A few weeks ago I met up with my housemates from last year in London for a little reunion, as we hadn't seen each other since leaving Durham just after graduation in June. Since we now live fairly spread out across the country and are doing very different things, it's difficult to find a time and place to see each other so it was lovely to catch up. It was also really nice to explore a little bit of London, as even though I now only live an hour away the only place I can say I'm truly familiar with is the inside of King's Cross and St Pancras stations! I wanted to capture the memory of this little day out so voila, a blog post. Enjoy the unusually high quality photos, courtesy of Ashleigh and her fancy camera!

After a quick initial catch-up (and coffee) at the train station our first stop was Camden market, where we stopped for (yet more) coffee at a cafe which I've forgotten the name of but it was very cute and rustic, if slightly overpriced.

Then we spent a couple of hours wandering around all the stalls and shops and taking in the sights, including this really cool huge sticker wall. I think everyone bought something except me as surprisingly I just didn't see anything that captured my attention (and that was also in my budget). After some deliberation over where to go for lunch we settled on Rudy's Dirty Vegan Diner which does a range of burgers, hot dogs, mac n cheese etc - basically vegan junk food and it was incredible! I got the dirty burger and then felt extremely full for the 6 or so hours (which is an achievement for me as I tend to get hungry really quickly).

As we digested we headed back to the tube - via Urban Outfitters because why not. We then battled the crowds of Saturday afternoon shoppers as we made our way along Oxford Street, stopping in a few shops including Zara and the Lush flagship store. Next was a quick stop at a bubble tea place - where I made the terrible choice of kiwi and tapioca, a combination I do not advise - before we ended up on Carnaby Street for more shopping.

At this point the tiredness was beginning to hit and the sun was starting to set, so we decided to give our feet a rest and catch the last rays of daylight during golden hour in Regent's Park. With the warmth of the day gone the evening turned chilly, and we headed back to the train station with the intention of having some dinner before we left. After a few false starts (it can be a legitimate struggle to find any viable vegetarian/vegan food options without doing your research beforehand) we eventually located a Wagamama's and actually sat outside under some heaters as the night fell properly. In a departure from tradition I didn't get my usual but instead went for something ever so slightly different which to be honest will probably become my usual now.

With some time left before we needed to part, we regrouped in Spoons for warmth and drinks and said our goodbyes and caught our respective trains and coaches. Although I was exhausted from all the walking we did it was a lovely day out and so great to catch up with some of my best pals - here's to future reunions, wherever they might be!

It's Saturday evening and for some reason I'm in the mood to write a long reflective blog post about my first few weeks at university. Well, that's kind of a lie because I wrote quite a few half-posts at various points over the last month that were more or less a stream of consciousness - so in this post I'm going to gather them all together and kind of rewrite them into something coherent.

The first topic on my mental checklist is Freshers' Week. Not living on campus it pretty much passed me by, although I did attend some academic induction events and spent some time leeching off the uni WiFi while holed up in the library. I suppose it's an age thing, but the whole freshers experience has absolutely no appeal to me anymore (if it ever did). I really wish there was less pressure to have an absolutely amazing time during your first few days at university. Despite living in college for my own 'proper' freshers experience with ready-made socialising opportunities and the ease of making friends that that provides, I remember feeling extremely overwhelmed by the whole change, and frankly the last thing I wanted to do was go out clubbing with a brand new group of people I had just met. Of course I realise that freshers is such a huge part of the UK uni experience, but in general I think more needs to be done to cater to those who - for whatever reason - don't want to go out every night for a week.

Another point I wanted to touch on is homesickness. Homesickness is something which bothered me less and less as my undergraduate degree wore on, I suppose just thanks to having made friends and eventually feeling totally at home in Durham. It's the kind of place which is so friendly and small that it really didn't take long. Having said that, I soon realised that I needed a couple of days to adjust to coming back to uni at the beginning of every term, just to get over the stress and anxiety provoked by the long journey and the jarring shift in circumstances. For some reason I didn't expect to feel homesick when I got to Sussex. It just never crossed my mind that, as a Masters student in my fourth consecutive year of university, I might miss home to a greater extent just after going to a brand new university. I told myself that I wasn't a fresher anymore, and not even an undergraduate, that I knew how this university thing worked, I had it down. But I didn't factor in that I would miss Durham quite so much. It's weird that this time my homesickness is directed almost entirely at Durham, rather than my actual home and family.

So how's my course and general life actually going? Well, I only have six contact hours per week and five of them are on one day, so I have a really intense day of workshops once a week and then the rest of the week is basically just me at home reading to prepare for the next week's classes. This means that my week is quite unbalanced, because it feels like I’m always working towards one big day and counting down the time I have left to do the work before it comes round again.

I do like having whole free days because it lets me get a lot done, however because I tend to work from home rather than going to the library it can get quite isolating sometimes - on certain days the only conversation I’ll have is with my housemates if I happen to be making dinner at the same time as them. On one hand this does suit me: being an introverted person, my long day of workshops completely drains me so it’s something of a relief when I can just be comfortable and quiet in my house and work away. But I’ve been realising that ultimately it isn't a good balance - while I don’t deal well with a lot of socialising all day every day, I do need some human contact even if it’s just a casual chat or FaceTiming my mum. This is something I’ve had to deal with during my whole university experience, but before I’ve always felt slightly more connected to the people around me - I don’t know if it’s to do with living in a still unfamiliar city or just the whole move from one end of the country to the other. 

It’s not that I’m miserable, it’s about adjusting and I think that process is going to take me longer than I thought and is going to require an active effort on my part rather than simply waiting for things to fall into place. But I have been making an effort to chat to people I meet and establish friendships, and I think those will come to fruition over time.

And that's all I have to say for now - please forgive an utterly self-indulgent post, it's not often I write so much about myself!