I had a pretty miserable time as a student. I was expecting it to open up my life, give me direction, answer all the questions I had, like what I was going to do with my life, who I was, etc. etc.

It didn’t!

Instead I found independence difficult, even though it was that funny kind of semi-independence where you went home at the holidays. I reckon most people don’t get a black-and-white “leaving home” experience, you do it (psychologically at least) over some years, I guess. But anyway. I found my student experience quite disappointing. I didn’t feel like I made the lifelong friends I had hoped I would make. I felt I’d left them all behind back at home. (In reality, I did make them, it’s just you don’t recognise them as such when you’re right there!) I didn’t get any epiphany moments as to what my career would be.

My student experience was one of confusing, half-formed feelings that melded into one another. It was hard to tell one apart from the other, despite my most strenuous analytic efforts.

And it just occurred to me, meeting up with a friend from those days, that not a lot has changed. Those feelings are still all mixed up and confusing, four years on. Now, there’s just more distance between me and them. I can look at them as an observer. It’s like visiting a museum.

I still have those same questions, too, but they’re not the menacing monsters they used to be. I have no idea how to answer, “Who am I?” but I’ve realised it’s not a question you can answer in words. Or not completely at least. Plus “I” is something that keeps changing, anyway.

Life is messy and refuses to fit into the boxes I try to put it in. But I like that. I guess I have always liked it, but back then “like” seemed to have a whole lot more pain in it. I don’t know. I haven’t lived life perfectly, but then no-one has, and I don’t believe that anyone really knows what “perfect” is anyway, so it’s effectively a meaningless question, but it’s funny how those questions we can’t quite answer are the most important. And enjoyable to try to answer! You have to answer them not just with thoughts thought, or words spoken (or written) but with life lived. You spell them out with the trail of the life you lead.

Here I use the word ‘programming’ loosely. I am a hobbyist web developer, who is pretty good at XHTML and CSS (or I was the last time I checked, which hasn’t been for a while) and not too bad at PHP with MySQL. I have to look up the odd, rarely ever used, obscure MySQL command, like INSERT or UPDATE, and every now and again I find myself researching the date() function, but I can do quite a bit with PHP. Classes and objects are still beyond me, yet I can use other people’s classes in my own scripts.

After I finished my degree I went travelling, and on my return to the UK I took up wasting my life as a full-time occupation: beforehand I had only been doing it part-time — what with my being a student. I did the odd bit of temp work (cleaning for the council, sitting at a computer for a day in my sister’s school, data entry for a mental health trust) but largely I spent my time getting up late, watching Star Trek: Voyager, walking the dog and, most productively, working on various web development projects.

It was during this time that I picked up my web skills, and really developed them. After I moved back to Sheffield in August 2006, I got a job working in a restaurant. It left my days free to do with as I pleased, and I spent most of them working on a plugin for WordPress that will allow me to manage all my photos from the same admin interface I use to manage my posts. I’m still working on it, over a year later…

I now work at Church (Hope City Church, Sheffield) in the conferencing department. The hours are long, and I also serve on the production team where I work on stage lighting, meaning the hours really are long. We often have things on in the evening, and there are events on both Saturday and Sunday. I don’t quite work a seven day week, but it does feel like it sometimes.

But I really love programming. I love seeing bits of code, and I just think monospace fonts are really pretty. I love the way everything is so neat and orderly, and how things always end with my most favourite punctuation mark, the semi-colon. It reminds me that code is a strange mix of language and mathematics.

Writing code is like setting up dominoes: each statement flows into the next one and the end point is totally different from the start point. The only difference is that you don’t have to set the dominoes back up again afterwards.

This post has been a retrospective of one of the best year of my life so far. Thank you for joining me on the journey. I am now going to eat vegetable samosas.

When I was little, we bought a guinea pig for my sister’s birthday. This guinea pig had rosettas in its fur, and my sister called these “Bonks”, and thus her name became Sally Bonkers. Sally lived with us for many years, longer than most of her peers. She died at the age of 9, and was much missed and mourned by us all.

Before that sad day, however, she met a male guinea pig, whom we were looking after for the weekend. Inevitably, nature took its course, and soon we had a litter of tiny guinea pigs. Piglets, if you will. Tiny, hairy, squeaking piglets.

But alas they died. They always died. It is the curse of life, and yet its greatest blessing, that all creatures meets their ineluctable ends, only to begin again immediately.

As is often the way with nature, incest abounded, and the babies just kept coming as siblings became parents faster than we could identify which were male and which were female. This horrible mass of inbreeding lasted several years, and we must have had 25 guinea pigs in total. I even made a family tree.

And so it went until we grew up and moved house, and the unfettered reproductive reign finally faultered and ended. The last surviving pig was a brown guinea pig that was the daughter, or grand-daughter, or niece (or, most likely, a combination of all three) of Sally Bonkers, the grand matriarch who began the entire story. We kept her in the garage until one day she escaped and was never found again. Never found, that is, until the day my father decided to consign the junk that surrounded the hutch to the city dump. There, beneath the cupboards, a deflated and mouldering body was discovered. There, the unmistakable shape of our last guinea pig was found. She had made her final resting place beneath the cupboards, and had died.

By then we were so used to the cycle of life and death that no-one was sad at her passing. We just popped her onto the bonfire. I don’t even remember her name.

So let this be a message to you all, you who keep rodents as pets. You shall all know the joy of new life, and the sting of death. Unless of course you can tell one sex from the other, in which case you are better owners than we. And here is the end of the message.

My parents had a radio alarm clock that woke them up to the sounds of Radio 4 in the mornings. As I was growing up, my room was directly next to theirs, and I grew to both loathe and detest this disturbance at the beginnings of each day. I felt powerless to stop the onslaught of news and current affairs until one day I discovered that my bedside lamp provided me with the best ever weapon against the dulcet tones of Sue MacGregor, John Humphrys and James Naughtie.

Not to mention Brian Perkins. O Mr Perkins! Where would we be without you?

Where indeed…

I happened upon my discovery one evening when listening to my own radio. I noticed that if I held the switch on my lamp between the on and off position, the lamp would flicker, presumably due to the contact almost being made but not quite. I think I once saw sparks within the body of the switch, but I don’t remember for sure.

This flickering also had the wonderful ability to interfere with radio signals. It would make the reception of any channel so irredeemably poor that to listen to the station was the most unbearable aural torture. It provided me with hours of secret mirth to hear my parents curse the white noise that so inexplicably plagued their radio before switching it off to allow me delicious silence in which to doze for a few more precious minutes.

Does anyone else remember all the way back to their French GCSE listening exam? I don’t remember the board, unfortunately, but I do recall that just before they got into all the questions, there was a woman saying,

You will now hear a short conversation, in Frunch, to introduce you to the Frunch voices.

Did anyone else notice that, anyone at all?

Update: I made a sound recording of what it might have sounded like.

My Mum was talking about a song that my Grandma apparently used to sing. She doesn’t remember all the lyrics, but she does remember that the song begins “Oko boko, hit him on the boko” before continuing with something about “slitty eyes”.

I’ll try to get the full version for a future post, unless it turns out to be horribly racist.

The song ends with the words, “I widdy wee”.

Update

We managed to find a few of the lyrics, except for one line. If anyone knows it, help would be much appreciated :)

Once there was a poor little man
His arms were long and his legs were small,
[ missing lyrics ]
And the poor little man couldn’t walk at all.

Chorus:

Oko boko, pat him on the boko
Roll him down the hill like a beecham’s pill.
Ido nora, nikky nakky nora,
Roko boko, I widdy wee.

Update

Found them online …

Also, Beecham’s pill were a laxative, so that’s interesting.

When I was very small, there used to be a charity shop in Bath called Whoops!

I remember it well because it had a play area in it that I really appreciated as a child being dragged around boring shops.

Anyway, I also remember finding the name irredeemably hilarious, because it implied that the clothes had been soiled (faecally) prior to their being dropped off at the store.