The Pessimism and Occasional Optimism of Juvenile Adulthood

Last semester, I occasionally thought about the students smoking in a huddle outside the library in mid October, puffing away late into the night, griping about a dissertation suffocating them into a state of self-pity. In that moment I felt detached, swept briefly away into a world I didn't understand yet seemingly expected myself to empathise with. The truth is that I did empathise, but only in the ludicrous, vague feeling of emptiness that accompanies anyone leaving the library late at night - the feeling that you have morphed into barely a husk of limp muscle, stretched excessively over a brain drained by the lateness of the hour. This is a final year. A final year is when the bedroom, once full of old family photos in a desperate attempt to project personality and emotion onto the walls, now exists barely for sleeping. Now campus is life’s centre, superseding all else. Writing this, I am once again ensconced within the horrendous grey of the main library before term has even b...

In the dying days of my year studying abroad, I had vowed that I would write something coherent, almost meaningful. It would attempt to reflect my experiences, drawing together the anecdotes of what became my everyday life. Yet for months I felt I couldn't, trapped between the fine details that together felt too abstract and disconnected, and the gently fading clarity I held towards the details even as they slowly pulled together. This isn't novel, merely the process of memory twisting and evolving as my brain continually tries to adapt towards the world around me.  But I also noticed my own passivity that seemed to impact my thinking, removing myself from the life I was leading. In messages and in conversation, I would increasingly draw on phrases that distanced my role as an actor in my own biopic. Life was 'accelerating away', 'happening too quickly', even drawing on lyrical references in 'happening to me whilst I was busy making other plans'. For rea...

This is a self-indulgent article.  Many months ago, I escaped from the monotony of both studying and pretending to study, embarking on a long voyage to the Skuleskogen National Park on Sweden's Bothnian coast. It was a solo adventure, made possible by an unusually high tolerance for complicated transport arrangements, and a sense of general lunacy. Despite the 900km round trip's panicked conclusion which may one day warrant its own entry in a Bill Bryson-esque travelogue, it was ultimately a success, a day detached from civilisation. The initial plan to devote a whole post to the trip was scuppered by deep exhaustion that lingered in subsequent days. My memories of the day now are no longer as precise as I want them to be. I can trace the emotions - ideas of how I thought I felt - but not the details that define what once felt important. The slightly uncomfortable truth is that the more I think about that day out, the more reckless I think I was. But in seeking spontaneous esca...

Last week marked eighty years since the sentencing of Otto and Elise Hampel to death. Their lives were almost unremarkable except for their persistent acts of defiance against the Nazi regime - motivated by the initial, intense grief of family bereavement. Yet their efforts over a two year period brought minimal effect beyond their own eventual demise, their 'defamatory' postcard distribution often reaching only as far as the offices of the Berlin police and later the Gestapo. But after the war, their case file eventually made its way to Hans Fallada who, in his final weeks, adapted their resistance into  Every Man Dies Alone , later published in Britain as  Alone in Berlin . Fallada's quest, accomplished in only 24 days, was to offer meaning to these futile resistance tactics, a legacy for these well-intentioned if otherwise forgettable citizens. It is a legacy which survives neither in revolution or popular consciousness, but in Gestapo archives and fictional dramatisatio...

Following his death towards the tail-end of last year, I delved into some of the solo work of krautrock pioneer Manuel Göttsching. An architect of electronic 'kosmiche' music, I was drawn to his E2-E4 album, a minimalist, hour-long composition that layered and sequented electronic instrumentation over itself, creating a sparse yet pulsating sound, one that has inspired this piece of writing. Thoughts on the past few months have at times also felt sparse. Inspiration of how best to articulate my sentiments have often only arrived on semi-drunken bike rides home from the mania of certain parties. There, the thoughts of increasing sobriety that stuck to my evermore fractious mind required frenzied vocal repetition in the biting Swedish air before they could be frantically noted down on my phone. Inspired by  E2-E4's charming lack of direction, here sits an attempt to bring these thoughts together, to try and capture a degree of sentiment before the whirl of a new Swedish seme...

William Penn wrote that "Time is what we want most but use worst." The more we want time to stop in its tracks, it races ahead of us, causing life itself to accelerate beyond our perceptions of the world. There is a slight irony in so bleakly forecasting a doomed struggle against time in the introduction of a piece that is, ostensibly, about a running race. But it is a race long enough for pride to be measured not in rankings but pace, though satisfaction as an amateur can perhaps only be accurately measured by lactic sensations. Today, at the Uppsala Half Marathon, there were inevitably too many.  This morning, time was an embuggerance and a bliss. Looping repeatedly back on myself through the outskirts of Uppsala's old and new, time was all I could calculate - my head constantly contorting my distance covered and time spent in an almighty effort to estimate a resemblance of my final time. My head was full, yet empty, liberated from the banal stresses of the everyday, bo...

 A man jolts upright, his day not having intended to start so abruptly. Instantly he rises. Unable to conventionally breathe, he makes a dash for the toilet, raiding the tissue to empty his nose and wipe his face from the muck that has gathered from the hours of previously laying in bed. The immediate struggle to breathe, heightened by the excessive brightness of the toilet light, kicks too many wheels into motion. Only upon checking his watch to see the clock strike three does the adrenaline of the day subside into a slow sense of delirium.  Groaning for branded eucalyptus oil, he lumbers back to his bed. Immediately he is too warm under the covers, his body already beginning the brutal spin cycle of awakening before the mind could cancel such a typically cheap transaction. Soon he is too cold, left exposed to the room's unheated temperature. A headache pounds, though not heavily enough to stop his mind from endlessly whirring. Tonight the mind's theme of imagination was an a...

There was a brief moment yesterday when, watching another DJ pushing buttons for his set at All Points East festival in London, I nearly denigrated him internally. He was the third of five DJs I would watch and listen to in the afternoon who would all in turn either ‘take it up’ or ‘take it down’, each in their own slightly imitable way. I swiftly realised the hypocrisy of such negativity, having delayed starting a year abroad in Sweden precisely so I could watch even older men press said buttons. Soon, I may be able to write an article without incorporating or shoehorning references to German electronica, but that time lies ahead. I booked to see Kraftwerk almost as soon as I heard they were performing. I wanted to feel the thumping bass lines, sink into the hypnotic melodies and revere the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ - universal work of art - before co-founder Ralf Hütter (who turned 76 yesterday) looks at his watch and calls it a day, through choice or circumstance. Decades of German precisio...

Working on three and a bit hours sleep at the time of writing, the cusp of delirium draws ever nearer, sitting on my shoulder, waiting to seize even a slightest act of surrender. I’m quite proud to have held it off for quite so long. My long weekend in Paris (acting as both a final reunion of flatmates and a celebration of the Tour de France) operated on a system of long days, late nights, and sleep being consistently demoted in favour of talking, walking or occasional doomscrolling. Adding to the creeping sense of madness is the nature of Paris itself. Years ago, cycling into Paris with Explorers, I wrote a crap blog entry, where I referenced how the traffic lights offer a greater ambience to the city than instruction to passing vehicles. In that regard, little has changed. Cities are places of purpose, action, intention. Desires are geographically concentrated for your convenience, activity is the currency of a city’s success. Arriving on Saturday lunchtime, having been awake for nea...

As ‘Le Grand Depart’ came to a conclusion on Sunday, Wout Van Aert’s frustration at a third consecutive second place was palpable. Though Van Aert’s ultimate quest for the green jersey will be helped by a lack of sprint stages such as these, neither the upcoming terrain nor his current ownership of the yellow jersey will yet console him. If he was feeling inaccurately self-deprecating, Wout could consider himself a Jack of all Trades against masters. But Fabio Jakobsen’s competitive spirit in the high mountains will be channelled into surviving time limits - his personal and sporting rival Dylan Groenewegen will only hope his toils at the Dauphiné weeks ago will spare him the worst of such stresses. Only Peter Sagan seems to pose a serious threat to the Belgian, and even that will rely on him besting the man who last year won stages on Mont Ventoux, the Arc de Triomphe, and the humble stopwatch. Van Aert is a man capable of consoling himself. Reliant on extrapolating conclusions from...