[lyg10] hello, i’m sorry, i lost myself;

September this year marks ten years since I made my first, tentative and over-sharey, foray into blogging. I hope you’ll forgive a little self-indulgence on my part, but I’d like to do something to celebrate a pretty significant milestone. I’ve hit upon the idea of publishing some selected takes from my archives – there’s a little bit of poetic license required here, as some of the proper cringeworthy teenage stuff is (thankfully) lost in the mists and pixels of cyberspace, but what I’ll publish every Friday from here until the end of the year is culled from the LiveJournal years, 2003-2006.

We’re coming to the end of my Napier years now, and my fluttering wings and urge to get out into the world can’t help but make me smile, with the benefit of hindsight.

15th March 2004
It’s a natural response of the human condition, once things get pressured, just to want everything to be over. As the work piles up – stupid assignments we can’t possibly do if we’re expected to attend classes as well, so we don’t attend classes because you can’t fail outright that way – we’re all beginning to lose our enthusiasm. And our patience.

I’ve always said I’d happily be a student forever, so experiencing the change within myself is as interesting when I’m playing casual observer as it is irritating living it. There’s a little bird trapped inside a nervous wreck of a body, squeaking mummy, mummy, I’m ready to go out into the world now!. Fuck this, I want an income, I want a weekend, I want an excuse to wear pinstripes, I want to be twenty-four.

And I want to stop feeling guilty that I’m wasting precious hours sleeping or cooking that could be spend on essays and shorthand practice. The voices in my head are back again, and less amusing than they’ve ever been. Even God got a lie-in on Sunday.

I had a notebook I passed around high school in the week before I left where people wrote me scrawled messages and memories and phone numbers I never used because they never really wanted me to. My old physics teacher, he who used me scoring best in both Standard Grade and Higher prelims as an excuse not to give out a prize the second year because “it wouldn’t be fair”, scribbled that he always knew I’d end up in court or jail. Today was, however, my first day in a proper courtroom, witnessing at first hand the legal system I studied for four years.

I can’t say that I didn’t feel a pang of loss as the solicitors scurried from courtroom to courtroom in their gowns with books and notes tucked under their arms, or while explaining art and part liability in hushed whispers to Susan and Lindsey at the back of the public gallery. This was the world I gave up, the forced formality of the lower workings of the mechanisms of justice, and it’s still my area of expertise when compared to the Man On The Clapham Omnibus. It’s still my thing, whether it’s Cheryl’s assignment or Seymour setting off my loud and obnoxious ringtone in the middle of an art gallery.

And I’m sure I could have been mistaken for a part of that world as I strutted the corridors in my blouse and best trousers (yes, strutted, even my own limited form of power dressing has the desired effect), had I not been wearing my Miffy backpack with its band logos and anti-war badges. Because nobody noticed the messages Susan and I were scrawling in each other’s shorthand notebooks: if all else fails we can flirt with the clerk of court for info.

A law student planning to become a journalist and a journalist with legal expertise are equally as interesting, and equally as fun, to be, and perhaps what is especially interesting is that I’ve always sided with the law where a conflict of interest has arisen and yet I’ve never seriously wanted to be anything other than a writer. I think the two professions feed off each other to a certain extent, along with politics, and certainly none of the three can exist in vacuum or be the same without the others. These same themes tend to arise in the protracted debates I have with my mother when the mood strikes us, and I was telling Susan this morning that I believe law, journalism and politics to be the three most important professions of the 21st century. I have an enormous level of contempt for the mass media, a healthy amount of cynicism for the legal system and a complete and utter distrust of all politics, but it’s a world I’m hugely proud to be a part of.

In whatever capacity. Sure, I came away from court wanting to be a lawyer again but it’ll have worn off by morning – after all, when Mari and I went to see Honey on Saturday night (fuck off, Mona Lisa Smile was sold out and we had to get out of the flat…) I could’ve sworn I wanted to be a hiphop dancer… but we’ll never speak of that again, obviously. And, following on from a discussion over lunch to the effect that we were going to chuck this all in and find rich husbands (he would adore me, because I would be like this volatile artist type and nothing he had ever known) I had all but resigned myself to baking cakes all day and babies with big, beautiful eyes and writing in the evenings. But then I realised I’d die of boredom, and remembered that small children make me almost as nervous as men who adore me do.

The best thing about court is that, whatever I end up doing (and I may be somebody’s legal secretary yet, fucked if I’m getting two degrees to earn £8,000 a year on some shitty local paper), it’ll always be there and open to the public. So, next time I have a free Monday morning and fancy seeing some guy getting sent down for contempt for showing up drunk for trial (“”Ahm huvvin’ a seizure, yer Honour!”") I can.

I doubt I’ll make it as a hiphop dancer though. I ain’t got no flow for one thing, and the music makes my ears bleed.