Let's go back to basics

I'm fed up of hearing about the government's initiatives for 'going green'. Especially when it comes to transport. Hiking taxes onto fuel and air fares is meant to help deter the nation from using these modes of transport. But it's not working.

Watching Panorama the other day, there was a report about the electric car, which - if successful - should cut carbon emissions immensely. In principle, it sounds like a good idea. The government is advocating this, and the report looked into the poor facilities available for owners of the electric car. Local councils don't have the recharge points needed (not enough, or none at all in many cases). On top of this, the electric car can't travel long distances on full charge - something that needs to be worked on before the scheme can become commercially viable.

But if the electric car is deemed the saviour to our carbon emissions dilemma, surely the effect would be cancelled out by the huge increase in the amount of electricity the nation would be using? I mean, there's only so much CO2 reduction possible with this 'solution'. And the electricity companies (as well as increasing the cost of supplying electricity) try and lure us to give them business by telling us they are the best in terms of carbon emissions created by their input into the national grid. So, if we all switched electric companies to the lowest CO2 producer, and exchanged our cars for the electric car, would it really get us anywhere?

This is where I propose my contribution to reducing carbon emissions: public transport. As far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the taxes we pay on fuel and in our air fares are supposedly meant to be pumped into improving the public transport system (rail and bus in particular). Unfortunately, I don't see this happening. In some ways I'm in a better position to judge on this, having experienced the efficiency of the French rail network. As well as being heavily subsidised by the French government, there are rarely any huge disruptions to timetables - except when they go on strike, but that's a whole different ball game. Forgetting the subsidy that our government could potentially provide (they may do already, I haven't looked into it enough to know if they do or not), if the extra taxes we as a nation are paying are going where they are supposedly intended to, surely we should have seen a vast improvement by now? Instead, we see rising train fares resulting in no chance of people leaving the car at home and travelling or commuting by train. Maybe this is where the subsidy could come in (if it doesn't already...) to try and influence the population of workers and travellers to abandon cars and planes in favour of trains and buses.

Do you agree with me? Am I looking at this from an angle which has already been exhausted? Or am I being biased because I've just bought a car and have the prospect of high petrol prices and traffic jams ahead of me? If I could wholeheartedly depend on the public transport system, I probably wouldn't have bothered with my new car. But given my experience particularly with the trains in this country, I refuse to take the risk of arriving at school an hour late because the bus was late. At least this way, I will be in control of my punctuality.

Decisions... decisions...

Deciding whether to do one thing or another is tough.

Especially when you're rather indecisive when it comes to yourself (as opposed to what's best for other people).

It's taken me a while to decide to write this post, for starters. OK, so I've been a bit busy sorting myself out, but surely I had a spare ten minutes here and there to moan to you all (or to myself?) about the fears of getting fat, being skint and growing up. Seemingly I didn't...

Something I did make a decision about was the next chapter in my life. Which brought another bunch of indecisions with it. Where to live? Who with? What do I need in my new humble abode? How do I prioritise? Trust me, there were many more questions, and even fewer answers. Advice from family was scarce - "Do what you think is best" was the standard response from most people. And so I prioritised. And decided. And found myself a new home. "Result!" I hear you cry... Not so fast...

Now that everything but material things are sorted, I have to prioritise and decide on a more material (or superficial?) level. Do I want to get a car of my own? Indecision. I either don't want the extra expense, or will have trouble finding a parking space. In essence, I do want a car of my own. If I didn't, I wouldn't be in this dilemma. Then, there's the new-found dilemma (a somewhat stolen idea from my mate at Beetroot Soup) of whether to set up a new blog to chart the next year of my life and all its new experiences, or to just chart them here. Or to set up a blog with the same aim as Beetroot Soup, and keep Assistant Voyager to chart the random events that may or may not present themselves before me. I will still be assisting and voyaging, so maybe I should keep everything here until I'm not doing one or other of my name...

Indecision. You gotta love it.

The record shows I took the blows

The title of this post sums it all up really. With just over a week left in my current position as a language assistant, I'm thinking long and hard about what this year has been to me. The optimist in me tells me I've grown as a person, learnt to take the rough with the smooth (moreso than before), and above all, I'm more focussed on what I do and don't want. However, the pessimist in me tells me that this may have been one of the worst years of my life, what with a nightmare flatmate, horrible children to teach and a lot of uncertainty over whether I am who I thought I was.

Luckily for me, I'm an optimist. But even though I look back positively on this past year, I won't be missing it too much once I get back to the UK. I'm going to miss my new friends, and I hope that like my last experience as an assistant, that we stay in contact and keep each other updated on developments in our lives - particularly our globe-trotting locations. And I guess I'm going to miss the sunshine, although this year's summer so far has been rather disappointing on Toulonian standards. Seems I brought the luck of the Irish, I mean Welsh, with me after all. But it can't have been that bad, I have a lovely tan to show for my life in the sun.

France will forever be a place that I associate with escapism and good times, but at the same time I could never commit to coming back here on a more permanent basis. Not until I'm old enough to retire, anyway. Yearly holidays to visit friends that are still here will be enough to satisfy my nostalgic yearnings, which will surely come to the fore in about a year's time.

How do I know this? Because I'm having many nostalgic episodes about my time at university these days. When I left a year ago, I swore to high heaven that it would be a long time before I was ready to go back. I actually visited for a few days in February and it was amazing, but I wasn't quite ready to subject myself to the memories of finals and the like. But now I am ready for that - I'm ready to think about and recount the stress and difficulty of finals. I guess that's what graduation is for - to close the book on the best and worst years of your life, for whatever reason.

And so, as I foray into a summer of the unknown before continuing my life path in September, I'd say this year has done at least one thing for me: it's let me go back to being me.

Damn it, I've forgotten what I came in here for...

Knowing when to stop or give up has never been easy for me. Knowing when to give myself a kick up the backside and get started has also never been easy. I seem to be one of those people who sits in limbo forever and a day, thinking about starting something or finishing something else that I managed to get started without actually taking any action.

Even now as I sit here and lament my state of limbo, I have unfinished business. I don't even want to think about the unstarted business. There is a reason why I can't get things done, though. It's the fear of having nothing to worry about getting started or finished respectively once the to-do list is all checked off.

I live for my to-do lists. The longer the better. That way, crossing off the half the menial tasks that get done makes me look like I've had a productive day. Unfortunately, those menial to-dos probably only took a total of about twenty minutes to actually carry out. Leaving me with the time consuming to-dos that have been on the list since the dawn of time. One day I'll be done with to-do lists. I'll go back to my infant days where I stored every detail in my brain and got it all done. Something went wrong in my teens, I lost the memory function in my brain - or at least the function reduced itself to a selective rather than functional memory.

What irks me most are those little distractions that make me question my sanity. Take my little detour to the supermarket on my way home from work. I went in for the purpose of buying some envelopes. I came out with a nice full bag of groceries, but no envelopes. The groceries will come in very handy, given that my shelf in the fridge is extremely bare en ce moment, but the fact that I went into the shop for one single thing, and came out with many things except that one single thing really drives me up the wall.

The onset of some debilitating illness that affects me for the rest of my life? Or a simple case of consistent superficiality - the filling of my stomach over the completion of 1001 administrative tasks? You tell me. Because I keep forgetting to think about it.

Figuring it all out

Yesterday I made a first in my life. For the first time ever (and this is rather shocking given my addiction to the internet) I legally downloaded my first two music albums. And what a buy they were! After taking what seemed like an age to get all the tracks to add to my music library in media player, I cracked it and have been playing them ever since.

I'm not sure what I'm most proud of though; the fact that I was a law abiding citizen, or the fact that I downloaded music by someone I found randomly on YouTube about two weeks ago and who a lot of my music savvy friends haven't heard of. I'm usually the last person to discover good music - I'm not the biggest MySpace surfer in the world. Usually I'm the person being introduced to random acts through MySpace and YouTube links over MSN.

So for once, I'm the one doing the discovering. And boy, the feel good goes a long way.

Tick tock... tick tock... I've only got four minutes, I mean weeks, to save the world

Time flies when you're having fun. I hate to admit it, but it's damn well true. After all the stress and horror of September to May, now that I've started to really enjoy myself and be able to appreciate my situation, I suddenly only have a month left to do so before moving on.

Yes, dear reader, I said enjoy myself. You see, I got out of the horrible situation I'd let myself stay in for 7 months, and moved into a new flat with a new, lovely (and, consequently, English speaking) flatmate. And the past month has been utter bliss. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I seem to only be able to write when frustrated/angry. I don't often feel motivated enough to write when everything's going good, even though I should push myself to write sometimes, just to be able to say that I've done something productive with a small chunk of my time.

And so the time has come to start stressing about the next step. Not about the uncertainty of the future, but it's near certainty thanks to the way I've mapped it out. And although it's what I want, and the only thing I can honestly see myself doing, it's still very scary. I don't know how well suited I'll actually be to teaching, but at least I'm finding out. Face the fear head on, that's how to overcome it, right? It better be.

But, the silver lining is cracking. Despite being much happier both in myself and my surroundings, I still manage to waste a horrific amount of time. It's not like I don't have a to-do list as long as my arm, so why do I do it? I can't decide between it being a result of having nothing to do once it's done, or just being too damn lazy to get on with it in the first place. Either way, it has to get done. All I need to do is push myself to do it.

I'll let you know how many boxes I manage to tick.

Je n'aime que moi

My hiatus got cut short. Within an hour of their return I was upset and going stark raving mad trying to stop myself from murdering one of them.

I even had a 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' moment after the disastrous reunion, albeit in a much less romantic fashion: I got off the bus and walked through the streets without realising it was raining. Heavily. So I got extremely wet. At least it cheered me up, anyway.

If I can take anything away from this horrible situation I've been living in of late, it's that I've learnt a lot about myself. I think I can look at things less subjectively now, for want of trying to see what I've done and how it might aggravate the atmosphere in my "home". So at least I can walk away from the situation knowing even though my head's been messed up in more ways than one this year, I'm a more encompassing person for it. I was never highly intolerant before, but on occasions I would make false judgements based on one or two encounters. Now I like to think that I live by that age old saying "time will tell". Because, after all, the passage of time allows us to accept and explore new people and things, and that time does tell us exactly how we feel about something or someone having changed our minds several times throughout the course of any given period.

Time teaches us who we are, and where we figure in the grand scheme of things. Which is probably a good thing. It's nice to think that I'm the centre of the universe from time to time - even if it is a little selfish of me.