Term Time Thoughts #1: Implacable November weather
Can't use the entirety of Bleak House's first paragraph just yet.
Trying something new to commemorate starting second year.
There are two—okay, three—funny things that I’ve taken to actively doing so far this term.
The first—funny because I was already sort of doing that last year—is watching a student production at least every fortnight. We’ve had three weeks of term and I’ve already watched three shows, so I guess I’m ahead of the curve on this one: The Last Five Years, Twelfth Night, and In Praise of Love. Tomorrow we’re going to see Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at the Playhouse, which seats almost 700; next week my friend’s starring in Under Milk Wood, a whimsical little Welsh radio drama adapted for the stage. There’s just something about student theatre in this city. It’s cliquey and nepotistic and overwhelmingly white and besieged by a whole host of other problems—but God if it isn’t rife with possibility, with rich artistic expression, with the feeling that anything could happen. That you could make it so.
The second—funny because for once, I’m playing a sport instead of writing about it—is playing tennis. Two mornings a week I get out of bed and bike fifteen minutes down the roundabout that several years ago was named the second most dangerous in the UK for cyclists, shitting my pants every time. I tap into Iffley Sports Centre and I walk the whole length of the track where Roger Bannister ran the first ever sub-4-minute-mile to get to the tennis courts. (Miles. What is this, America?) It’s pretty humbling, doing something you’re bad at, something you can’t expect to come to you easier than thinking, something that calls your body into motion and forces you to stand there braced against the freezing cold of what the weather forecast called “a gentle breeze”. Still, basic muscle memory from a long-gone era of adolescent stick sports wins out and puts me firmly above the fiftieth percentile. Between drills I stare across at the overgrown grass courts and dream of summer.
The third—funny because you would think that I read enough as it is, which I don’t—is that to wean myself off doomscrolling I’ve discovered a radical new thing called reading. To be precise, reading a chapter of The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025 every night before bed. Actually, before is factually inaccurate; I do it in bed, ensconced snugly in the covers, as the very last thing I see before I close my eyes.
There are thirty stories in the anthology. At the rate I’m going I’ll finish the book just before the term ends; chapters I’m looking forward to include “I Emptied My Retirement Account To Buy Basketball Cards. It Was Thrilling. It Nearly Ruined My Life” (not SEO-approved, I hear my Editor-in-Chief’s voice say) and “One Must Imagine The Detroit Mechanix Happy”. But this third thing encapsulates a lot of how my second year has started, which is to say: remarkably introvertedly.
Is that it? That I’ve somehow taken to prioritising my solitude a lot more since I turned twenty? Or is it just that that’s the way life has to be, if I want to have everything I want? Maybe. Not really. I can’t tell.
A few days ago I went to a pub quiz social hosted by my newspaper, for my newspaper. (Hashtag by students, for students. Etc etc.) It was honestly about three hours of great fun; the whole thing wrapped up by nine-thirty. Everyone headed off to the pub for an after-quiz social, and I made the split-second decision to join the two editors who were leaving then even though I had nothing on after. We had a lovely walk back across Folly Bridge and into town, gossiping about inane bits of student drama, bonding over our dislike of pubs, and at some point I lied about having to duck into Tesco to buy something and bade them farewell there because we’d passed my bike and I needed to go back and get it.
I keep going back to it, because I can’t figure out why I let it happen. Why didn’t I simply say I had to go as we passed Broad Street? I knew very well where my bike was. Have I really become this terribly introverted? (I began writing this yesterday; today I had my first anxiety attack since I was eighteen.) That’s the wrong question, really. The better one is this: would I have done that last year? How different am I, now that I have even a vague approximation of a fraction of the effort it takes to get where I want to be?
And where do I want to be? The pinnacle of greatness. Like real, true greatness. The kind of great that people talk about over their morning coffee, screenshot and repost on Twitter, reward with a cool two thousand pounds at an annual awards ceremony. The kind of great that gets you to Milan in February, Wimbledon in the summer, the MetLife Stadium in July. As I was writing this I realised the flaw in my own logic: that if I really believed in myself that much I wouldn’t be going to America this December, wouldn’t be treating it like it was my last chance to see the East Coast in who knows how long. I would trust that I’d get my internship. That I’d be sent there for the World Cup, clutching my media pass to my chest like a good little sports journalist-in-training. But like any sensible gambler, I’m hedging my bets: I am afraid. I can say it now, because nothing’s happened, not yet. I am afraid that none of this will pay off, that I’m somehow already behind, that I’ll have run myself ragged to get to a starting line that everyone’s already reached. That I’ll have destroyed myself for nothing, Dostoyevsky-style. (Kidding. There’s much more room for plausible deniability in sports journalism than in consulting, anyway.)
But it’s not all bad. Like any sensible gambler, I have my eye on the next hand. In winter I’ll fly to Geneva for skiing and Norway for the aurora, Prague for Christmas and New York for the new year. In a month I’ll go to Florence and step out of the train station and my family will be waiting there, fresh from a new job and a set of end-of-year exams. In a few days I’ll go down to South Parks and see the fireworks go off in the sky with my friend. In a couple of hours I’ll go to bed, read about dykes playing basketball, dream about a future where everything pans out. It’s not all bad. It’s not all bad. It never has to be. Halfway there. Half to go.