Some thoughts about life and other things

It’s about 7pm, and I’m walking home from the library. I’ve had a knot in the pit of my stomach since I looked out the window when I finished my work and realised it was dark. I am alone. I hear a man’s voice behind me and my breath catches in my throat. He passes by me. I see a man standing outside a door start walking as I’m passing him. I start walking faster. I can feel my heart beating. This is the reality of being a woman. It has been ingrained in me since I was 12 years old and my dad told me to take the dog with me when I was walking to my village shop for the first time by myself. I am constantly aware of my own frailty. I am constantly aware that in the dark, alone, I am unsafe. I have been conditioned to believe that I must be hyper vigilant, that I am responsible for what happens to me at the hands of men. You might say that nothing’s going to happen to me, that my fears are in my head. Tell that to my friend who was picked up in a taxi and taken back home for

It’s an odd benchmark, to judge how far you’ve come by how you feel when watching Lewis. But I was watching a rerun last night and I realised that each shot of the stone streets of Oxford, each panoramic of the Radcliffe camera, made me feel light, happy, proud and nostalgic.   Watching Lewis hasn’t always made me feel like that. I went through some very dark times at Oxford - times I’ve written about on this blog. I used to want to cry when I saw shots of the library, of my college. It was a place I felt alienated from. It was a place that didn’t feel like home anymore. But somehow, yesterday, I rewound a scene which was filmed in my college and watched it over and over with a full heart, thinking ‘that was my home for a while’. I have always been someone who has attached feelings to places. In my first year I lived in a building called Florey which one might describe as having a marmite effect. Some people, my friends included, loved it and thought it was an archite

There is an emptiness to it that I did not anticipate. Or perhaps I did, but I didn't have time to consider it before it happened. I was borne to the inevitable ending by anxiety and stress. I kept waiting for it, wishing for it. It came, and then what? The euphoria can only last so long. The impossibly long list of things to do that I put off with the endlessly repeated phrase 'It can wait' now hovers, encroaching. But still I feel I have no purpose. For weeks, months, my life has been the inside of libraries. I did not think I would miss it so much. I am someone who craves routine. I am someone who has never coped well with change. I went home - I thought it would help. But the walls didn't seem as familiar as they usually do. My bed did not feel like my bed. It has not been harbour for me for so long now. I am no longer an undergraduate, bouncing from home to Oxford and back again. Something has shifted. The house seemed to have shifted too. It felt somehow alien.