Career Ideas

Now that I can see again, and haven't (yet) repeated the weekend's eye incident, I've been spending a lot of time trying to start a 3000-word essay on the French Revolution. It's not a particularly exciting essay, but it's either that or doing real revision, which is infinitely worse.

Robespierre. It's his fault I have to write an essay.

Occasionally, to put off doing the essay, I've been looking at possible job options. I graduate in two months' time; real-life is creeping steadily closer. My career ideas, however, have been getting increasingly far-fetched and ridiculous. In the past couple of months, I have considered the following:

• Astronaut
• Crocodile sanctuary-man
• Café owner in South America
• Farmer (ploughing looks fun)
• Author
• Postman (of a new, yet-to-be-made Royal Mail competitor)
• Fighter pilot (but not a killing one. A friendly one)
• Lock-keeper

A decent amount of variation, I think, although I'm not sure of the salary of some of them. I can't imagine being a lock-keeper pays particularly well, for instance. However, if I combined it with being an author, while farming a patch of watercress in the lock, for I could probably make a reasonable living.

On another, completely-unrelated note, there was a nice sunset over Reading a couple of days ago. One that deserved being photographed, I reckoned. Here it is:

Reading at sunset (massive amounts of crime not pictured).

Now, enough procrastination. Back to the essay. Otherwise I'll never be able to keep that lock.

.

Eye Issues

A normal Sunday for me usually involves standing at the till in a large department store, bleeping and bagging the various bits and pieces that people deem it necessary to buy.

This is the shop that I work in. That is not me. (photo from Ceeko's Flickr)

Today was meant to be a normal Sunday, until I climbed out of the shower, and started to get dressed. When it came to putting on deodorant, I picked it up, pressed the little button at the top. Nothing came out. Still bleary-eyed and half-asleep, I adjusted the nozzle. Again, nothing came out. I then tried to adjust it again, when it suddenly decided to blast a substantial amount of Sure For Men™ directly into my left eye. I yelped, and frantically splashed water into my eye to try to stop the stinging. It then dawned on me that it might be quite dangerous to have an eye full of deodorant, so I picked up the aerosol can, and tried to read the tiny print on the side. At that point, my right eye decided that stinging looked fun, and had a go too, forcing me to jam my eyes shut, and thus rendering me temporarily blind, and unsure of whether it would become a permanent thing.

Eventually, I began to be able to see again, and my eyes stopped stinging. I left for work, and walked there fairly uneventfully. However, when I arrived at the aforementioned large department store, it turned out the air conditioning was on. A few minutes after taking my perch behind the till, my eye started to cry. It didn't just start to water, or just begin to well up. Oh no, my tear duct decided that the perfect time to irrigate my eye was just when a customer was coming to the till. And while it was at it, the tear duct apprently decided that my entire face could do with a clean, and dutifully provided enough tears to do so.

The culprit.

After attempting to stem the flow with various things from the medical box, which should probably have been thrown out in 1987, I decided to attempt the trek to the 'eye casualty' at the local hospital. Normally a fairly simple walk, but with one eye out-of-action, a surprisingly difficult one. After meandering my way across Reading, and arriving at the hospital, I found a map that explained various departments and wards of the hospital. As some kind of joke, the label for the eye clinic seemed to be in the smallest font ever. After finding it, and  after a short wait, I saw a doctor, who knowingly nodded when I explained what I'd done, then proceeded to poke around in my eyes, testing them with litmus paper, weird lights and cleaning solution, before prescribing some eye drops and advising me that the dryness is going to last for last a few days. I'm now sitting on the sofa, applying eye drops every few minutes, and scowling at the deodorant can on the floor, where it can stay for a while, as far as I'm concerned.

Basically, I wouldn't recommend spraying deodorant in your own face. Although I imagine my eye now smells excellent. And it certainly won't sweat any time soon.

Je suis dans la bibliotheque.

So, the Easter break is already here. Unfortunately it won't be a break at all. In the space of three weeks in May, I'll be spending a good few hours sitting in various buldings around campus, and determining the direction of the rest of my life with a few badly-written essays.

Most of my waking hours are going to be spent in this building:

Five floors. 1.2 million books. Nowhere near enough plug sockets.

The trouble is, just because i'm in the library doesn't mean I'm actually doing anything useful. Last week I spent at least an hour poring over a map from 1939, simply to see if I could find my house. I couldn't. And just yesterday I spent the majority of the morning looking out of the window, watching people's reactions upon finding out the cash machine had run out of money. Most seemed to just walk away; one man decided the money was probably hiding somehwere, and proceeded to look around the corner before returning and peering at the screen.

Another highlight of a 'revision' day last week was when this decided to fly over:

It's an airship. I think.

Obviously, it wouldn't suffice to simply look at it, then get back to work. Oh no, I had to take a photo, wonder what the difference between an airship and a blimp is,research it, look at how much they cost to run, watch videos of blimps being inflated, then wonder what the French word for 'blimp' is. All while I was meant to be writing an essay on constitutional reform.

It's going to be a long time until Easter...

Reading Half Marathon.

I’ve realised I haven’t posted anything on here for ages. I seemed to make a grand re-appearance, and then promptly forgot to write anything else. But now I’m back again, possibly to do precisely the same thing again. We’ll see.

This morning I wandered up to campus at 10am to cheer on a couple of friends, James and Eve, who were running in the Reading Half Marathon. A group of us found some convenient railings, and stood there waiting for the masses of people to start sprinting past. 

Eventually, a car drove past, being chased by a man in a wheelchair who was going far faster than is probably allowed. A few minutes later, a couple of police motorbikes came into view, followed by four Kenyan men who seemed to be taking the whole thing very seriously (it worked – apparently they took the top four places). Finally, the hoards of people arrived, in a variety of guises. Batman was among the first to pass, with Spiderman, Superman and other assorted superheroes following him. Also running were a Lucozade bottle, a fish, a chip, Spongebob Squarepants, a variety of insects, and a camel. Oh, and there was a banana. There’s always a banana.

The Lucozade bottle, happily running along. (Photo from Toffee Raspberry on Flickr)

Our friends did come running past, both so fast that we almost missed them. Surprisingly, they didn’t want to stop and chat...

After the 17,000 runners had passed, and I couldn’t find any further excuses, I went back to my second home, the University Library. Six-thousand words of essay are due in on this coming Friday, and they’re not going to write themselves. Trust me; I tried that with the last one.

I'm back!

And so the blog returns. You may have noticed that the title has changed. That’s mainly due to the fact that I’m no longer in Nantes. Rather than abandoning this blog, and leaving it in a corner of the internet to gather dust, I decided it’d be nicer to keep it going. 

So, quite a bit has changed since I last posted on here. Here is a brief summary of what the past few months have held:

• I returned to England
• I returned to Reading
• I found a flat in Reading
• I got a weekend job at John Lewis.
• I started the last year of my degree.
• I started my dissertation.
• I finished my dissertation.
• Christmas presents were wrapped.
• Autumn Term ended.
• I went to Sweden.
• I returned to England
• Spring term began.

There we go, now you’re all up to speed on everything. There probably were some other things that happened, but that’ll do. Future posts will hopefully be more exciting than this one, but I felt the six-month absence needed to be explained! I'll leave you with some recent photographs:

The fountain in Forbury Garden, Reading. It was cold.

Completed dissertation!

View across a snowy Reading campus.