Well it has been a strange few weeks.  After St. David’s Day, I will have handed in half of my term’s coursework.  That will be a good day.  So what has been happening recently?  Quite a few things, actually.

After a hellish appointment with an endicrinologist at my local hospital, who went against everything that my Cambridge-trained, very meh but top-of-his-field competent endocrinologist, I felt pretty down.  It’s nothing new, but she essentially blew me off because she had no interest/sympathy to treat me.  I was discharged from her care, even though the senior consultant endocrinologist in Cambridge thought I needed further treatment.  Actually, she was harsh.  Medically, she failed me and I left the appoitment in tears.  When I explained this to my Very Awesome GP, she apologised profusely and said that even if she had to get me back on the books of the old consultant, she would get something happening for me.  But I am not holding my breath.

Degrees at my university, particularly in the arts, are very focused on group work.  I will come out and say that, whilst I do not love group work, I am happy enough to do it well and work together because I can see the need to get a good mark at the end of it.  It seems many eighteen year olds, do not.  It has been a bit of a nightmare when group work has been assigned as I am often the only one who wants to get it done.  The more I think about it, the more group work seems to be a bit of a get-out clause for the university as for every module I have, we are expected to form ‘study groups’ to share ideas before the seminars.  Yet many of these groups don’t function very well and serve to allow those people who haven’t done the work to take everyone else’s ideas and use them in class.  Hmmm.

I think I am on the wrong degree.  I thought this might’ve been the case in my first few weeks – I am now pretty sure I am a very square peg trying to fit into a very round hole.  I cannot do anything about it, so I will continue on this degree and work my hardest to make sure that I get a good degree at the end of it.  I cannot say that I would feel better doing a non-humanities degree, because I am quite left-field and creative, which is what I like about English, but there is something awfully reassuring to know that you can reach the dizzying heights of full-marks on a piece of work if you know your facts.  Our marks are unofficially ‘capped’ at 75, which makes everyone feel like a failure.

I have been listening to Snow Patrol’s Fallen Empires LP, Depeche Mode and the Thirteen Senses back-catalogue.  A lot.  A lot.

I don’t sleep well here.  It’s a fact: I cannot get a decent night’s sleep.  I wake up in the morning and sometimes I am unable to move out of bed.  At night, however, I am quite active and often awake until 2am. It doesn’t help that one of my flatmates plays loud music to cover his carnal-nocturnal endeavours.  Which means subsequently…

I need a lot of supermarket own-brand foul-tasting diet caffeine drink to get me through the day.  It doesn’t give me wings though.

I love most of my flatmates to pieces.

I have to choose my second-year modules and trying to pick between them is a nightmare.  I have whittled them down to a reasonable number, but I am still trying to work out how much I want to do the one I really enjoy (creative writing) which doesn’t look as good on a CV compared to modules on Shakespeare or Chaucer (sigh, at least I know I will get a good teaching ratio in Chaucer as no one seems to want to do it by choice!)…

I cannot wait for The Hunger Games to be released in the cinema – if you haven’t read the books, they are amazing and far more intellectual than their under-sixteens label suggests.  You should read, they are gripping.

I have been both reading and writing a lot of poetry recently.  It has been one of the most transformative aspects of my course so far, I think, and the information I have now (like the drill of times tables at school), I will probably remember for the rest of my life.  Go on, ask me about sonnets and I’ll wow you with my knowledge ;-)