Nerds with Nerf guns taught me stuff.

Presented without context.*

- If you find a potato on the street at 5am, you should always always pick it up.
- If you are drinking wine at 5am at your friend's house, you should probably not have anything too important planned for the next day.
- It is perfectly acceptable to send drunk Snapchats on trains at eight in the morning.
- It is also perfectly acceptable to spoon on the floor of trains. Especially if you are still drunk from the night before.
- Apparently study drugs are "fantastic but taste like balls".

- Taking no spare clothes to a field full of mud is a really bad idea.
- Trying to run around on less than five hours' sleep in the last forty-eight hours is really hard.
- Running around while sleep-deprived is easier when drunk and harder when hungover.
- Nerf gun bullets are capable of doing actual damage, judging by the bruises on my arms.
- Sheffield is a demon hill surrounded by demon hill spawn and no matter which way you walk, it will be uphill. 
- TEAM SPUD.

- Trams are great.
- Sexist tram conductors are not great.
- Friends who stand up to sexism in its insidious day-to-day forms are great.
- Taking an oversized hammer on the tram is great.
- Oversized hammers are great.
- Unexpected punchlines to hammer jokes are great. "Stop! ... Collaborate, and listen!"

- Blue hair will not always help you get spotted in a crowd.
- You should bond with people over your suspiciously similar hair colour.
- Dexterity beats brute force in any fencing match.
- People actually want to be your friend and sometimes they go out of their way to help you.
- Sometimes people you have only known for twelve hours will lend you their pyjamas while they wash your jeans and socks and let you borrow shirts when you have no change of clothes. These sorts of people are to be treasured.


- Furries are not what the media want you to think they are.
- Frozen is still amazing.
- It IS possible to order £700-worth of Domino's.
- There is nothing wrong with playing Cards Against Humanity over breakfast.
- Mentioning Prince Albert piercings in a group of guys will cause much confusion and squeamishness. This is doubly so if one of the guys in the group has one. And it has a fairly large gauge ring in it.
- Twitch Plays Pokemon has made the leap from weird internet phenomenon to something that spawns intense esoteric debates about religion, community, free will, and the power of technology.
- Running around a park with fake blue and orange guns is cooler than whatever you did with your weekend.
- Everything is awesome.

*This weekend was Assassins Varsity in Sheffield, for student Assassins Guilds across the country. About eight different universities were represented. That's all you're getting.

A year in the life.

A year ago today, I published my first blog post on here.

A lot has happened in a year.

I've had 6,393 views on my blog from 6 continents and 60 countries. I've written 45 posts on this site, but I've also written for Autostraddle, Thought Catalog, Bloomsbury, Total Film and of course Nouse. I've become Deputy News Editor for the campus newspaper! That's pretty groovy.

I've been on more dates this year than in the rest of my life put together. I'm yet to fall in love with a person, but I've fallen in love with some places - with Japan and its gentility and culture, but also with York and its winding streets and perpetually smoke-grey sky.

I've seen a little bit more of the world than I had before: there are now 10 more countries I've set foot in compared to this time last year, and I'm working on seeing even more countries by this time next year.

I've started university, made new friends and maybe lost a few too - but that's okay, because life is all about gaining and losing things.

I've shared my bed with many bodies and even my head with one or two people. I'm slightly officially insane, and the hyperbole makes me feel better - but so does one of my friends holding me in the middle of the night.

I've learned I'm not as smart as I think, but perhaps a bit kinder than I give myself credit for.

Am I a better person than I was a year ago? Probably. I still have a lot to work on though. I'm not as confident as I was, and I'm still self-centred and insecure and liable to flail uncontrollably when tickled. I still wear my bleeding heart on my sleeve and hold onto old grudges like scars and keep raking over the same old wounds, despite knowing how much it'll hurt, but I'm trying to be better.

That's it, I suppose. I'm trying.

Here's to another year of trying.

Bruised.

Natasha Beddingfield can fuck right off: if anyone can talk about getting bruised, then it's me. And no, I'm not talking in the metaphorical sense. I mean literally, physically, black-and-green actual bruises. If there are bruises to be had, I probably have them.

At the moment, I am quite impressively bruised. My bruise catalogue is as follows:

1x hickey, on my neck, from a night of necking in Willow. Reddish and almost invisible.

1x bruise on my left leg, circumstances unknown, but presumed to be from the infamous Party Harty. For reference, Party Harty was almost two weeks ago. This bruise on the outside on my thigh is roughly the size of my fist, presently brown, but has faded full the full spectrum of colours.

4x bruises on my right leg, circumstances also unknown. From their uniform colour (green) and similar locations (in horizontal bands up my shin and to the knee), I presume these are from walking into things - but again, I can't tell you for sure.

1x bruise on my right outer forearm, from either tree-climbing or my habit of shrugging a tote bag off my shoulder and catching it on my arm. Only perceptible because the skin still feels slightly tender, otherwise gone.

Admittedly, alcohol may have featured in a lot of these stories, but I have always attracted bruises, far more than scrapes or burns or cuts.
At ten I fell over constantly, laddering my tights and getting away with no bloodloss but impressive contusions.
At twelve I was so clumsy that the school nurse, seeing my multi-coloured arms, asked if "everything was alright at home." 
At fifteen I would come out of gigs looking like I'd been beaten up without ever going near the moshpits.
At eighteen a playful bite from a beau turned into a line of angry red marks on my tricep, which relegated me to wearing long sleeves for a week lest I explain it to my mother.

On Hallowe'en I was accidentally hit in the face, and wore an impressive black eye for two weeks until it faded into obscurity. My friends might have forgotten, but I haven't: there's still a small bump on my cheekbone where it healed funny, a permanent lump under my right eye.

I sort of like it, the way I sort of like all my bruises.

They remind me that things really happened, that I was really there, anchored in the material world. This is not to say I would ever put up with someone trying to hurt me - ain't nobody got time for that - but more that I understand accidents and incidents. Most are my own fault, from wandering around with my head in the clouds rather than staying grounded. On my more ephemerally dualist days, my bruises remind me my body is real and active and perfect. There is no good reason for me to bruise like this either: I have no blood disorders, and even my chronically-pale family members seem to have more resilient capillaries than I do.

Bruised emotions are another matter, and a story for another time. But, Ms Beddingfield, until you've managed to bruise yourself sliding downstairs to see your friend on New Year's Eve, or carelessly dropping an empty tin on your leg, or sneezing a bit too violently too close to a wall - don't talk to me about bruising easily. I'm like a fucking peach, and I might as well be proud of it.

Beating the blues with green.

Everyone has mood swings. Everyone has days when they feel awful, and getting out of bed takes as much effort and willpower as running a marathon. But these mostly only last a day or two, and then life goes back to normal.

Over the past three or four years, I've noticed a persistent change in my moods around December through to March. I feel much less ebullient, more reserved and cranky. I crave isolation, and company, but want to withdraw from social interaction. The last time I asked a doctor about it, I got told to fill in a questionnaire and come back in six weeks - by which time, it was the spring. Therefore, although it is not confirmed - and honestly, there are very few ways to treat it - the working hypothesis between me and my ex-nurse mother is that might I have some mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. (The best thing about SAD is its highly appropriate acronym.)

Anyway, that is the backstory. Take it with all the salt you want, but take away from it the fact that I was feeling fairly down today. Spending time outside is supposed to help, even on miserable overcast days when the whole sky is the same shade of pigeon grey: and so, I was outside, walking home from coffee, when I came across The Tree.

The Tree is opposite the Philosophy department on a fairly busy commuter stretch of the York University campus. There are other trees of a similar height around it, but this one is my favourite. Some way up there is a conglomeration of flat branches which look perfect to sit on; around the tree as a whole, the branches are close together and roughly form a spiral, so by moving clockwise around the main trunk of the tree it's possible to get thirty, maybe thirty-five feet up. The only way up for someone of my height is to grasp a branch about six feet off the ground, and jump your legs in a most inelegant fashion onto a second, slightly lower branch a few feet away. It's the same way I got up my favourite climbing tree as a kid.

So there I was, tote bag slung over one shoulder, making my way up this tree. I stopped to read some philosophy at a nice little flat branch maybe twelve feet up, the same place where I'd watched the sun rise from one day last term. It was peaceful, and easy to people-watch.

You never realise how much people miss until you're in a position to notice for them.

I got bored and numb after a while, and climbed higher to warm up. I tied my bag to a branch and scrabbled haphazardly up the tree, precariously balancing my feet in weird crevices and wondering why I'd never taken my grandad up on his offer of tree-climbing lessons as a child. I stood still for a while; I turned up my iPod and climbed higher; eventually I reached the perfectly horizontal branches I saw from the ground.

From them, I could see the lake in the centre of campus, and the Eric Milner buildings across it; I could make out buses cresting the hill of University Road, and hear hurried snatches of conversation as students and staff rushed past, caught up in their little worlds. In ancient Japan, ninjas were taught to hide in plain sight, which they often did by clinging to the ceiling: it's easy to see why they never got spotted. Nobody looks up.

I'd been sat up the tree for maybe an hour and a bit when the Security Services arrived. Some of the passers-by had reported me, clearly unnerved by my presence. Because if I wanted to commit suicide, apparently a moderately-high tree on a busy part of campus is a far better bet than throwing myself into Ouse or jumping off the top of the Physics building. Either way, the authorities were here: while they had no problem with me being up a tree, they politely implied that people would keep reporting me if I stayed, and really I had better come down.

I did so, slowly, collecting my bag on the way - because like hell was I going to rush and fall out a tree while being watched by two middle-aged, faintly bored security guards. I got back to base level and presented my Student ID for scrutiny, and wondered why it made so much difference.

Up the tree, reading my dry-as-pirates'-tack Philosophy notes on Natural Law, I had been... not happy, but certainly less down. Maybe it was just prolonged exposure to the cold, but my mind felt clearer. With my feet firmly on solid ground, instead of awkwardly wedged against twigs or dangling into oblivion, my mood had plummeted again.

It was only a couple of hours ago, but it sort of feels like it never happened. Only the photos and the green powder on my coat exist as proof. I'm not sure what helped more: the change in perspective, or the low-level rebellion and the evident nervousness it instilled in the general public. Either way, for at least a little while today, I got the winter blues to go away.

"Good enough" is good enough for me.

When I say "that's good enough", it implies I have reached one of two stages.

The first is the point of frustration. When I have been toiling away at something for hours, or sometimes just minutes. This is often something I don't care about as much as I ought to, be it a blogpost or an essay or icing a cake. This is the version where I throw in the towel and accept that I cannot be bothered to work any more: it is the "fuck it, that's good enough" mentality.

The other arises more rarely. It applies to the things I really care about, more often the things I write out of an obligation to my own sense of artistry than the things I write out of academic necessity. It's an acceptance that I will never be as good as I want to be, unless I work hard. And that's okay: I can't just jump into being perfect. I have to work. For now, this is good enough.

Good enough.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that we are our own person, isn't it? It seems like we're surrounded by people telling us we are not pretty enough, our skin not smooth enough, our conversation not sparkling enough, our rooms not tidy enough. Admittedly yes, my room isn't tidy, but it's tidy enough for me! I can find anything I want on this desk, if I spend some time wading through the salmagundi of papers on it and remember to move my biscuit tins.

"Fuck it, that's good enough" is what I say after ten minutes of half-hearted tidying up, or two days of staring blankly at the third chapter of Plato's Republic. It's also what I'll say about the prologues I draft and re-draft. And it's the fear of it - of not being good enough - which means those prologues are left as forewords to stories that never get written. 

I am tired of not thinking myself good enough, and I am tired of my own lazy standards.

So that is my new year's resolution, in the broadest possible sense: to never settle for being less than enough. And to remind myself that things do not need to be perfect. Strive for better, but recognise when "good" means "good enough".

This blog post isn't great, but it's something - and something that has provided a temporary portal away from the stress of my exam revision. It'll do. Fuck it. For now, it's good enough.

12 Days of Student Christmas

On the twelfth day of Christmas, university gave to me:

Twelve physics friends
Eleven funny flatmates
Ten posters hanging
Nine reindeer galloping
Eight slices of bread toasting
Seven bottles of wine
Six burnt potatoes
Five glasses of wine
Four books to be reading
Three average essays
Two relatives arguing
And a very drunken Christmas.

It's that time of year again, and so I suppose I have some amends to make.

To my friends: I'm sorry for not being a better friend.
To my brother: I'm sorry for not being a better sister.
To my grandad: I'm sorry for not listening as much as I should.
To my parents: I'm sorry for listening as much as I do.
To the ones I hurt: I'm sorry for hurting you.
To the ones I didn't: I'm sorry that it'll only hurt more when it happens.  
To my (few) readers: I'm sorry for taking so long to write my blog.
To me: I'm sorry for not being true to myself whenever possible - and it is always possible.

That's it. That's all I have to say. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. I shall endeavour to return to updating this blog semi-regularly in the dear future.

Until that happens, I'll be the one in the corner with the bottle of Bailey's to myself.

What we talk about when we talk about stress.

Recently I've been sleeping a lot more, and dreaming a lot less.

This isn't how you're supposed to respond to stress. You're supposed to lie awake long into the small hours of the night and twitch with anxiety. Stress is supposed to give you nightmares or patterns of interrupted sleep. You're supposed to eat less and less and slowly wither away, consumed by a vague but lingering sense of panic, in the back of your mind or the pit of your stomach or some other fringe of your body.

I haven't been getting that.

My A-level exams are looming. For my international readers (hi, I kind of can't believe you exist), A-levels are the standardised tests you do in England at the end of your last year of school. Their results arbitrarily determine your future, if you get into the university you want to or are sent to your insurance choice or have to go through the confusing process known as clearing - which seems like a January sales-type deal, where you apply to empty places that other universities have due to their applicants messing up - or if you need to retake your exams. Of course, if your future doesn't involve university, then they are a lot less relevant.

But the fact of the matter is that I am relying on my grades to get to university. My offer from the University of York is fairly low and pretty easily achievable for me; I can drop a grade from my predicted mark in each subject and still exceed it. Perhaps this is why I'm not stressing the way my friends are.

Of course, with everything I do, I feel like there is a niggling fear that I will fuck up, and I will fail. Every time I write an essay, I turn it in thinking about how I could have improved it, and how it's my own laziness which is preventing me from doing so. When you don't have to work hard, sometimes you stop caring. I'm worried that this will happen to me, that I will become complacent from treading water and suddenly sink. I am cool and nonchalant, but inside my head I am afraid of doing it wrong.

This is what stress is to me. I don't down bottles of wine or party into oblivion to forget, but I don't obsessively revise either. Stress over my impending trip to Japan is probably compounding issues - it's less than two months till we leave and we haven't finished booking accommodation! That is stressing me out! What if we get to Kyoto and have to illegally camp in a park?! By comparison, I'm finding it a little difficult to care about the GOP position on immigration or William James' essays on religious experience or the dramatic presentation of power in King Lear.

Sure, my future might hinge on how well I can bullshit about Webster's poetry, but what if I don't book a hostel in Hiroshima in time and have to pay an extra five pounds a night?!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have no sense of proportion. I am a little bit stressed over a lot of things, so I focus on the most innocuous because - well. That's just it. I don't know why. Maybe because it's the least scary.

It'll all be over soon, and until them I guess I will continue to sleep less and eat about the same amount, and hope it all works itself out in the end.

Perhaps I will write love letters.

The English language is an amazing thing. It's malleable, and adaptable; it grows and changes and, magpie-like, picks up words and phrases from other tongues. We are a country forged by invasion. We speak words every day that we inherited by Romans and Saxons and Vikings. We are influenced by Greek and French and German. And yet, we only have one word for love.

On Wednesday, I looked around a university to find out if I wanted to go there. It was St Andrews, a pretty university in a pretty village on the pretty coast of Scotland. It wasn't so pretty when I was there. It was raining so hard the drops bounced off the ground, forming a grey mist for several feet around. I knew all about the course and I had looked up the different halls of residence. But I had to visit.

It's like online dating. You might be the perfect match on paper, but you have to meet in person, to find out for sure. To see if you click.

St Andrews and I didn't click.

On my third date with The Boy, on his birthday, we were sat in a bakery in London, on barstools, eating cake with shiny metal forks. I sighed, and told him all about the fact I was torn between two universities. It had been a long time since he was in my position. I don't know if he ever felt that indecision. I just wanted to talk through my feelings, and had arbitrarily decided he was going to listen to me.

One university was a more logical choice than the other. It was a case of practicalities, I supposed.

He looked at me over his carrot cake (all our conversations seem to happen over food) and said, "Don't make a logical decision. Base it on your feelings. Go with your gut."

I had assumed, therefore, that I would fall in love with one or other university. Naively, I had thought that when I found the place I wanted to go, I would just know. I would become enamoured with the campus, the town, the dorms. The very feel of the place. I would leave, and know in my bones I wanted to go there.

York was... nice. I could imagine myself there. St Andrews was also nice. But neither one made my heart pound and flutter. Neither one gave me that swelling in my chest, or the sensation of my blood skipping in my veins, that made me think "...oh. I want to come and study here." Neither town felt like home; they felt like places I was passing through.

And so, with no emotional component to make me select one place over the other, York seemed more sensible. It is closer home, closer to a big city, and with better travel links should I wish to escape the campus for the weekend. I don't love it, but I feel that maybe I will come to. Love at first sight is all well and good, but it's got a limited scope. I think I prefer the love that grows and develops, which falls for flaws as well as the pretty veneer over them. 

I firmly believe you can fall in love with things other than people. Love is a word with many sub-categories. Saying "I love you" to my friends is different to saying it to my grandad, or my paramour, or my cat. When we talk about "love letters", we think of notes written in copperplate to a husband, a girlfriend, a romantic partner who makes your lungs feel squeezed and gasping for air.

I think we need to write love letters to everything and everyone we hold dear. I need to write love letters to my friends, to my family, to individual aspects of life that makes it worth holding onto.

If I could, I'd write a love letter to a place. I'd write it to Bawdsey, a village in Suffolk, a place which smells how I imagine 1955 would smell. I would pen the letter on a rock from the shore; write it with a stick of chalk; fashion an envelope from the leaves in the graveyard where my paternal family are buried; post it out to the slate grey sea and watch it wash up on some other beach, in some other town that smells like another time.

Perhaps one day I will want to write a love letter to York, to its castles and history and cobbled streets. Perhaps one day, I will want to write a love letter to The Boy (because it's so much easier to communicate when there's a piece of paper to act as a barrier between you. And a text just wouldn't be the same. It's all very well having the versatility of English, but that counts for nothing when a smile can wipe your mind blank. I can't imagine heaving my heart into my mouth; I'd rather keep it in my fingertips.)

The way I see it, we all cultivate our own language. It's a personal amalgamation of slang and phrases and injokes and gestures and expressions that is so uniquiely us. It bends according to how others speak, what we read and what we hear. It's our own little take on English. And in my take on English, love still means many things. I love home. I love my laptop. I even love you, dear reader. I think I mean love most when I write it down, because letters on a page are a solid record. They are there long after the whispered Iloveyous have evaporated into the air. I want love to exist than more than just a memory: I need the proof.

How am I supposed to leave?

We all have to leave sometime.

I have lived in this village for as long as I can remember. It is too small to have a train station, and the buses to the nearest towns only come once an hour. It is big enough to get lost in, but I haven’t for a long time. I have lived here for seventeen years and I don’t know the names of most of the roads. Once, on the day of my first driving lesson, my instructor asked me where Fish Street was.

Fish Street? No, I don’t know Fish Street; it’s The Common, which changes names halfway down for no apparent reason. It’s the little curved apostrophe of a road where all the terraced houses have window-boxes full of cheerful pink carnations, and cars parked in front with two wheels up on the pavement. It’s a road I can describe with my eyes closed, but I’d never paid any attention to its name. I saw the road name on a sign every day, and it was so obvious that I never noticed it.

When someone says “home” to me, I think of the High Street in the summer, when hanging baskets adorn every lamppost and shop front, suspended on fragile chains beside the door of the chemist or the chiropractors’, and the whole street smells like a garden centre. Home is the gravel path of the church I used to walk up every week as a child, before my creeping antipathy for religion rendered me an atheist. My mother still walks that path every Sunday, and the nave is where we sat the last time we said goodbye to her own mother. It’s a safe place for her.

There’s the bench next to the needle of the war memorial, the criss-crossed paths cutting across the Common that are surrounded by a canopy of trees, the cratered road my childhood best friend lived at the other end of. Driving down her road was an exercise in how to ruin your car’s suspension and her parents always used to mutter darkly about how extortionate it would be to repave it. But I loved it, and loved how running over the bumpy surface could make it feel like you were flying, never quite sure where your legs would land.

My hometown is affluent, a microcosm of suburban paradise where children play in the river and climb trees, and where my elderly neighbours still stroll with impunity. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me here was when I got honked at by a passing car when I was walking home from the shops at age fifteen; it’s that sort of place.

And with each day that passes, I get closer to leaving it. I’ll be flying the nest. I don’t yet know where I’ll be going, but it’ll be two hundred miles away or more. I won’t be living in a place where I can go for a walk at 2am, on my own, and feel utterly unfazed. I’m excited for the city, for the new people, for a room that is mine and a place where I get to be someone new. My village is dull, but it's safe. It won't surprise me or hurt me. It seems inconceivable this place could ever change: it's going to be the same forever. I know I've outgrown it.

But I’ll miss this. I’ll miss holding open the door of the post office while a pensioner closes her umbrella and we share a knowing smile about the weather. I’ll miss the white gates of my house and the feeling of being anchored, to a specific place in a specific moment of time. I suppose that moment is coming to an end, and something new is about to start.

I don’t want to go. I can’t wait to move away. I could stay here forever. We all have to leave sometime.

Don't make me get a proper job.

I come from a family of smart people. Who did proper degrees with practical applications, and got proper jobs in the real world, and got married and had families and houses and mortages. And I'm not planning any of that. And that's fine.

My grandfather went to Oxford to study Maths. He applied after his two years of National Service in the army, where he taught illiterate prionsers to read in Scotland and helped with the repairs in Germany after WWII. Originally, he asked to study Natural Sciences, because he thought he wouldn't be smart enough to study Maths - but he got in, and he graduated and got a job and fell in love. He met my grandmother at a Roman pageant. She was dressed as an archer, he as a centurion; he gave her a lift home on the back of his motorbike, which he'd bought off a South African pole-vaulter at the 1948 Olympics who needed to pay his way back home. She fell in love with him, even though he started losing his hair at twenty-five.

Gran grew up in a poor household; apparently her father or grandfather gambled away all the family fortunes. She got a scholarship to a snooty school, and wanted to study History at university. But her little sister was a musical prodigy, her parents couldn't afford to put both of them through higher education, so she trained as a teacher at Homerton College. I'm pretty sure she got an honourary degree from Cambridge before she died. I'm glad. My grandfather would write software programmes, and she would write the manuals so people could comprehend them, but she had no interest in technology herself. She preferred people.

My mother was less academic than her brother, who studied as a vet in Edinburgh and married a civil servant, then a travel agent. Instead, she trained as a nurse and medical secretary, and stopped working to have a family and live in suburbia. In an attempt to prove the theory that women fall in love with men like their fathers, she married my dad: a software engineer, with an Oxbridge education (but rather more hair. And no motorbike).

Even my cousins are scientific. Gus has a phD in something to do with birds, and his wife is a doctor of spiders. Cat and her husband both studied chemistry, before being forced to drop out of university.

But really, it seems a bit like I exist only to be a contrast to my brother. He is skinny and athletic, all muscle and bone with not a molecule of fat on him. He worked hard at school and is in the third year of a Physics MA. He'll be spending the summer in Didcot, where his girlfriend works in a chemical engineering company. He's going to be working on nuclear fusion, which is a pretty big task for an undergrad. He doesn't really have plans for the future, but it's a fair guess he'll get a steady job, because physics graduates are always in demand. I'd like him to to marry his girlfriend and move to Coventry and have babies as geeky as they are, and a wilted lawn with toys strewn across it, and a lazy lapcat called Molly.

And then there's me. I am not skinny, nor athletic, instead exquisitely endomorphic with a fascinating topography. I spend all my time procrastinating, complaining when things don't go my way while simultaneously telling everyone to CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE!!! My plan for the summer is to travel around Asia for five and a half weeks before starting my degree in English and Philosophy. Then things get a bit hazy, but I'm almost sure I'll never get a proper job. And it certainly won't involve trying to solve a major energy problem. I'm more likely to move to New York, sink thousands of dollars into a post-graduate degree, and barely scrape a living as a freelance writer always dreaming of something more. I'm going to make a point of being every 'starving artist' cliche I can. Maybe I'll make a check list, so I can tick them off as I go.

I have nothing in common with my brother, but we get on pretty well.

But I always feel like a bit of the un-favourite in my family, like my parents prefer my brother because he's predictable and conventional and going to be a success. I'm more of a roulette. I honestly can't imagine ever living in the real world, full of bills and deadlines and social expectations. Maybe that's what appeals so much about writing: I can ensconce myself in a little bubble, where other people can only come if I invite them in. My family don't understand, but I don't understand how anyone could live working in an office from 9 till 5, so I guess we're even. Let me be a flake; just don't make me get a proper job.

But I wouldn't change them for the world - because I know my sensible, stable family will always be there to help me out. They'll give me a sofa to crash on, so I can figure out my life while they get on with theirs.