getting fresh

I spent the weekend in Southampton visiting my younger sister. She is in her first year at university and still in the Hardcore Fresher phase where every night is full of drinks with questionable names (Jesticle, anyone?) and chicken burgers from a van owned by a man named Ali. I drank one of those innuendo laden cocktails last night and regretted it when I woke up with a head full of gnomes with gongs at 7am. Clearly my body clock does not allow for Jesticle abuse and still believes I should get out of bed (or, you know, off the floor) at Bright and Early AM.

Southampton is fun. Getting home was not. Stuck at a sorry excuse for a train station because the delay to the first part of my journey meant I missed my collection I texted nearly everyone I knew with much RAGE about the fucking trains. My experiences in relatively economically weak Eastern Europe this summer with trains that Run! And! Are On Time! make me particularly bitter about the stupid fucking government and their stupid fucking trains.

But! I had an awesome time. Like, totally groovy, which is my sister's new phrase du jour. I didn't embarrass myself particularly. I didn't throw myself at men who are too young for me, and I only had to use the toilet in that awful, awful bar once.

I am exhausted now because I am a sad old fart and so, to bed.

wherein I am frustrated

I have a presentation due on Thursday, about a Roman villa no one cares about unless you are daft enough to read Archaeology at university. I am tired and fed up of writing notes on the excavation reports, scanning 20 colour plates and trying to collate it all into a coherent 10 minute piece that not even my supposedly academically inclined classmates will care about. It isn't even assessed, doesn't count for a point of credit, and yet it has enveloped my life these past few weeks.

University work at the moment, it makes me want to cry, like I used to over my Maths homework, balled into frustrated sobs. I am tired. I hardly see my friends. My best girlfriend lives two minutes from my door, and yet I have not seen her in a week. I wasted two hours today in a talk that was meant to give me some direction in my future career; all it did was convince me that most journalists only like to talk about themselves and that the inflated sense of ego they bear is totally undeserved given their presentation skills. If I wanted to listen to the supposed achievements of an overbearing overweight twit I could watch our illustrious PM splutter his socialism on the 10 o'clock news.

Undergrads are notorious for thinking they Know It All and of course I am right there, cooing away in my neat little pigeonhole, but I truly find it depressing that four successful professionals can damn their life's work by all coming across as rambling and incoherent, having previously stressed that the entire point of journalism is to produce news that is relevant and succinct.

Just, frustrated.

oh,

Arse.

I would like to say I haven't been writing because my life has become fabulously tumultuous with love affairs and scandal. Six months ago you would have been bang on the money, and with a heady emphasis on the bang, but these days the only shagging I participate in is last night's overtly graphic dream about someone wonderfully inappropriate.

Instead, I have been going to bed before my housemates stumble in blearily from the pub and getting up in time to hear (nearly) all of Chris Moyles' show. I work out, an hour a day. I eat good things, in that sensible low-fat high-fibre proper diet fashion, I drink hardly anything and I have lost a stone in a matter of weeks. It is all terribly grown-up but it is also occasionally Really Fucking Boring.

Thing is, I just don't care. I like not being hungover. I like my girlfriends' jaws hitting the floor when I stepped off the train this weekend looking delicious (if I do say so myself), I like cooking and going to aerobics and enjoying the comparative stillness of an early morning city street.

I think, perhaps, I am about ready to move on from being a student. And I didn't ever think that would happen.

It is Itchy Feet syndrome, but on a more life-changing level than my usual escapes from England.