’s a slightly different lifestyle. I would have eaten less
food, and spoken to more people. I would also have read less, and played less
music. I would have gone further than the end of my road. Rather than walking to
the postbox, I would probably have looked guiltily in passing at a pile of
letters and papers yet to be written on and sorted out.
When you come home
from work and turn on the tv, you don’t have a constant nagging feeling that you
should be doing something else. Here, with two dissertations to write and over
40 Shakespeare texts to cover in 20 weeks, there’s always something else I
could be doing. I don’t know which I prefer. They say that spending a year out
is a good thing to do, because it makes you appreciate education more. I'm not sure working has made me appreciate education more, but it may have made me appreciate midday starts and student discounts more. I
can’t help wondering how many of the things my lecturers say next week will
strike me as impractical academic bullshit.
That said, did you
know that H.D. was sent from London to Austria and referred to Sigmund Freud in
1933 due to her increasing paranoia about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? I found that out this week. Some of
the politicians at the time might have benefited from the same condition! I
can feel I’m getting my geek on already.
My first seminar is
tomorrow. Having been away for a year, it’s unlikely I will know anybody in it.
I also have my first meeting back at the uni newspaper tomorrow, and a trial
shift in a local bar next week. Give it a month or so and hopefully I will have
got myself a nice (but probably reasonably unstable) balance of the two.
