The Bloc Party Gig

It's a Sunday afternoon and, quite frankly, I am bored. Oh so bored.

Hence, I am now reflecting on what was a pretty monotonous week itself. I had to work a couple of times at my local pub, I went to the pub with a couple of friends to watch and England and I went to a friends' 21st birthday party.

There was one highlight of the week though. 

On Thursday night, I went to see my favourite band, Bloc Party, play live on their first tour in three years. 

Earlier in the day, I went back to Reading to clear out my student house with my house-mate in order to receive as much of our deposits back as possible. There was one further issue as well, I had no one to go to the gig with. 

I offered pretty much every friend I have the free ticket. Sadly, everyone rejected the offer with there being a wide range of reasons why they couldn't attend. 

Who did I turn to?

My sister. Yes, my sister who has previously gone to a couple of We Are Scientists gigs with me. I warned her that the moshing and jumping from the crowd would be more ferocious, but she batted away my warnings. 

I told her to be ready to leave our house at 3:45. We caught our train on time and then via the underground we reached Koko in anticipation of a large queue. 

Just a few people were there. I even knew a couple of them due to them being fellow Bloc Party fans. 

After a couple of hours of queueing we entered the venue and got right on the barrier, in front of Kele. The perfect position. 

The support band, Story Books, performed. I can't think of a more apt description than to label them as very average.

Bloc Party then came on stage after an hour of waiting and immediately launched into some new tracks. There aren't enough superlatives in the English language to describe how amazing they were but I will tell you that I had a big grin on my face throughout the entire gig. I realise that makes me sound very simple. 

I asked my sister at the end what she thought. She responded by telling me that she was in agony due to the moshing and pushing going on and that she felt like she had been physically abused. 

She doesn't want to ever go to a Bloc Party gig again. 

The Degree Results

It's not often that I say this, but I had quite the enjoyable weekend.

That would be quite a disservice to many previous previous weekends that I have experienced in my life, but this weekend was particularly good and better than at least 80% of those aforementioned previous weekends.

I travelled back to Reading on Friday morning to pick up my final degree result. I had previously tried to play down the importance of the result and give off the defined image of cool and collected but on the way to to notice board with our results on, quite frankly, I was bricking it.

I had never known nervousness of the sort. If you had asked me about prior moments of true nerves then I would have pointed you to moments in my life such as waiting to find out whether I had made it into university or the final day of the 2007/2008 Premier League season where Fulham just managed to avoid relegation.

As I am going down the Masters route instead of employment, it seemed vital that I gain a 2:1 to ensure that I have the strongest CV possible.

I walked up to the board with some of my friends and in the large crowd gathered around the board there was a vast range of human emotion on display. There was joy, tears, disappointment and some very delirious people.

I scanned the board for my name and spotted it halfway down the list. My eyes moved towards the result and my heart began to pound even harder.

"Second Class First Division"

Phew.

The Sad Realisation

Over the course of the last two weeks, I have been  working with my Dad in the Supplies department at the Private Hospital that he works at. 

The work involves waking up at 7AM and then lifting and delivering boxes and parcels to various departments around the hospital. The positive of the job though is that my Dad lets me go home every day at Midday. 

On Tuesday, I drove home with my window down blasting out Capital FM on the car's now ancient stereo. I drove through New Malden High Street and I noticed so many people that I vaguely recognised from Secondary school. 

You know the type. The people who you constantly passed in hallways but you never spoke to, people who were a couple of years above or below you. 

I drove past a few of these people and something sad, disappointing and worrying struck me. They all looked really glum. 

I don't mean that they looked like those very unhappy dogs and had black clouds literally hanging over their heads. They looked world-weary, tired and lacking in hope. They cast the image of people who were stuck in a rut. They looked exactly how I felt at 7AM when I realised that I had five hours of hard-graft in front of me. 

Three thoughts quickly sprung to mind. 

One, were they glum because they were stuck in dead-end jobs with little prospects?

Two, did they want to travel the world yet found themselves stuck in the same town for the foreseeable future?

Three, did they not understand YOLO?

These thoughts, whilst potentially condescending, re-enforced my new attitude of working as hard as possible to fulfil my ambitions, my desire to not be stuck in my home town for the rest of my life and my attempting to try to follow the law of YOLO a bit more fruitfully. 

The Daily Mail Article

I was flicking through the Daily Mail this morning when I came across an article which heavily indicated that I am not a grown-up. In fact, it indicated that I am nowhere near being able to say that I am a grown-up.

The article is, quite simply, a list of fifty activities that a typical grown-up would do.

Admittedly, they aren't the most exciting of activities. They include such life highlights as owning a vacuum cleaner and having a joint bank account.  Yeah, I did warn you they weren't exactly the most thrilling rights-of-passage.

Of the fifty indicators, I only fulfilled twelve. I know that is poor but at least I can cook a meal from scratch and I do my own washing. We all know that is what every girl looks for in a guy.

I can safely say that I am not too disappointed by my score though, if being a grown-up is simply achieved through owning a joint bank account then I'd rather attain the notion of being a grown-up through something far more exciting.

See if you get a higher score than I did and leave me a comment below with your score. Follow the link here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156475/How-tell-grown-up.html

The Diamond Jubilee Party

Here in the United Kingdom, it is a special weekend.

You see it is Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, celebrating her sixty-years sitting on the throne. It is quite the occasion and numerous street parties and other celebrations will take place around the country.

It also marked the perfect timing for my parents to host a family party. We haven't held one in a while and despite the cost, time and effort of hosting a party, they tried to justify it as being a jubilee/belated birthday party/I'm home from university celebration. Quite possibly, that is the only time those three reasons will ever be merged together to give reason for hosting a party.

Sunday rolled around and the first guests arrived in punctual fashion, it was my aunt, uncle and cousins. It was  the first time they had been on time, though one can assume that the lure of alcohol got them to our house on time, a classic trait of Irish people.

Soon the numbers swelled and a few of us nestled down in front of the television to watch the flotilla. It made for fascinating viewing, though I do think the alcohol definitely helped numb the borefest that it apparently was judging by the negative comments in today's papers about the coverage.

After a few hours, my sister's boyfriend, Terry, challenged me to a game of chess. I considered this a rookie error, an unwise move.

You see, I once reached the finals of the Surrey Chess Championships. I won two out of my six games in that competition after qualifying through borough matches and I felt proud to have been one of the best under-11 chess players in all of Surrey.

After an encouraging start, Terry was winning and after some skilful play, he had my King in checkmate. Disaster.

"Beginners luck!" I protested.

He subsequently won his next few matches whilst I lost to my eleven-year-old cousin.

OK, I used to be good at chess.

Bloc Party - Four

I'm breaking blog protocol. I haven't begun the title with 'The'. Shocking stuff, but something happened today that I just had to write about.

Bloc Party are back. And they are back with an album, ingeniously, titled 'Four'.

Now, Bloc Party are my life. I've seen them live countless times, I've obsessed over intricate little details of their songs, I've brought numerous CD's and vinyl's and I've even once high-fived Kele Okereke himself.

I am currently sitting in my chair listening to the trailer for the album and I'm quite sure I've just jizzed in my pants.

Bloc Party are back. God Bless Bloc Party!

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The Epiphany

I write this post at home in Kingston-upon-Thames having left university yesterday.

Sure, I am going back for results day, summer ball and graduation but having packed away the vast majority of my stuff and then saying goodbye to my house-mate, Nick, who I won't see for a few weeks, it felt like the end-of-an-era.

I now have an entire summer to re-focus my life and orientate myself back to life at home. I always thought that by doing my Master's that I'd be happy. Don't get me wrong, I really am looking forward to the course and I would love to write for a living but doubts are beginning to creep.

It all boils down to money.

In the short-term, journalism doesn't pay well. I can look forward to a starting salary of £15,000 which quite frankly isn't very good. This means that I will be living with my parents for at least two to three years. After three years of living away from home, I'm not sure I will enjoy living back at home for an extended period.

In the long-term, I want to live the dream. I want a big house and land in a nice village somewhere in the country. I want to have friendly, middle-class neighbours who I will go to the local pub for a few drinks with. The looming question is whether journalism would fund that? It is possible but I'd need a lot of luck and skill.

This has led me to an epiphany though. I really need to go after opportunities and succeed. Basically, I need to try harder.

YOLO, right?