now say hello.

Well, I have an insane amount of work to do, so of course, of COURSE I have remembered this blog! As I type, I am sat in my no-frills single-berth room in my University halls (although the walls are plastered with photos, leaflets, flyers and I can't keep an inch of it clean to save my life; it could, at the very least, never be called "impersonal"), listening to two of my flatmates play-fighting in the next room & supposedly doing my history reading.

I took that subsidiary after all.

It's two months this Thursday since I moved to Liverpool and in that time I have not been home since, though I have visited M. once and been to London a couple of times, so I'm not sure what the reasoning behing that is. At the beginning, I felt like it would be simply too strange to see my childhood bedroom and all those old familiar sights, and then return to my new friends and home and life - I still think that it will be strange, but now it feels like a decision motivated more by Let's Just See If I Can than anything else. Anyway, it doesn't seriously count because my family have visited once (for my birthday, of which more later) and are doing so again in a couple of weeks.

Ironically, after I said all that "oh who even meets people through their accommodation" stuff, all my closest friends up here are people from my accommodation who I met in the first few weeks. Unfortunately, this has made it easier for me to not socialise with other people than to socialise and my neighbour-friends are, in many ways, my only friends up here. I know a couple of people on my course enough to chat to, and am beginning to get to know my castmates better (hindered by the incredible discomfort and sense of being on the back foot that I always experience when I first meet drama people, because I am not confident enough to make my voice heard and feel, for at least the initial few weeks, like the most horrendous and unfunny person who has ever lived), but still. It's not quite the social whirl I imagined? Like, I thought I'd instantly know THOUSANDS of people and be forever going to, you know, to beat poetry readings and underground bars and tiny theatres and so on, and wouldn't be able to sleep for all the hot jazz playing on a loop in the room downstairs.

Okay, of course that isn't exactly true; I have enough older friends to know that you get out of university only what you put in, that people have wildly different experiences and that almost everyone is disappointed. But then one of my closest friends up here said today, she's considering dropping out: not because she hates her course or isn't having fun, but because she cannot shake the sensation that she is merely drifting. She wants to go travelling and take photographs and I am jealous because even if the decision maddens her, even if it drives her out of her skull, at least there is something she wants to be doing.

If I dropped out of university, I would have no idea, no clue at all, what I wanted to be doing or how I should go about achieving it. By staying, all I am doing is ignoring this fact: I have exactly as little reason to want to leave as I have to want to stay.

The problem is what the problem has always been, basically - that I am not good enough at anything, not a single thing, to deserve a) payment in return for doing it and b) to continue it on for any real amount of time. I like writing and acting and music, and I am not particularly terrible at these things but neither am I very good at any of them, basically. Well, I'm pretty awful at the last one and the first two depend on the night, but no matter. I said all this to a friend the other day, only casually, but really rather upset myself - as I always do when I get onto this subject - because I realised that it is so incredibly true.

Remember when you were a kid and you said, I want to be an actress/a spy/an astronaut/a whatever? And your parents said to you, well dear, that's lovely, but don't forget that lots of people want to do these things and only a few people can, so most of them just grow up to be tax accountants and office workers and that is okay. You shrugged it off, because yes, of course - most people did grow up to do these things instead of the thing that you wanted to do, but obviously none of them wanted it as much as you did. Otherwise they'd have done it. And it was that simple, because you were young, and then you grew up and realised that you are not special either. When I had to learn that, it was, it really was okay.

The only really hard thing is that, nowadays, I don't want anything very much.

My flatmates got me a commonplace book for my birthday because they know I like to write, and they stuck photographs and messages into the first couple of pages, and it was one of the sweetest gifts I have ever received. Why do I have to care so much about being good at everything? Isn't it enough to just do things because you like them? I would tell anyone else that it is, because it is, and I'm nineteen now, I must at least attempt to recognise that ridiculous double-standard of mine for what it is.

CHRIST. I only opened this window to say that I was sorry I abandoned my (incredibly well-intentioned) university blog as soon as I actually made it to the fucking place. What's wrong with me! It's definitely time to go and read about the first crusade.

Sorry, lovely blog. I will try to find something to do with you soon.

p.s. the money worries got sorted out fine. Sorry I called you a pack of dicks so many times, student finance?

begin the beguine.

Being a 21st century lady and an all-round modern sort of cat, I got my first blog at the tender age of thirteen, a livejournal, in defiance of a friend who laughed in my face when I told him I was considering it. He said (and I know this, for I have my very first blog entry tabbed as I type; oh, the internet), "What interesting things have you got to say?"

I'm still not sure that I do have anything much to say for myself. But I was never serious about it, and over the years I dabbled, and continually told myself that one day, as an adult, as a real person, I would begin the process in earnest.

That same year, when I was thirteen, I was taken to Normandy on the only residential school trip I ever braved. For the most part I had a slightly miserable time, but we did spend a pleasant morning visiting a rather beautiful and secluded little orchard, the like of which is no doubt very common in northern France. While we were there, we were all given free samples of the orchard's apple juice, which I thought was - beautiful. Was just about the nicest thing I'd ever tasted. I bought a bottle with several of my scrunched up and carefully rationed-out euros, and I brought it home with me.

So enamoured was I with this drink that, in a fit of deferred gratification, I desperately saved it for a special occasion: I wouldn't let myself have any until I was ready, until I had earned it, and by the time that day arrived, I opened the bottle to discover that it had congealed and gone off. It had to be thrown away. My thirteen-year-old self was distraught.

I suppose the moral of the story is that if I put things off forever, eventually they...go...rotten. Rotten, like my soul.

Oh dear, no, that wasn't it at all. And I was sure I had a genuine point to make.

Okay, well, so, anyway. After a long and confusing and fairly drawn-out process, I learned today that I will definitely be spending the next three years in Liverpool, studying English (and some subsidiaries; I think I'll take history?) at the University of Liverpool. I want this blog to be, I don't know, a sort of chronicle of that embarkation; of the trials and the struggles and the excitements that a first generation university student, going up at the beginning of a big old recession, will really encounter. To be some kind of record.

Perhaps somebody will one day find it useful - or, more likely, perhaps I will rediscover it five years from now and laugh and laugh at all the silly things I thought and said. After all, there's no better place to keep a record than the internet. The shallow, eternally-logged thoughts of my thirteen-year-old self, drifiting about forever in cyberspace, are proof of that if they are proof of nothing else. And they really are proof of nothing else. Except perhaps that I spent altogether too much time thinking about chocolate.