The Anglo-Saxon Diet

[theanglosaxondiet]

A conversation with my dog

NICK

I’m sorry about all this.

NICK

I really thought we had a bit more time. I was making plans for Christmas. I was going to make fried chicken from Morley’s a semi-regular treat (semi-regular, I said; don’t get too excited). I was going to wrap you in tinsel and you were going to hate it. I wanted to feed you sausages, straight from the barbecue next summer. I wanted you to play with Jess and glare disapprovingly at Alba when they get back from New Zealand. I’m sorry that none of that worked out.

NICK

I’m glad we got it over with quickly. You had been my podgy little haggis for so long, I never suspected it’d be the liver what did it. On Wednesday you were yourself, and now we’re here. You weren’t built to stagger on for years – more Ferrari than Land Rover, or so I tell myself. A good time, not a long time. I hope you had the former.

NICK

Dogs are people too, that seems clear to me. In fact, most people would’ve imposed themselves less on my house than you did. All those guilty little wees, incessant enquiries into the recycling, minute-long disappearances into other rooms on unspecified “dog business”. All the times I opened the door to find you asleep on the job of guarding outside my bedroom. All the times you couldn’t wait for breakfast to hit the bowl before you stuffed your little face in. You are more comprehensible to me than anyone else I’ve ever met.

NICK

But I also know that getting through the day, for you, was to be mysteriously muddled by an anxiety that you could neither explain nor articulate. I wish you had been more chilled out. I wish you had felt more secure in the knowledge of our approval as the years went by. I wish you had taken after your brother and sister and been willing to lie down, just for a bit. But you were my Anxious Warrior. At the end, the very end, you were so calm; it was like another dog. Finally, you were a picture of peace and serenity – the dog I sometimes dreamed you’d become – but I knew that life wasn’t for you. The life of curling up in the warmth, staying in one room for more than ten minutes, snoozing in bed with us – that’s a great life, but it was never your life.

NICK

In almost fifteen years of talking to you, you’ve never said a word back to me. You’ve panted and grunted and licked and, increasingly of late, farted, but you’ve never said a word. I thought that, as a Belgian by breed, you were waiting for me to break out in French or, perhaps, Flemish, but I think you would’ve learned English from my incessant cooing. It seems impossible that you never said a word to me when we spoke so much. I’m sorry if our conversations flowed only in one direction; I promise that I agonised about your happiness too.

NICK

But in all the thousands of hours I’ve spend playing conversational ping pong with inscrutable humans, I’ve seldom got as much back from them as I have from your gormless loyalty. I think we had a reciprocal and credulous devotion. I talked to you, not because I expected you to help avec my développement personnel, but because we were both people staggering through life with mismatched tools. And even though, at the very end, I couldn’t read anything in your eyes, I hope I did the right thing. I think we understand each other.

NICK

Who will I talk to now? I’m still talking to you, but I guess that will stop. Last night, I saw my beige hot water bottle lying on the floor and screamed because I momentarily thought it was you. Over time, I suppose, I’ll stop expecting to see you lurking behind me. I’ll stop expecting to see you on your Sisyphan journeys up and down the stairs. I’ll stop expecting you to wind me up with over-excited yelping when I get home from work. And yes, in time, I’ll stop talking to you.

NICK

So I’m sorry that this happened now and sorry that you won’t be at home with me tomorrow, or any of the days that are obligated to follow. I hope the fourteen years and eight months we spent together were happy times. It’s so deeply unfair that I get so much more time than you; I hope that each day you spent pottering around the garden felt like an eternity. And an eternity is what’s left, without my friend.

[theanglosaxondiet]

Life, at the end of 2016

I’ve made so many abortive attempts to resume writing this blog, but they’ve all ended up in the Tumblr trashcan. Where once there was a sense of purpose – albeit of a doomed, listless variety – now there is something altogether different. And it seems odd to try and write a ‘student blog’ when I am no longer, in the strictest sense of the word, a ‘student’.

Still, I’m going to give it a go. Here’s a quick rundown of where I am in November 2016:

I’m not a student. I was a student at Oxford – as you might remember – and then I ceased to be. But, discovering the world to not be quite as accommodating as I’d hoped, I then became a student again – at KCL – for a year. And then, once again, I became not-a-student.

Now I work at a magazine (like Carrie from Sex and the City right?!). I am what you might call a broadcast journalist, or a broadcast producer, something like that. I make podcasts and videos in an office that looks out over one of London’s Royal Parks, a genuinely spectacular setting to a fairly banal process of nob-twiddling. 

I sort of fell into this, in the way that a lot of middle class white guys seem to. After I finished my Masters I was resolved to finding a good job – something I’d failed to do in the year immediately after I left university (the first time round; Christ, it’s confusing). I quit my job at the book shop where I’d been working, not because I didn’t enjoy the work, but because I felt like I wanted to try something different. Try anything, I said to myself. 

That’s not a very Nick mantra, but I was heading into summer 2016 with the intention of finding a job in a sector I hadn’t even imagined. Who knew I’d be a great medical administrator? Who thought I could do PR for TfL? Who saw me as a Private in the 4th Rifles? Try anything.

But, in the end, I didn’t really try anything, because I fell into a job more quickly and more easily than I had ever hoped or imagined. And that’s where I am now, and where we’ll take off from. Any questions? 

[theanglosaxondiet]

Hi. Just wanted to say, as an English student going into year 3 at Cambridge, that I really enjoy reading your work on here! It's oddly reassuring to see a lot of my own thought processes mapped out with variations in your writing. Yeah. Nice. Cool.

Just to let you know, my thought processes are 100% unique so you are almost certainly guilty of intellectual property theft.

[theanglosaxondiet]

“...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...”

Here I am, back where it all began.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop, just like I have done forever. I’m a student again, just like I was before. I’ve got a copy of Henry James’ The Aspern Papers in my hand and, for the hundredth time, I’m distracted myself from doing the Victorian reading that I ought to be focused on.

I’ve been a post-graduate student for about three weeks. The first week was just inductions and refreshers, a re-baptism in the same mucky font as my undergraduate degree. And then, after that, ‘teaching’ commenced in earnest. But where, in my undergraduate degree, teaching felt like an almost custodial attempt to keep me on the straight and narrow, here the teaching is conducted in more of an absent daze. There’s reading, there are lectures, there are even seminars (a wholly novel experience for me), but I could glide through noiselessly if I so desired. I’m a name, occasionally ticked off on a sheet, and little more.

But obviously that would be a supreme waste of time and money. So I’m trying to avoid gliding through, which means that, in addition to grinding through Victorian texts that I thought I’d put behind me three years ago, I’m facing up to my nemesis THEORY.

My problem with theory is, as ever, my lack of credulity. I just watched a film in which philosophy is referred to as ‘verbal masturbation’ and it’s hard to see literary theory (or just theory in general, as it so often seems to be) outside of that same self-satisfied framework. It’s so circumlocutory that it becomes unbearable to the well-organised mind, but if you try and pick apart the verbosity, you get shot down. ‘Complex ideas can’t be expressed in simple terms,’ they always say. Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps simplicity should be sought in both explanation and idea. I don’t know. I’ll get back to you on that one.

My tutor for one module is everything I want to be and more. He has an amazing beard that you could hide KitKats in, and he wears these baggy, shapeless knit jerseys over plait shirts. On top of all that, he speaks so softly and seems to be completely onboard with the shit coming out of his mouth, something I am deeply envious of. Despite my worshipful stance, he does have a serious drawback: in attempting to explain anything in simple terms, he inevitably makes it even more complicated than it was at first. It’s not a condition I’ve encountered before, but there’s something stunningly imperfect about it. It’s like watching a dog chasing its tail (albeit a very smart dog and a very difficult to catch tail). The faster it goes, the closer its jaws get, yet, at the same time, the quicker the movements, the more it attacks its own inertia, the dizzier it gets, the harder it is to snatch the tail.

Which, I have to confess, is an equally over-complicated way of saying that, at times, I can’t quite follow what he’s saying.

[theanglosaxondiet]

Ok, first things first, I’ll make a confession: I’ve gone back to university.

I’m doing an MA in modern(ish) literature at KCL (in London) whilst continuing to work at a bookshop and generally agonise over the futility of modern life. I’m sure I’ll be writing to tell y’all more about the experience in due course.

In the meantime, here is the fourth episode of my web-series The Magic Circle. Not a huge number of people are watching it, but it’s fun to make and, you know, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? (A: Practice)

I’d be grateful if you’d watch it. I’d be more grateful if you watched it and gave it a thumbs up or positive comment on YouTube. I’d be more grateful still if you shared it on Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter. I’d be gratefullest if you offered me £10,000 to make a whole bunch more episodes. But I will settle for simple gratitude if necessary.

[theanglosaxondiet]

Results Day and How To Be Happy

Happy A-Level results day, or, for me, happy 5-year anniversary of A-Level results day...

I’m aware that those people who still read this blog (I am led to believe that Tumblr sort of forces it under your eyes) do so primarily because they are interested in what university life is/was like, at Oxford or elsewhere. And a large proportion of that readership will be going into school today to harvest the fruits of a few hours’ (or a few years, depending on your diligence) labour.

When I received my results five years ago, I don’t remember any particularly grand feelings. I hadn’t got the grades to match my Oxford offer, so there wasn’t any relief. But, at the same time, I hadn’t messed it up all too badly – I was close and I knew that I still had a chance. A couple of fairly frantic phone calls to the admissions office later, the ship had been righted. Even then, I don’t think there was any outpouring of emotion: I was looking ahead to the coming year – a long 12 months out of education where I intended to catch up with my age group, being only 17 at the time – and seeing nothing more than empty weeks on my own.

I didn’t raise a glass of champagne on results day. I just felt frustrated to be trapped in that hinterland between outright success and outright failure, a middle ground so blurry that it inevitably comes with a dose of seasickness. Even after I had successfully negotiated the terms of my arrival in Oxford, I was unsure how to proceed. From that results day back in 2010, right up to the moment we pulled into Pembroke Square the next September, I was umming and ahhing about what I really wanted, what I really needed. Hundreds and hundreds of times over those months I imagined a future for myself that didn’t involve university. Those futures were always different – I had no clear goals or ambitions – but they were seductively immediate. The alternative, as I saw it, was to spend another 3 years tossing, turning, and drifting further into the uncertain waters of not knowing what you want from life.

If you can feel relief on results day, do so. That’s definitely the best way to feel. Maybe you’re delighted at the end of formal education. Maybe you’re chuffed to have met your offer. Maybe you’re ecstatic because you smashed it and got 15 A*s and have won a scholarship to study Divine Omnipotence at Harvard. These are all really great, really positive emotions to be feeling.

And if you feel disappointed by your results, that’s also fine. You know where you are, even if it’s not where you want to be. If you miss your offer, you miss your offer. Nobody’s born to go to a certain university and the world will always make space and reform according to the movement of the tides. If you got a B in English and you wanted an A, never mind. You’re still gonna write the next Jane Eyre because, let’s face it, it’s not gonna be written by the AQA examiners.

And if, like I was, you’re stuck in the space between cheering and crying, don’t stress about it. The worst thing you can do is to second or third or fourth or fifth guess yourself. I spent a year (maybe longer, if the opening entries of this blog are to be believed) thinking that I wasn’t cut out for being at university, and I was wrong about that. But if I’d decided, on that results day in 2010, to forsake further education and go out and pursue my dream of fronting an indie rock band, that would’ve be fine too. It would, at least, have been definitive. The problem with visualising all these futures for yourself is that you get trapped in a constant cycle of analysis and comparison, and you’ll only end up disappointed that, in the end, you only get one future. That’s the sad lot of the human mortal.

So enjoy results day – it’s the last time that something will really be riding on your exam performance, because your university degree will likely be a foregone conclusion. Enjoy being young and feeling sick to the pit of your stomach. Enjoy congratulating your friends whilst secretly resenting them. Enjoy getting ready to leave home next month. Enjoy the weeks of nervous anticipation, preparation and rehearsal for a few years of faking it. And then enjoy turning up and doing whatever it is you’ve gotta do.

In semiotics, people talk of signs, made of two parts. The lily is the signifier and death is the signified. It’s a simple, subliminal communication between a thing and our understanding of that thing. Those letters on the results sheet, the words spoken by your teacher, are the signifier. They signify a million different possibilities, so long as you can deconstruct the message. Good art undermines and inverts our understanding of signs, so that a set of bad grades don’t equal a bad life, and a set of good grades don’t equal a good life. Remember that the sign always has two parts, and you can choose what is signified.

And after you’ve done that bit of Semiotics for Dummies, have a beer and watch Homes Under The Hammer. You’ve earned it.   

[theanglosaxondiet]

I play this game, Amazing Thief, when I’m on the toilet. It’s an iPhone game and I’m not sure whether it’s particularly successful or not. Certainly it’s not in the Angry or Flappy Bird league, but I think it has its devotees, and I’m one of them.

Around a year ago, I was sat on a toilet in Holloway at work, playing Amazing Thief. My record at that time was something like 20 or 25 (it’s very difficult for me to explain the metric of success in the game, but suffice it to say that’s a decent enough score). Anyhow, I was sat on the loo and I beat my record. But I didn’t just beat it – I smashed it. I smashed it so badly, into such infinitesimally small pieces, that I realised I hadn’t just set a ‘new record’, I had achieved everything I could achieve. My best score went, in one beautiful minute, from 20 to 41.

And 41 is where is stood for a year. Despite knowing I could never beat the perfection of what I accomplished on that North London bog, I persevered, mercilessly killing time with my Amazing Thief friend. For a year, I played pretty much every day and, though I came close, I never beat that immortal 41. 38, 38, 39, 38, 40... the occasional brilliant scores came and went, but I could never beat myself at my own game.

I’m sure you’ve already seen the twist coming, but last night, once again on the toilet, I beat my score. Not just beat it – smashed it. Usually, I get into the upper-30s and I start to panic. Can I beat that score? What does it mean for my life’s accomplishments if I do beat it? Do I want to beat it? If I beat it now, can I ever beat it again?

But, last night, I didn’t panic. My heart hammered in my chest as I slipped over 40. 40, 41, 42... once I got to 42, I knew I was there. The ‘Best Score’, displayed on the title page, would inevitably change. So, at that point, I relaxed into the game and cruised onwards, passing hurdle after hurdle until I finally succumbed at 56. Game over, new record.

After that, I struggled to get back to sleep. Even though it’s an iPhone game that requires nothing more than a couple of thumbs and some time to commit to your efforts, I had felt that momentary exhilaration of accomplishment, made all the sweeter by the memory of a year earlier, when I had set that record. Of course, there was no real accomplishment, it couldn’t have meant any less. But the incidental fact of my success meant something to me, as I sat there on the loo at 2am. It means something to me to know, to finally have proof, that my unbeatable score was perfectly beatable. My heart was pounding because I was excited – at 2am, I didn’t realise that the whole experience was another fucking metaphor – and because I’d redacted and subverted the uncodified history of my own potential. Onwards, to the future, where one day 56 will be but a distant memory...

Also, I am on holiday in Tuscany and should not be playing on my iPhone. 

[theanglosaxondiet]

I love reading your blog. :)

I love re-reading it.

It’s one of my favourite works of fiction.

[theanglosaxondiet]

Do I look older? I think I’m still looking youthful and angelic (the white tee plus white coffee shop wall might help), though I now shave a couple of times a week, which makes me feel very grown-up...

I’m in London, cos that’s where I live, in a coffee shop called The Roasting. It’s cute. I made a blink-and-you-missed-me appearance in Oxford a couple of weeks ago, nominally to visit finalist friends who were, finally, decamping from the Dreaming Spires. Of course, knowing me, the visit basically turned into an unrelenting series of nostalgic despairs for what could’ve been, what might’ve been, and, finally, what was...

A year on from leaving Oxford, I work in a bookshop and write occasional articles for people who are willing to pay me a bit of money. It’s ok – I have a degree (of independence) and can still take the occasional daytime coffee, but it’s not the rocket-ship progress that the national media would have you believe awaits Oxbridge graduates. I assumed I’d have a position in the Cabinet by now.

I can’t help but offer 2015′s graduating class the unbearably self-indulgent advice that you shouldn’t expect anything of the world, once you leave university. Sure, if you want to become a banker, a management consultant or a lawyer, then you can expect a fair bit (about £40,000 a year, if my enquiries are to be believed), but if, like me, you’re reluctant to completely sign over the rights to your soul age 22, you shouldn’t expect much. You’ll apply for things and be rejected for most of them. Gradually, you’ll start applying for less and less, until the point where you’re applying for things that don’t require a degree or any sort of expertise, which will inevitably make you wonder whether it was all worth it.

All of this means that I spend a lot of time thinking about turning the clock back. ‘Regression’ is a dirty word in the English language, cos it’s almost always intended to be a bad thing, but I wish that I could regress. Oh, how I look back upon those carefree student days, where nothing mattered and every week was a new adventure... Obviously, my prescription spectacles are incredibly rose-tinted, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with over-valuing the past. 

The reason to go to university is because it’s better than not going to university. If I go back to university next year (which I might, watch this space) it’ll be because I am shamelessly trying to recapture the sense that Oxford gave me: that failure is impossible and that anything is just a short email away. Of course, returning to university would just be a way of delaying the reality that failure is very possible and that almost everything requires very long emails and/or psychometric testing, but maybe that’s the path that I was meant to follow.

Summer is coming. I can tell because my laptop trackpad is getting too hot and the cursor is jumping all over the screen. I hope that, by the end of summer, I have a firmer grasp of my direction, since regression is not actually a physical possibility. 

I will try for progression and if I only get halfway there, well, at least that will be progr.

[theanglosaxondiet]

So, here's the third episode of my web-series about an adult Harry Potter discussion group. It's taken a while to get it finished, but hopefully the end product has been worth the wait.

And, if not, well, it's your time, not mine.

[theanglosaxondiet]

I Didn't Listen To Myself

"Back home I would've been the chief of surgery. Or a cowboy..." – Michael Scott

Nobody listened to Cassandra, the fabled prophetess of the fall of Troy. In the annals of mythology, the guys who refused to listen to her and, instead, insulted and ostracised her, go down as assholes. But of course they're not really assholes, because Cassandra had been cursed to never be believed, so they had no self-determined option but to not believe her. The real asshole of the story is Apollo, who cursed her with her lack of credibility because she refused to have sex with him. As with many of the Greek myths, there are some serious consent issues...

Six months ago (or maybe it's seven months, the time is slipping away) I sat at my laptop somewhere (I think it was after I'd left Oxford, so presumably at home) and prophesied regret, nostalgia and all the complex emotions that impractical people carry around as baggage for their life. I reflected on three years of monotony by suggesting that they would be the best years of my life.

Of course, I didn't really believe myself. I talk a lot of shit, so it would be imprudent to do so. I wrote of that feeling of premature regret because I supposed it to be my sensation, not because it really was. And so, on this occasion, I played the role of both Cassandra and the laughing assholes.

Post-university life, thus far, has been a steady destabilisation of my feelings about the world. At 21, I am too old and too experienced to be reborn as some new person. I will forever carry my habits, good and bad, with me, and what change there will be will be slow, incremental and usually trivial. I may, one day, like the taste of fish pie. I may, one day, enjoy waking up before 8 AM. I may, one day, be able to read more than 35 pages of a book in one sitting. But, largely, I am cast in bronze, like a Rodin statue which is urging, begging to reform and reposition.

I am unemployed and, next week, I will be 22. 22 is halfway to 44 and a quarter of the way to 88, by which time, according to most statistics, I will be dead. Why am I unemployed? I am unemployed because: A) I do not know what I want to do or what I am doing, B) Those few things that I do want to do are solitary and unprofitable (not intended to be dirty), and C) No one even wants to give me a fucking interview.

Which isn't to say I've done nothing. I've indulged myself, here and there, with some writing and filming gigs. And if there's a Genius Grant somewhere for worrying about not doing things, I think I'd probably stand a fair shot at it. But I am, undoubtedly, in a rut where my days are played out like Alan Bennett monologues but without the intrigue or the talking. I wake, I bath, I read, I drink coffee, I watch The Big Bang Theory, I see my girlfriend, I cook, I eat, I sleep. And I live that day on repeat, filling the interludes with adhesive worries that stick my days together and tear me apart.

Right now I'm sitting at my computer, having spent the day watching football, reading and having a bath. I haven't put on trousers. I can see my junk. I am thinking about when Waitrose will close, I need to get food in. And I am dreaming absently of everything changing, regressing or progressing on a single deus ex machina moment.

My blog was always intended to be a diary for myself. But, like most committed bloggers, I am incapable of bothering to write if I don't think there will ever be an audience. Some people can scratch and doodle away in endless Moleskines, just to satisfy their own need to confess to themselves or some unspoken deity. I am not one of those people. I write my boring blog because I hope that people will read my boring blog. And I do realise it's boring, but I have a flicker of hope that people don't 'hate-read' it in the way that I read other people's boring blogs. We're all boring; it is part of the human condition to be boring.

I started writing this to compensate for my lack of success, to stake a flag into some small corner of the internet. I don't know where or when I'll write again, but, perhaps, in the continued absence of the success that I find myself inexplicably craving, I will re-colonise my old internet inglenook.

[theanglosaxondiet]

Episode 2 of my web-comedy about an adult Harry Potter discussion group is now online. I'm enjoying the fact that people seem to be enjoying it, so please do keep enjoying it!

[theanglosaxondiet]

So, in lieu of a ‘day job’, I created this Harry Potter web-series. That's what everyone does, right?

It’s a comedy about a group of adult fans of the books, who gather in order to fiercely debate the burning issues of the fandom. It’s vaguely along the lines of The Office or The IT Crowd, but with a lot of nerdy Harry Potter chat thrown in for good measure.

This is the first episode, so I hope you enjoy and tune it for the next couple (which will be release in the next month).

'The Magic Circle' Facebook!

'The Magic Circle' Twitter!

[theanglosaxondiet]

Scottish Independence Referendum Drinking Game

Tonight’s the night of the Scottish Independence Referendum. As with any major broadcast event, it’s only fitting that people are prepared to participate in a drinking game to ease the passage of the coverage. So here is the quintessential Scottish Referendum Drinking Game (even though there are, I’m sure, hundreds of others available on the internet):

1) Swig of beer every time we see a fluttering Union Jack.

1b) Swig of Scotch for every fluttering Saltire.

2) A finger of Scotch any time someone shouts ‘Fuck her right in the pussy’ on live television.

3) If Charles Kennedy is speaking, you must be drinking.

4) Mouthful of haggis if you can’t understand a Scottish accent.

5) Shotgun a tinny of Irn-Bru if the BBC uses subtitles for a Scottish accent.

6) Finish your drink if an English celebrity comes out in favour of the Union.

7) Take a drink any time a Labour politician mentions the NHS.

8) Take a drink any time an SNP politician mentions the EU.

9) Take a drink any time a Tory politician dismisses a currency union.

10) Spoon of maple syrup any time there’s footage playing of the 1995 Quebec independence referendum.

11) Swig of lager any time there’s footage playing of the 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia.

12) Shot of vodka for any mention of the 1905 dissolution of Union between Sweden and Norway.

13) Finish your drink if Flower of Scotland is playing.

14) Refill your drink if God Save the Queen is playing.

15) Finish all alcohol if Prince George comes out in favour of the Union.

16) Drink of Scotch if we visit a whiskey distillery.

17) Open a can of anchovies if we go out amongst the fishing trawlers.

18) Make a forex trade if we visit any financial services institution.

19) Scream and finish your drink if David Cameron mentions his Scottish ‘roots’.

20) Drink any time the phrase ‘Once in a lifetime’ is uttered.

21) Drink any time we see a man in a kilt.

22) Finish the drink of the person to your right if they use music by any of the following artists: KT Tunstall, The Fratellis, Snow Patrol, Amy Macdonald or Susan Boyle.

23) Finish the drink of the person to your left if they quote any of the following writers: Rabbie Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle or JM Barrie.

24) Each hour, on the hour, drink a finger of Scotch or half a beer depending on whether the latest guesswork poll was in favour of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ respectively.

25) Mouthful of haggis and finger of Scotch for every local count that goes in favour of the ‘Yes’ campaign.

25b) Chew up and spit out some haggis and take a swig of beer for every local count that goes in favour of the ‘No’ campaign.

Original post on VeryApt.co.uk

[theanglosaxondiet]

Grey Rain

As a kid, I always enjoyed a good storm.

I remember being on the East Coast of America for Hurricane Charley in 2004. I was 11-years-old and I’m not sure that I’ve ever been so excited. We all huddled in a room at the top of the house (which was obviously madness and not proper hurricane etiquette) and waited for the storm to hit. It did hit, but in quite a limp way, with some wind and rain, which, after a spell, I slept through. The next day we went out into the yard and there was some trash scattered on the lawn (might’ve been raccoons) and my bike had been blown away. Otherwise, you’d never have known there had been a storm.

But maybe those experiences of stormy summers in the US set the tone for my lifelong enjoyment of the rain. Being in a car, or by a window, when the rain is drumming down is fantastic. It makes me want to toast crumpets on a fire and play Scrabble. I like being protected from the rain, and, provided I have dry clothes at my disposal, I like being caught in it. It’s like having a fun shower from God.

It’s raining at the moment, as it has done for the last 48 hours. People who went to the Notting Hill carnival (not me, I can assure you) were drenched, and I spent all day hovering inside, considering when to make my sandwich dash. I thought the rain would blow itself out overnight, but, reliably, it’s turned up again today. I know it’s a very British thing to do, complaining about the weather, but being really cold and wet on the tube is universally unpleasant. I mean, it’s better than Ebola, but it’s still not great.

Perhaps this distaste for the rain has something to do with the loss of my inner-warmth. I’m not speaking metaphorically; I genuinely feel colder, all the time. I’ve been wearing a jumper for about 50% of August, which is unprecedented. I used to be quite a warm person (I once went skiing without any thermals and had to be taken home by mountain rescue (my first and only skiing experience, I should add)) for whom the rain was a refreshing break from the overbearing sun. Now I just want clouds and a jacket.

London couldn’t be more grey at the moment. I’m staring at the sky now, above a horizon of dark green tree leaves, and it looks like a prisoner’s jumpsuit. The bare blanket sky is hanging over us, like it’s waiting to smother us, looking to press down… But, really, it’s just the weather, shaking its dick at us, and showing how insignificant we dry mortals truly are.

British storms aren’t like American ones. They don’t come with fire and brimstone, hurricane status or tornado shelters. They’re oppressive, rather than aggressive, and, if the rain doesn’t let up soon, people are going to start writing very gloomy blog posts.

Original post available on VeryApt.co.uk

[theanglosaxondiet]

Going North

North London is not an area I’ve ever really experienced. I once had some Anglo-Saxon lessons with a Spanish lady in Archway, but that’s really the extent of my exploration. I know that it’s the Guardian reading heartland of London and, secretly, posher than West London, but I’m basing that mostly on the personalities and affluence of the North Londoners I know.

I’ve been working for the past few weeks on the Holloway Road, which isn’t quite Islington or Muswell Hill. What it is is a well integrated mixture of cheap cafés and expensive supermarkets. Sports Direct sits next to M&S; the Diamond Cafe next to Costa. I buy myself a £1.80 sandwich each lunchtime from a seemingly unbranded restaurant, and delight in my own frugality. Conversely, I go to the vast Waitrose each morning in order to redeem my complementary cup of coffee (an amazing scheme which everyone should be involved in, as a form of legitimate theft) and its packed out with breakfasting yuppies and old people, buying copies of The Telegraph and sniffing the tulips.

The houses on Holloway Road betray something of the Islington spirit – there are some epic Georgian townhouses, with bright, beautiful living rooms from which their owners can frown at people walking down the road. There are some truly lavish curtains, cut in lush cream fabric. These are the things I appreciate; I can comprehend the desire for nice curtains.

In reality, I’m not far from home. It’s 7 stops on the tube (5 on the Victoria line, 2 on the Piccadilly) and only takes me about half an hour. But it does have a different vibe. I’m not sure if everyone feels this way, or if I have a superpower, but if I found myself, for example, magically teleported to the centre of Manchester, I would know that I was somewhere foreign. The wind feels different; the corporate typography looks wrong. I wouldn’t need to see Old Trafford, or hear a Mancunian accent, in order to know that, Toto, we’re not in London anymore. And I feel pretty much the same way about North London. It feels weirdly out of place in my mind.

But I love my £1.80 sandwich, and my free coffee. And Sports Direct is doing a ‘trainer sale’ and I simply cannot argue with that.

Original post at VeryApt.co.uk

[theanglosaxondiet]

A New Beginning

After an hiatus of a couple of months, I'm ready to start writing stuff again!

Now that I've left university, it seems silly to continue with the pretence that I give less than the most fractional shit about Anglo-Saxon, English literature or university life. I've been there, done that, been obligated to buy the t-shirt.

My new blog is called VeryApt.co.uk and it's going to be about all the things that come around in life, immediately after leaving university. So pretty much exactly the same, but with fewer books.

I'm going to continue uploading all my blog posts onto this Tumblr account, so this is a very easy place to follow it. Any questions/mail that get submitted to the Tumblr, I'll try and answer on the main blog. The domain name here will stay the same. In fact, pretty much nothing will change. There'll be more photos and fun formatting over at VeryApt.co.uk, but, otherwise, there's no particular reason to visit.

Talk soon.