emily at beSottied.com

Hello hello hello, and welcome to the website of a fully-fledged, card-carrying university student, mwahahahaha!

Earlier, I briefly mentioned my starting University. Basically, my employer has agreed to fund an Honours degree course in Communication and Culture at York St John University. I’m still a full-time worker, and am now a part-time, mature student. This week is Welcome Week for new students, so I’m travelling down to York every day. It’s about 55 miles away on a little train, which means I get 50 minutes of this on the way there:

And 50 minutes of this on the way back:

I’m in York every day this week but, from next week, I’ll only have to go down on Tuesdays to go to lectures etc. Quite what the ‘etc’ is, I don’t quite know (but I’ll most likely be screeching about it on here once I find out!).

The only problem is that all of the freshers I’ve seen are 18-year-old whippersnappers. I feel so old! I’m only 22, but the five years between an 18 year-old who’s just left college and a 22 year old who’s been there, done that and has been working for years seems to make a lot of difference. Hopefully, once everyone’s settled and I’ve seen a few more mature students, I’ll feel a bit better about it all.

As for other enjoyable goings-on, I met Arron* in Leeds this weekend. Leeds is approximately 2 hours from London by train (for him) and 1.5 hours by car (for me and the bean) so it seemed like a logical, if slightly odd, destination. In reality, the London King’s Cross train ended up sitting outside the station for about 3 hours (OK, it was more like 25 minutes) before it finally pulled in and disgorged squawking Hens, strutting Stags and one ever-so-slightly fed up Arron onto the platform.

We had a very jolly weekend where I managed to make a not-too-huge fool of myself. I did accidentally elbow him in the face once or twice, break a glass against the hotel room wall (we were in the eaves, the walls were slanty!), and squeal like a pig when a balloon popped in the restaurant on Saturday night, but for me, that’s quite good going!

Our next jaunt is in the second week in October. I’m off to London again and hope to continue my good work of remaining standing in all public places, and not setting fire to stuff. I’ll let you know how it goes =)

Things I Have Learned This Week

• The basics of the offside rule. Arron did a brilliant job of teaching me this on Sunday, and I did manage to remember it for about 12 hours before totally forgetting it. Laura came over last night and gave me another lesson to set me straight. Thank you, dear football experts
• Train station catering is frighteningly expensive, and not that tasty
• That it is very, very nice to receive a surprise bouquet from a super-dooper young man (enter gratuitous flower-photo…)

*Arron, I know I need to add you on to The Cast, I do! I haven’t forgotten x

What ho, dear readers!

I’m not going to lie to you, I have absolutely no good reason to explain my month-long absence from the tinterwebs. This month, my online moments have mostly been spent looking at train timetables and poking folk on Facebook.

I have had a few adventures of late, though. In my last post I very casually mentioned someone named Arron, a very nice boy from London who I met on holiday in Faliraki. We’ve been talking (if you can call it that) on Facebook since Laura and I got home at the end of July, and so when I happened to be attending a work event in London last week we decided to have a mini reunion.

I hadn’t been to London in years, and took advantage of an unexpectedly sunny day to walk from the meeting rooms in Lambeth, south of the river, to Westminster, where Arron works. I stopped to take a quick picture of the London Eye, knowing that as a local, Arron wouldn’t stand for any of that touristy nonsense.

The purple van you can see at the left-hand-side of the photo thrilled me greatly:

I strolled along the Embankment (I think) to meet Arron at his building in Whitehall (I’m going to skip over that part, if you’re reading this Arron, as I’m not sure if I’ll be dropping you in it…). After a brilliant greeting which I’ll keep to myself, we went for a jaunt over the Thames and had a merry spin on the London Eye. They confiscated my knitting needles!

Neither of us had been on the London Eye before, and the lovely bright evening was definitely a bonus.

The rest of the evening was spent going for dinner and drinks, and riding the tube back to King’s Cross in time for me to streak (as in on a train, not actually naked) up the East Coast mainline towards home.

You’ll hopefully be happy to hear that Arron and I do plan to see each other again very soon. Who would ever have thought something good could come out of Faliraki?!

(I do have knitting updates too, by the way. I’ve also had a spot of concussion, and I’m going to university this year. I’ll write about all of that in more detail next time, which hopefully won’t be a month away!)