Well well well. Long time no see (perhaps even the longest break I have ever taken on this blog?) but here I am again. The last six months have been ridiculously busy, what with multiple important essays in Epiphany term that took all my time and effort, the Easter holidays which weren't really holidays as I spent part of the 5 weeks on a research fieldtrip in Liverpool and the rest of the time writing up the field report from the trip, and then finally exams in Easter term which took over my life for about seven weeks. Phew! Here are some things which have happened since I last blogged:

1. I turned 20! I have a half-finished post in my drafts about my birthday that I wrote in mid-February and never got round to publishing so I might just finish that off, even if it is about half a year late. But yep, I'm now officially no longer a teenager and closer to 30 than 10. Still processing that to be honest...

2. I finished my second year of university! I think I'm going to do a full on 'review' type post about my second year like I did last year, just for my own purposes and if anyone at all is interested in my thoughts on university life. Briefly then, it's fair to say that my second year has been really tough in terms of the effort required (see above) but also so interesting in terms of the work I did and the topics I studied, and I made a lot of really great memories. And to top it all off I got a 1st overall! Second year only counts for 40% of my overall degree mark but with 76% in the bag I think I've made a good start on doing really well.

3. My best friend visited me at uni! It was a fleeting visit for various reasons but it was so lovely to see her and to show her around Durham and introduce her to my uni friends. I definitely had the slightly disturbing sense of two worlds colliding!

4. I went on holiday with some uni friends! Durham has this thing where after exams we have three weeks of nothing where technically we're supposed to stick around but there are no lectures or anything, so way back in January we decided to book flights to Alicante and spend a few days at my family's apartment in that area. It was such a lovely and much needed post-exam getaway, and nice to be back at the apartment as I haven't been there in about three years.

Obviously more things happened but those are the highlights off the top of my head. Another major one was getting an internship with a planning company in the UK which I'll be doing for the whole of July and August, and then coming home for the last month to do my dissertation research. It's going to be a busy summer...

x