Welcome to Limbo. The weird twilight zone between finishing a course and graduating is the weirdest place to be on Earth. The lull in activity does give you time to discover new things, but the imminence of your birth into the real world gives you no chance to really enjoy them. I've discovered a lot since my degree finished, including a couple of new best friends who I'll get to see a lot less often now, shortcuts around a city I'm leaving and the fact that before the week is out I may have to come face-to-face with my arch-nemesis but must restrain myself from committing bloody murder. If this is what Limbo is like in the first few days I'm more than a little apprehensive about the next month and a half.
And beyond that the real world waits like some monstrous animal, crouching in the long grass ahead of me with its jaws gaping, its teeth filling my vision and its putrid breath assaulting my nostrils. This beast is being ignored as much as possible for now but when the time comes I'll go in all guns blazing and hope to come back out with its head in a bag.
Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more.
Tuesday, 29 May 2012
Saturday, 19 May 2012
"It's Just Running and Chucking Stuff".
Here come the Olympics! That's right Great Britain, we are now under ten weeks away from the opening ceremony and just nine-and-a-half weeks from the first event. That's right, the first event is before the opening ceremony. Only in Britain.
Now like all right-minded people, I couldn't give half a flying f-word about the main Olympic events: I mean, seriously, in what world is 100 metre sprint a spectator sport? Yes, there's some really fast people, cool, I'm happy for them that they have somewhere to test themselves against the best in the world and attempt to prove themselves the best of the best, but as a nation, do we all have to get so excited in the build-up? If you want to put years of hype into an event that lasts at most 12 seconds ... we all know there's a sex joke there; I'm not going to spell it out for you, just insert (giggity) the punchline that works best for you and we'll move on.
What's more, we managed to create a ticketing system apparently designed for the sole purpose of furnishing the sad weirdos who seem to get a kick out of spunking money away on pointless sports tickets with tickets to events even they considered to be not worth it at an exorbitant cost and in the most complicated way ever devised for such a simple process.
Now, I'm not saying all of the Olympics is bad: I love team sports so every four years I will be found watching as much Basketball, Football and Handball as I can while the Olympics are on. This being the first time since like the 1940s that there has been a GB Football team I figured I'd go and watch a game or two live. But the powers that be have put paid to that, with both the men's and women's teams playing their matches so far away from me that the time and expense I'd have to put in do not make it worth my while. This is supposed to be Britain's games and yet the few events that are allowed out of the host city are put so far out of the way that attending them is a logistical nightmare. The best games take place in Cardiff, which believe me is nowhere near accessible, or at Wembley, which is bloody expensive. Not one match takes place in the city where Football was born - Sheffield - and the nearest matches to there are dead expensive latter-stage games and/or between two countries you've never heard of, never mind want to see play football.
On the face of it, tickets starting from £20 which allow you to see two games in one day seem like good value, but given that you'll be lucky to find four good teams on the bill at once and that "a stadium near you" is a concept that the Olympics organisers clearly felt wouldn't be a good selling point, that £20 can easily turn into £180 for travel both ways, one match you want to see and one you will have to sit through and a hotel room because there's no transport back until the next day.
Seriously, nobody thought extra trains or coaches might be a good idea. With fans from across the country and around the world having some interest in the events taking place, nobody thought it might be a good idea to keep the transport network going after the final whistle of these events. We spent all this money on getting London ready and then when it came to the events away from the capital, they clearly selected the venues by having Seb Coe blindfolded, sticking pins into a map of Britain and hoping that people could actually get to these places. If it'd been left entirely up to our Olympic committee, I'm sure the GB Football teams would have played their games in Canada, Australia, the Falklands and Gibraltar. It would arguably have been easier to get to games on Gibraltar, in fairness. I'm sure Jet2 or Ryan Air must do cheap flights to there.
The two best football venues outside of London are Newcastle's St. James' Park and Manchester's Old Trafford, these are used like once each, while Cardiff gets three or four games at least and the shitehole that is Coventry's Ricoh Arena gets a semi-final match. Great cities like Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham don't get a look in, despite all having at least one nice Football stadium.
Add to this the fact that the country will be left with crippling debt while only London reaps the financial rewards and this whole thing starts to feel a bit like a kick in the teeth to the rest of the country, particularly the North. The part of Britain that makes it great will not find it easy to benefit from the Olympics. We can't be flitting off to London the whole time to watch the games and we have had very little investment from Olympic funds. The few things they do let out of London are kept away from us as much as possible and the televised sports will be the pointless athletic events that are no fun to watch.
The opening ceremony will be the biggest anti-climax in history after China's spectacular in 2008 and to cap it all off, the logo looks like a well-known cartoon character felating someone.
Someone, somewhere is taking the piss. There is not one benefit I can see to the Olympics being here. Roll on Rio 2016. When the Olympics are back where they belong - the other side of the world - we'll all feel much better.
Rant over.
Now like all right-minded people, I couldn't give half a flying f-word about the main Olympic events: I mean, seriously, in what world is 100 metre sprint a spectator sport? Yes, there's some really fast people, cool, I'm happy for them that they have somewhere to test themselves against the best in the world and attempt to prove themselves the best of the best, but as a nation, do we all have to get so excited in the build-up? If you want to put years of hype into an event that lasts at most 12 seconds ... we all know there's a sex joke there; I'm not going to spell it out for you, just insert (giggity) the punchline that works best for you and we'll move on.
What's more, we managed to create a ticketing system apparently designed for the sole purpose of furnishing the sad weirdos who seem to get a kick out of spunking money away on pointless sports tickets with tickets to events even they considered to be not worth it at an exorbitant cost and in the most complicated way ever devised for such a simple process.
Now, I'm not saying all of the Olympics is bad: I love team sports so every four years I will be found watching as much Basketball, Football and Handball as I can while the Olympics are on. This being the first time since like the 1940s that there has been a GB Football team I figured I'd go and watch a game or two live. But the powers that be have put paid to that, with both the men's and women's teams playing their matches so far away from me that the time and expense I'd have to put in do not make it worth my while. This is supposed to be Britain's games and yet the few events that are allowed out of the host city are put so far out of the way that attending them is a logistical nightmare. The best games take place in Cardiff, which believe me is nowhere near accessible, or at Wembley, which is bloody expensive. Not one match takes place in the city where Football was born - Sheffield - and the nearest matches to there are dead expensive latter-stage games and/or between two countries you've never heard of, never mind want to see play football.
On the face of it, tickets starting from £20 which allow you to see two games in one day seem like good value, but given that you'll be lucky to find four good teams on the bill at once and that "a stadium near you" is a concept that the Olympics organisers clearly felt wouldn't be a good selling point, that £20 can easily turn into £180 for travel both ways, one match you want to see and one you will have to sit through and a hotel room because there's no transport back until the next day.
Seriously, nobody thought extra trains or coaches might be a good idea. With fans from across the country and around the world having some interest in the events taking place, nobody thought it might be a good idea to keep the transport network going after the final whistle of these events. We spent all this money on getting London ready and then when it came to the events away from the capital, they clearly selected the venues by having Seb Coe blindfolded, sticking pins into a map of Britain and hoping that people could actually get to these places. If it'd been left entirely up to our Olympic committee, I'm sure the GB Football teams would have played their games in Canada, Australia, the Falklands and Gibraltar. It would arguably have been easier to get to games on Gibraltar, in fairness. I'm sure Jet2 or Ryan Air must do cheap flights to there.
The two best football venues outside of London are Newcastle's St. James' Park and Manchester's Old Trafford, these are used like once each, while Cardiff gets three or four games at least and the shitehole that is Coventry's Ricoh Arena gets a semi-final match. Great cities like Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham don't get a look in, despite all having at least one nice Football stadium.
Add to this the fact that the country will be left with crippling debt while only London reaps the financial rewards and this whole thing starts to feel a bit like a kick in the teeth to the rest of the country, particularly the North. The part of Britain that makes it great will not find it easy to benefit from the Olympics. We can't be flitting off to London the whole time to watch the games and we have had very little investment from Olympic funds. The few things they do let out of London are kept away from us as much as possible and the televised sports will be the pointless athletic events that are no fun to watch.
The opening ceremony will be the biggest anti-climax in history after China's spectacular in 2008 and to cap it all off, the logo looks like a well-known cartoon character felating someone.
Someone, somewhere is taking the piss. There is not one benefit I can see to the Olympics being here. Roll on Rio 2016. When the Olympics are back where they belong - the other side of the world - we'll all feel much better.
Rant over.
Thursday, 17 May 2012
The "What I Learned These 3 Years" Blog.
Yep, It's my turn, it's been done a few times now so I feel like I'm joining the party late, like I did with the whole wearing a fedora thing:
Anyway, I finished my last essay yesterday morning (a whole day before it was due to be submitted!) and the odd feeling of having no more essays to write makes me feel like I've lost an arm. I just don't know what to do with myself anymore, so I'm doing my version of the summing up post that's been doing the rounds lately.
I'm going to split it up into a couple of sections, so without further ado, I present the "can't think of a name for the blog" what's-changed-in-the-last-three-years round-up.
Well, I'm not someone who gets hung up on appearences or anything but I have noticed that where three years ago the standard outfit would be footy shirt, jeans and trainers, I've moved slightly up the style ladder to casual shirts, jeans and trainers, with a fedora for the winter months. The beard spends a lot less time roving wild around my face and the ponytail has become much more prevalent.
Away from the physical, I now actually know what postmodernism is, and have much love for it, I've gained a useless passion for ethics and I now have a blog. I've also made some very slight progress on learning the guitar, bought two new guitars, a bass and a drumkit and I twice tried to get back into songwriting, each time remembering somewhere around the second verse exactly why I gave it up in the first place. I've joined facebook in the last three years and thankfully stopped using txt spk lol in my statuses (Thanks, timeline, for reminding me that I used to do that, now I feel like my first forays into the world wide web were even more senseless than than my songwriting, which is saying something).
I've been on my first ever night out, managing a grand total of one pub before getting ID'd and having to go home and I've become more knowlegable about the British railway network than I'm comfortable with. Seriously, three years of making an average of five rail journeys a week and you turn into a little bit of a trainspotter, no matter how hard you try to resist.
And now, the "things I would tell my younger self" section.
Bon voyage, mon amis
 |
| Hello? 1950s America? No you can't have your fashion back |
I'm going to split it up into a couple of sections, so without further ado, I present the "can't think of a name for the blog" what's-changed-in-the-last-three-years round-up.
Well, I'm not someone who gets hung up on appearences or anything but I have noticed that where three years ago the standard outfit would be footy shirt, jeans and trainers, I've moved slightly up the style ladder to casual shirts, jeans and trainers, with a fedora for the winter months. The beard spends a lot less time roving wild around my face and the ponytail has become much more prevalent.
Away from the physical, I now actually know what postmodernism is, and have much love for it, I've gained a useless passion for ethics and I now have a blog. I've also made some very slight progress on learning the guitar, bought two new guitars, a bass and a drumkit and I twice tried to get back into songwriting, each time remembering somewhere around the second verse exactly why I gave it up in the first place. I've joined facebook in the last three years and thankfully stopped using txt spk lol in my statuses (Thanks, timeline, for reminding me that I used to do that, now I feel like my first forays into the world wide web were even more senseless than than my songwriting, which is saying something).
I've been on my first ever night out, managing a grand total of one pub before getting ID'd and having to go home and I've become more knowlegable about the British railway network than I'm comfortable with. Seriously, three years of making an average of five rail journeys a week and you turn into a little bit of a trainspotter, no matter how hard you try to resist.
And now, the "things I would tell my younger self" section.
- DUDE! Move into Halls in first year, I know commuting is marginally cheaper and you feel capable of maintaining a good social network without being on site but when third year comes around and folks are reminiscing about good times in Shrewsbury, you will regret not being there.
- DO NOT move into Halls in third year, I know by then you'll have realised you missed out and its much easier being on campus but trust me, commuting is marginally cheaper and I'm confident you can maintain a good social network without being on site. ALSO, commuting will have the added benefit of avoiding being woken up at 4am by someone singing the only four lines they can remember from Joesph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. I know not who these people are but trust me they are neither handsome, smart nor walking works of art.
- Accept Luke's housesharing offer first time round, push everyone to get the originally planned ten-bed house, stage a coup and become king of this small tribe, rather than waiting 'tl the last moment only to end up taking the place of the person you were actually hoping to live with.
- Don't worry if you mess that one up, 330 Burley Road will become one of your favourite places on earth.
- Footy shirts are not a good look in Higher Education establishments. Get a better wardrobe.
- Learn to take a compliment. Your better wardrobe will surely bring many - well, some - well, one or two - well, one - compliments flooding in and I still don't know how to deal with them.
- You will get more appreciation for well-chosen band T-shirts than any faux designer shirt you can imagine.
- Listen to Fleetwood Mac. NOW! Every second you are not hearing Lynsey Buckingham's insane guitar tekkers is a second wasted.
- Buy a fedora, they are cool.
- Your fedora will look better on everyone else.
- Everyone will steal your fedora at least once.
- Don't buy a laptop just because it is white. It may look sleek but it will be shit.
- Always check the quality of goods you are going to buy from ebay. Bass guitars without strings, machine-heads, a bridge or working electrics are not smart purchases.
- Go to pubology in first year, before the lecturers stop going and it gets lame.
- That's right my friend, at uni, everything is backwards: when teachers do something, it's cool.
- Do not judge a book by its cover, literally. Books are the one thing you actually do judge on outward appearances, despite this being the example that's been hallowed by time as the cliché to end all clichés. You will carry far too many useless books home for essays and have to carry them all the way back without quoting them once.
- Do not judge an album by its single. You will mourn the downfall of a musical legend when you hear "Los Angeloser" on the radio as you get the train every morning, but when you eventually buy Hang Cool Teddy Bear, "If I Can't Have You" and "Did You Ever Love Somebody" will make the whole thing totally worth it.
- Learn more about Sikhism, it is awesome.
- Avoid Buddhism at all costs, it is not your friend.
- Buy a camera, the amount of times you will wish you had pictures of people and places that you've encountered will be ridiculous.
- Join the university gym, you will have days off and they will need filling. Playing FIFA will eventually get boring.
- Start a blog, you don't write too good but it's actually kind of fun, in an "I hope nobody reads this, oh my God it's so stupid" kind of way.
- Compulsory modules are always the worst. Fact.
- On a Wednesday morning some time in early October 2009, you will be on a train to Horsforth, something will catch your eye, some ethereal voice will tell you to look up and see what it was, what you see will be a defining vision for your next three years and beyond. The reason why you want to live in Halls or at least in the general Leeds area will be contained in what you see, as will the reason you wish you'd got in on the housesharing earlier, and the reason you'll realise what a scruff you look in a footy shirt and that you need some better threads and the reason why love songs start to have deeper meanings and the reason why Sikhism's concept of love will draw you in and the reason why you wish you'd captured every moment of the last three years on film. It'll be the reason you've got angst that needs the catharsis of a blog, it's the reason you got out of bed for Vision at Work and New Testament even though they were the worst classes you've ever taken.
- Enjoy yourself, man. You only get this time once.
Bon voyage, mon amis
Monday, 14 May 2012
The Dream of a Lugubrious Man. Also, I am done apologising.
I think it's about time I faced facts and stopped kidding myself. This blog started, some six months ago, largely because I wanted to have somewhere I could write something that wasn't going to be marked on academic content, but mostly because I was struggling to write a Christmas Card and wanted an escape from that too. Hidden below the desire to write, which has always been with me, was a slightly darker desire. At the very genesis of this endeavour I apologised because part of me knew where this was going, this was always going to be an exercise in lugubriosity - a chance for me to be sad and sorrowful on the public stage. It's one of the main characteristics of my personality that when I'm feeling down I have to make sure everybody knows about it. I'd like to think it's not just because I'm after sympathy but for the life of me I can't understand why else I would do it. Anyone who's got me on facebook will have noticed this, especially for the 6-12 months before I started blogging: the endless song lyric statuses must have been so annoying.
Anyway, I was right to apologise, this whole thing has been me bemoaning certain things in my life and feeling just a little satisfaction that I get to show the world how sorrowful I am, interspersed with the odd attempt to justify it with something slightly deeper. But now I am done apologising. I am just the sort of person who likes to be affectedly distraught and that's the way it is. If that's what's going on with me, that's what I've got to write about. Much as I'd prefer to be contributing something more cerebral, relevant or at least entertaining to the interwebs, I love writing and I've got to write what I know and what I know is over the top sadness.
Despite all this, one day I hope I've refined my style to the point where you can be found reading something of mine that is a) not this blog and b) worth the effort of reading it. Even if all I can write is lugubrious crap, at least I can dream of a time when it's publishable crap. Old me would here go on to apologise for the fact that this blog will be continuing, and contuining in the same vein. New me will instead warn you: I've taken ownership of my demons and so I have embraced the fact that this blog will never contain literary genius, I'd recommend you take notice of this because it means that things will only get worse from here on out.
Anyway, I was right to apologise, this whole thing has been me bemoaning certain things in my life and feeling just a little satisfaction that I get to show the world how sorrowful I am, interspersed with the odd attempt to justify it with something slightly deeper. But now I am done apologising. I am just the sort of person who likes to be affectedly distraught and that's the way it is. If that's what's going on with me, that's what I've got to write about. Much as I'd prefer to be contributing something more cerebral, relevant or at least entertaining to the interwebs, I love writing and I've got to write what I know and what I know is over the top sadness.
Despite all this, one day I hope I've refined my style to the point where you can be found reading something of mine that is a) not this blog and b) worth the effort of reading it. Even if all I can write is lugubrious crap, at least I can dream of a time when it's publishable crap. Old me would here go on to apologise for the fact that this blog will be continuing, and contuining in the same vein. New me will instead warn you: I've taken ownership of my demons and so I have embraced the fact that this blog will never contain literary genius, I'd recommend you take notice of this because it means that things will only get worse from here on out.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Back to the Blog
That's right, I'm back in the blogosphere. At a time when I really should be finishing my study so that I can get to bed in preparation for tomorrow's (or, in fact, later today's) 5:45am start, I'm sat on the comfy settee, aftertaste of my midnight cornflakes still lingering in my mouth and trying to blog. A shitload of stuff has happened since the last entry and I've got a thousand things I'd like to write about but for now, this is just me saying hi, having a little check round to see how things are, making sure the place hasn't been robbed in my absence. As part of this I'd like to ask anyone who reads this to "like" the link to it that I will be putting up on facebook, just so I can guage my readership as I'm sure I've got a few silent voyeurs.
On a related note, I said last time that I'd toyed with the idea of allowing my over-emotional side get the better of me and writing blog posts for each of my uni friends, this is by way of me sounding out the community for thoughts on the subject. I think it's well corny and will cause me much embaressment but at the same time I feel more and more like I want to do it. With this in mind, who would be interested in a short piece dedicated to them being published in this blog? Answers in the comments or on facebook.would be appreciated, but bear in mind that this will probably happen anyway because I'll talk myself into it eventually unless literally everyone tells me they think it's a bad idea. If you'd like to opt out, please say so and I'll be respectful of that decision.
On a related note, I said last time that I'd toyed with the idea of allowing my over-emotional side get the better of me and writing blog posts for each of my uni friends, this is by way of me sounding out the community for thoughts on the subject. I think it's well corny and will cause me much embaressment but at the same time I feel more and more like I want to do it. With this in mind, who would be interested in a short piece dedicated to them being published in this blog? Answers in the comments or on facebook.would be appreciated, but bear in mind that this will probably happen anyway because I'll talk myself into it eventually unless literally everyone tells me they think it's a bad idea. If you'd like to opt out, please say so and I'll be respectful of that decision.