I'm running through a forest. I'm running away from something - but I'm not sure what. I keep stumbling over tree stumps and tree branches are lashing me in the face, cutting new cuts and deepening old ones. I know my legs are below me - how else would I be getting anywhere? - but I can't feel them and have to rely on guesswork as to where I'm putting my feet. Something warms breathes down my neck like the heat from the back of a city bus. I recognise the pungent smell but I can't quite place it - I've smelt it before, I know I have. Then I see the end of the forest, the light in the distance slashed by the trees that stand between me and potential freedom. My legs are still going, somehow, and my heart seems to be the only thing in my body that is functioning - how many beats per minute is normal? The edge gets closer yet still seems so far away, the pungent smell and warmth of a thousand ovens still close behind me. Then I burst out of the forest into the daylight. It's raining but I'm sodden from my own sweat and tears so I hardly notice. As I stumble to a stop I turn instinctively to look back into the deep darkness that lays behind me. But nothing is there, just the rustle of the trees in the soft wind and a few broken branches that I left in my wake.
Well that's how January felt anyway. OK so that was maybe a bit over the top but I thought I would get my readers a bit excited for the first time in ages. Yes, January has been a bit of a rubbish month for one reason or another. I've spent it writing essays, thinking about what I could have written in my essays, preparing for classes or moaning about the fact that I've got to prepare for classes. Then there has been the applications for summer placements which have hardly been my finest hour but, as with my essay results, I'll just have to wait and see with those.
So with my negativity out of the way it might be an idea to look back at what actually wasn't such a bad month. I've had a few great nights out with great friends - something that I completely failed to do last semester. I also managed to hit the aforementioned essay deadline with 3 essays that were as good as they were ever going to be - can't ask for much more than that. Then there is the fact that I've not got any more essays to write before next Christmas, by which time I'll have some feedback under my belt from the ones that are currently going through 'the system'. In short, I can't complain about stuff, or at least I shouldn't complain as regularly as I do.
I guess that today has just been one of those days and this post has slowly been heating away until it reached boiling point just now. I'd love to be able to go for a whole day without moaning about something but it seems that I constantly find something to whinge about.
I'll tell you one thing that really brightened up my life recently to end this post, otherwise what are you going to think about me!? It was the Law School Burns Supper on Thursday night. As always I had something to moan about all night in the form of a twisted ankle, picked up the previous day while being stuffed in a five-a-side football game. Anyway I stopped moaning eventually (I should really let the folk that I was with be the judge of that) and had a super night out as I thought I would. For whatever reason, when we got back to our friend's flat (at some silly hour in the morning) I couldn't stop laughing. It might have been the whisky or the fact that my friends and I had gone to the 24 hour Scotmid for snacks - the latter doesn't sound funny but believe me it was at the time. Anyway, the moral of the story is that it's good to laugh and I found that out the next day when I was staving off a hangover - always better to have a smile on your face in the, well in the face of adversity. There were too many faces in there - I'm sorry.
Thanks for reading,
Martin
