Love Actually Isn't All Around

For some reason Blogger wouldn't let me comment on Harry's excellent blog on being single at Christmas, so I am writing my own.

Every year, inevitably, I am single. This comes with questions from my grandmother along the lines of "Your cousin Emma has a lovely boyfriend. Do you have a boyfriend Annie?" I always say "no" while my parents deliberately change the subject. However I'm tempted by creative excuses, such as:

a) No Granny, I'm too busy having casual sex with total stangers.
b) No Granny, I am a lesbian.
c) Yes Granny, his name is Chad and he's my drug dealer.

A university friend of mine was recently accused by another friend of 'always being in a relationship.' She protested that this wasn't true, and she had actually been single for four months before her current relationship. It's difficult to avoid a bitter, sarcastic internal monologue going "Oh poor you. Four whole months, that must have been so hard." I try not to be bitter though, as some people just have relationships more frequently than others. I propose relationship communism, where love is divided equally amongst everyone. I could be the Chairman Mao of relationships.

As Harry said, however, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Statistically single people will not be single forever, and the general feeling of loneliness is due to songs like 'Lonely this Christmas.' Try to imagine a house that's not a home, try to imagine Christmas all alone.I like to think that refers to people who don't have families, rather than single people. After all, we all have people we love and who love us to spend Christmas with right?*

It's not like any of us would be spending actual Christmas day with a boyfriend or girlfriend anyway. It's just the build-up that's the lonely bit, particularly as for me that build-up takes place in Canterbury, a beautiful, historial little town full of twinkly lights and buskers singing 'All I Want For Christmas' outside old-fashioned sweet shops.

But it's important to remember (without meaning to sound cheesy, except, inevitably, this will sound cheesy) that we are not really alone. I'm not walking around Canterbury by myself, I'm with friends. We all have friends and family.** Think of the starving children in Africa. Do they know it's Christmas time at all?***

Well, I hope that put things in perspective. Remember, no matter how depressing the build up to Christmas can be, that's nothing compared to how catastrophically shit New Year is.


*As far as I'm aware, everyone who follows my blog has parents/guardians. If you don't, I'm really sorry.

**Again, I'm really sorry if you don't. I'll be your friend.

***If you're reading this, and you're a starving child in Africa, then it's Christmas btw.

Rebel Without A Cause

Last week I had a dream that I was Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey. I was all set to abandon the aristocracy and run away with Branson, the politically radical Irish chauffeur, when, regrettably, I woke up.

Ever since then I've had a slight feeling of dissatisfaction. This is partly as I'm not actually about to elope with a fictional character portrayed by a man voted the sexiest in Ireland, and partly because it is very hard to rebel against anything nowadays. My views (men and women are equal, gay people should be able to get married, we should narrow the gap between the rich and the poor) were radical in 1912, but not so much now. This is, of course, a good thing; it shows that the world has generally improved.

Rebellion nowadays is a bit...lame. It's completely impossible to rebel against open-minded, liberal parents who I completely agree with on all major issues. I wouldn't want to. I like to think if I were actually a member of the Edwardian aristocracy I would be a bit radical, but you never can tell. If I wanted the disapproval of my parents, I would get an offensive tattoo, date someone from The Only Way is Essex, a programme I have mercifully never watched, and join the BNP.
Reading 'How To Be A Woman' by Caitlin Moran, hilarious and insightful though it may be, is not going to cut it. My mum wants to read it after me.

In the good ol' days they could rebel with style. Please take a moment to do a Wikipedia search for Jessica Mitford. She was, in my opinion, the coolest person of the 20th century. Her family were aristocrats, and they were all completely and delightfully mental. One of her sisters married Oswald Moseley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, another sister fell in love with Hitler and then killed herself when Britain declared war with Germany, while Jessica became a communist and ran away to join the Spanish Civil War at the age of nineteen. There's a picture of her (which I have in a book but can't find on the internet) as an old lady playing boggle with Maya Angelou. What a badass.

It seems the way to cause controversy nowadays is to go backwards. This can only be another sign that the world is improving. My cousin's fundamentalist, homophobic, majorly conservative views are met with far more concern from my grandparents than anything I believe ever could be.

Because I can't think of a sufficient way to finish this blog, here's a picture of Caitlin Moran with Sybil and Branson from Downton Abbey (Jessica Brown-Findlay and Allen Leech, because there is no point pretending that I don't always remember actor names)

Hugs Not Drugs

I've had a chesty cough for the past week, which is weird because I rarely have a cough, and I don't have any other symptoms. Interestingly, this cough began on the day that the three smokers in my hallway realised that it's possible to smoke in the bedrooms without the smoke alarm going off.

I couldn't sleep at two this morning, and I heard voices outside my room, so I went to hang out with two smokers in one of their bedrooms, which gradually turned into a weed den. As the night of listening to slightly pretentious Indie music on YouTube progressed, my voice became huskier and huskier until I eventually had to leave. I'd taken my duvet with me so I had to change the cover at four in the morning, because it stank of tobacco. My cough has worsened today, almost certainly due to the passive inhalation of both tobacco and weed.

The cleaners are turning a blind eye, which, in a way, is good of them because they also turn a blind eye to our new kettle which hasn't been safety checked, but I kind of wish the smokers would return to just going outside. I understand that it's cold in November and it's an effort to walk, but they chose the habit.

The more I hang out with smokers the less I understand it. These people spend about a third of their weekly allowance of cigarettes, while I spend about one twenty-fifth of my weekly allowance on the Strepsils which I need because of their smoking habit. They have to find people to supply them with weed. They can't walk from our building to the building where we eat dinner without lighting up on the way. Some of them need weed to write essays. I for one, keep a bag of chocolate Crunchie rocks in my desk drawer, which are cheap and I don't need to block the bottom of the door with clothes to prevent the smell of the Crunchie rocks escaping and setting off the chocolate alarm.

Oh dear, another complainy blog. On the plus side, soon I'm going to buy a hat with the proceeds of not smoking.

The Nightclub Issue

I feel I have blogged excessively over the past month despite in September thinking I had given up, but this issue persists too much not to write about. I briefly talked about hating nightclubs in Sydney where people go out with the sole intention of groping backpackers, but at least that was a cultural experience. At university, I still hate nightclubs. If they were all unexpectedly shut down tomorrow, I'd be wandering amidst all the protest riots saying "Oh well, never mind, why don't we just go to a nice pub?"

It's currently twenty past five in the morning and I had the lovely experience of fleeing the university nightclub at half one, by myself, in order to escape from Gropey 'Would you like to come back to my room' McInappropriatetouching. I was under the impression that I was generally feeling all right until I got to my room and cried out all the vodka. The thing is, it wasn't actually Gropey himself who upset me, it was the fact that I feel like I'm in the 0.5% of people who would not like to go back to his room because I don't actually know him. That's the problem with nightclubs, you don't actually know anyone except for the people you arrive with, because (mostly) everyone looks and dances exactly the same. Which is not to say that I never enjoy myself; if I'm with nice people and there's no expectation of groping and it's one of the rare occasions when I actually like the song then I have a good time. Except I had a better time last week, when I was in a slightly quieter bar and one of my friends suggested that we left at eleven, bought ice-cream, and sat in the corridor in our pyjamas watching Pulp Fiction.

Really, nightclubs combine a selection of the things that I hate: annoying, repetitive music which seems to be from an album called 'Songs to play in nightclubs about being in a nightclub,' people who make me feel like a Jane Austen character for thinking that emotional intimacy should, in an ideal world, come before physical intimacy, and pretending that I can dance.

I am, reassuringly, absolutely fine because just before escaping the nightclub I managed to find Catie and screamed in her ear (not because I'm rude, but because that's the only way to communicate) that I was leaving and the reason why, so no-one thinks I am a) passed out in a corner somewhere, or b) With Gropey McInappropriateTouching.

One day, hopefully, I will be thirty and nobody will ever expect me to go clubbing. That applies to both nightclubs and clubbing seals. Which is also bad.

Typical Quiet Night

Two friends of mine (both girls) just came into my room in their underwear, completely drunk, stole both my winter and my summer dressing gowns and put on my lipstick, and ran upstairs to go and watch porn in the public computer room.

I, of course, chased after them in my pyjamas with a giant red lipstick print one of them had left on my cheek, apologising to the students in the computer room who were actually trying to do work.

Sometimes university is mental.

Universations

I have had a lot of bizarre conversations recently; far too many to write down on a long word document for Zanny to turn into a book. (Just an example of the sort of thing which might happen.)

Just now, I had a conversation which flowed perfectly from horrific sexually transmitted disease urban myths to James Joyce. Immature to pretentious in about ten seconds, which, thinking about it, is what every conversation throughout sixth form was like as well.

Earlier today, in my seminar, we learnt about Iambic Tetrameter, which is when there are four beats in a line of poetry. I was wondering why it was called 'tetrameter' and not 'quatrameter' and then had an epiphany, which I shared with the girl next to me and we sat there with our minds blown for the next several minutes. Tetris is called tetris because there are four blocks which make up each of the shapes that fall down. It is possible that no-one reading this blog finds that quite as exciting as I do, but never mind.

On Friday, a peculiar third year boy approached me in a club/bar-type place and then, without really any build-up other than a brief discussion about how bad the music was (they were playing Love Shack), invited me on what might have been a date to the library. It pretty much went like this:

"This is purely hypothetical, but I hang out in the library a lot, so if you ever come to the library, maybe we could get coffee." Then he went away and unsubtly spoke to his friend about me, complete with mouthed words and enthusiastic pointing.

I was left both confused and marginally depressed. Confused because it was a hypothetical date to an absolutely enormous library at some point in the future. That could not be vaguer unless I was asked out on a metaphysical date to the universe at an unfixed point in the space-time continuum (which, by the way, would be awesome.) I was also marginally depressed because I love coffee and I'm quite fond of libraries, but the guy in question did not know that, so I get the impression that he says that to all the girls. I think I may have been targeted because I was exactly the same height as him.

In other news, my conservative, incredibly religious, homophobic cousin has recently announced his engagement to a woman from his conservative, incredibly religious, homophobic church and they're going to have conservative, incredibly religious, homophobic babies. That's the depressing future of my surname, which originally belonged to Polish Jews and is now going to belong to the Church of Scotland.

That's all folks. Tonight I am going to a 'pub quiz' with a due sense of dread because apparently here 'pub quiz' involves clothes-swapping and blowing up condoms.

The Cure For Illness

I have freshers' flu. I kind of assumed that because freshers was the week before last I had miraculously escaped, but no such luck.

Aside from one seminar, I spent all of today drinking an endless cycle of tea, coffee and hot chocolate and attempting to read 'Oedipus the King' but having to have an hour-long nap every other page. Obviously I should have had an early night, but I couldn't sleep so I ended up walking to the other side of campus in my pyjamas with some drunk people, one of whom was just wearing knickers and a top. I feel like perhaps the fresh air did me good.

University is good so far.