Four Headings and Approval

Departure in less than a week, too many important tasks remain incomplete, and there's not enough time to do them. Lack of preparation now reaching chronic and totally inadvisable levels:

1) HEALTH. I'm meant to have a medical so I can opt into the university health insurance plan. Instead of organising this months ago I waited until this week, concomitantly forgetting that I'm still registered with a GP in Oxford, the form is ridiculously complex, and there's a pretty steep cost (£100+) for elective medicals. So I'm going to do this in Budapest, or just throw myself on the mercy of EHIC and hope any accident in my first week is a massive one (fall out of window, hit by car, mauled by boar) rather than a mild but persistent migraine.

2) ORGANISATION. I've been in the process of cleaning my bedroom for a full week now. This has meant binning undergrad offer letters and eye prescriptions that date from 2007, shredding five years worth of bank statements, and trying to cram the books and clothes bought in London into every remaining corner of my room. On the plus side, I have found my National Insurance card, which I thought was lost to the world, and bedroom drawers and cupboards now open without spewing forth a pile of hastily shoved miscellanea.

3) PACKING. A big suitcase is sitting by my bed. It contains a single penny. This is a Thursday night job.

4) LEARNING. Despite telling myself I would use this summer to read, read, read, it has slipped past in holidaying, sleeping, drinking. I'm looking guiltily at an introductory textbook to IR and worrying that reading pages 1-26 does not count as sufficient background knowledge for an MA degree. I can try to sidetrack every lecture into discussing veiled Anglo-German conflicts in interwar Tanzania, but this may not be a failproof plan.

THE GOOD NEWS
I have figuratively smashed the dentist ("hello", 60 second check-up, "see you in a year"), bought a satchel, had a rather brutal and unflattering haircut. And I came second in the tenpin bowling today. And second in quasar. Always the bridesmaid...

Distillation

I'm just back from a week splashing around Cornwall, returning with nothing more than moderate sunburn and five minor surfing-related injuries (caused exclusively by my own incompetence). Despite this, it was a very nice holiday: packed full of swimming, running, sleeping, drinking, reading, surfing, eating, exploring. Tough life.

So now the countdown begins. I'm a student once more. And I'm staring at a roomful of books and clothes accumulated over the past few years, and yet again wondering how to magically sift it down into a 20kg baggage allowance. Obviously this will be impossible, and only partly because I'm totally awful when it comes to packing. I postpone and delay and procrastinate and avoid it entirely, and then finally throw some stuff in a bag about an hour before my flight. I fully expect to arrive in Budapest with three socks, some worthless Latvian coins, and a May 2005 copy of National Geographic.

But it will be fine: wherever I go, things tend to migrate out after me. Various visitors will have some space in their luggage, and packages will arrive in the post, and I'll hopefully have to nip to London once or twice to make some job interviews - (cue military-style logistical operation to rendezvous with my missing winter coat in Watford). Chances are I'll have got most of the things I need by June... and will then start worrying about getting it home again. I guess this problem is magnified for students travelling from further afield, so I won't complain too much.

At some point my bedroom at home will need to be blitzed, and return to its primary function as a pleasant place for sleeping on trips home, rather than its current incarnation as a storage bunker with a bed hidden away in one corner. But hopefully my mum doesn't put her head round the door anytime soon, and that can become a task for 2014... 

I need to get a big flat!

Blog: Return of the Blog

After perusing the world wide web for many weeks, I slowly came to the conclusion it wasn't quite full. No. What the internet really needed was a semi-incoherent study-abroad blog from an angsty twenty-something trying to dodge the onset of real life. Something it has never seen before. But who could be self-aggrandizing enough to assume such a momentous task?

Then, a few days ago, came a moment of realisation...

"Bloody hell!" I bellowed loudly, startling several other shoppers in the Tesco checkout queue. "I fit that description perfectly. If I could get such a thing moving, I'll have completed the internet."*

So here we go again. I'm resurrecting that lucrative "Somewhere Near ... / Ten Months in ...." blogging format, only slightly concerned that I haven't done anything too noteworthy since the I last ran away from the UK. In this time, Louise Mensch has written for every major British newspaper, been on Question Time and HIGNFY, founded a bizarre alternative to Twitter, closed down a bizarre alternative to Twitter, got involved in public spats with both Nadine Dorries AND Luke Bozier, quit a job in Parliament, and run off to New York with the manager of Metallica. 

Meanwhile I spent far too long completing an abstract sketch of an elephant.

But now I'm getting ready to depart for a year-long MA course, to study International Relations at the Central European University in Budapest. It looks like a fascinating and studious year on paper, but could quite plausibly mutate into a surreal phantasmal haze fuelled by bathhouse fumes and cheap beer. (I hope so).
 
I'm not entirely sure how or why I ended up applying there – I vaguely remember stumbling across the website in December and it seemed fairly impressive. The university received a massive endowment when it was established in 1991, so is (hopefully!) well resourced with lecturers and books and facilities. After a few days of day-dreaming I sent off an application and forgot about it for a few months – especially as I started receiving a stack of acknowledgements from other perfectly respectable universities in lovely local cities: I could yet be happily partying in Manchester or punting in Cambridge before the end of August. 

But this option started to grow on me; taking the less predictable track seemed both exciting and suitably unusual, and CEU has a very diverse student body, an interesting course, and a healthy reputation in IR circles. I accepted the place quite quickly, any twinge of hesitation disappearing when the Tab politics faculty sent through a nine-page preparatory reading list. My boat race loyalties remain (impassively) dark blue for now.

So decision made. And the blog is back, for the benefit of friends, family, acquaintances, and myself. I'll try to keep it relatively complete and up-to-date, as I still enjoy reading back and reminiscing through my Maldives scribblings. Keeping a blog is probably the most productive thing I did out there, and it's been nice to have that record, even if it did end quite abruptly. And people were very kind about those efforts, to the extent blogging will soon be listed as a skill/hobby on my CV. The others are making pad thai and trying to forge those rubber loyalty card stamps so I can get free coffee in Caffe Nero…

On to CEU in a few weeks then. I’m hitting the road first, which is why this post has been done so uncharacteristically early. Leaving London this weekend, holidaying in Cornwall, zooming around Shropshire, and then hopping over to Budapest towards the end of August.  


* Didn't actually happen.