The Good Life?

I do love the countryside

I'll tell you.

I have gained a new skill. It is something I think will equip me well for my next year of university, though will probably become less valuable or viable in the rest of my life.

This is the skill of doing very little.

Now, I hear you cry, you're a student – surely you've mastered this skill long before now! But this time there's something different. I have somehow managed to bend time and space to acquire the ability of doing very little, in ridiculously large amounts of time.

Maybe I could class it as work. Some kind of science experiment: how little mass of activity I could fit into the huge volume of time?

No, I didn't really think so either.

So what have I been doing?

Ah, yes. Doing the rounds of the school friends. This was something, as I mentioned in my last blog that I was really looking forward to. So did it live up to expectations?

It was certainly different to how I expected it would turn out.

The first meet-up went well. A sleepover with a girl friend can be a perilous business when you haven't seen each other for three months or so. All sorts of doubts can plague you. Have I changed? Has she? Will we find enough to talk about for so many hours?

We did, as it turned out. Yes, of course we'd both changed; and yes, we did spend an awful lot of time taking about our new worlds and new friends. I heard an awful lot about her boyfriend; she heard an awful lot about my newfound confidence. But it wasn't forced – I was genuinely interested in what she had to say. We weren't trying to compete with each other, we were just sharing stories. And while she commandeered my Facebook account and had a few questionable conversations with a few of my university friends, I didn't mind because it was comfortable.

Unfortunately, my more recent meet-ups haven't been quite so successful.

Last week I tended to live in the local pubs rather. This, in itself, wasn't a problem: my friends and I know the answer to “Pub?” is always “yes!”

What was the problem was that I felt distinctly uncomfortable. The group was too big to be intimate, but too small to split into more personal groups to have a good chat. On top of that, the boys accused me of being too feminine now. Now, I value my honorary “Man Card” and this was not a good thing to say to me. I had always been one of the lads, and had no intention of changing that, whatever I was wearing. Implying they no longer wished to keep up the pretence of my masculinity was very much the wrong thing to say.

But before you think I’m just moaning, there are loads of things I love about being home – and it's not just the free food and the free laundry.

I'm enjoying being with my family – when they've been at work all day they're much easier to get along with than when you've been with them at every moment as I was on holiday. I'm having fun reconnecting with my sister, however much we bicker, and I'm liking the (almost) complete lack of responsibility after a year of pretending to be grown-up.

I'm also realising that I really do love the countryside. Okay, so a uni friend often teases me for living in fields, and it's not quite that rural, but I thrive off eating fruit straight from the trees and taking walks through the meadows. And, while I've previously written about disliking my small-town, I have missed the everyone-knowing-everyone-else mentality – it's a bit like university.

And as I sit with my laptop, watching the European Athletics Championships with my parents and texting friends, I reckon I could live with this for a few weeks more.

Although check back with me – no doubt I'll soon start craving York again!

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