Experiments in Living

It took seven years, but finally the plant that my dad brought back from Madeira has bloomed!

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Tags: bird of paradise, houseplants

The college years - part 2

After my French adventure, I returned to Bangor University to complete the final year of my degree. The thing was, it wasn’t the same. Time doesn’t stand still. Just because I was away having this massive experience certainly did not mean that everything was the same when I returned. For a start, most of my friends who had started at uni at the same time I did had already graduated. I also felt like the older generation, which in a way I was, as during the time I was away, there had been some massive changes in the higher education funding system, which were starting to trickle down into social change. Whereas my generation collected our grant cheques after enrolling, the new kids had fees to pay.

I was drinking heavily and smoking yet bizarrely I had this fantastically healthy vegetarian diet. This was the year I had next to no money, as the student loan cheque was miserly for the final year, and even with the money I had saved from my summer jobs (working in a fish factory and then driving a tractor on an arable farm) and working in France, I was still pretty skint. I don’t know what I lived on half the time, but I was the skinniest I’ve been in my whole adult life since. I remember it being a totally mad year, filled with strange people, strange experiences and strange ideas.

Personally, I was into occult and esoteric theories and practices, but my degree work also took a strange turn into the unseen world. One of the courses I studied was about the symbolists and dadaist art and literature. While looking for material on the subject, I found masses of scholarly works on the subject. In between staying up too late and drinking, I would sit for hours in the library poring over anything on the subject, and there was a lot of it. At one point I was particularly interested in Rosicrucianism, and wrote a paper on How to become a Fairy (Comment-on devient fée) by Joseph Péladan. Bangor Uni has an extensive Welsh library collection, not all of it in the Welsh language luckily for me, which is filled with books on the Celts and other pre-Christian cultures. As you have probably guessed, I didn’t own a television back then.

I also got very interested in existentialism and angst, only this time I was looking at it from the outside rather than experiencing it directly. For the first time I was glad that I had experienced such misery during my teens as I could relate to the difficulties in existence as not just being about me, but being universal. Just to impress you (or not) I will name-drop a few authors I read that year, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, J-P Sartre. To make it all the more interesting was the context of the end of the millennium that I was living through myself. It was all rather surreal.

I hooked up with a random ripped-jeans wearing guy during the time I lived in this subjunctive universe. Not only was he a vegetarian and spoke French, but he also saved up his beer bottles to recycle, which I thought was just fantastic. This was cutting-edge stuff back in 1999. We had a couple of special months together, there was something almost magical about that time, although it’s difficult now to know how much of that was down to the large amounts of alcohol and cannabis we ingested. It was so great to finally meet someone who was totally on my wavelength, who “got” me, that I could be myself with. I spent several months where I was fulfilled with my academic work and was living life to the full outside of the library. Somehow I even managed to make it through my finals and get a 2:1 degree.

Then the letter arrived. I had been accepted to work abroad for a year in Guadeloupe. I had applied months before to go on another language assistant programme and had almost forgotten about it. In any case, I didn’t think I would be selected for one of the overseas posts. It was a rare opportunity, but I felt as if I’d just got my life going. I was enjoying my life, I didn’t want to leave Mr Ripped-Jeans, but if I didn’t take the chance, wouldn’t I always regret it?

Find out what happened next in Part Five.

Tags: France, Guadeloupe, university

A year in France

As I mentioned in Part Two, a large chunk of my motivation for following a languages degree was the opportunity to live and work abroad. I left for Annecy, a beautiful town in the French Alps in the autumn of 1998, to take up a post as an assistant teacher of English for primary schools. I had no experience of teaching, and the schools had no experience of foreign languages as it was something new the French government had dreamed up, seemingly over a long business lunch with plenty of wine.

I really enjoyed working with the kids, although it was a pretty steep learning curve. Getting to work was a challenge: I would get the bus from outside the hostel where I lived in the pitch black at 7.11am, and have to change buses twice to get to my destination. All in all it took almost an hour to get to school, but I didn’t really mind. I loved planning my classes and doing all the fun activities such as playing games and singing songs. I had always been a natural introvert, but I discovered that I enjoyed leading the kids. Hearing them put together even the simplest sentences made me feel proud because I knew that it was me who had taught them that.

The other thing that was great is that we were paid, and although it was not a lot of money, it was the first time in my life that I could go out and buy something rather than have to worry about how I was going to pay for it. Funnily enough, I never got into retail therapy in a big way, but it was nice to be able to have the freedom spend money should I want to.

Living in shared accommodation was something I was used to from being a student, but as nearly all the other people were French or from other non English speaking countries, we all spoke French all the time. It was fantastic for my language skills and I can honestly say that the only times I spoke English was when I was teaching (at a very basic level) or on the phone to my parents once a week. The experience of living in another country also taught me that it’s one thing to know things in theory, but something else to experience them first hand. Just as an aside, the French language does not distinguish between the words “experiment” and “experience”. They are both “l’expérience”. You experience life by experimenting with it!

Before long, I had managed to get involved with a guy. This time it was an Italian bloke who was 12 years older than me, and to be honest, wasn’t really that attracted to. We had very little in common. I suppose that I was trying to find my feet in a foreign country and there he was. Weirdest of all, I was happy to have the “status symbol” of having a boyfriend. My self esteem around men was so poor that I was just grateful that someone wanted to be with me!

If am totally honest with myself, the warning signs were there all along. On New Year’s Eve, he got so drunk and abusive that my friend and I left the party at the hostel and got in a car with some guys we hardly knew and headed up to the mountains. We ended up in the ski resort of Le Grand Bornand, where a friend of a friend’s boyfriend worked in one of the restaurants. We all went up to this guy’s flat and were smoking various random substances, when someone called the police. It had nothing to do with us, it was some woman in the restaurant whose bag had been stolen, but I got it into my stoned little head that the cops were going to bust us and I would be deported. My friend and I ended up sitting in a doorway opposite the restaurant for 30 minutes in temperatures of -5 celsius until the cops went.

I should have finished with my boyfriend there and then, but he talked me round and after a few months I moved in with him. I had joined the local rock climbing club (which he didn’t like), and throughout the winter we would climb up an indoor wall. However once the weather started to get better would go for days out. After one such day, after returning to Annecy, we decided to go out for pizza. I got back at around 8pm and he went totally mad, and started getting physical which was when I knew that I had to get out of that relationship. Fortunately, I had only a few weeks before I was due return to the UK.

After I returned home, I promised myself that I would never stay with someone who made me feel less than safe with them ever again. I gained so much that year in terms of my fluency in French, and also learned some valuable life lessons. I also gained quite a bit of weight The weird thing was that I kept in touch with this Italian guy, we’d speak on the phone a couple of times a week. Then slowly it dawned on me, I was the one keeping the contact going, even though I’d wanted out of the relationship and had only stayed because it seemed easier. Yet if he called and I was out, I would call him back, but if I called and he was out, then I would call him back. What would happen if I stopped making all the effort? Yes, you’ve guessed it. I finally confronted him on his lack of interest and ended up hanging up on him due to the total frustration of the conversation. I never heard from him ever again.

To this day, I still believe that no relationship is better than the wrong relationship. That doesn’t mean that your partner has to be perfect, but you deserve to be in a relationship that is right for you rather than trying to make yourself conform to someone else’s idea of the perfect partner. You have to take responsibility for your own happiness.

Coming next: Part Four - Back to Bangor

Tags: Annecy, France, French Alps, language assistant, relationships, year abroad

This is from  Vegan with a Vengeance

The cinnamon and dark chocolate give a rich, velvety flavour. The original recipe called for maple syrup, but I replaced this with just enough demerara sugar to take the edge off. As I was cooking for my mother who has type 2 diabetes, I was being conscious to try to use as little sugar as possible. Best of all it was really easy to make, a great dessert!

Vegan MoFo Contents

Tags: chocolate, rice pudding, vegan mofo

Yet more homage to Vegan with a Vengeance.

I made these cookies with half the sugar recommended in the recipe and they taste great!

Vegan MoFo Contents

Tags: cookies, home baking, peanut butter cookies, vegan mofo