Weekly Ramblings: Re-started

Issue 10 – Monday 26 October 2020

Don’t hold your breath, but I’m going to try and bring this shambles of a blog back from the teetering edge of vanishing forever with my sporadic and untimely weekly ramblings. For lack of a better excuse, my writing has been temporarily put on the back burner as my weekly schedule finally starts to fill up a bit more.

In recent weeks I’ve moved into a new flat, re-started a part-time job and most importantly, started my third year as a journalism student. This means I’ve been relatively busy, while also suffering from some untimely writer’s block and in honesty, a lack of self-belief in my writing.

Anyway, enjoy these ramblings and I will do my utmost to maintain a weekly dose of nonsense for the foreseeable future without too many grammatical or spelling errors hopefully.

The Good

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Autumn this year as it brings a tinge of much needed colour to the streets and parks of Aberdeen. When it’s sunny in the Granite City the orange and yellows of the many trees around town are a stunning site.

For someone who usually complains about the cold, I’ve also found the switch to wearing cosy jumpers quite comforting. This is either because my best fashion choices are geared for the cooler weather or because I’ve put on a bit of Scotch beef recently and want to hide it under a couple of layers.

In all seriousness, this short period of the year before the long Scottish winter brings good running conditions with it. The cooler temperatures are the perfect anecdote to the sweat fest of a summer time run. It also meaning I have a good reason to wear my lucky green hat again when its not too blustery.

Elsewhere, there’s been the chance to watch professional rugby on channels previously unseen by yours truly, being brought into the new flat by my cohabitant. This wasn’t part of the long and grueling screening process for choosing a flat mate, but just happened to be an added bonus.

 On Saturday we enjoyed a festival of rugby, with two internationals and the Premiership final between Exeter and Wasps. It was also good to see Scotland get off to a slightly clumsy, yet promising start to their Autumn campaign against Georgia on Friday. I could watch Finn Russell play all day.

More importantly, we are settling into the flat well and it’s been great to have my own place again, out with some small teething problems… 

The Bad

On moving into the flat about a month ago, we were slightly spooked by the irregular sounds of banging which we though were resonating from the attic. This would occur about once a day and usually in the evening as we wondered around the flat, making dinner and just being students.

It wasn’t until the start of this week that we discovered the actual source of the noise in a letter stuck to our foyer which had been written in red felt pen and lacked a signature. It explained that that the tenants below us had experienced rattling lampshades and had even apparently lost a bulb to our outrageous rampaging behavior above.

In all seriousness, we were pretty puzzled at their complaints, especially as we heard them assumedly banging on their ceiling (our floor) with a brush when I went to brush my teeth the other evening at approximately 9.45 pm. Out of curiosity I wrote them a letter, but there has been no reply.

 Anyway, Mum* thinks it because I stomp about a bit and now, I’m feeling slightly paranoid. Maybe I’m pretending I have a clear purpose? Maybe the neighbors have a right to be annoyed? Maybe they’re all 8ft tall and the sound is magnified because their heads are so close to the ceiling?  

A second slight teething problem with the flat is the inconsistency of our shower which has now gone cold until the plumber returns from his pilgrimage for a mysterious part. Previously, the shower had kept you on your toes as it went from hot to cold and back to hot. Now it’s just cold.

A definite silver lining is that cold showers do wake up the body for the day ahead, as I’ve found when waking up early to drive to work in Braemar. They are however, much more suited to the Fijian summer than the Scottish Autumn and it takes a fair few layers and the blasting of a heater to warm the body up once you’ve dried off.  

The Ugly

Being a dishwasher feels slightly perilous during these times of heightened attention to preventing the spread of infection. Even those who are less concerned about the spread of the virus are still taking precautions.

Therefore, it still comes as a bit of a surprise that so many customers leave their wet baby wipes on their plates and still insist on using their tables as a rubbish bin. This along with the inability to socially distance and wear a mask properly in many of the supermarkets has become a real bug bear for me.

Working in the kitchen again has definitely nailed down the importance of good hygiene in the kitchen and why its key to shave my pathetic attempt at a beard off to avoid the temptation to scratch my face.

However, I do have sympathy with the difficulty which some will still be having adapting to the bizarre changes which we have had to make to our lives over the last six months or so. Not all people can wear a mask, but if you can then surely you could at least wear it properly? I don’t want to see your big nose at the best of times.

Signing off,

Stomp, the T-rex dinosaur from Flat F   

*Leah revealed while I was writing this piece that she also thinks I’m heavy footed and now I’m feeling even more self-conscious.