10th October...

Thoughts on Entering 3^rd Year ....Cynicism and Cider; or, what happens when you start your final year of university and realise that in a year's time you'll be moving 200 miles south to Wimbledon to start a training course with £20,000+ worth of debt and no idea how to pay a gas bill. Christ.

 

Freshers week of third year has just ended, and I feel old. Yes, old. Not old like I should be settling down with a Labrador and a suburban bungalow and a copy of Reader’s Digest, but old as in I might be getting past the ‘student’ mode of living that has been the norm for the last couple of years.

 

Allow me to explain.

 

My feelings this past week have leant towards the notion that going out every night is massively over-rated; freshers week is forced. The amount of over-eager freshers reps who have asked me if I know where to park on South West/  which group I’m in for the bar crawl/ etc etc etc, only to be silenced by one shot of my cynical glare and the unspoken message ‘I’m a bloody third year!’ has made me feeling sort of… well, bitchy.

 

But I’m finding it hard to feel bad about my cynicism.

 

When I started here in October 2008, everyone I met told me the same things. Freshers week was going to be the MOST AMAZING week of my life. I was going to meet SO MANY people. It was going to be the BEST thing I’d remember about university.

 

Erm, yes. Because the constant pressure to be perky, to talk to every single person you meet in case they become your new best friend, to ward off the hangover in case you come across as grouchy, to survive all week on four hours sleep a night, to live up to the expectations of everyone around you, not to mention your home friends who will doubtless be having the VERY BEST week of their lives too really is a recipe for a great week.

 

I could never escape the feeling that freshers week is the most superficial time that anyone has, at any university. Everyone is on their best behaviour; no one is genuine. And in any case, why force getting to meet people? I have a beautiful, hilarious, individual group of friends at this university. But I met them in seminars, over long lunches, and on film nights in their flats. A deeper, less practised and more natural connection was forged than would have been possible at 3am on the post-headphone disco Sugar bus.

 

I felt mildly sorry for the first years I saw on their Big Night Out last week, all fresh faced in their horrible t-shirts that identified them as freshers, sat around tables in Friary with their VKs, determined to have a good night. The best advice they could have been given was not which bars have the best drinks offers (they’ll discover this themselves soon enough) but that freshers week is very, very unlikely to be the high point of their time at university –nor should they expect it to be.

 

The best week of their lives? I can almost guarantee that by November they’ll have topped it easily.

24th August...

10 Things That Journalists Do...

1. Swear. All the time. Case in point, Monday 3.10pm: 'Where the b*llocking fu*k is my *anking Rossendale lead? GRAHAM! Where is it?'

2. Drink possibly dangerous amounts of coffee. Offer to make coffee every third minute, especially early in the morning, creating a situation where they find themselves bouncing off the walls and talking very fast by 9.45am. Sometimes offer to make coffee and then get distracted (by the Rossendale lead, see above) and leave fellow journo in a state of caffeine dependent flux, unsure whether they should make their own coffee or not.

3. Ask random people on the phone how they are/ how their day has been/ where they have just been on holiday. We don't care. We just want to make you talk.

4. Search the internet in a desperate hunt for nibs. End up trawling the websites of the Pendle Ornithologists Club, the Darwen Limestone Society and the East Lancashire Beekeepers Association.

5. Make more coffee.

6. Say things like, 'Quick fix me a Darwen lead, and I'll chase up the letter about the Smitty column while you find me ten nibs and give Shelia a call; tell her to fax me a new press pic across.'

7. Laugh at the word 'nibs'.

8. Spend around 95% of the working day in editorial meetings. Leave said editorial meetings with less idea of what might end up in the issue than you did before.

9. Start dreading exam results season in approximately mid-June.

10. Develop an email checking obsession. Forty times an hour is about right.

23rd August...

Clothes to Covet…

Winter might not have officially set in, but in cloudy Wakefield last week you could have been forgiven for thinking it was already October.

Not that I’m complaining. I have long given up hope of any August sun in Yorkshire, and it doesn’t matter too much, because there are a lot of things I like about autumn. Being an enormous geek, the end of August always made me happy because it meant I could go out and buy new shoes and a new fluffy pencilcase, usually complete with a novelty set of erasers.

Aside from the excitement of new stationary sets this time of the year also brings beautiful clothes, of course.

My lunch hour proved the perfect opportunity to browse the new A/W collections, despite the fact that Wakefield Ridings Centre was hardly a shopper’s paradise. The Topshop, Bank and River Island, however (yes, I am a high street whore) were surprisingly impressive.

So, courtesy of Wakefield Ridings (oh, the unquestionable glamour!) here are the clothes that I will be coveting this season………..

19th August...

...happy students (jumping), further Facebook drama, arguments over coffee and completely appropriate use of the English language...


'Much madness is the divinest sense-
          To a discerning eye-'

          Emily Dickinson.




On the 5.29 train back from Wakey, drinking the last bit of flask coffee, which is not mixed with milk, and tastes like tar -I imagine. The train smells of urine. It is not pleasant.

Today I spent the morning interviewing A-Level students at Wakefield College. Despite recent suggestions that they would be drowning their sorrows in the cafeteria and contemplating lives that consisted of nothing but university rejection and general drudgery, they seemed surprisingly chipper. 

I don't believe that the student who has worked hard, researched their university choices wisely and not over-estimated what they can achieve is going to miss out. Yes, sometimes there are unfortunate circumstances, and those who are now going through Clearing might find themselves without a place -but this happens every year. Something has gone wrong in the advice they have been given, if they haven't made the offer for their insurance choice and in this have failed to achieve their minimum expectations.

Newspapers have been commenting that the students most likely to be photographed with their results tomorrow are of a very particular breed -female, blonde, middle-class, often twins, usually Oxbridge. It is very likely that they will be jumping, results and Ugg boots in the air. I don't have a great deal to say about this, I just thought I'd throw it in there. It's so true.

Other general comments on this week's news:

Former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil might not have meant to cause a 'political statement' with her disgusting Facebook pictures of hand-cuffed, blind-folded Palenstinian prisoners, but she would do well to realise that a lot of the time the politics of the situation are superfluous. Before the obvious political ramifications are considered, Abergil should consider the fact that these men were probanly going through some of the most traumatic moments of their lives. Who would be taking photographs in this situation, for anything other than journalistic purposes? And what kind of psychopath would upload them onto Facebook -for entertainment? It seems to me that Ms. Abergil could do with a lesson in basic humanity.

An English professor has been removed from a New York City Starbucks for 'refusing' to use their own particular brand of language.

Lynne Rosenthal asked if she could order a multi-grain bagel. 'Yes,' the cashier replied. 'Would you like butter or cheese?'

Ms Rosenthal refused to answer, saying that she wouldn't compromise her 'plain English'. After she refused to answer the question a ruckus occurred, the police were called, and she was removed.

I agree that sometimes language needs to be kept traditional, and I also cringe when ordering a Venti Americano in Starbucks. But it seems that Ms. Rosenthal was being equally as pretentious. The cashier simply asked her if she wanted butter or cheese. Some customers do not want butter on their bagels; some do.

It sounds like a valid question to me, not an abuse of the English language. And clearly causing this argument didn't do Rosenthal any good either, because she left without her bagel. Maybe next time she'll try using that most plain of English words -'no'.

17th August...

…Fitzgerald on the train, French Connection lust, blogging, microfilm, 6am suspender drama, coffee cake and theatre employment searches….


Probably should be going to sleep, since I’ve got to get up in 5 hours… however, happily distracted by frenchconection.com ♥


I’m salivating over most of the online collection, but one serious question still sticks out in my mind: why do people wear playsuits? Do they want to look like 3 year olds? Also, the floor in public toilets is always vomit inducing, and who really wants to sit in a public toilet naked with a baby-grow around their ankles just for the sake of fashion?


The mind boggles, honestly.

 Also aimlessly Googling Jeanette Winterson books. Sexing the Cherry sounds interesting, but slightly gutted that Wikipedia doesn’t have a page for Written on the Body. Was hoping for some breezy and not too taxing analysis. Might have to pick up a criticism book, scary.

 Missing my lovely Lancaster sisterhood, particularly those of it who have departed these rain splattered shores and whisked themselves off to altogether more exotic climes. Still, Madrid in September and London before that, over the bank holiday weekend, so I can’t really complain without sounding like a spoilt bitch… especially since I’ve been back from Greece for all of 5 days.

 It’s now 4 ½ hours until I need to get up, and I’m still feeling the effects of today’s 5 cups of coffee. Mildly annoying, because I’m definitely going to need my energy tomorrow. I foresee another day translating the overly-punctuated, rambling letters of Wakefield residents, waiting for non-existent emails to flash into my inbox, and fighting with the temperamental microfilm machine.

 I literally can’t wait to be a proper journo.

 Also, I’ve discovered the fairytale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, as translated by the Brothers Grimm, and it’s b-e-a-u-tiful.

 Thought of the day… ‘I’m feeling your leather jacket, want to go to the Premier Inn?’
♥

20th July 2010 - Wasting my life on Facebook? Erm, no. I’m just keeping up with my correspondence…

In pre-internet times, women with nothing else to do (‘kept women’, I think is the term) could very feasibly have spent all morning dealing with their correspondence. Letter writing, etc. Communication was once seen as a great art –among the many collected volumes of letters that have been selected and published in anthologies over the last few years are those of Jane Austen and the legendary Mitford sisters. Austen’s letters shed light on some of the greatest works of modern British literature, whilst the Mitfords’ give us an invaluable insight into some of the most torrid yet socially and politically important events of the twentieth century.



‘Dealing with my correspondence’ was undoubtedly very important for most comfortably off or aristocratic women. ‘Kept women’ might be the wrong term –in past times this was the social expectation, of course. But I can’t help feeling, whilst at home during my long, long summer break from university, that I too am biding my time, waiting. My long term aims might be different, of course. But essentially my days follow a rough pattern. I read. I meet friends for lunch and conversation, or other social purposes. I visit family. I take trips to London, Stratford, Madrid and Greece. I write the occasional article, commenting on society. And I do, of course, spend a great deal of time ‘keeping up with my correspondence’.


Although the art of letter writing has somewhat been lost over the last half century or so –we can justifiably blame busy lifestyles and the internet for this– there are still snatches of it in society. I am talking, as you may have guessed, about Facebook.



Facebook is no doubt a very modern social phenomenon. But it essentially lets us do what our ancestors did, albeit a lot quicker. But young people who spend a lot of time ‘keeping up with their correspondence’ now –through the medium of Facebook– are generally looked at with scorn. They are wasting their time.


But apart from it being a very much less romanticised way to communicate when compared to letter writing, I do not see a whole lot of difference. By logging onto Facebook, I am simply using modern technology to do exactly as my peers have done for hundreds of years. The only difference, essentially, is that I am doing it in the twenty first century.


Looking over neatly hand written letters might offer a more sentimental and romantic notion than simply clicking a button and viewing a mutual ‘wall-to-wall’ conversation. But times have changed –and with change there often comes a loss of beauty. It is not something that we can fight, I don’t think –it is something, simply, that is. And it might be a shame –but we shouldn’t blame anyone for this, especially those who are simply trying to keep up to date with their acquaintances, and doing it in the easiest way they know how.

5th July 2010 - Tea or dinner… when language gets in the way of life.

I have just spent three minutes staring at my computer screen, trying to decide on the correct way to phrase a suggestion that, next week, I meet with an old friend for food. Food, in the evening.



I have been wondering whether to change the word ‘tea’ in the message to ‘dinner’, or to avoid the issue entirely by just calling it what it is –‘food’. Clearly, neither is correct. To write ‘dinner’ in a message to a fellow Huddersfield friend would probably instigate raised eyebrows; it is almost a cardinal sin.


But saying ‘tea’ to anyone other than family, after two years in an environment that has been more than peppered by southern influence, feels just as alien.


I am a northerner. I am undeniably proud of this, and I never imagined that it could be seen as a problem, especially when I started at Lancaster University, an institution that is much further north than my home in Huddersfield. Starting at Lancaster, I didn’t expect to have my language repeatedly mocked and ‘corrected’ by linguistically arrogant southerners.


I should have been forewarned. Almost as soon as I reached my six-bedroomed on campus flat in October 2008, I found that there seemed to be a theme emerging. My flatmates were from Essex, Northampton, Redditch and Plymouth. And Norway. But essentially, I was the token funny voiced resident.


Immediately I found myself watching my language. If I didn’t, a chorus of ‘Lucy, say ‘nowt’! Say ‘owt’!’ would ensue. It is very, very rare that I ever say ‘nowt’, or ‘owt’, but occasionally my northern dialect does kick in –‘tea’, ‘mate’, ‘nah’. The Southerners found it hilarious. It is so superficial, I could scream.


One particular flatmate appeared to believe that the north was simply one town. One memorable quotes was, ‘Do you say ‘book’ like ‘buwk’? My mum used to say ‘buwk’, because she’s from the north. She doesn’t anymore.’


It turns out that this mother was originally from Durham, a hundred miles from Huddersfield. It isn’t that close.


But I digress. Back to my Facebook message. My Huddersfield friend Danielle does not care about the sensitive intricacies of the English dialect. She would not notice anything strange about my message if I wrote ‘tea’, but if put ‘dinner’ the aforementioned surprise would be almost guaranteed. And this is on Facebook, where most people pay so little attention to their language choices that quite often their messages/ comments/ status updates are almost illegible.


I could suggest, if I was in a particularly pseudo-intellectual frame of mind, that it isn’t just about dialect, it is about roots, and more than anything identity.


I feel pretentious and try hard saying ‘dinner’, simply due to the fact that I am not southern and have no desire to be. So to my northern friends and my family, I’m sticking with ‘tea’. To everyone else, it’ll quite simply have to be ‘food’. I can’t be bothered with the politics.