Sunday morning vibes

Above are images from different Sundays, but both nice ones. I feel like there two sides to the Sunday coin. One is getting up early, going on a pretty walk and feeling productive. The other is getting up as late as humanly possible, eating a labour-intensive breakfast and sitting around in the same room listening to music all day. Have a cup of tea, put on a good album, hopefully bask in the sunshine and have a nice Sunday.

Adventures in Adulthood: The Moving House Edition

photo mine. it's truthful.

Moving into halls was far easier than I thought it would be. I was handed over a key, then handed over to somebody else, who walked me to my building and left me to begin the rest of my life. There were directions to the town and people in official hoodies waving signs and paperwork packs and about fifty billion emails, and even when my chair was broken and my internet didn't work, it all got resolved within a day.

A few months of living in halls, and I thought of myself as a Real Live Adult. I tidied my room without my mum forcing me to. I cooked meals for myself, and not all of them involved ketchup. (Although I did once, on a particularly grim day of essay-writing, perilously close to a deadline, buy just a packet of chicken dippers and a bottle of ketchup at Lidl. The cashier's response was 'we all have those days, don't we?'. I then proceeded to eat the entire packet. It was a low point.)

I was so very excited to get out of halls. The house I had paid a deposit for was a promised land, with a dishwasher and a double bed and peaceful nights, un-punctuated by the sound of the flat above singing Happy Birthday and banging on the floor for the fourth time this week. (How many birthdays can a flat of ten people have?!) 

Unfortunately, I didn't quite take into consideration how much students are looked after by halls staff. I live with two other girls, and none of us are stupid, but when we got into the house and saw the fridge and freezer wide open, we naturally assumed that new houses just don't have electricity. We rooted about in the cupboard under the stairs and pressed a switch, and the house alarm went off. We pressed the switch again, panicking, and the fire alarm started bleeping ominously. We decided it needed batteries, and went about unpacking with the equivalent of Chinese water torture as a soundtrack. 

Our landlord then arrived, and kindly told us that the electricity had already been on, and flicked the switch on the plug that was very obviously connected to the fridge. The beeping stopped. Peace was restored. We cleaned the house top to toe, hoovered the patchwork 70s carpets, and wiped the layer of stickiness off the kitchen counters. Thoroughly pleased with ourselves and feeling competent, we broke out the gin and tonics and settled down in front of 24 Hours in A&E (like the wild, crazy students we are). 

Then the bloody slugs arrived. There were two big fat ones slithering across the freshly-cleaned kitchen floor, and a few more tiny ones wriggling across the Artex walls. For some reason, we had anticipated everything going wrong except this. We'd assumed that naturally, the wifi wouldn't work. We'd discounted the possibility of having hot water for at least a week, and that we'd be living in the lap of luxury if the heating worked just once over the course of the year. But nobody walks into their kitchen and expects their foot to meet something plump and slimy. We had had a few gin and tonics, and we were absolutely traumatized. 

There it is: my experience as a student so far in a nutshell. Dodgy carpets, dodgy flats, dodgy food choices and dodgy TV. Oh, and alcohol, of course. 

on being long distance

image via tallulah fontaine @ tumblr

Since previous posts, things have changed. (As they tend to do when you don't update a blog for a year and a half.)

I have now moved away from my teeny tiny town in the middle of nowhere, and currently live in Manchester, which is obviously a bit more exciting. I have emerged from a year's living there so far with high expectations about public transport (there's a bus every thirty seconds rather than once an hour!!!!!), a paranoia about my so-called posh Southern accent, and a new-found appreciation for Greggs (who am I kidding, I've always loved Greggs).

I love Manchester, and how there's always something going on there. I love living away from home, and the freedom to visit people whenever I want and get in at 4 in the morning, and the technical ability to eat chicken dippers for tea without my mum clubbing me to death with the packet for cooking junk food in the house. I love living up north (everyone is friendly, it's cheap, and they call bread rolls barms which is really cool).

The only problem is that my boyfriend has moved away from home too, and now lives in, as far as Manchester is concerned, the arse-end of nowhere. The journey from Manchester to Cambridge, if you're taking the cheap route, is five hours long and involves a train and a coach: almost literally planes, trains and automobiles. It also requires money, and a lot of planning. Spontaneity is supposed to be sexy, isn't it? Sitting on National Rail Enquiries a month in advance is most decidedly unsexy, as is waking up at three in the morning to get the first train with unbrushed hair and dribble on your chin. Even less sexy is watching somebody be sick in a Tesco bag on the X5 bus and lob it out of the window into Milton Keynes Station. The X5 bus is not a place that fosters romance or elegance.

 Being in a long-distance relationship also makes me an extremely boring person. At home I was always confused about people who couldn't spend a day without their partners; being alone can be so lovely! Then I got into a habit of spending every evening on Skype talking about the inanest shit (for example, extreme interest in what the other had for tea), starting to miss my boyfriend after two days of not seeing him, and, worst of all, may or may not have fallen asleep spooning a pillow on more than one occasion.

As difficult and lonely (and expensive) as a long-distance relationship can be, however, there are silver linings. Neither the freezing walk to the train station at three in the morning, nor Milton Keynes Station, nor the X5 bus are particularly romantic. But running into the arms of the person you love the most, bags and all, on a sunny morning on a Cambridge green is rather cinematic. And curling up in somebody's arms after months of not seeing them, laughing in almost disbelief that they're real and you're with them, is probably one of the romantic things around.

Then again, I say this from the perspective of somebody who's home for the summer and is a fifteen minute walk away from the love of my life. So think of me next September as I slump on the 4:30 train with bird's nest hair, feeling as unenthustiastic and unsexy as humanly possible.

Writing experiments

image via tumblr - unknown source

Recently I found this list of writing experiments and am absolutely intrigued. I love the idea of writing about a single thing every day. I have recently rediscovered a list I wrote once of all my favourite things, including:

• the smell of cumin
• the amber colour of tea when the sun shines on it
• orange roses
• how legs look underwater
• recipes written without measurements

I am really tempted to start writing a journal about things I see from the bus, however, which I feel would be far more interesting. 

Coatspiration

image via

As far as I'm concerned, this year's pastel pink winter has been the most irritating trend since leggings-as-trousers. (Irritation at said trend may or may not be to do with the fact that I definitely participated it when I was 13 - oh god, the cringing involved in looking back on old photos!) Not because it's aesthetically displeasing, but because I'm ginger, freckled and generally unsuited as a person for wearing pink. There is a woman who lives in my town who has the most beautiful tailored pastel pink coat and since she is blonde (an AW13 free pass to looking nice) looks amazing in it. I will admit that I'm jealous.

Even if I can't wear pink, I'd still settle for a beautiful pastel coat. And I would very definitely nick the little boy's look: shiny shoes, white shirt and a gorgeous powder blue coat. Beret optional but preferred. In an ideal world the walk to school would not instantly muddify my shoes and my shirts would not always be creased and I would be able to look chic and tres parisienne in a beret... But then again, in an ideal world, I'd be pretty in winter pink.

(As for the artistic rebel on the left, a baggy white t-shirt dotted with random colour and a very simple necklace and something denim seems like a great summer option. Thank you, opinionated 50's ad!)

The problem with the future...

...Is that it's completely unknown. A room full of darkness. I am seventeen years old and The Future is something that I'm currently having to feel my way through prematurely, tapping on the walls and sliding my palms around hazy shapes of university courses and job opportunities. What you might think is shaped like an A-grade might actually be a C in disguise. The bannister of work experience that you brush your hand along might lead to a solid shape of Well-Paid Job but the stairs might vanish into an unemployment trap-door instead. It's a dangerous thing to do, mapping out your future. It leaves no room for disappointment.

Right now I (and most other people of my age) are being shot at with questions about the future. Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What they mean by this, of course, is: Which job will you be working in? How much money will you have? Will your education have been worth it? Work, work, work.

Like many people, my answer is an increasingly-panicked I don't know I don't know I don't know! Some people take an exploratory squint into The Future and immediately stub their toe on a vocation. From there the work may not be easy but the planning certainly is. If you know that you are going to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a vet, it's easy to see yourself in five years or ten. Once the distant shape of success is obvious in the landscape of your life yet to come, it's easy to make a route to it. If you know what job you are going to have, it's easy to imagine yourself performing it, easy to conjure up images of somebody with your face in the appropriate uniform, frozen in industrious imagery like scenes from a children's reading sample. For people who know what they want to do, it's easy to present yourself via your job, because your dream job is part of you already.

As a result of having no clue what I want to do, my answers are all slightly unorthodox. My visions of my future self all seem to revert to frivolity. I know I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a vet. I know I'd like to see what living in a city is like. I see my twenty-seven year old self as a red-headed figure in heels coming home from an unknown job to a flat with books and house plants and a cat. I see, perhaps, a wedding to a man with a greyed-out face. Children who look like me for lack of any other factor. I want to be successful enough to shop in Waitrose on a regular basis, for lack of better job description, but that isn't as such an acceptable answer.

I want to study English and French at a good university (with old buildings and trees), and I want to write, and my vision of The Future doesn't stretch any further than that. A satisfactory answer for now, perhaps. But when I see myself in five years, a girl with my face but different clothes on, the one thing I know for certain is that this answer will not suffice anymore.

On paleo mothers

image via ren-hang at flickr

Recently I have gone on a crusade of healthy eating, which is partially due to a desire for slim, tanned summer wholesomeness and partially due to the crippling guilt of a recent impromptu lunch of pizza and ice-cream. As a result, I have been joining in with my mother in smugly declining bread and cakes in favour of salads.

My mother has been Paleo for a few months now, and the rest of my family has somewhat got used to it. There was the initial shock, of course, of the banning of orange juice and cereal and puddings every day. Pasta became a high-risk substance, sugar in tea became the work of the devil and talk of sandwiches was met with dirty looks. Suddenly chocolate was something furtive to sneak into the house wrapped in a jumper or stuffed into a bag, like attempting to smuggle alcohol under the nose of my parents, only ridiculous. My mum spent days on end reading health articles and constantly updating us on what she'd eaten and how it made her feel and the state of her health. Every conversation was warped by her into a discussion on her eating habits. It was as if she had become devoted to religion overnight, obsessing constantly about cauliflower rice and the Omega 6 content of almonds, rapturously quoting food statistics like Bible passages. Instead of urging miserable people to find Jesus, she would proclaim that all their problems could be fixed with a Proper Food. We (my brothers and I, that is) were her reluctant converts, rebelliously chomping crisps and sausage rolls in the Tesco car park as a sort of sullen refusal to conform, our vanilla version of dyed hair and tattoos. Blasphemy was confined to two words, always spoken with a definite capital letter at the beginning and a slight impressive whisper: Grain, and Rancid Fats.

It is only now after the fervour of resistance that I am perhaps realising that food as a form of rebellion is not necessarily the best thing in terms of health. It is a trap that I have fallen into before. As a child, my mother, ever well-meaning, was determined to feed us the best things she possibly could. And she did. We ate organic vegetables and cooked breakfasts, home-made dinners and whole-fat milk. Cereal was strictly banned if the of which sugars section on the packet was over 10g, and Nestlé was exiled from the house after a political incident. She worked her fingers to the bone keeping us well-fed. Not a single ready meal passed my lips my whole childhood; she never stopped working even for a night. And now, of course, I am incredibly grateful for her efforts, even though as a child I was blind to them. I longed to fit in with the other children, you see, particularly in primary school. This combined with a natural sweet tooth made my daily packed lunch a nightmare. I would pull out my squashed hummus and carrot or cheese and onion brown-bread sandwiches out of my lunchbox with weary distaste, gazing longingly at my classmates slurping milkshakes and munching on chocolate bars. My small tupperware box of nuts and dried fruit would never quite compare to the crumpling of packets of Wotsits and Skips. My dream was to be able to open crisps at lunchtime by squeezing the ends of the packets - POP! - like those in the lunch hall with effortless cool, the sort I thought could be obtained by eating the right things for lunch and wearing the right hair accessories. More than once, I have been met with the cry of 'Urgh, what's that?' upon biting into a radish, which was hell for a self-conscious wallflower such as myself.

Luckily these days I am more likely to have an impressive lunch if it unfalteringly healthy rather than the other way round, and hummus sandwiches and radishes are more likely to evoke the envy of my crisp-crunching coke-sipping friends. And while I am still reluctant to completely give up Grain, Sugar and Rancid Fats, I respect my mother a great deal more for her efforts to get us to eat healthily.