24th October 2008
Alternatives to listening in lectures, as observed of late….
- having a note conversation on the, or rather a, Christian perspective on masturbation
- playing 4×4x4 three-dimensional noughts and crosses
Who said Maths was boring, eh?
28th September 2008
“And everyone is blonde, and everyone is beautiful…”
This is the line that always jumps out at me from the Beautiful South song. It pretty neatly sums up how I feel at Durham at times. I walk into a lecture room or the library or wherever, and find myself looking about me and wondering, ‘…but where are the fat people? Where are the ugly people?’. And for all the confidence that I have built up over the last two years, I am taken straight back to the me of school. The tall, chunky, geeky, awkward person who sits on the edge of the group, trying to feel included but somehow always saying the wrong thing (or in extreme cases of stress losing grip on the English language altogether). The boffin, one of the Maths kids. The only person not to be wearing jeans on ‘Jeans for Genes’ day. Wasn’t my fault I didn’t own any.
I’ve got better, don’t get me wrong, and after the initial heavy culture-shock
September 2008 sometime
I have a very love-hate relationship with driving.
Some of the time, I can’t stand it. I don’t like the backache, I don’t like the fact that I am essentially too tall for the car I drive*, I feel guilty that I am taking up more space on the road and churning out more gases into the atmosphere. I also get stressed pretty easily, which is a general statement but it does apply on the road, and that’s when the standard of my driving plummets and it starts to get dangerous. I’ve not yet found a common cause. Certain passengers make me anxious (mentioning no names :-P) but it’s not because they’re bad passengers or side-seat drivers; idiots at roundabouts worry me, mainly because I know the potential for problems (and have a recent hefty mark of the back of the car to prove it); I dread driving on small country lanes because I have had very little experience of their higher speed limits and reduced visibility.
But then there are times, like last night when I drove the four miles to school to collect my sister, that I love being in a car. The independence it gives, yes, but it’s more than that. The weight of the steering**, the smooth hum of the engine, the puzzle-like quality of navigating a busy junction – and the capsule quality that being in a car has. On a night like last night, it was the beauty of the rhythm of driving that won over any stupid road setups or speeding motorbikes. I was driving well, on roads that I knew, and stress was as far from my mind
Maybe part of it is the novelty of enjoying a car. My parents really do dislike driving, so we tend to go places on public transport if at all possible. In two years of being at university, I have been to Durham in a car twice, back once – a pain from a luggage point of view, but fine otherwise. Having the hub of Network Rail as your local big station does help!
And yet I miss driving when it’s not there.
*not ‘my car’, ‘the car I drive’. This is regularly pointed out to me by my parents, but then they do pay for my insurance so I can’t really complain!
**Power steering is for wimps! Seriously, I keep hoping that I’m going to get toned arms, it’s that unresponsive…
Callan’s visit to his ‘Drafts’ folder a while back got me looking at mine. I may* publish some of the bits in the coming few weeks, for your enjoyment, perusal, boredom, official records, hair loss, and any other symptoms that you may experience as a result of taking this medicine.
And yes, I know several of them probably don’t make any sense whatsoever!
*that is to say, will
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