Being about to start my fourth year at University is an odd feeling, especially as most of the people I know have just graduated after their third year, have spread out over the country, and are about to enter the big bad world of working.
I'm not sad about postponing the latter, but I am a little sad about postponing the former. One of the reasons I went to Holland was that I didn't feel ready to graduate as I didn't know what I wanted to do afterwards. Having now been to Holland, I'm a little more sure of what I want to do after finishing University, but I'm 100% certain that I'm ready to graduate and get on with things, and that's a feeling that's only been exacerbated by spending a few days visiting friends who've now done just that.
After getting back from France I visited Jon who's moved up to Norwich to live with his sister and brother-in-law. I'd never been to Norwich before, and I didn't know what it was like, but I feel it worthy of being classed as a thoroughly nice place. In fact, it wasn't dissimilar to Bath (possible my favourite place on earth), just a little bigger and more cityish. It also provided a good opportunity to see the Simpsons Movie (itself a slightly missed opportunity). On the second day there we all went to Pleasure Wood Hills, a slightly oddly named family-friendly pleasure park just outside Norwich with Jon's little sister. Now, I've known Jon for 10 years, which means his sister was 3 when I first new her and alas, not having a little sibling myself I tend to still think of her as that age, so it came as a little surprise to find her being 13 - a surprise that triggered one of those "we're so old" exchanges that tends to leave everyone depressed for rather longer than it should. Although I have noticed that the young prodigies in the news have gone from being a few years older than me, to being several years younger over the past couple of years.
The pleasure park was an odd cross between fairground and theme park, and Jon and I seemed to occupy an awkward age range, being slightly older than other groups of kids, and younger than the groups of parents. However, this provided some fun. After noting that Jon and Lauren went further at the bottom of the water slide than Lauren and I did, and that Steve and Lauren went further still, Jon and I decided to see what we could manage and so we pushed their two-to-a-dinghy rule to the limit and got up some impressive speed before launching off the bottom jump and sliding to a halt quite some distance away. Maybe getting old in age, but still apparently young at heart.
After the excesses of the day I boarded a train for London to visit Stef, Stuart and Joe who've just graduated from Selwyn and moved to the big city in the Docklands area. Unfortunately owing to the day at the pleasure park I didn't have that long there as I had to catch a train early the next morning, but it was great to see them again and to hear about how they were getting on post-University.
It's odd to think that had things happened differently, had I not filled in the Erasmus form, that I'd have been part of it all, moving on from home and university to start something new, but I've no idea where I'd have been. Going to Holland may have made me desperate to graduate and 'grow up' while postponing the event by a year, but it's also made me much more prepared for doing so and I'm continually glad that I did it. I'm not wanting to graduate to get away from University, in fact I'm pretty sure that I'll come back to it at some point, instead it's that I'm wanting to graduate to move on and get on with what my life will bring, whatever that may be.
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