Beauty in the Details

Since leaving the UK, I am able to find more things beautiful than when I was living here. The distance makes me nostalgic,  and prone to romanticism. I'm still predisposed to expat moaning about the weather, about the hideously disorganised train station at Gatwick, and about the cost of living (the price of a glass of wine in a London pub is nothing short of scandalous), but each time I return I am reminded of the intrinsically strange and wondrous things that make this green, rain-soaked little island such a uniquely wonderful place.

Two things in particular have struck me on this visit.

1. We have an almost unparalleled university system. One I feel proud to have studied in, and one which encourages the nerdy, the geeky, the obsessive, and the introverted; those whose interests may have been their only friends through school and their adolescence. We welcome that obsesssiveness, if not demand it. This made the Americans I was recently touring universities in the Midlands with a little uncomfortable. They have students who they would consider on the "autistic spectrum" if they threw themselves wholeheartedly and unabashedly into one narrow field of study. It's almost unheard of in the USA until doctorate level, and yet we require this stringently of our 18 year olds. If being able to focus an entire university application and a series of up-to-twenty-minute interviews throughout a day waxing lyrical about one's interest in Roman coins or pre-Raphaelite paintings, toxicology or the films of Truffaut means that you're on the autistic spectrum, then I suppose most of Oxford and Cambridge's students must be damaged goods.

This kind of focus and drive is what creates the idea of great British eccentricity we are all so familiar with. And guess who loves the idea the most? You only have to watch how British academics are represented in American film to understand just how enamoured they are of the idea of this fiercely geeky, weird but ultimately brilliant intelligence : Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything? Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game? Emma Thompson as Sybill Trelawny in Harry Potter?!

Where else could we have watched a lecture on entertainment in early modern times - entitled Stage, Stake and Scaffold, all about theatre, bear-baiting, and hangings in Elizabethan London?

2. People here are dead funny. There was a chipperness to people in the Midlands, despite the weather and the buildings (at times) being uniquely grey. Actually, I think this is pretty widespread. The British can laugh at themselves, and often do. We admit freely to needing to have a drink to function in large social situations. We know we can't dance, yet we have zero hesitation about yowling discordantly in large groups to karaoke hits. It initially takes more of us to strike up a conversation, but a couple of pints in our veins and we'll chat until the cows come home.

I'm back in Scotland again, having last been here in November. It's a glorious evening to arrive, with a sweet dusky pink sunset kissing the treetops. Every burn, brook and stretch of water glistens in the light, and there's a lot of water in Scotland. A friendly Glaswegian woman waiting for the loo on the train sizes me up in the queue and immediately starts chatting to me about her journey from Bournemouth. It's taken her 9 hours, but she tells me she would happily rather take the train than fly. "You can have your book, and your coffee, and your sandwich, and watch the world go by, and there's none of that..." - she motions brusquely to her feet, making a grimace - "take off your shoes, take off your belt, take out your water rubbish". (The Scots have a deserved reputation for being some of the friendliest and chattiest Britons).

And that is the British idea of pure pleasure, a hot drink, a sandwich, a good book and a journey.

I think that's the meaning of beauty in the details. Details - whether they be found in a subject you love, an eccentric leaning towards something that others might find odd, or or just knowing what little fripperies will make you happy. Generally speaking, we Brits don't need big and showy. A simple well-made cup of tea will draw contented sighs and a sense of inner peace.

It's the little things, isn't it?

The Quarter-Life Crisis, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Failure

The plan is coming along nicely.

We've identified the city (check), come up with a business plan (sort of) and started tucking away savings (erm...yeah. I am putting that shoe fetish on hold, as of next week. Promise). We've sorted a date to leave our London flat. In February we're moving in with my mum for 6-8 weeks while we squirrel away our rent money. (Eeep.)

All that remains is to get driving (ok, so that's a fairly large undertaking, but my 19 year old cousin has  already beat me to the wheel in Wood Green, so I should bloody well be able to apply myself). It's getting embarassing. My US family members already think I'm some kind of idiot-savant who just about manages to hold down a job and feed myself without being able to drive to Walgreens. Not that we have a Walgreens to drive to. But you get my meaning.

Oddly enough, even with all this change coming, there's a strange feeling of calm about my future washing over me. Even though I have absolutely no idea what the next year will hold, I feel like I'm really working towards something. And even if it turns out to not be a sustainable business, at least I will have tried something independent, and been my own boss. It's not quite 'do what you love', because, as this very clever lady rightly says, what we love changes all the time. So I'm taking what I consider to be some very good advice and doing what I am. What I am is someone who needs a challenge. Someone who has always wanted to be fluent in another language, and do something I feel passionate about. Passion is everything, after all.

I spent this Saturday at the Nordic Study Abroad Conference, as a speaker alongside some very learned professors from the Universities of Cambridge University, Brown, Georgetown, and Copenhagen. 250 young Danish, Swedish and Norwegian students assembled at PWC's Copenhagen offices to hear from those who had done something different, and were all the better for it. I was possibly the least senior person on the billing, with no letters after my name, no ivy-league degree under my belt, and a mere 6 years' experience of working in the field of international student recruitment. To tell you the truth, I was pretty petrified of putting on that little microphone headset and owning the stage in the way some of the more seasoned professors had. Many of the other speakers had been truly inspiring, and they had managed to captivate the audience in that way that only those who have inbuilt charisma, and a true passion for what they are speaking about, can.  But watching the talk preceding mine, from Professor Sudhanshu Rai at the Copenhagen Business School, I was impressed by some home truths in his speech, which was all about not being afraid to make mistakes, or "fail". I was struck in particular by one statement he made, which put the whole 'failure is not an option' culture into a new light. He simply told the audience of very high-achieving, driven students that when we succeed, we experience a state of euphoria, but that when we fail, we experience a state of reflection. It's therefore only with reflection, and true consideration, that real successes are born.

Hearing that actually helped me to make a better presentation (I suppose the pressure of failure was lessened a bit!). I spent the rest of the conference being pretty inspired just being able to speak to these young people, who had such big plans in their sights. I'm not much older than many of them, and they were so committed, so eager to do something memorable, to chase their dreams that it made me stop for a minute to consider why I'm feeling something very similar now. I might be a little late to the party, but I've realised that we all need to do something that scares and exhilarates us once in our lives. 

A tiny me, onstage (bricking it).

I guess now that I'm not as scared of getting up and presenting alongside the great and the good, in front of an audience who will achieve more in their 20s than many of us will in our entire lives, I'm on the right road. There's still loads that I am scared of: getting a phrase completely wrong in my fledgling new language; running out of money; having to live at my mum's again for a few weeks, or months. I'm scared that I might really miss the security of an office job. I might miss London terribly. And I think I still have a lot to learn, even from those 18, 19 and 20 year-olds who haven't figured it all out yet. And basically I think, if I were younger, I'd run at the opportunity to gain new experiences and try out something new.  I'm not getting any younger, so today is the youngest I'll ever be. So I'm going to bloody well do something cool before I'm old.

Maybe it's a bona-fide quarterlife crisis. But hell, I'm enjoying it.

Coming Out, Standing Up and Being Counted

image credit: www.hannahnicklin.com

I have a secret. (Shh - it's this blog).

Ever since I began writing here in February 2009, I have done so under a pseudonym. I have shown it to maybe four or five of my friends and work colleagues, but I've never made my posts public on my facebook or my own twitter account. At first, that was mainly because I wasn't confident about my writing, but more recently, it's been about not wanting to be too public about my thoughts, especially as so many of them are about jacking it all in and leaving London behind. The blog was always intended to be a diary and an occasional account of events going on during a particularly turbulent time in my life, but more of a virtual notebook; a place to store my thoughts, archive them, and be able to look back on them. I certainly still don't really know whether this blog is a foodie thing or a self-indulgent ranty thing, or just an online space to store musings. But a few things are happening that make me want to publicise a little bit more, and address some issues I feel are important.

Firstly, work is totally bonkers at the moment. People are leaving and throwing their toys out of various prams all over the place. I am trying to remain somewhat indifferent to the upheaval because it fits in with my master plan to pack my shit up and leave in around 11 months' time to try finding sustainable work somewhere in France running a jam farm. But these relatively minor HR storms rage within a sector-wide squall - I work in higher education, you see.

image credit:www.globalhighered.wordpress.com

It's become increasingly clear to me that "this country" (as I write, I hear it being said in David Cameron's twattish little voice - shudder) has been, for the short term at least, monumentally buggered *polite term* by the Con-Dem government. All right, nothing new there; that's been going on since May. But specifically, I'm increasingly disillusioned with the prospect of talking excitedly about higher education to 17 and 18 year olds across the UK and EU this year knowing full well that they will be committing themselves, for the most part, to at least £27,000 worth of government- endorsed debt from next September onwards, not including their living costs. And that's my job, which makes things a bit tricky, really.

Thanks a bunch, Dave.

I feel like a bit of a fraud and a hypocrite, but at least part of my job is about trying to raise aspirations of young people who have the the ability to go to university but are facing barriers to progression. (It's also to help the university I work for increase their intake from as wide a variety of schools and backgrounds as possible.) But I don't yet know how we can really fix things to make university education more accessible to all, though. And I'm getting tired of feeling like we're all lying and just trying to make up the numbers to satisfy this government's guilty conscience.

But for the moment, here's what I'm doing. I'm trying to motivate a small team of people, keep my head above water, clear my own (relatively meagre) student debt, not lie to anyone (intentionally or not), get my bus commute down to under an hour a day, eat up all my greens, better my own personal best Scrabble high score of 420, and keep writing.

Oh, and given that influential people are leaving my workplace, I'm no longer worried about this blog being public anymore. You can find the real me on twitter here and here, and you can email me at the.bittersweet.cityAT gmailDOTcom. Holler at me and tell me what you think, or leave me comments and let's interact. And if you can, come and join me at this on March the 26th. It's important, for everyone, not just students.

By the way, I'm totally serious about the jam farm.