She was the roughest, toughest frail

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: Year Two @ T-3 weeks, +/-

When I was +/- 16 years old, a parental unit gave me a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. At the time, I thought this was a rare moment of intuition, in giving me something that would show me journalism wasn't just people in offices writing articles; sometimes, it seemed, the journalist became part of the story, or, in extreme cases, was the story.


Later, I found out that they'd picked it at random, thinking I might like it. Life is like that, sometimes.

So I find myself, on a sunny, blue-skyed autumn morning, contemplating what Thompson called - I believe - The Great Magnet. The idea is that the magnet controls the flow of our lives, and when we travel towards the magnet's attraction, things flow smoothly; if we choose - knowingly or unknowingly - to fight the attractive force of The Great Magnet, we're merely placing rocks in the stream of our lives, futilely trying to break an unbreakable pull.

The last part of that last sentence is a fairly apt summary of this summer. Granted, I didn't expect to find the perfect part-time job that utilised my skills while providing a steady income, but I applied for, oh, say, everything locally, and only received one callback. However, because of this, the garage has never been more organised, the house has 60% less clutter and crap knocking around the place, and I still feel annoyed because I appear to be defying the magnet's flow without even consciously realising it.

This has led to a fairly unique symptom that I've experienced once or twice before; suddenly, nobody responds to any attempts at contact. Emails go unanswered, phone calls too - or fobbed off, which is, curiously, worse; even unsolicited email gets in on the act too, with messages from people I'd quite happily not hear from popping up of a Thursday afternoon, bringing with them dire tidings and annoyance.

It's a fairly unique phenomnenom - and that's a word I can't spell as well as say, right there - and it's always curious when it happens, a kind of electronic susurrus. Suddenly you're on a becalmed, idyllic but irritating island where nothing, apparently, can reach you.

In some ways, it makes a kind of sense when it comes to fellow students, because the summertime is traditionally a way of getting away from everything, and emails serve as an unwelcome reminder of the existence of the place you have to go back to in, oh, say, five months. Which is partly why I didn't start emailing until a month beforehand, to minimise the tension convention of remembering you have to actually, y'know, complete another two years of this thing they call 'study' before you enter the heady world of graduate unemployment.

And if that sounds like a negative assessment, take a look at the world at the moment and you might start to think that everything has a negative assessment.

Still, of course, there are worse things to complain about than people not responding to any means of contact. So... Why worry?