On Futility

I will apologise in advance if today's post comes across as a little ... non-sequitur. I would have called it "stream of consciousness", but recently it has been less a case of a "stream" than a series of damp puddles occasionally interlinked by a brackish mixture of desperation, panic, lackadaisical boredom, and occasional bouts of manic energy. 

I struggle with freedom. I am a creature of routine - I like lists, and plans, and things set out in advance so I can settle everything down and hop through it all one little hoop at a time. And I like routine. I like the easy productivity that comes with it, when my free time is limited, and so rendered precious, and therefore lends itself to a neccessity of action.

Recently, I have had no set plan, no routine, and I have landed myself in some unpleasant places. Not drastically unpleasant, that is - no pits of despair or Sloughs of Despond for me. More like sitting in a field where the grass is just damp enough to soak through your trousers and leave you feeling faintly ignominious and a little bit sad as you glance at the bumblebees and butterflies who, all of a sudden, seem a little more judgemental in their existence than any pastel-coloured insect has any right to be.

If life is a series of wagons, I have fallen off a lot of them. I have neglected this blog, neglected work,  friends, job-hunting - productivity in most senses of the word. Why? Because I either have too much free time, and therefore squander it all because it seems endless and I may tell myself that glorious lie "I'll do it later", or else because a lot of things happen to me at once and I become so busy that the very thought of trying to deal with anything else winds me up to the extent that I give myself an existential headache.

I am not here, however, to dwell on that. I have now recognised the problem, you see, and in my book that is the first step towar whacking it over the head with a mace and jumping on it until it stops being sastisfying. I know what I need to do to sort myself out and get my fragile facade of competence back on track.

The problem here is everyone else. Not what they're doing, but rather what they're not doing. And what they're not doing is having this problem.

Perhaps it is simply that I made the executive decision to go straight from school to university, ensconcing myself in the company of fellow scholars and dusty tomes rather than going out and ice climbing, skydiving, or digging wells in Africa like many of my fellow students have done.

I do not regret my decision - I like dusty tomes much better than I like dusty bottoms of wells in the midday sun - but sometimes, filing through my Facebook feed and seeing pictures of people I knew as fellow schoolgirls now doing all the things I was told were essential so far as affirming the usefulness and worthwhile nature of my existence at my age . . . I sometimes looked at myself, sat at my desk with my third packet of Minstrels open at my side, watching the rain snail down the window while I wondered whether or not I could be bothered to make myself lunch before looking for another Spotify playlist to motivate me through my next hour's revision of Freud, and wondered if anything I could do or be would, in the end, measure up.

Ah, "measure up", the phrase so often uttered as an instant segway to the wangst of your choice in every Not Another Coming Of Age Movie ever. Measure up to what? To expectations, most like, but whose? My parents'? My friends'? My peer group? Or simply what society tells me I should be doing and wanting at my age? 

Why should I care?

Was it not bad enough that I already spurned most mainstream social occasions in favour of typing up a blog post at midnight while I waited for my neighbours to quiet down? Was I wasting my youth and vivacity by not doing anything and everything right now? Why was I not more involved in politics, in leadership, in adventure, in causes, in protests, in fun and love and laughter and group pictures that stare out at me from every social media outlet telling me that I am missing out?

Did I now have to stare down at my swiftly-cooling pot noodle and see in the chicken-flavoured dregs the ultimate futility of my existence simply because nobody else was struggling with that feeling too?

I speak, of course, only from inside the confines of my tiny little mind. In all likelihood, I am not the only one feeling this at all, and in all like likelihood I will be just fine, and muddle through one way or another at the end of it all. 

Still ... it raises some interesting questions, doesn't it? Who's really judging me? And whose expectations am I judging myself against? Is it simply a matter of human envy playing upon the mind of a slightly insecure young adult, or something more?

Questions, questions, questions. But are any of them worth answering?

~ Charley R

Things I Find On My Walks

It's been a long few months in the world of Charley. But now, with exams over, and a few weeks between me and the summer for proper, I've had some time to do a bit of thinking and rejiggering of my mental space.

Part of this process has been going for walks. During term time proper, when I can be going up and down the campus hill anything between four and eight times per day, I usually come back to my little lair and collapse in a small heap to settle down with my course reading and a nice pot of baked beans. With term and exams done, I've had more time in the day to do stuff.

Or, rather, not to do stuff. I'm not used to having so much time, and to be the only thing governing my use of it, and so I've had a few awful feelings of lethargy and unproductiveness in connection with several days where I hardly went further than the bottom of the road, simply because I had no reason to do so.

So I started going for walks, to get me up and going and get the bodily juices flowing so that, when I got back, I felt energised enough to seek things to do - like write blog posts, hunt for competitions to enter, and find more employers willing to send me an apologetic piece of paper to add to my wall of fiscal rejection.

Luckily for me, there is plenty of awesomeness around my city to help cheer me up.

One of my favourite haunts is my local pub, The Imperial. I'm not a drinker by the slightest stretch of the word, but there's a really lovely warmth and atmosphere to this place. Couple that with the memories I've made here with the friends that made my first year at university a whole barrell of awesome - and some of whom, sadly, will not be back to grace my second year with the same atmosphere, and 'the Impy' has squirrelled itself thoroughly into my emotinal core.

And then I found this beer. I always go by the philosophy that adding 'Of Doom' to anything makes something a thousand times more awesome - and this beer is literally called Doom.

The drink of megalomaniacal evil overlords everywhere.

... Oh, and the pub also do really nice scampi and chips ... just so you know.

I've never actually been inside this particular pub, but I've passed by it quite a lot on a way to some of my favourite haunts out in the town centre.

This brings me onto the second of my favourite things - the heritage. Aside from the mahoosive (and utterly gorgeous) cathedral, Exeter is just full of beautiful historic sights. Want Victorian Botanical gardens? Ancient city walls? The favourite drinking hole of Francis Drake? Our own riddle? We've got it all!

Jealous yet?

I snapped a picture of this pub completely on the fly, because the name made me cackle. It had the same effect on the woman walking next to me, when she leaned over to see what on earth the strange woman in the leather jacket was sniggering at.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about Arena. It's a nightclub - one of the biggest in the city, and a favourite of the student population. As such, it's also the source of a thousand and one memories (or lack thereof) for an awful lot of people, both newbies and old hats, who have staggered out of those doors at 3am.

I, personally, have only one experience with this place - and it consisted mostly of being elbowed, stepped on, and getting so crowded that I gave up and left after just under half an hour. But just because it isn't important to me personally doesn't mean I don't have a connection to it through the memories of the people who also occupy the peripheries of my life, too! Especially given how often I've had to guide them back to their rooms after one jaeger bomb too many.

... Oh, and about the giant blue gorilla? Just another enigma on the unsolvable mysteries of life. Maybe.

This last one is here to appease my inner Grammar Nazi just as much as anything else. The inner Grammar Nazi, that is, who nearly catapulted herself out of a window when she realised how many times she had walked past this faculty without noticing the horrific abuse of the English language broadcasted across the front.

You know you're a writer when...


In all seriousness, though, it's a wonder what a good walk can do for your mindset - and for your camera, given how many things you'll run into that you didn't know you'd been missing up to this point. *insert generic life lesson type thing here*

See you all next week!

~ Charley R

Adventures In Berlin

For once, Easter holidays have actually lived up to the second half of that name. After three years of spending these three weeks of supposed freedom chained to a desk full of revision with thrall-like wails, cries and dejected snufflings in the servitude of GCSE, AS and A2 level exams, I've finally caught a bit of a break. Say one thing for your first year of university - at least they're aware that a few months aren't quite enough for someone to completely readjust their academic mindset enough to start contributing toward a degree.

So, if not tied to a desk, where have I been?

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

Or, more accurately, clattering about Germany wondering if she remembered to pack her hairbrush this time.

Say one thing for big cities - they are excellent places for adventures. My first was on the train, where I found myself in the company of a very nice (but very confused) Arab gentleman who shared my deficit of German ... but also, sadly, a deficit of English. Luckily, we were speedily joined by a Nigerian gentleman who spoke not only English and Arabic, but German too. Between the three of us, we not only managed to make it onto the correct train, but also commandeered a very comfy set of seats in 2nd Class. Mostly because there wasn't any space anywhere else on the train.

Berlin itself, I must say, is a lovely city. I was happily encamped on the sofa of some uni friends, who took me out to see bits and pieces of the city between the rainstorms. Of which there were a lot. So, sadly, this post shall be a bit of a dearth of pictures. Luckily, each one of the few I have comes with another little adventure story.

 This, my friends, is the Brandenburg gate. This is also the point where I discovered that the German word for 'pancake' does not exist.

Why? Because they have multiple potential words for pancake, all of them context dependant, and most of them absurd enough to bend an English-speaker's brain over backwards in several directions.

It is also here that I learned that the city of Bielefeld does not exist, according to most city-centric German landlines.

This lovely structure, meanwhile, is part of the German parliamentary network. Rather puts 10 Downing Street to shame, eh?

We planned to cross the road and take a look at some of the older buildings further down, but there was a rather forceful-looking police barricade in the way at the time.

Our attempts at circumnavigating the streets to get around it ended up with us in a flea market, purchasing possibly the most awesome t-shirts known to man.

Finally, we come to an unexpectedly artsy shop over the new Jewish memorial, with guest appearances by the American embassy and another German parliamentary building.

The fun fact about this structure is that the main part of it is underground - and features a huge information centre, exhibits, and all manner of soul-crushing things within.

The upper bit, however, sufficed perfectly well as a bamboozling optical illustion that ended with a terrifying disoriented collision with a local tour group.

There were, of course, a great many other adventures that were had - like the unexpected visit of the police to the flat, after a well-meaning neighbour wondered if we'd left the door unlocked or if an intruder had gotten in, a night spent in competition for the high score of a limited edition Lord Of The Rings pinball machine, and lots more linguistic discussions that ended in me trying to bribe my German friends to steal the word 'matchbox' from the English in a desperate attempt to spare my sanity from processing the absolute monster of a word they have for the blasted thing.

I bribed them with Jammy Dodgers - and I darned nearly convinced them, too!

Well then, now that you've had some snapshots of where I've been, I feel it is only fair to update you on where I am right now.

Bavaria, on the Alps. A beautiful, beautiful place - so beautiful, in fact, that one doesn't tend to mind when the snow for skiing does not appear in as great a quantity as one might wish for. Not that we haven't made an attempt today, nonetheless. So far, I have also climbed trees, jumped out of trees, and  made lots of bad puns concerning trees, and later in the week look to be indulging in a spot of waterskiing, and maybe even some hiking if the weather holds out.

I shall, of course, endeavour to procure some pictures of that, too. If the rain stops.

I'm sensing a pattern here.

~ Charley R