/5/ The one where Fiona takes on too much

“Better late than never!”, I always say… But the motto which I apply to this blog has started to fail me in my use of it on the rest of my life.

The fact is, I’ve had to resort to it more than I’m comfortable with recently. I’ve gone and taken too much on again, just like last year when I put on 5 plays in three months and subsequently had a complete and utter meltdown. No surprise there.  For a self-described lazy person who likes nothing more than eating Nutella on toast in bed while watching New Girl, I have an uncanny knack on stressing myself out beyond health and sanity.

So here’s the rundown…

• I tutor a 12-year old boy in German once a week,
• I work one shift in my college bar every week,
• I take photos for a student newspaper every Wednesday,
• I am the Domestic and Accommodations Officer in College,
• I am on a long-term photography contract for my College which takes time out of my week each week,
• I am on the committee for the Turl Streets Arts Festival and its behemoth of a Closing Party,
• I am a research assistant on a ten-hour-a-week historical linguistics project (so exciting!).

Oh yeah, and then there’s that essay-a-week (plus busy work like translations) degree I do on the side. I’m also writing an article about Norway for a student travel magazine, and am the lead tenant in my leaking, creaking, rotting, crumbling rented student-house which means I spend a good hour each week on the phone with maintenance men and my landlord.

TOO MUCH.

ARGH.

So why is the photo for this week a crappy camera-phone snapshot of a train station? Because last weekend I packed up my netbook and a couple of books about expressionism, and hopped on the twenty-minute train home. I met up with my Mum for a much-needed catch-up, I hung out at home with my awesome brother and dad, I read a lot about the expressionists and ended up having a little cry about their failed dreams (overreact, much?) before being bundled into bed by my mother.

A break is exactly what I needed, and the essay I wrote ended up being one which I am immensely proud of. I remembered that weekend the reason that I'm here: my degree. I think you’ll struggle to find someone who has made such an about turn on their degree choice as I have: from reluctantly dragging myself here to study German, when I really wanted to learn about Ibsen and Strindberg (still do, always will), to now being in love with German literature as much as Scandinavian. And, when I get a few hours to devote to it, I am happy and at peace.

I know the peace is there, then, I just have to make time for it.

I hope you find your peace.

/4/ A world of contrast

Two things stick out to me in the past week.

On Friday night, College had a bop (a drunken dress up party in the college bar) in which I worked behind the bar and served my increasingly drunk  friends and classmates so much alcohol that someone decided to smash a fire alarm later on that night, meaning that I finished my shift by trying to keep 300 inebriated and tired students in the chapel while the fire brigade came to make sure it was a false alarm.

On Sunday I hopped on a two-hour coach to IKEA, where I met up with a friend from school and spent the day browsing sofas and eating Swedish food before chilling out in a weird and zombie-like Milton Keynes pub (do not go to Milton Keynes). We were the outsiders. They were the locals. It was made very clear. In fact, we were asked to leave…

The first, resolutely Oxford: hectic, absurdist, furiously intense, dramatic, claustrophobic and insanely fun.

The second, pure escapism: in a town not linked to anything I know, in a small Swedish oasis (if that’s the right word for IKEA – it is if you ask me), with a friend of almost ten years and more time than we knew what to do with.

I’m starting to realise that I need both. I need the rush of Oxford life, I need that feeling of walking through 800-year-old buildings and being able to greet every face I see, of having plans every evening, of missing deadlines and drinking wine and living in the most beautiful town I know with the craziest people I’ve ever met.

But I also need that balance of nothingness, relaxation, no responsibility, the familiarity of friends so old you don’t need to be anything but yourself around them.

With just the one or the other I would shatter or rot. But with both, right now, it’s pretty good.

/3/ snow days

Choosing a photo for the third week of January, and the first of term, was not difficult. I think this is definitely one of those situations where a picture says a thousand words (is that the expression?)

I love snow to the moon and back, just as you’d expect an enthusiastic 6-year-old Scottish German who was amputated from the Alps and brought to conventionally paradisaic Florida where the snow is made of deep-frozen chemicals and newspaper shreds to do. 

Not that you have to be a child of the mountains to love snow! The students of Oxford came alive last Friday morning when we awoke to a city clad in powdered virginal silks.  Festooned with scarves and gloves, ski jackets and snow-boots (or, for the more profoundly English, a pair of Hunters), we made our way into the centre. Bedraggled and mummified on foot, or tentatively reckless on bike, a procession of people skidded and tripped and trudged along feeling simultaneously blessed and inconvenienced. Good-natured grumps watched over-excited and rather anticlimactic snowball fights (not enough snow to built up a respectable artillery) between their classmates, while others sat behind panes of century-old glass with a hot chocolate and a dash of rum and admired the majesty of Oxford in the snow

Well, I tried to paint a picture with  words, didn’t I? A bit twee and contrived to be sure, but perhaps some photos of  my friend Ed and I frolicking  in the snow (yes, we literally frolicked) will do a better job than I: