How We Live Now

About a year ago, I wrote a post detailing my angst for post-graduation life and specifying that as long as I was writing and surrounded by friends, I would be alright.

One semester into my MSc in English Literature at Edinburgh, I managed to wangle my situation into almost fitting those specifications. I am writing a lot (and reading even more), and am surrounded by a fair majority of my friends (although those who left Edinburgh last year, I'm still awaiting your swift return).

A TICKET!

What I have most notably salvaged from fourth year, is that worrying about the future does nothing. Neither does comparing yourself to other people and the amount of work experience they have (this is my new hobby; it's actually quite stressful). Neither does doing something because you think you should be doing it. This is the most pertinent lesson I can take from my final year of undergrad. Last year, I applied for an awful lot of things that I wouldn't actually have enjoyed, because I thought it's what you do when you're in final year. It took up a lot of brain space and also real time.

So actually, I wouldn't like to say I predicted the future, but I kindof did. There's lots of people (let's call them nay-sayers, for the sake of this post), who, whatever you life decision is, will scowl upon it. My message is this: follow your heart. After you've stopped cringing, I recommend you go to a workshop like the one I grumbled about last year (or recreate it at home - I mean, all you need to do is draw a spider diagram and think about yourself), and work out what you like. Work out your priorities, and follow others' advice with a pinch of salt. Post-graduation life will be alright, in the end.

LOTF

We all know Lord of the Flies, our first encounters being in a haze of hot secondary school classrooms and the 'naughty boys' saying how boring it is. But after my initial misgivings, Golding's text turned out to be one of the most formative texts of my school years. Looking through the 60th anniversary ebook, it looks like it was for a lot of other people, too.

Find my contribution on page 31, here.

Touching strangers

This week, my school friend Ashton was making a business trip (swanky) up to Edinburgh and extended his adventure by staying with me for one night. My friendship with Ashton goes right back to lower sixth, when we cavorted off to Cambridge (lol), on an open day (double lol), and spent most of our time making outfits out of balloons and bin bags, and wondering if our teachers were drunk (they were). Since then, we have made cakes of different anatomical shapes and sizes, screamed at each other on New Year's Eve (my fault), and lost pieces of my charm bracelets, only to find them in Ashton's pants.

To start Ashton's Edinburgh experience off, then, we began by embarking on a ghost tour. We giggled at the guide's swishy black cape, and duly followed her down into the vaults. We pretended not to be scared, but halfway through we were clutching each other's arms and trying to forget that our phones DIDN'T HAVE SIGNAL DOWN THERE. I won't spoil the ghost story experience for you prospective punters, but, right at the end, she was holding a candle to her face and regaling us with more horrors. With the climax of the story, the guide screamed. Ashton screamed. I screamed, and, already having a firm hold of Ashton's arms, reached for someone more comforting - the girl in front. Suddenly being accosted by a stranger in a dark underground room, the girl in front screamed. The guide looked at us disapprovingly and I hastily apologised. I had noticed the girl at the beginning. She had come on the tour on her own, and I remember thinking how brave it was. Apologies accepted, the guide carried on with her tales. The girl asked the guide to 'please not scream again'. At the end, she finished by blowing out her candle and plunging us all into darkness. -  I shrieked even louder and grabbed the poor girl's shoulders again. My string of apologies was drowned out by Ashton's giggles.

Now, as the end of undergrad life quickly approaches and all ideas with what to do with my life quickly disappear, I have been hastily applying to things. All of these things need references, and, for my poor tutor who thought he had escaped from all university duties on research sabbatical, this meant more work. I had plagued him with emails a few times, before being told to wait patiently by the people at the college reception. I had loitered outside his office a few times, before halting my ready-to-knock hand and going back downstairs dejectedly. So when he replied, joy of joys, I was overwhelmingly relieved! (This is the tutor at uni who supervised my dissertation-like essay AND taught me for a semester. Like, he knows me well.).

We had  a photoshoot at the beach

Anyway, on taking Ashton back to the station, we stopped off at Sainsburys on the way for some train-time snacks. Sausage roll and pasta in hand, Ash sauntered off to the queue, and to me, it looked like he had pushed in. 'ASHTON, did you PUSH IN?' I half-announced, half-questioned. Ashton turned round to face the patient queuer he had offended. I turned round, and saw the man who held all the abilities to both grant and dilapidate my dreams. There was my tutor who had finally agreed to write a recommendation. I gave awkward pledgings of thanks and shuffled Ashton out of the door.

No One Ever Has Plans For NYE

Every year, my friends and I go through the same anguish. It starts in October, when the first festive rolls of wrapping paper arrive in Tesco, and oddly-flavoured lattes appear in all of the
coffee shops. 'What are you doing for New Year?' is whispered around flats, on campus, and whatsapp groups up and down the country.

Something needs to be done about this situation. No one ever knows what they are doing on New Year's Eve. Sometimes, even after it's over, no one knows what actually happened.

I've had new year's in a club, new year's at house parties, new year's in the village Scout Hut, new year's at home watching the London fireworks on television, and, for the past two years, new year's actually watching the fireworks amongst a shivering, and rather bolshy crowd. Each of these NYEs were great in their own little ways, but none of them validated my three months of questions.

That much-coveted view of Big Ben

Which brings me to this new year. After a dinner finishing at 11pm, we had 1 hour to navigate the crowds of the capital. And crowds there were. Trafalgar Square was already packed, but Sam decided that etiquette wasn't important in the last 60 minutes of 2014, propelling us through people who had been standing there for hours to get the view of Big Ben. We were verbally abused, and someone spilt a pungent alcoholic liquid over our bottles of Prosecco. Once through, Sam decided now was the time to attempt a crossing of the river. We got stuck on the mall. He admitted defeat. Some Germans began to talk about us, and I immediately jumped in to top up my oral skills for the end of the year. A common stereotype is that Germans are not polite. On the contrary, Germans have excellent social skills. I only had to murmur a handful of incorrectly-conjugated verbs before in came the compliments.

Fast forward to the early hours of 2015, and we had returned to Trafalgar Square and the excellent view of the  Big Ben. Sam was in deep discussion with a policeman who didn't really know how we would ever cross the river before January, 2. A Spanish man saw room for interruption, charging up to us and bringing the discussion to silence.
'Excuse me', his politeness was almost on a par to that of the Germans -  'Where is Big Ben?' - unfortunately his navigational skills were not.

The Crow, The Collapse, and the Cleaning Man

     I have quite a few friends in my German classes. We drink beer together and find German people to steal and cook Schnitzel for us and sometimes all dress up in German clothes to visit pubs on weekday nights. English literature, however, is an entirely different story. I have a few friends from English who I am very proud of, but our friendship was built upon other things, like Berlin, or drinking tea together at work, or...actually, no, just two.

     Anyway, at risk of digression, one of said English Lit friends turned to me today, and proclaimed, 'Hilary, you are the only person I know who manages to get herself in so many socially awkward situations quite so often'. I took this as a compliment, but it could have been her bidding me adieu in order to find cooler English Lit friends.

A poem, by my mum, October 2014

     The tale of the cleaning man comes after a particularly long weekend involving muffins, wine and very little movement. Safely in the swanky new toilets of our swanky new department building, I was inspecting my new-found stomach in the swanky new full-length mirrors. I admit, I might have even poked aforementioned flab. In comes cleaning man, to be greeted by a lot of skin and a lot of bra. We both laughed it off. 

     The crow was a little less entertained by my new gain of weight. The crow tried to carry me away. I was walking home from a 10 o'clock lecture, having a great time and envisioning tea and biscuits and the Made in Chelsea catchup on 4od. Then, there was a crow on my head. It was heavy and had grabby claws. I shrieked and shrieked and shrieked, and all the people in the meadows turned round to see me, the girl, flapping around, with a crow having the time of its life in my hair. 

     The collapse should be taken very seriously. I fell up the library stairs. Now, the library is not a place to stop and be embarrassed and look around at your audience, all the while laughing nervously at the accidental fall. No. The library is a place of no eye contact. The library is a place of silence, even if you might be dying. So up I hopped, sprinting up the rest of the stairs to safety. It soon transpired that I was not in the right shape for sprinting, as the world began to get darker and fuzzier, and the pain in my knee was far greater than that time I forgot to get off a t-bar ski lift and ended up ploughing into a snow-covered rock. I found a nearby table (a tall awkward one, like you get in costa or airports), and lay on it. It was there that two girls found me, shaking me and asking if I needed assistance. 'Because we're medical students', one said proudly. 'Well, medical sciences', said the other. (Even I could work out in my near-death state that this meant they were not actually doctors.) 'I'M FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE' I moaned, throwing myself further across the awkward too-tall table.They wheeled an office chair across from the other side of the floor, which I flopped into, and they left.

     All these stories are much better told in person with hand gestures and real life screams, but they are also told in a shorter form on my twitter.

The Difficulty of Now

At the risk of being misunderstood, this is a post about the struggles of right now. Don't get me wrong; I love being back in the UK. I love fourth year. I love my flat, and my part-time job, and the fact a very large percentage of my friends are all in the same city as me (after living in the Forest, this is a novelty I will never again take for granted). I appreciate that the workload is demanding, but the motivation this provides me with is the most motivation I have had for at least 3 years (thanks 'A' Levels, you were mean). But what I really hate about now is the not-now: The future. 

'The future is in your hands' (I feel like people say this a lot. Or maybe just my dad).
My future is literally in my hands. If I ain't typing applications, all I have in front of me, literally and metaphorically, is a white blank page (see Mumford and Sons for some good mood music). I am a particularly worry-able person. For the first time in my life, I have no idea where I will be in a year, or even where I should be in a year.

Last week, I visited a careers workshop for my school, the school of  Languages, Literatures and Cultures. I expected to be bombarded with places to go to find a job, and useful application strategies. Instead, I drew a spider diagram of what I enjoy and who I admire. I'm not being scathing; I see how this can help people to maybe see where they want to go. For me, it just said the obvious: I like writing, and I like being around people I like. This I knew already. I desired a more narrowed-down answer of where I can go in order to achieve this. And what is yet more frustrating, is that right now, I am expected to be doing a lot of writing, and I have enough time to spend with people I like. I like the now, so why should I be spending it thinking about the next? 

The answer? The next terrifies me, and in order to make the future a little less terrifying, I should think about the next. I'm applying for graduate schemes. I am scouring the internet for internships. I become confused about salaries and start dates and deadlines on a daily basis. But I have a feeling that if my new future does not comprise either writing or friends, this time next year, I will still be complaining about the now; only with less time to change it.

The now: beer, sausages and friends