Where is Rowena?: 2015

Mistletoe and Whine: Things I Love and Hate About Christmas

I love Christmas. Andy Williams described it as the most wonderful time of the year and I agree with him. In the wet, windy wasteland that is the Great British winter, Christmas is the red and gold beacon that brightens the dark, cold south-west nights with goodwill and tat in equal measure. It seemed fitting, therefore, that I dedicate a blog post to my favourite things about Christmas before being plunged into the eventless, joyless, sunless black spot that is January–March. However, even I can't maintain an unfaltering level of festive spirit and Christmas cheer, and there are a few aspects of the holiday season that irritate me, so there are also a few things I hate to maintain a necessary equilibrium.

Things I Love

The food

If you're reading this blog you almost certainly know me and there's a pretty strong chance that you're related to me (shout out here to my biggest fans: my mum and my grandma). You will, therefore, know that my favourite thing to do in the entire world is eat and if there was ever a holiday dedicated to doing just that it is Christmas. It's not just the prodigious Christmas Day feast that I enjoy, although that is the juicy glacé cherry atop the huge, hyperglycaemia-inducing cake. It's Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, cooking for visiting family and friends, the endless supply of biscuits, the gourmet cheeses, the well-stocked wine rack, the cakes, the chocolates… What other time of year do we sell calendars that actively encourage daily chocolate consumption? None. Whatever Jesus may have thought of gluttony, for the secular foodie Christmas is a time for seeing how rotund one can become over the course of 5–10 days.

The extravagance

As evidenced by my extensive – at fifteen pairs, one could arguably say excessive – collection of leggings, I very much enjoy indulging in things that I don't need and can't afford. Christmas is the ideal time for this. Normally I would avoid forking out 75 Australian dollars (roughly £42) and having an item of clothing shipped from as far away from the UK as you can get without actually leaving the planet, or at least I would avoid admitting to anybody that this is what I did. My salary is designated for things that keep me alive like food, rent and utilities. Any leftover money is usually pumped into keeping my social life alive, and at the end of the month the scraps are usually so meagre that any notion of Urban Outfitters would be outrageously lavish. Enter Christmas money, which exists purely for pleasure. Pleasure, in my case, is importing shiny fabric from faraway lands or spending £100 on designer ankle boots.

This song

I love this song. I love it with all my soul. It makes me want to prance around my house throwing tinsel and glitter. It is completely impossible for me to listen to this song and be unhappy. If I could listen to it all year round without public ridicule I would. Fun fact: this is also officially the most fun song to play on a kazoo (if you can count what you do to a kazoo as "playing" it).

Perfume adverts are back

Specifically, this one. That stuff could smell of a rubber tyre burning slowly on top of a pile of long-dead rodents and you could still persuade me to buy it by having Gaspard Ulliel advertise it.

Time off work
I love my job but I'm still human. The prospect of ten days off in a row is a welcome prospect to anyone who doesn't work as a professional kitten cuddler. This year is particularly exciting for me as it's my first Christmas since leaving education, which means it's my first Christmas in around seventeen years that won't be ruined by the looming presence of the essays and exam revision that is being neglected in favour of a family Boggle tournament.

Christmas films and TV

This isn't limited to the obvious festive flicks – it's a family tradition chez-Ball to watch the delightful and hilarious A Christmas Story every year – but also includes the not overtly Christmassy things that are shown on TV every year at the end of December. For me, this generally involves a lot of animation as I work my way through everything featuring Wallace and Gromit ever put to screen, Anastasia, the under-appreciated Disney classic The Sword in the Stone which for some reason reminds me of Christmas, and whichever Pixar feature is on the BBC that year (2014 was Monsters Inc.; this year I'm hoping for A Bug's Life).

Things I Hate

Feeling bad because I don't cry at the John Lewis advert

To clarify, I do quite enjoy the John Lewis Christmas adverts, as much as I can enjoy an advert designed to make me part with cash I don't have for things I won't even get to use (whoever said giving is better than receiving clearly only got shitty Christmas presents). I also recently cried while watching Lilo and Stitch in an emotionally fragile state, so my ability to be moved to tears by things that aren't real is certainly not in question. No John Lewis advert has ever reduced to me to tears, or even summoned a stronger emotional response from me than, "Aww, that's quite sweet." Mostly because it's an advert for a shop, not a documentary or a piece of art or a heart-breaking true account or anything one might find on a screen that could usually cause me to well up. The idea of actually going into a John Lewis store during the Christmas rush is more likely to bring me to tears than the advert trying to get me to do just that.

Mince pies

Making mince pies a staple Christmas treat merely encourages the false notion that raisins are acceptable. Don't even think about telling me that mince pies contain currants or sultanas, not raisins, because they're all the same and you know it.

Love motherfucking Actually
At some point in the early 2000s someone paid some of the UK's most likeable actors and Hugh Grant to form half-hearted attractions to each other on-screen. Here's the genius part: it's set in December so look how festive and adorable it all is! Snow! Christmas songs! London! Cute! Yay! Except, no, it's not adorable. It's saccharine and soulless and thoroughly irritating, all of which I could forgive of a by-the-numbers romcom if all of the characters (apart from Martin Freeman and the girl from Gavin and Stacy, whom I like) weren't either completely forgettable or intensely dislikeable. Here is a brief list of things I hate about Love Actually, and I really mean brief because I could rant about how much I hate this godawful piece-of-shit film for hours on end, and often try to but am stopped by friends who are more glad than I to suckle at the poison teat of Richard Curtis.

The fact that Liam Neeson's advice to his ten-year-old kid who is "in love" is not, "Calm down; you are ten."
Keira Knightley's husband's scumbag friend who casually tries to destroy a happily married couple and is rewarded with a kiss instead of told to leave and never come back.
Bad things happen to Emma Thompson which is obviously not OK.
Except they're not actually that bad, certainly not awful enough to write off the marriage without even attempting to salvage it, and we never get to see her and Alan Rickman trying to work it out because EW REALISTIC COUPLES FACING THEIR PROBLEMS LIKE ADULTS GROSS WHO WOULD EVER WANT TO WATCH SOMETHING LIKE THAT MORE CONTRIVED SENTIMENTAL DROSS PLEASE.
Not only does the film insultingly try to convince us that two people who can't even speak to each other have fallen in love to the extent that they want to legally bind themselves together until one of them dies; we're actually expected to celebrate this staggering display of shallowness.
Colin*'s stupid face.
Colin's stupid personality.
God, I hate Colin. I hope one of those hot American girls that the script presents him with as a reward for being an obnoxious, dim-witted misogynist gives him a particularly nasty STD. I would actually watch Love Actually 2 if it featured Colin dying of syphilis.
Bill Nighy is the only person in this "romantic" "comedy" who is actually funny and he's not in it enough.
The idea that Hugh Grant could convincingly play the UK's most important statesman.
Everyone keeps making comments about how enormous Natalie is when she is clearly normal-sized. I can only assume that either the part was originally written for a chunky girl and when one wasn't cast they couldn't be arsed to change the script, or, what I suspect is the more likely option, the director thought that we are so clueless about human anatomy that we could be convinced that Martine McCutcheon is fat.
'All I Want For Christmas is You': the version sung by children that nobody asked for.

This is merely the snippet version of the endless problems I have with this film. If you would like the full, unabridged extended edition, simply suggest that we watch the film together.

*Colin the character, not Colin Firth. I have no problem with Colin Firth, apart from the fact that he agreed to be in Love Actually.

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

travel

Bustin' Out

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

lifestyle

Being an Adult is Annoying

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

Duolingo

Adventures in Duolingo

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

lifestyle

How I spent my final year: staying at home

Credit: Flickr//Curtis Gregory Perry

I have always felt that the 'grass is always greener on the other side' expression rings true in most aspects of life. Having just moved into my first 'professional' let, I have found an area in which it does not. When it comes to moving from a student house to a proper grown-up house, I only realised when I made it over the bridge that the lawn I've been contentedly chewing on for the past three years was actually dry, shrivelled and covered in animal excrement.

Nevertheless, you don't need an immaculate lawn to throw a good garden party and the superiority of my new flat (it's massive and has a balcony) hasn't tarnished the fond memories I have of my final year house. Yes, it was damp. Yes, the furniture was sub-par. Yes, it had a shingly garden instead of a huge, spacious balcony. But there was fun to be had there, which is why I spent so much of my final year refusing to leave it.

Those who left university behind years ago and those who never went in the first place have a habit of describing student houses in a manner that I would generally reserve for the assessment of plague pits, demolition zones or Stevenage. Hyperbolic and hysterical as they may be, there is some truth to these descriptions. As well as their housemates, most students that I know have shared at least one house with some non-humans, including but not limited to: mice, rats, ants, slugs and various species of mould. In my first year halls of residence we also had a visiting squirrel, although this is unusual for flats that aren't on the fourth floor. Damp is par for the course, especially in Bristol where the houses are mostly Victorian and the natural meteorological state is reminiscent of a south-east Asian monsoon but colder and with less chance of spectacular lightning. And more fool any student who expects their furniture to be from anywhere more expensive than Wilko's.

Are students just careless, untidy and generally inclined towards living like they have little to no fear of dysentery? Of course not – or, at least, no more than any other demographic. From experience, your standard of hygiene and tolerance of mess don't change just because you suddenly have a regular salary and no essays to do. I still leave my shoes wherever I kicked them off when I entered the house, still leave the occasional plate next to the sink instead of washing it up immediately and still hoard mugs and glasses in my bedroom like they're a treasured collector's item. No, the difference is certainly not me. The difference is that the landlord of my current flat is aware that the state of his property has an effect on its value and that keeping it in a better condition than 'just about habitable' is in his interest as well as mine.

Student landlords share no such concern. As long as most of the building is still standing, they're fine and you're expected to be, too. When the damp in our final year house became so problematic that mould began to grow on some people's clothes, our landlords took no action whatsoever, despite damp posing a risk to the house as well as their tenants. They merely told us to turn up the heating, to which our response was that if we could afford to have the heating on full blast all day we could also afford to rent a better house – maybe a nice flat in Montpelier with a balcony. It's generally accepted among estate agents and landlords that students don't deserve nice houses because they will just throw up all over them, or throw huge parties where everyone within a five-mile radius is invited round to throw up all over them. Of course, if students had nice houses they might be more inclined to take good care of them, but life is far too short to explain the phrase 'self-fulfilling prophecy' to an estate agent.

My final year house had all the problems listed above and more so it may seem like a strange decision to spend most of my final year in it. There are three major reasons for this. One of them was that, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't particularly mind all the problems while I was actually living there. Obviously having the smell of damp assault your nasal passages every time you enter your home isn't ideal but it was an expected tribulation of Bristol, at least from what I could tell. You come to accept what you're given and that house had nothing to throw at me that my previous Bristol abodes hadn't already, some in greater quantities. It's easy to look back at the place as a shithole now I'm living in a nice, well-maintained flat (did I mention the balcony?) but at the time the house and I managed to coexist in our shared imperfection quite harmoniously.

The second factor was the lack of going out generally associated with being in your final year. This wasn't just because I'd decided that I was too old to pay to go somewhere I didn't like the music, limiting my choices to pubs or a £20 trip to Motion where the good DJs play. Final year is something of a mixed bag, especially when you've returned from a year of extended holiday masquerading as academic enrichment. Seeing old friends, making new ones and enjoying the Bristol nightlife after the frankly horrendous clubs of southern continental Europe were wonderful. Final exams, coursework and the prospect of job-hunting were not. Post-Christmas holidays the nights out start to die down and post-Easter they become non-existent. You might get a pub trip if you have a week-long gap between exams or someone you've been friends with for too long to bail on has a birthday but that's your lot for April and May. Even if you're lucky enough to have a light workload, your friends are probably too busy working to hang out with you. I stayed at home so much because that's what everyone was doing. Call me a slave to the masses if you like; it's a more appealing moniker than 'that girl who kept going to the pub on her own instead of revising and now she has a 3rd'.

The third – and best – reason for staying in a lot was my housemates, who were and continue to be wonderful. Living with people you get on well with can actually be detrimental to your broader social life because you can enjoy yourself without having to step out into the big, scary world of Outside. More frequently than any of us care to admit we ended up bailing on the pub and staying in with Cards Against Humanity and a bottle of half-price Sainsbury's Sauvignon. We weren't hermits, of course, but having some lovely people to share the living room with makes it that bit less tempting to leave it in the evenings. Especially when one of them sits in front of the damp patch so you can pretend it's not there.

So, in spite of the dampness, coldness and general scabbiness of the place, my fourth year house was actually where I ended up spending some of my most enjoyable evenings in the last twelve months. Now I've left and moved into a damp-free, slug-free house with a proper cooker and walls that aren't peeling, I can see the old place more for how it really was but I know I will always look back on it with a strange sort of affection. I think about it a lot when I'm relaxing on my new balcony. Did I mention that my new flat has a balcony?

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

lifestyle

How I spent my final year: Netflix

Credit: Flickr//SaGaR PuRo

Welcome back to my blog. You probably forgot it existed; I don't blame you. So did I for a while. Turns out that revising, essay-writing and crying bitter, bitter tears can take up the best part of nine months.

I am pleased to report that I have passed through the dark tunnel that is final year. I have gained my 2.1 and I will soon put on a black robe and walk on stage to fetch it as my parents and hundreds of people who don't give a shit about me clap. Before I write anything about proper adult life, which I've been told is coming for me whether I like it or not, there are some aspects of my final year of university that took up enough of my time and emotional energy to merit a few paragraphs on the internet. Seeing as I have not updated my blog once in 2015, it seemed an appropriate time for a series of posts about how I spent my final year.

Anyone who knows me will know that a common theme in my life is not doing what I'm supposed to be doing and final year was not the year I turned over a new leaf (despite what I told myself in August 2014). I will be the first to admit that I have wasted a very high proportion of my precious, finite minutes on this earth. The ways in which I choose to do so vary. I learnt to name every UN-recognised country in the world with the help of sporcle.com. I have almost every Sims game ever released. There was the time I spontaneously bought a Bop-It and the time I spent three solid weeks playing Pokemon Blue because I discovered you could download GameBoy emulators onto your computer. After twenty-two years of life, about eighteen of which have been spent faffing about, there is one fact in which I have absolutely no doubt: gaining access to a Netflix subscription was the worst thing I've ever done for my productive life.

Netflix has increased my laziness in two ways. First of all, it has given me more motivation to indulge in the laziest form of time-wasting. At least with playing a game or memorising a pointless list some level of concentration is involved. Video, to me, is by far the easiest medium to consume; in fact, you can consume it without really consuming it. What I call 'watching a video' is, in reality, being vaguely aware of some noises and movement while thinking about something completely different. It entertains me in a way that half-concentrating on reading a book or looking at a picture never could. Those activities require my full attention for me to gain anything from them; I can turn off a half-watched video and feel like I've enjoyed myself. Netflix has given me a huge high-definition library of things to not-quite-focus on. Not only that but I no longer have to deal with the mildly annoying obstacle of sifting through bust link after bust link on streaming websites. It may not sound like much, but every twenty minutes I was forced to choose between completing my important daily tasks and trawling the internet for a working episode of Archer. It was like a little 'you're wasting your life' reminder.

Netflix gives you no such reminder. Netflix is a faff enabler. Instead of forcing me to work for the next episode by finding it myself (which I think may now be the only way I'm applying the research skills my CV claims I gained at university) Netflix serves it up on the right hand corner of the screen. Worst of all, you don't even have to click anything for it to play. You know your sedentary lifestyle is becoming problematic when you choose to wait fourteen seconds instead of moving your finger to click "play now" on Netflix. This is the second, and possibly most insidious, way in which Netflix has encouraged my slothitude*. Not only am I lazy more frequently; I have reached new depths of laziness. I can pretty much lie still and motionlessly, thoughtlessly, mindlessly consume for hours and hours on end, the only energy I use being the two or three calories it takes to lift a Jaffa Cake from the packet and into my mouth.

During the really bad periods I lost entire days to Netflix. I have sat with the essay I was supposed to be writing minimised in my start bar for over eight hours, watching episode after episode of a programme I wasn't 100% sure I was enjoying. It was a way of distracting myself from the stresses of exams, coursework, and trying to find a job; a form of entertainment that gave my brain time to shut off and relax after a hard day of stress and over-stimulation.

I spent this year convinced that university made me less intellectual and leaving has confirmed it. When your main day-to-day responsibility is based around learning it becomes a chore. As a result, you become more drawn to mindless entertainment than intellectually nourishing activities because you associate learning with worktime, not downtime. This was especially true for me with reading. When I was at school I was an avid reader but doing a literature-centric degree left me reluctant to pick up a book that wasn't on a set-list unless I knew it would be short, easy, and funny. Since leaving university I've started taking pleasure in reading again, partly because I know that I can put a book that I'm not enjoying down without fear of not being able to write 3000 words about it later. As the list of activities I deem my frazzled brain capable of coping with grows, the lure of Netflix is weakening. It's still a useful service, obviously, but I now find myself using it more for purposes such as watching a film with friends than background noise for lying around in a semi-vegetative state.

I'm not blaming Netflix for my poor life choices. I take full responsibility for the lost days spent doing nothing more taxing than simply existing with the full use of my ears and eyes. If it hadn't been Netflix it would have been something else, and it's probably been better for my housemates and next-door neighbours that I didn't take to the Bop-It with the same enthusiasm and dedication. Perhaps, in time, my first choice of leisure activity will be to create something, or to play beautiful music, or to read one of the great novels that understanding French and Italian has opened up to me. Or perhaps an entire season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will have just been released. Only time will tell.

*Not currently a real word.

No comments

, by Rowena Ball

Pages

Where is Rowena?

Mistletoe and Whine: Things I Love and Hate About Christmas

Bustin' Out

Being an Adult is Annoying

Adventures in Duolingo

How I spent my final year: staying at home

How I spent my final year: Netflix

Rowena Ball

Today's Most Read

Popular

Archive

Pages

Where is Rowena?

Mistletoe and Whine: Things I Love and Hate About Christmas

Bustin' Out

Being an Adult is Annoying

Adventures in Duolingo

How I spent my final year: staying at home

How I spent my final year: Netflix

Rowena Ball

Today's Most Read

Popular

Archive

Subscribe