Famous Blue Hoodie

You know that feeling when you just want out? Well, I have it. It is not a fervent desire to escape so much as an absolute frustration with my circumstances to the point where escape seems the only faintly desirable option. I was bored in Surbiton at the beginning but I really detest it now! I know that I have played around with the concept on the pages of this blog but these affluent suburbs really are nowhere; just hinterlands, functional little hubs for functional people... not places to be young. We, who are numbered among the unremarkable, have been pushed out here to keep us off the unemployment register, while our ostensibly luckier counterparts lounge around at Bath Spa or sedate themselves under the slate-grey skies of Liverpool or Preston.

It could be worse I suppose but don't tell me that this is 'it'. I may not be a one of those hopeless young-people in a dead-end job, wandering the streets of a Staines or a Stevenage but nor am I happy or fulfilled or even, dare it say it, useful. The course doesn't train me to do anything- I know how to read already and reading Ian McEwan or J. G. Ballard will have no discernible positive effect on this most basic of academic abilities. I am a glorified Culture Studies student, with nothing more than an increased chance of answering related questions at a Pub Quiz (and I am rubbish at Pub Quizzes).

Once upon time, I had a dream that I would be (don't laugh) a Mental Health Nurse... I had the forms and everything; it came out of my awe for a medical student I met while volunteering during an election campaign: his gravitas, his workaday saintliness. After that, I came to Kingston for the first time to begin a part-time degree in Politics and Applied Economics, started reading Iris Murdoch and Jean-Paul Sartre and then gradually lost interest in anything that smacked of the vocational or utilitarian, in favour of the narcissistic. As you may have expected, I dropped out of the latter, eventually taking up an OU course in Literature, almost on a whim, while I was away in Ireland.

Well, after all that has occurred in the interim, I am about to finish the aforementioned- albeit, having returned to Kingston- and, in the time it has taken me, everything vain and self-obsessed (including, I guess, 'Notes from the Polytechnic') has, itself, begun to lose flavour. What is the use of keeping a record of your time spent reading the records of others? In the same way that the study of philosophy simply spawns more intellectuals- all a little dimmer, a little less original than their forbears, I am beginning to defer that the academic study of literature, to the exclusion of all else, simply spawns second-rate, secondhand and, in my own case, selfish writers...

As I said at the beginning, I want out now, if only to do something with the force of the teleological behind it, instead of that navel-gazing analysis of the same in books which, to paraphrase Geoffrey Howe, I have been performing for, perhaps, too long.