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| This is apparently what running in the rain looks like. It doesn't. It's shit. |
This morning as I
write this and reflect on yesterday’s events the Swansea weather is peppering
my window with fat drops of salty rain, which annoys me no end. I want to
continue my training this morning, and whilst some people hold the opinion that
running in the rain is “refreshing”, I beg to differ and find it similar to how
I imagine it would feel to be pissed on by a lot of really cold people. There
is nothing “refreshing” about hands purpled with cold, hair plastered across
your forehead like a dead spider and running shorts so saturated they cling to
your arse with all the grace of a giant wedgie. This means my only other option
this morning is the gym, which is fine after a long day to de-stress in the
evening, but admittedly fucking boring and full of posers which is never the
most inspiring start to a brand new day.
Yesterday got off to
a brilliant start. I got up bright and early, jumped in the car and drove to
Morriston Hospital like a good girl ready to attend my appointment on time. Walked
down the grim corridors, which always remind me delightfully of something from Silent Hill so that I always at the back
of my mind half-expect a zombie nurse to fall out of a cleaning closet and eat
me. Sat in the waiting room. They’d taken away the piles of People’s Friend and Ideal Homes. Gutted.
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| Is it cos I'm mad? |
“…you’re here to see
Liz, yes?” The receptionist appeared in the doorway. I was the only person in
the waiting room. Just me and a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night which always seems to be up in whichever hospital you
go to that deals with psychology. I don’t know why this is. I’m not mad and I’ve
never wanted to send my ear to anyone.
“…yeah…ten o’clock.”
It was five-past.
“Liz always holds
her appointments in Singleton Hospital on a Thursday.”
Nat, you twat.
So I drove home and
wondered at what time it would be acceptable to start drinking vodka. On a more
positive note, I have some cracking Christmas songs on my iPod and screeched
Band Aid most of the way to Penllergaer roundabout.
The rest of the day
was spent reading Charles Dickens in bed because it was cold. And I mean cold. The sort of cold where you fear
your nipples will start talking to you. At 12.30 I started walking to Uni, had
a weird dizzy spell and went back home, thus rendering my day all the more of a
failure in respect to getting places on time. My blood sugar levels were
ridiculously high. This made me angry and tired and thirsty so I wrapped myself
in my duvet, pretended to be an earthworm and fell asleep and didn’t dream of
anything exciting, like tunnelling in mounds of compost, which I take it worms
must dream of.
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| An interviewee lovin' the Corpus Christi nightlife |
The evening was much
more productive, even if I was still in bed (alone. Single. With my cup of tea.
YESSSSS). I applied for both full-time and part-time places for an MA in
Creative Writing in Swansea. I even started filling out a form for Oxford
before remembering that time I went for interviews and decided the place was dull,
one of the lecturers was a sneering old bag who wrote books on Plath therefore
I wasn’t allowed to admit to liking Ariel
and everybody dressed the same and read a lot of papers. I don’t mind a
cheeky flick through The Guardian but
I don’t see newspaper-reading as an intense activity which absolutely requires
me to read also The Independent, The
Financial Times, The Telegraph and Some
Other Political Newspaper That Probably Has a Lot of Pictures of Fat
Politicians I Generally Don’t Give a Shit About. Of course not all Oxford students are like this at all, but I remember that a few of the interviewees were so over-keen to impress, they felt the need to turn themselves into dull, guffawing, pompous idiots. "Ah but Shakespeare was a playwright not a poet primarily, was he not? Harharhar." Plus Oxford has no sea. At
least in Swansea, when I’m pissed off I can walk dramatically against the wind
along the promenade and pretend I’m in a film. In Oxford I would have to hang out of a window and pretend something dark is happening at Hogwarts.
Applications took 3
hours. THREE HOURS. The forms kept self-deleting. I needed to throw together a
poetry and fiction portfolio, which I did, but the application refused to
believe I had lived in Britain all my life and kept arguing with me, which I
found very rude. You don’t argue with someone you’ve only just met like that.
Especially if you have no face or soul, because you’re a computer application.
Finally,
applications all sent (I will receive my answer in 9 days) and with fingers
crossed that I get the place (though won’t know if I’ve got a scholarship until
July, and it pretty much depends on that, even though there’s only one between
over 100 applicants), I checked my University emails before bed. There were 273
unread messages due to some hilarious error the other day where everyone was
added to a mailing list and pissed each other off, which was funny at the time
but not at 1am when you’re searching for important emails and have just read
somebody confess “LOLOL I LIKE TURTLES” the third time in a row.
This is when I found
an email from my lovey tutor, Nigel. He had written to ask me whether I wanted
to take part in the London-based Arts and Sciences collaborative project called
Cape Farewell and had nominated
myself and a PhD student to work with him. The project is all about renewable
energy and how it will be used in Swansea and includes a two-day workshop with
the chance to work alongside engineers, artists and scientists to make this
vision a reality. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and really appreciated
being selected to do something so interesting and different.
Plus everyone loves
a bit of science and poetry. Eureka, innit.
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