Nostalgia Continued - My Brief Glance at Ramblings of a Teenager

I've not been writing enough recently, or at least I'm not writing the stuff that I want to be. The final semester of university (or at least undergraduate) is starting to swallow up all of my waking hours, with very little time for myself in between library sessions. Tonight, therefore, I am happy to say that I have found a moment to sit down and relax with a beer and some good television - finally got around to watching last weekend's Musketeers! 

Of course I can't be working all of the time. I have pretty good staying power and focus when I want to, but I am also a pretty astute procrastinator when the right distraction comes along. Tonight I want to tell you about another trip down memory lane that I took this week. It seems that every post that I write just now it looking in my past, but I suppose that's what an impending end does to people.

The Beauty of the Past

This post is five years in the making. To be completely accurate, it is five years and nine days in the making. On December 23rd 2008 I opened a Notepad file on my laptop and started to write about my day. The event that set me off was the messy capitulation of a high school romance; a break-up that I oddly owe so very much to, in hindsight. Every day from that moment on I would write an entry, some longer than others, in what would be called 'Diary of a Boy'. Between that youthfully painful day and the 27th of May last year I typed thousands upon thousands of words, as I mapped out four and a half very important years of my life.

Confidence: A State of Mind or Just Who You Are?

Everyday life is full of 'fine lines'. There is a fine line between something being funny and something being offensive. There is a fine line between dressing well and dressing badly. There is a fine line between your food tasting lovely and it being just OK. Then there is another line that I've seen many people cross (or even dance over) in my time: that is the line between confidence and over-confidence. We've all seen it and we all know people that frequent the wrong side of it on a regular basis. As a continuation of the theme of this week's writing (slightly philosophical for those that didn't notice a pattern!), I'm going to suggest that there is another one of those lines to do with confidence. It's one that takes conscious thought to create but nevertheless one that I think we're all capable of conjuring up when we need to, whether that be a good thing or a bad one. That line is the one between having confidence and having none.

A Pure Scottish Mindset

So Andy Murray was beaten by one of the greatest Tennis players, no sorry, one of the greatest sportsmen in history - what of it? That is not the issue here though really. The issue is whether is was the Brit Murray that was beaten or the Scot Murray that lost. Time and again this argument about the negativity of the Scottish psyche comes to the fore and sadly I noticed Facebook was littered with such discussion after the final yesterday. The thing that bears the bug for me above all is that such accusations (although hurtful) are probably true. As much as I tried to fight it throughout yesterday's match, I was unable to fend off the demon that haunted the final with the air that Murray just wasn't going to win. Even with the first set under his belt and a break in the second I just knew. I'm Scottish after all, but should that matter?