End of the slog

When I came back to London on April 3rd and I not only had revision and exams in front of me, but three essays to write before that even started, it felt like standing at the bottom of a mountain looking up and thinking it’d be impossible to get up there without a few scrapes and bumps. It was a total blind-faith-in-self exercise, because I didn’t know how it was all going to get done, just that it would have to one way or another. Well, now I’m up there, getting drunk and dancing a jig in the log cabin at the summit. It feels great. I’ve looked forward to this week for – literally – around two and a half years, and now it’s finally here I am so happy I can barely even think.

I started reading a book yesterday, Het Diner by Herman Koch. It’s in Dutch, but it’s a pleasure to read. I can’t describe how nice it is to pick up a book and read it because I want to, not because I have to. I can put it down and pick it up whenever I feel like it, because I haven’t got to read it by a specific date or discuss it or have any serious thoughts about it. I think this could be the start of a long overdue relationship between me and reading for pleasure.

After I get back from the Netherlands on Wednesday night I will have another week and a half to enjoy myself down in London, and then on the 13th will be heading back up to Nottingham for my final stint (hopefully) at exam marking. Unfortunately, the first day of the job is the day after my birthday… ah well. I can more than make up for that in the meantime.

Free as a bird!

I’m so happyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Now I’ve just got to wait for the results…

aaaaaaahhhhhh!

ONE. MORE. DAY. In eighteen hours it’ll all be over.

Grimmelshausen exam this morning. It went neither brilliantly nor awfully, but again I came out feeling satisfied with it. Perhaps it’s just because I’m aiming so low: it’d have to go really seriously bad for me to actually worry about it dragging my average down, so as long as I avoid disaster in each exam, I should be okay. And although I am notoriously incapable of predicting how well I’ve done in exams, I don’t realistically think I could have done any better with the mood I’m in and the inability to revise that I’m experiencing.

Anyway, in other news, I’ve got an interview in the Netherlands next Wednesday morning for a position as a junior translator at an agency in a small town called Zeist, near the city of Utrecht. Zeist, incidentally, was the place I did the language course two years ago, and the place seems to have some kind of magnetic pull on me ever since. It’s bizarre: a bit like going repeatedly to Market Harborough for whatever reason. I was originally due to go out to Nederland tomorrow afternoon, but for various reasons I’ve decided not to, chief among them the fact that I’m so exhausted at the moment I can barely even think about picking up a book to revise, let alone embarking on a seven-hour Eurostar-and-Intercity trek when I could just come home and sleep for days, which is how I currently plan to celebrate the end of my days as a student.

Totally didn’t know what language to converse in when I phoned the woman up at this agency I’m going to next Wednesday: she’s German, I’ve been corresponding with the third-party agency until now in English, her staff are mostly Dutch, and the job would be translating German and Dutch texts into English. Obviously, my preference would’ve been to do it all in English, then in German, and (because it is my weakest language) Dutch would’ve been my least-ideal language of choice. Anyway, she picked up the phone and did her usual Dutch-telephone-greeting and after that I had little choice but to continue the conversation in Dutch. It would’ve sounded pretty silly, after all, to phone up to discuss an interview for a position as a translator and then have to say “is it okay if we talk in English?”

Right. Expressionism. Film. Leni Riefenstahl. Nazis. Spectacle. Documentary? Weimar. Weimarrrrrgh.

The future

Two exams in the next 45 hours, argh.

Almost there

Exam in National Identity on Thursday. I think it went okay, not amazing, but probably as well as I needed to do. So that’s four exams out of six, all of which seemed to go alright. I felt satisfied with what I wrote in all of them in any case, so if the results are on the low side, it won’t feel so gutting.

Although I did panic when I turned the paper over and the questions were structurally quite different to what I had expected. It was one of those “oh no, I can’t answer any of these” moments. But once I started writing it seemed to fall into place for both of the answers, so I came out of the exam feeling okay. Watching most of the other people coming out and celebrating finishing their final exam was a bit galling, though. Finishing on May 27th is unusually late for UCL – in other years I’m usually finished by around the 15th. I thought finishing late would be beneficial, that it would give me more time to structure my revision and space out my work. In the event, it’s just given me more time to do nothing and feel bad about it.

Four more days, two more exams (Grimmelshausen on Tuesday and Film on Wednesday), and then freedom…

Stephen Fry

Whenever I need to reassure myself that I am not completely mad and that I am not just wrong in all my political beliefs, I shall from now on just watch this video a couple of times and be comforted that someone else in the world is eloquent enough to translate the pure rage in my mind into convincing and eloquent sentences.

The best thing anyone ever said

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”
- Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, 1830

Breaking news

Today I developed a New Goal in Life. It is called Ridding Myself of my British Citizenship and I plan to start work on it immediately.

Now I just have to decide whether I want to be an American, a German or a Nederlander.

Ich bin vom Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt

I do not care about MPs’ expenses
I do not care about the Gurkhas
And I really especially do not care nor do I want to hear any more about the credit crunch

Translation exam today! Three hours long and I only left fifteen minutes early. It went, I think, rather well, considering that my revision involved watching the entire third series of Peep Show and listening to some Marlene Dietrich songs on my iPod on the way to the exam. A few weird words came up but I was able to guess at most of them and it turned out about half my guesses were right when I checked afterwards.

I’m back in Nottingham for a while to recuperate. I have three more exams, on the 21st, 26th and 27th, so I’m going to take it easy up here for a few days and do nothing at all without feeling bad about it.