Bleak House

Yesterday I walked in the valley in the shadow of death. I was afraid.

I came home to escape from the hell-hole my life had become in the last week, and was confronted with a more terrifying reality. What happens, when a part of your framework can no longer stand? The rest tumbles in is what.

I have spent the last two days in and out of a hospital, watching somebody I love more than myself fight his way back from the edge. To see someone so big, and immortal, looking so very small and vulnerable makes everything else meaningless. This is the farce of the hospital. The wards in visiting time are full of people, hiding their pain from their loved ones, to save them pain. The loved ones hide their terror, to help the patient. In the corridors, behind closed curtains, both parties can silently break. The empty sobs of an old man, holding on for his young. The silent tears of a son, wiped away for a brave face to hide the truth which is death. Because there, the only constant companion is death, whether you can escape it, or welcome it as an escape, it is there. And all we can do is push it away for those few minutes, and live that lie.

Even the tiny light of the maternity ward, cannot illuminate the darkness of the crying football team outside intensive care. Through those hospital doors, the immortal, the youthful and the brave, become so many dearly loved pieces in a cruel game of give and take.

Dear God, whatever you are. Please give him back to us.

Amen

Small Beauties and Secret Places

Life, for the most part, goes by in shades of grey. Days roll together, not happy or sad, just happening as the things we have to do fill up the hours. But within all this averageness, there lie those things which can make life beautiful. Some of them are planned, holidays, birthdays, the fruition of long laid plans, all of these are wonderful in their place, but nothing compares to the magical moment in which you experience a small beauty.

Dozing off in the sunshine in the library and waking to a sunset, catching leaves as they blow off the trees in the garden, sitting at the piano and picking out a tune. It is these moments that make me so profoundly grateful for the life I am lucky enough to lead.

But when the shine fades, and I'm left without direction, I can run to my secret places. The secret places are not necessarily private, perhaps they even hold little beauty to other people, but they are the places I love. A windy hillside, a bookshop, the end of a garden, the top of the world, or just a bench hidden in the middle of a busy world where I can sit and think, and catch a leaf from the liquid amber above me. And then looking at the leaf burning red in my hand, I remember the beauty in the world, and I can get up, and move on.
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The Way We Write

Yesterday somebody asked me why I began writing this blog, and I had to think about it. I am not a person who writes with agenda, I do not aspire to be a great writer, I have no expectation that my words will change the course of history, or if they will even make sense to those who stumble upon them. And yet I write.

Some days I write for self discovery, to force me to be cogent in my thoughts. The process of typing arranges whispers of ideas in to a web and holds them for me to better understand. But this is not the reason.

Some days I write for the beauty of words. The structure of a sentence, for the glory of expression. It is on days such as these that I am staggered that there are so many to whom this simple means of expression is denied, and the idea that 200 years ago, I would have been one of them fills me with a sense of how blessed I have been. Worthy though this is, it is still not the reason.

On rare occasions, I write for somebody else. A message in a bottle, with little chance of reaching its intended subject, and a slighter yet chance of being understood, so cryptically do I package it for my own protection. The thought that they may read it, understand it, understand me, is a motivation and a fear. But it is not the reason.

The reason is this. I cannot let my life pass undocumented. One of over 6 billion tiny pieces in an enormous game of win and lose, I am essentially unimportant. I have no idea at what point my life may be ended, but should it be tomorrow, I know I will have lived without having left behind anything which will transcend the memories of those who have known me. This is true of most people who have lived and died on this earth. But I cannot accept this as a certainty. In writing myself, I am putting a little of my life in to the ether, where should I disappear, it will remain. It is likely that that is where this simple memoir of a simple girl will remain, but should chance favour me with just one person reading this in my absence, then for that moment, I will live again, and I will be remembered.

Flesh is transient, but words, especially virtual, indelible and quietly desperate words will linger on. Unnoticed perhaps, but with the hope of one day being uttered again. And this, this sad little truth, is why I write.

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The Student Myth

When two years ago, I submitted my UCAS application, I felt as if I'd just taken an enormous step towards the sort of life I want for myself. It didn't matter that my family had no clout, no money and no university tradition, I was officially making something of my life. Grades pending, interviews looming, what the heck, I was in the system, headed up.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, I've discovered a lot of pretty demoralising truths that they don't list as side effects of attempting to graduate

1) You are now, officially, bottom of the heap. It makes no difference if you are responsible, intelligent or morally upright, the rest of the world will treat you like a common vandal. Some of the perks will include filthy looks from the elderly, the assumption that you are constantly drunk, promiscuous AND lazy and companies attempting to rip you off because you are a "high risk" human. I could go on but I'd only get shouty and you really don't need to read that.

2) You don't actually have any rights. From the get go the university, your landlord and the government have you the your proverbial balls. They will tell you they care, run for the students, by the students is the favourite tagline (obviously not from the government). But it remains that if any one of those organizations changes its rules, guidelines or even the law, you just have to deal with it. I mean the fact that when you started in 2009 you'd leave with a just about repayable 20k of debt, which for an English graduate is pretty daunting, by 2012, the university could be allowed to charge you whatever it wants. And you can either drop out, and just casually pay back the three years you've already undertaken outside of the governments repayment scheme, or you can take the hike, and leave uni with 20,000 (+undisclosed amount £££) of debt you have no certainty of ever being able to pay off.

3) No one actually cares what grades you get. Sorry, but the completely sterile set up of the lecture hall, is not tempered by the vaguely more human structure of seminars and tutorials. Lecturers may be smart, interesting and driven, but interested they are not. Perhaps once in a while some exceptional young thing comes along to be lauded, branded as a genius and noticed by all. But for the rest of us, sitting week after week in the same room, we will be lucky if the lecturer ever learns our name, let alone what we aspire to and where our strength lies. The homogenisation process is instantaneous and almost inescapable.

Having said all of this, my time as a student has been incredibly blessed, but by the people I have met, not, as I had naively believed by my entrance in to an institution of higher education and intellectual betterment. In eighteen months I will be entering the world of uncertainty, unemployment, tax and ladder climbing, with a 20 grand well in my pocket, a piece of paper saying that I'm mildly intelligent to fight hordes of similarly poverty ridden, former social outcasts for access to one of the tiny pool of graduate careers. If all this should fail, the light I carry with me, is that at least I'll have plenty of friendly floors to sleep on when I finally get out of debtors jail.

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Ambition is a dangerous game.

Living in a house-share for the first time has had a fairly massive impact on my life. For the first time I'm truly exposed to the frolics and foibles of other people, without the option of just saying "jog on" and letting it go. While for the most part who does and doesn't leave pills on the table, and who never turns on the extractor fan is fairly mundane, there are some things which have led me to re-examine my own standing in life.
So we have P. She is a pretty, athletic, intelligent, 19 year old girl. Basically the average student, right?
Wrong.
She is also an obsessive CV booster. For P, to do the work to guarantee her an Honours degree is not enough, she joins enterprise schemes, sports teams, volunteers, dances, attends meetings, rallies, works a counselling hotline for rape victims.... you get the idea. Sleep and nourishment fit round the edges.

Now personally, I have always considered myself a pretty well rounded human, I have interests, I'm competitive, I'd even call myself ambitious. But when I look at myself next to P, I'm a regular layabout.

At what point does ambition become all consuming? Ambition, for ambition's sake seems so meaningless. I want to be successful in order that I can afford a good lifestyle, this in turn will make me happy. But if my quest for success costs me happiness along the way, and all I can do is moan about having two meetings at 8 o'clock, does the means justify the end? Seems to me this is how we end up with 28 year old burned out, divorced executives, who sold out their youth for their future, only to get to the top and realised that they've dropped what they needed on the way.

I need to figure out how ruthless/self-serving I can afford to be, and without hindsight, it's a pretty tough call.
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Male Influence

Living in what is essentially a sorority, it is increasingly easy to gauge the effect which various male cast members have on my life.

Today, there were three players who influenced the passage of the day, and their after-effect is something I need to learn to apply to the next day, for self preservation.

Number One is someone who a month ago I would have disposed of, obnoxious, cocky and generally not my cup of tea, a mellowing process has rendered him someone I enjoy having around. Not impacting on my mood, but allowing the upward curve of the morning.

Number 2 is an enigma. No, that's too generous. Number two doesn't really care. By no means unpleasant, just disinterested. This is the one I waited to meet, only to feel disappointment at the man standing in front of me. And while I expect nothing, and feel animosity towards any future dealings with him, a little part of me keeps reaching out, and I need to use my head to beat it back.

Number 3 never changes. He is a constant, and where the others demand nothing, he demands everything. While I would give it all for his happiness, I need to serve my own for the time being. And the separateness which is hurting him, and hurting me, is allowing me to grow. This is the most bitter-sweet, and the most important of all.

Because I have realised, that no one can make you truly happy, if the absence of that same action would not break your heart.

"When you love someone, you open yourself up to suffering. That's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart, maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks. The thought of losing so much control over personal happiness is unbearable. That's the burden. Like wings, they have weight, we feel that weight on our backs, but they are a burden that lifts us. Burdens which allow us to fly"

Radio 3

This morning my house-mates and I had a debate about Classical Music. To me, it is the only soundtrack to my early mornings. I can't stand the banal misogyny of Chris Moyles, and I would far rather wake up to a string concerto than a pounding bass line.

However, their insistence that it was depressing got me thinking. Why is it that I find it so satisfying, and I came to two conclusions. Firstly that I am my own grandmother. Classical music with breakfast, tea leaves brewed in a pot, baking skills and an affinity for pruning things at the wrong time of year. I love this. Don't get me wrong, I love my laptop and blackberry also, but nothing makes me feel as safe and as loved as realising how much I have in common with one of those I love most in this world.

And the second is that I derive a strange pleasure from melancholy. I have a whole ipod playlist entitled rhapsody which is bloated with pieces in a minor key, which I adore. I listen, and I get that thing there you feel kind of like your heart is actually expanding. Sometimes I cry, but you know what, it makes me happy. The expression of the spectrum of human emotions as told by music isn't all lust and love, and heartbreak as Radio One would have us believe, but encompasses the history of human hope, tragedy and remembrance. And for me, the sadness of any given piece gives me such great faith in the ability of humans to deal with life, that Barber's Adagio for Strings is a source of comfort to me, rather than the most tragic piece of music ever written.

I have dance and my grandparents to thank for forcing a know-it-all western kid to open her ears, and then her heart, to such a gift as this "depressing"/"boring" music
has given me.

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