Because I just can’t seem to write during term-time.

It’s twenty past one on a Monday morning. Can’t you tell I’m a student?

The title of this blog isn’t strictly true, I’ve written far too much about some things this autumn, but it is extremely factual when it comes to Obfuscatory Nonsense. You see it seems that whenever I get the urge to write something it’s 4am and I’m mid-essay and it’s the most counterproductive thing in the world.

So now I have a bit of respite from the essays, I have decided to just type away, and see which strange avenues I explore.

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It’s easy to lose yourself to being busy. Balancing mobile phone alarms has become my trade. The snooze function is akin to the big boss on an old video game. Spotify has found a new use as a timepiece – for time is now judged in songs, not minutes. Bikes are miraculous inventions, but they overestimate the effort required in your legs. And then a late night walk home can be a wonderful way to switch off – even as you are simultaneously wishing to not have to walk anywhere.

What I am trying to convey, I suppose, is simply how hectic my life seems to have been this term. I don’t think it has been, really. It is not as if life has ever seriously threatened to not fit into the minutes as they fly by. It does seem that the contrast between how ‘on the go’ and purposeful I’ve felt during term, and the bizarre lull which seemed to settle around Oxford as night fell on Friday of 8th week, must be telling. I have been able to go food shopping with more than just the current evening in mind, aimless walking is allowed again, and writing for pleasure seems somewhat palatable.

…which bring us to now. Let’s rewind a little;  it is getting towards that mythical two o’clock moment –  mythical because I tend to think that 0200hours is the line between late-night, and early morning – and I’m doing what I end up doing every term break: Watching film after film and being inspired by at least every other offering, potentially every other scene.

I spent two hours earlier in the week watching one about drinking – it felt appropriate for this, the fag-end of term. It was a film I had actually never heard of until about 25 minutes before I began to watch. Called ‘Drinking Buddies’, and starring Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson – of New Girl fame – and Anna Kendrick, it was a lo-fi quite romantic comedy. But that undersells it slightly, because in reality it was a film about how a preponderance of alcohol, fuzzes the way we feel about things, and people of course. The main thing I admired about it was definitely Johnson’s beard, but otherwise a film which decides to actually be a bit interesting with the whole ‘rom-com’ genre was a nice change.

Since then I have watched the first Hunger Games movie, Anchorman, half of Annie Hall, the third Harry Potter film, Johnny English, and Adventureland – it has been a fun and varied week all told.

All of those are good films, a couple might even be great. The first in that list explained to me quite why everyone thought Jennifer Lawrence was ace before Silver Linings Playbook. The second reminded me why I’m terrified about the sequel (no way can they match the original…). The third, although it remained unfinished thanks to the vagaries of my sleeping pattern, made me smile an awful lot and led me to spend too long browsing Woody Allen-style glasses. Numbers four and five both took me back a little: Harry Potter, as is discussed elsewhere on this blog, is simply the biggest touchstone in my childhood, whilst Rowan Atkinson taking on the John Malkovich’s fabulous French accent did what it always does and made me giggle and really want to watch an old Bond film.The final film pointed out something quite pertinent to me (in addition to the fact that Kristen Stewart can actually sort-of act): it suggestively hinted that daft things happen when you go in search of a plot.

On a related note, the real lesson that each of those films has taught me is thus: The world in which they take place is ever so slightly misaligned with our – actual – world. The way in which Drinking Buddies subverts a couple of conventions (I won’t say how) is probably as close as any recent film has got to fitting the metaphorical tracing paper on top of dodgy sketch that is reality. Films shouldn’t be about reality though, at least not as a rule (because who in their right mind would watch a film about me writing this, at two o’clock in the morning and wearing a stupid hat?), but that doesn’t stop the self-reflexive way in which reality tries to be like films.

(If the person alluded to in the brackets directly above is you, please let me know, you either need some serious help, or you’re perfect; it really could go either way.)

So, I think I have worked out that that is what I love about films, and all the other forms of fiction we have – there’s this bizarre relationship going on which makes us watch things, and read things, and care about those things.

Raise your glass to fantasy then, the subtle kind, just as much as the kind which has dragons.

Ranting and raving: A year.

Staring at the walls of the bedroom that I’ve flat-out refused to give up for as long as I can remember – it is the biggest – and reflecting on the last year is slightly harder than I had expected it to be. It’s been a year that has resisted labelling. As if it were some suspicious insect which just could be a spider if I was to tilt my head in the correct direction, I’ve found myself unsure quite how to pin-down quite what has been going on during a span of time which has taken me from the achingly familiar to the disconcertingly well-known.

Amusingly – to my no doubt shellshocked ‘fresher’ brain at least -I spent most of Christmas stuck with the word ‘crazy’. ‘Mental’ occasionally forced its way in, but – apart from being examples of a kind of stigmatisation of mental illness which I’d really rather didn’t come from my mouth – neither term tells anyone anything about what I’ve been up to.

The fact that I’ve written about one and a half things on here didn’t help, either.

In truth, it’s been a year spent receptively. Living in a new city is strange, and it is something which threatens to dismember you fairly often. Apart from anything things like ‘not losing your accent’ – however inconspicuous mine is – become ridiculously important. It’s impossible to be aloof from your circumstances though, and a year down the line I know I’m an older person, with an ever-so-slightly altered perspective.

Oxford’s great. If I were to pick a city to influence the way I think, I don’t think I’d have many other options. From the insanity of Mayday with its morris dancers and extreme tiredness, to the way in which the last day of exams sapped my will to do anything, the city and the university were both incredibly (pretentiously) present. It’s  place full of the most bizarre kind of history, and then when I remember that Exeter College itself derives a great deal of its infamy from fictional (Morse, Pullman, Bennett) sources, I get oh-so drawn into the grand narrative of the place.

As I say, it’ s been a good year. My top personal reflections include the disappointing fact that University puts a strain on your waistline – I have a particularly love/hate kinda relationship with the infamous Hassan’s – and the really quite worrying fact that I strangely like how much I resemble a shit Hollywood villain when I’m lazy enough to allow the pathetic beginnings of  a moustache to become unchecked. (I know it’s not good, I really know.)

This has been strangely hard to write. The majority of it came when I was really quite drunk, and I’ve only edited that bit slightly. That’s probably for the best though. I was never sure whether I wanted to, or how I would, cover ‘Oxford’ on here. And this is probably the only effort I’m going to make to do so. Directly, anyway.

Instead, I’m just gonna try and write stuff. Working title might well include frequent self-deprecating references to myself as a ‘workshy layabout who likes the sound of his own voice’.

I actually really think I might keep this promise to write more on here, too.