There’s all this stuff that needs doing, both for the magazine and uni. We have a month-long break but at least three-fifths of it will be spent doing work for either of those. Dissertation proposal / redo a couple of projects for assessment / redo the typography brief / photography ‘road trip’ brief / prepare content for new ‘book’ project / transcribe 40 minute interview / write up as 1300 word piece / transcribe 20 minute interview / commission illustrations / commission music interviews / the usual editorial email barrage. Bring on the long holidays, I say! Then I only have to worry about juggling magazine stuff with researching and writing my dissertation. Going away is nice. Not checking work emails is manageable for about 4 days but work inevitably piles up. In the end, you’re part of a team and you really can’t let them down.
Sometimes I wish I could just have, say, 2 weeks off from everything. No commitments at all. We’d go someplace like a cottage with a grassy expanse surrounding it. Clean and quaint with a couch and a large hunk of a wooden table. I’d lie on the grass under the sun and at night, watch films and spend time editing photos from the past year that I’ve had to neglect.
It was so sunny today.
Just yesterday I came back from a four day trip to Amsterdam with six friends from school, which was great even though we did end up having to stay overnight in Bruxelles-Midi station so we could catch our train back to London which had been rescheduled from 8pm the previous evening to the next one at 6am. Adventure, eh? Not my first time sleeping overnight in a foreign train station and I can only assume it won’t be the last.
That it was three years ago now – that first one - seems like an impossibility. Lately the photos have started to come unstuck on the wall above my bed; every day I see one about to fall and I have to press it hard, back into the surface. You do anything you can to hold on.
