A Summer's Afternoon in a Meadow

A relatively long post today, but hopefully succinct. Choosing To Die finished not quarter of an hour ago on BBC2. Sir Terry Pratchett exploring the nuances of being able to tell when you want to go, weighing it up against guessing when you will no longer be able to do it yourself, trying to be dignified in dying- an outstanding programme, with exceptional people. Peter Smedley and Andrew Colgan were two outstanding gentlemen who knew that it was all they had left, in the time left when they still could, to end it before they were no longer able.

I have always been so assured of my own immortality. I turned 21 not six months ago, and waste some time in quixotic planning of things I may or may not ever do with my life. The one thing I do know is that, as for me death is the end of it and there is nothing on another side or in another world, I would never, ever want to give up.

And the thing is that these men haven't given up.

'Blank Blankerton' has skewered you. Return fire?

Ah, social networking. That dangerous wasteland of procrastination, of studying other people in a manner which would be considered not just an invasion of privacy in real life but also downright sexually delinquent, of an oxymoronic name given the readiness with which the rules of social engagement go out the window.

(Poor pun number 1- on one level, people disregard the social rules; on another, you're viewing the website in a window. Har har.)

I, recently, changed my esteemed and oh-so-nurtured Facebook settings so that the langauge everything is written in is "English- Pirate". Almost a year ago I did much the same thing, which lasted all of about a month before I changed back to regular English, sick of the amount of things I could no longer understand. In the time between both of my forays into social network Privateering it appears I've got my sea legs and sea lingo a little more sorted, and therefore the first instance of anything I didn't understand or deduce the meaning of occured only two and a bit months in. I was informed, among the masses of notifications about messages in bottles, scrawlings on planks and other such peg-legged punnery, that I had been skewered.

This was a triumph.

This post is unique for several (read many, many, many) reasons.
First- I am no longer, technically, an undergraduate student. Huzzah! And poignant goodbye to what has been.
Second, out of almost eighty, this is the first post in which I have succeeded in embedding a video- and that video is, indeed, plenty apt and also "cracking".
Third- it's prose heavy. I'd apologise, but it's meant to be.

Here is, from Portal (Portal 2 was released recently, buy it) the end credits "Still Alive" written by Jonathan Coulton. It sums up these two days, and these three years, and (effectively) these fifteen years of education, in my honest opinion. This has, well and truly, been a triumph.



Today has been, all in all, pretty good. To the point where there is too much to mention should I be trying to record an entire day's activity in a single Facebook status or "tweet". Everything except blogs have word limits.

So the day began with a really early morning start, in typical insomniac and scalding-shower-alertness style at just before eight. A cup of tea followed, along with much recital of quotes I would, it turns out, not need or forget in the exam.

The next stage of the day, or significant stage, was either realising how sunny and nice it was as I left the house before eleven or the reason I was leaving the house at that time- to sit in The Novel Cafe and review notes and themes etc with the esteemed and beautiful Kristina Roberts and Kat Haylock. Both of these women got me through today, no word of a lie.

Having done all that it was time for a brief trip on campus and a brief spell of about half an hour on a triangle of grass in front of the George Fox building (he was a quaker, dontcha know- I was a quakin' for my second and last final). I ate a bacon and egg sarny. It would have been a salami roll, but while I deciphered the text up close with my faulty eyes a hand, belonging to a beautiful red head, swiped the product away. I protested by way of complaint, and haven't stopped going on about it all day, including the "diary entry" post being written now (considered this evening).

Between then and the next notable event in this post some sort of exam happened... Oh, wait, it was my last exam ever. Oh well. I finished it with twenty minutes to spare and decided, after a debate, to walk out early. The reason? I'd never done so, and wanted to feel the "thrill" (that's right, Haylock, mock all you want) of it just once.

The Writers' Society hoodies arrived two days ago, and this evening we got to see and collect them from the resplendent Laura Dallison, Social Secretary. They look awesome.

Then there was the drinking, and the Writers' Society meeting. We held it outside in the brilliant sun. I read a poem, like a girly girl, which was corrected by my peers and encouraged. Ta. Then it was back to the bar.

On returning to the bar, we ran into the stoner crowd again, those who will waste their lives on substances not substance they've been part of and will probably die forty years before us. The good news? Haylock hadn't returned home, and fled them to talk to us. Cracking. After merriment, an evening spent fighting, drinking and making our fathers proud, we returned to town and home, via two places of distinction.

One- the ice-cream shop that has recently opened on campus, with every flavour under the sun including rum and raisin, which I partook in. Then, to wind up the evening, myself and a burgeoning, potential writer in the form of David "The Prospero" Helm ventured towards The Stonewell Tavern, where I had never been. In terms of what's on tap and the music they had in tonight, it's on a par with The Dalton Rooms and The Robert Gillow. And I had a free pint. And they played James Brown's "I Feel Good", which I said I was likely to break out of when in the bar after the exam.

So there we are- a day, after two or three (I'm not sure) days of rough sleep and shit cramming and worry over examinations, in which everything tied up. It all came together, it all ended, and, hey- I'm still alive.

Getting rid of the voice saying 'Don't make me do stuff'

Experience and epiphanies come in all shapes, sizes, places, states of undress, degrees of sobriety, degrees of intoxication and shades of fatigue. They can strike you, with short term frustration, during the first-thing wake-me-up solo fumble under the bed sheets just as equally as they can pause you mid-sip of your fifteenth 'cup o' joe' and just as potently strip away any other thought or factor you were paying attention to.

In this aspect they are like ruthless and inexplicably succesfully efficient toddlers. The other thing they share with the fledgling, wailing, sticky-fingered semi-humans is that once they have your attention whatever they are trying to show you is often incredibly and insufferably annoying, if only because you should have seen the life milestone/ dead amphibian in your kids hand (and, imminently, mouth) a lot sooner.



Such an epiphany hit me recently. Everything I have known

On the replacement of skill with luck in the modern gameshow

Right, prissy and pretentious 'essay title' style heading aside, let's got on with this shall we? You haven't got all day.

Gone are the days when you could win money for knowing things or being good in a field such as retaining knowledge/ intelligently matching answers with answers popular with the public/ intelligently deciphering a clue or puzzle or catchphrase. This sort of actual skill, brain power, concentration and logic has, unfortunately, been sidelined to National Lottery spin off shows, normally on air while people leave the TV alone to have dinner, the gap preempted by Doctor Who and any number of talent shows and closed by Saturday night dramas and the film at nine.



Now you have to rely on, without fail, luck

The curse of a good book

Reader, I apologise for being so abesnt over the last months. I promised myself that I would not, could not allow anything so pithy as a degree and the work I had to undertake thereof to stall my frequent harranguing of the proverbial ears you lend me. Clearly, I was wrong.

However, had I not been so Preometheanly chained to the rock of higher education while my coursework pecked at my internal organs, there is no way in which I would be able now to nejoy the respite with any way near as much gusto. It is this freedom, the liberation to read and write what I like now while merely dabbling in this strange trifle called revision, which bring us our next topic of grumbling.

I have a, at times unfortunate, love of books. Can't help it, that's that, it's the way my mother put my hat on (cheers Rob), etc. And now that I'm free to read what I want, I am- with some brilliant and some more tarnished results.

Cut the head off the snake and find it's a hydra?

Negativity isn't normally what I set out to broadcast to people, honest. Personal pessimism, maybe, but negativity isn't my default setting. I just try to point out the glaring flaws in a lot of peoples' celebrations sometimes, with a touch of what I like to call common sense.

I should note, before I go any further, that I am not talking about, nor will I mention again, the mass hysteria with which 24-hour rolling news would convince us the nation was gripped in the run up to Friday. Most people don't care and were sick of it, so I'm going to leave it well alone.



This morning I awoke, having spent last night sat in a pub which advertised a quiz (there was no quiz), watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead and my perennial favourite Stephen King film Misery and then spending hours writing because I was unable to sleep, in a sort of fuzzy haze. My stereo alarm was blaring at me at the regular time of 6:30 despite being on a volume of 5, and the grey dawn filtering through my skylight was burning into my corneas. It was that sort of stumbling, fumbling wake-up, until I heard a news story which snapped me right into conciousness and alert attentiveness.

Osama Bin Laden (not to be confused with one of the perpetrators of his downfall, President Obama- I'm looking at you, Fox News) has died

The rise of the rhyming advert

Twenty two days without a post? Blimey. Anyone who thought the recent summer glory would have mellowed me, sorry, but I return with a resounding fanfare of two words. Stop it.

Here's a quick list of those involved so far- Jenson Button, Harvester, a 118 radio ad, that stupid dog training TV show after extensive research, it is called A Different Breed- I'm not sure if that's in reference to the dogs, the team behind it or the owners), and Cuprinol's 'Wood Preservation society'. Also, the "For dogs who BLANK a lot" dog foog ad- Oh, Philip Glenister, how could you?

'500,000 on sick are fit to work'

Oh, dear god.

If this is true, as one minister suggests, then every single one of these 500,000 people need to get going. Or move abroad so we don't have to deal with them sitting around and cheating everyone else out of what they could be doing.

I'd like to turn to a recent piece I wrote to be published in my college magazine, The Bowland Lady. If you're ever in the North West of England, seek it out. The piece was entitled

Grit your teeth and get on with it- that ridiculous sense of entitlement in the job market

and I think it's a bit relevent here. It reads as follows:

If I wanted to take part in a scrum I'd have gone to a midnight rugby game.

This is a shout out to all the shitheads out there who love to make queueing at the bar a physical war. I do not want to go to a nightclub to get my upper body workout, or any sort of exercise for that matter, aside from occasional "dancing" which may cause other people on nights out to question both my sanity and whether or not I've got some sort of permanent problem with my nervous system. I want to drink copiously, bellow along to songs which should have been left in the past and generally have a good night.



Having to take part in the ebb and flow of people that becomes a gigantic, braced scrummage with dozens of individual three and four man teams all heading in the same direction and, apparently, attempting to widen the club twenty metres by pushing the bar and back wall away is not my idea of a great way to spend twenty minutes.

And the upshot of it all?