Happy New Year! I hope the festive break treated you all well, and you were able to enjoy some home comforts over the holidays- although, with it being over three years since I flew the nest, the couple of days I spent back home with family over Christmas were more than enough for me! (The freedom that moving away from home grants you is highly underrated!)

I spent the holidays alternating between either working or being bed-ridden with the never-ending flu so don’t have much excitement to share with you.  Although, we did have snow in Dundee which I think was the first time I had experienced so much of it here.  Dundee is beautiful all year round, but especially so with the crunch of snow on the streets and the sparkle of the reflection in the water.  I made the most of the quiet streets and warmed up with brunch in my favourite Dundee coffee shop, Pacamara,
which, as you can see, was pretty damn good.  Thankfully, however, the snow didn’t last long as the novelty well and truly had worn off after having to add an extra twenty minutes onto my commute to work to account for potential slips and falls and I was grateful that it had cleared up before classes started again.

Which brings me onto my next topic- classes.  We’re nearing the end of the first week of semester 2, which is a significantly different experience to semester 1.  The first half of the academic year begins excitedly and celebratory and it speeds through until the Christmas celebrations start to begin.  Semester 2, on the other hand, begins just as the New Year high is wearing off, the realities of final exams (or in my case, graduation) starting to kick in.  You hope that your New Year’s resolutions- keep a diary for organisational benefits, stop stuffing face with chocolate, read more- will actually succeed this year and you will suddenly morph into ‘The Ideal Student’- doesn’t leave work to the last minute, takes notes while reading articles and book chapters, goes to library everyday whilst maintaining membership of three different societies and a gym membership.  Who  knows what the semester will bring (besides the certainty that is my Graduation date on the 23rd June ahhh!), but the build up to a sunnier climate with longer evenings, that all-year-round sparkly Tay, and the promise of a long summer break will always make me more productive, or, at least, frightened into action!

I am, actually, hugely excited for my class this semester.  Yes, class, singular.  I have one module and my dissertation- the less said about that the better at the minute- and my class has been given an evening slot so lasts for three hours on a Monday between 6 and 9pm.  This is my first experience of an evening module, which are normally reserved for part-time students, so it was a bit of a shock to my system and caffeine will definitely be a necessity in future.  Having spent the full day in the library before going straight there-‘ The Ideal Student’ in practice- my poor brain was fried by the time I eventually got home.  It was, however, a really fun class.  I’ve taken a book history/publishing module which is a departure from my mostly theory-based English Literature classes up until this point.  This week was a very practical, historical and business based introduction to what promises to potentially be one of my favourite modules ever taken (though I am missing immersing myself in fiction and themes and characterisation etc).  We also have a trip to the archives in a few weeks which I promise to blog about- I’m very excited!

Hoping to get back into writing to you all more frequently- it acts as both a procrastination technique as well as attempts at becoming ‘The Ideal Student’ so win/win!