What's Been Going On? Summer 2022

I never realised how fast life can change. This time last year I was stuck in a rut. Leaving the house was few and far between, I was halfway through my A Level courses and everything had started feeling too real, I was starting to feel too old. I was starting to question everything I knew and trying to distract myself from it all. This time last year I wrote ‘it must be the best summer yet’ but seventeen-year-old me, with her new friends and so much of her life yet to figure out had never really experienced ‘real life’ before. And I suppose a year later, eighteen-year-old me hasn’t really either. Though while maybe, I don’t have it all figured out, I’m moving to a new city, I’m meeting so many new people, and a new chapter of my life begins; it has finally hit me that nothing is the same as it was. Ferris Bueller once told me: ‘life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it’ and ever since I first watched that film in a GCSE Film class in year 10, that has been the quote that resonated with me the most. It’s the one I believe to wholly be true.

Summer this year has felt different, I don’t know if it’s because we’ve all known it’s just 3 short months and everything we know gets obliterated into fragments of what once was. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so vastly different to who I was back then, not only in character but in passion and ability. I never thought for a start this blog would become an important part of my life, that it would become part of who I was to others. ‘The girl with the blog, the blog endofapaige’. It’s been this very blog that sparked the best part of this summer actually, but we’ll come back to that later.

There was a vast juxtaposition to the start of the summer and the head-banging stress that came with my exams. The day I finished, I was packing for a week in Portugal and in that week in Portugal I was wondering what to do with the empty space left in my brain. Schools spend so long warning you of the stress of exam season, but never once do they prepare you for the numbing emptiness when those exams are all over because it really does feel like you’ve lost your purpose in life. It’s tough to stare into the sea and know you’re meant to be relaxing but have your brain convince you you should be revising. Madeira is lovely though, the hotel we stayed in was one of the fanciest I’ve seen. If I were to go complete travel critic on you, I’d tell you that the food was definitely on the nicer side for the buffet style restaurants in holiday hotels. The hotel had four restaurants, a traditional Portuguese, Italian, the Buffet, and the pool bar. We ate at all four, and while yes, the Italian was clearly the worst (probably because we weren’t in Italy), nothing was disgusting. The Portuguese restaurant was actually some of the nicest food I’ve had in a long time, and the traditional Madeiran sandwich ‘bolo de caco’ was to die for. We spent the week alternating between walks into Funchal and sitting by the pool. In Funchal we spent more money than we should have on a cable car ride that wasn’t quite worth it, and I saw some lizards who I named Stan, Steve and Sebastian. None names I purposely pulled from my obsession with Marvel but all that fit as pointed out by my brother. I read two books in total: One Last Stop by Casey McQuinston, another queer romance that made my heart melt just like Red, White and Royal Blue did and To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo. A fantasy book that successfully relit my adoration of YA fantasy when I was in a phase of romance book after romance book.

Looking back on the holiday to Madeira, it doesn’t so much feel like it was part of my summer. It was my first week of freedom, and everyone else’s final week of hell so by the time I got home, it was like I hadn’t missed anything at all, like I had blipped from existence for the week. It was after then that summer began to get quiet again, back into my routine of waking up late, watching something I’d already seen on TV and walking up and down the stairs until something sparked in my brain and I was no longer bored. I saw Georgia a few times to break it up, the two of us sitting in my living room gossiping for hours about things I couldn’t even begin to remember now until we had nothing left to talk about and we put a movie on instead. I know we watched Dear Evan Hansen once, because with the start of July came our trip to London to watch it on the West End, a day I enjoyed so much I wrote an entire post about it in the days following. If you haven’t read that, which I think you should, it was incredible. The show is by far one of my new favourites and the day sparked a goal in me to live the big city life in London once I can afford it and have reason to.

A couple of weeks before held a University Open Day. My parents, brother and I travelling up north to visit the campus that will, though we didn’t know that yet, be my new home for the next three years. With Covid, I never really got to experience the university in a way prospective students usually do. Big talks, all buildings open, something going on everywhere you looked. Instead, we visited in the dead of winter when nobody was around. And even with no students and no atmosphere, I fell in love with it. So, we visited on July 2nd, the first open day for next year’s class of potential freshers, when everything was back to normal, and everyone was bumbling around. I fell in love with it even more. Ask anyone I know and they’ll tell you how I’ve never been more excited for something so utterly terrifying in my life. I’ve made friends already; I’ve researched and read everything I can about the city and the school and what’s tradition and what’s frowned upon. It’s the first time I’ve been so secure in my decision in something, and that in itself is horrifying to me.

Thor: Love and Thunder came out on July 7th, another marvel movie I saw on opening night, another one I had so many opinions on, said I’d share and then never did. Being a fan of the MCU has gotten hard, not because their content has gotten bad, though worse maybe, but because it’s turned solely into a money maker. What was so special about the MCU before the end of the Infinity Saga was that there was suspense. A film released, ties were loose, and we’d have to wait an entire year for the next release to find out what was going on. Now, we get new content almost weekly, so we don’t even have the chance to get excited. That ruins it for me. Thor: Ragnarok has always been one of my favourite MCU films, with the release of Love and Thunder and the return of Taika Waititi directing, I was obviously excited. But it’s hard to be now. The film was good though, great even. Gorr was such an incredible villain and addition to the storyline. They kept the stupidity that did so well in Ragnarok. But it got too much, it was too stupid, too funny, it overrun the genuinely quite heartfelt and traumatic plot points of Thor and Jane. Though not so much that I hated it. The end confused me, I don’t like Thor having an adoptive daughter, I don’t like that Korg’s story seems to be completely wrapped up, I don’t like whoever this Hercules character is and how they made it a big thing. I was clueless. But it was good.

The weekend after that began something I was not prepared for. A simple birthday party, a group of people I didn’t know too well, a mismatch of people in a situation that can never end well. I’m not one for partying and alcohol, you won’t believe that by the end of this, but I don’t drink much, I’ve never been drunk and being around people is hard for me. Yet Em’s 18th birthday party came and went and all of a sudden, I had so many friends, so many plans, and a boy on the scene. I’ll tell you now, developing a crush on a guy a couple of months before you move away is never a good idea. Not even when you’ve kind of liked him since January and he’s kind of likes you back just as much. Mutual infatuation or not, it’s messy and it’s complicated. And for us messy and complicated does not even start to cover it. But messy and complicated is exactly us, and we kind of love it. It was Em’s party that started it all, a fun night of me and Katie stumbling around Em’s house, I a bit tipsy and giggling at everything, Katie practically unable to stand straight. You’ll find even at house parties girls go to the toilet together, though in this case it wasn’t in fear of a potential Katie Bell in the Goblet of Fire moment, but more in fear Katie was going to fall down the stairs and kill herself. You’d never think you’d meet the perfect guy outside the bathroom. Or that your first real encounter would bounce off you trying to get another guy to remember your name and end in a joke about the Olsen twins. But that’s Jack, Jack who remembered my name having met me only once, Jack who bought up this blog to impress me, Jack who had planned to talk to me the entire night, did so for two minutes outside a bathroom and then disappeared while I was stood wondering what the fuck had just happened.

The party was messy, too much happened, but it fuelled the gossip for the next two weeks. The day after I was supposed to go to a music festival, we skipped that one. My social battery had started to fizzle and spark, the friend I was going with didn’t have a great night before. So instead, we sat in bed watching old YouTube videos we used to love.

Another party planned, and that one conversation outside the bathroom turned into an all-nighter and talking every day for a month. He drunkenly asked me out that night, we went out the following Monday. Two basically strangers on a date that neither of them actually knew was a date. It was fun though, he took me to a comic book shop, talked my ear off about characters I’d never heard of. I took him to a bookshop and did the same with the books I’ve wanted to buy but never got round to. He doesn’t read, that’s what he told me, yet we spent an hour in Waterstones. Him stopping and picking things up, flicking through them with a ‘this is so cool’, reading bits out and giving me facts a normal person shouldn’t know. I loved every second of it. We ended the day with a round of mini golf, the same place I went with Elly and Katie just a couple of weeks before which ended in an attempt to ask him out where I got ‘seen’ in response. He won the game, he’d talked himself up the whole day, but I won a free round on the 19th hole. So, who’s really winning Jack?

The 13th of August marked the end of the wait for my mother’s birthday present. Her birthday was back in March but my dad, brother and I all chipped into get tickets to see The Book of Mormon at the Liverpool Empire Theatre. Another musical I loved. I truly believe the theatre is one of the things that makes me the happiest. The show was unbelievably funny, I had no idea what to expect going in because unlike Dear Evan Hansen I only knew a couple of the songs from the soundtrack and hadn’t tried to find bootlegs on the internet. It truly surpassed any expectations I did have, and even my brother enjoyed it which is not an emotion I knew he could feel. We didn’t stay long in Liverpool, we’d explored the town two years before, and me and Georgia had done so again the summer before this one. But I thought it was pretty cool I was back there almost exactly a year after I was there trying to take photos for my Media coursework.

Results day week was a fun one, the stress was overwhelming, but I did all I could to distract myself. The Monday was the date, the Wednesday was the best day of my life. Georgia and I ventured down to Watford and spent the day at Warner Brothers Studios, the making of Harry Potter for those of you who might not know. I’d been a couple of times before, I went with my family when I was 10, and with school when I was 13, but they had added and expanded so much since we’d last been, it was still just as magical if not more so the third time round. Most notably, they’d opened Gringotts’s bank with statues of the goblins and a projector of the dragon that the golden trio escape on in the final movie. They’d also opened the Herbology greenhouse and had a ‘Mandrakes and Magical Creatures’ theme where there were plaques everywhere quizzing visitors on their knowledge of the magical creatures in the franchise. I made it an unspoken competition between me and Georgia – I clearly won. We learnt to duel, we took a ride on a flying broom, we danced about in Bellatrix’s vault. I took more photos than was necessary, and I made everyone sit while I showed them all. The best day of the summer so far, no question, if you ignore the bit where we had to stand up, exhausted, on the train most of the way home.

Abigail and I spontaneously went to Aberystwyth earlier in the month, we hadn’t seen each other since she’d started a new job and I was apparently a social butterfly now. It was a Sunday night, and we were both free the next day, so we spontaneously booked the train and decided to spend the day at the beach. It was hot, and the day was lovely but there really isn’t much to see and do in Aberystwyth. We walked the high street, had lunch at the Wetherspoon’s, I pretty much finished A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. An INCREDIBLE book by the way, I’m currently halfway through Good Girl, Bad Blood. Abi slept over that night; I don’t remember us doing anything of note, but I do remember that she’s become one of my parents’ favourite people.

The day after Harry Potter was Doom’s Day, and the day after that was yet another house party. I spent the day in Birmingham with Emily and Eleni which was lovely. It’s hard pushed to get Len to come anywhere so it was nice to have the trio back again for a few hours. We just wandered aimlessly, in the bookshops, into Lush, Tim Hortons for lunch. All while discussing results and joking like we always used to in English. I went back to Em’s before the party, met up with her boyfriend and one of his friends and Em made us a makeshift Sex on the Beach cocktail that I don’t think anyone else actually liked. Then we were back at Elly’s house, the place the friendship group I’d seen so many times in the last few weeks had first met, back in Elly’s pretty kitchen with Katie and I not fully sober, where I spent the entire night thinking I was going to get kissed. I’d hugged more people than I’d ever hugged in my life that night, I was practically attached to Elly and Katie’s hips and if I wasn’t I had Jack’s arm around my waist. For someone who claims to hate physical touch, I really had a great night.

Another spontaneous plan found Em, her boyfriend Zakk, Jack, and I in a bar in Birmingham for a Marvel quiz. Zakk, Jack, and I have been huge Marvel fans for years, Em knows practically nothing about the franchise, but it was safe to say the three of us went in terribly confident. And by the end of the quiz we were still adamant we’d only lost one point and sure we’d get the bonus points for the best team name. In the end we came 4th, all three of us absolutely gutted. I still think we should’ve gotten the bonus points for ‘The Civil Whores’ was a tenfold better name than ‘MC. Mjolnir’, but I’m convinced the quizmaster had a thing for both Jack and Zakk despite claiming to have a boyfriend and wasn’t impressed when Em and I made it very hard to believe either of them were single. After an almost fight, being kissed, and successfully not throwing up on the bus home while Jack nattered about something I can’t remember, we made it back to Em’s where I stayed for the night. A sleepover one would call it if I’d actually slept at all.

That Monday was the Monday just gone as I write this part of the post. I’m now sat in a little cottage in Anglesey with my brother snoring beside me on our final night of a 4-night getaway. Knowing that it’s getting late, and words aren’t quite wording anymore, and I need to be up early in the morning for a 10am eviction. I’ll get back to you later, maybe soon, maybe just before I move. All I know is I’ve got a month, people are starting to leave, and I need to make the most of the time I’ve got left with all the people I adore.

I’ve decided Wales is not my favourite place, not for any particular reason besides my family holidays have always been in Cornwall or at holiday parks and there’s such a distinct divide between the bustling of children and entertainment and the quaint and peaceful villages like Beaumaris where in truth it’s mostly older people. Don’t get me wrong, Beaumaris was fucking beautiful, there were a plethora of adorable little shops, a bakery we could walk to every morning, a castle and the sea was just around every corner. The biggest problem we faced was the fact their only supermarket was a Spar, and in said Spar there was nothing in terms of substantial meals. So, we lived off crisps and peanuts. It was a good week though, the weather did us well until the very last day. I finished Good Girl, Bad Blood, which I read on a very cute bay window chair I talked about to my friends more than I talked about the actual holiday. I do have to say I think Holly Jackson has become one of my favourite authors, the second in the Good Girl’s series was just as entertaining and gripping as the first and I’m genuinely so excited to start to third, though I haven’t gotten round to that yet. This holiday ended in a situation my family are actually in quite a lot: my mother looking at puppies, my brother and I begging my dad to get a new puppy, and my dad getting more and more pissed off by the second until he shouts at us telling us to shut up. Difference is, he wasn’t pissed off this time. Mum had found a cockapoo puppy at a rescue centre in Wales, he was tiny and apricot and adorable, and his name was Jinx. I fell in love with him. We already have a dog, a black cockapoo named Bella who we got 8 years ago now and we all love her to bits. I tried telling them that because I’m moving away for university soon, they need a new dog to fill the void in their lives I will have left.

It worked. Well, something worked because the following Monday after we returned home, we were on a three-hour road trip to Many Tears Rescue Centre to pick up baby Jinx. He made a beautiful first impression, he trampled in paying no attention to Bella in the slightest (a good thing for us, Bella can get very aggy with other dogs) and just sat in his water bowl. Since bringing him home we have discovered he is in fact a stupid little fucker: his stubby little legs mean he can’t quite get onto and off the sofa, his huge paws just slip and slide all over the laminate flooring, he has run full pelt into the back door and he’s quite a big fan of trying to bite your feet. But he is the most adorable little thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and him and Bella don’t completely hate each other, so a complete win for us.

The Saturday before this marked Jack’s 20th birthday party, a night of lads getting drunk beyond coherency and screaming like a drunk group of lads do. It was a good night, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the shouting men. Though I never expected a 20th birthday party would end up with a group of 15 sat around watching the KSI fight on twitch, us having to swap streams every now and again because copyright would strike and take it down. Also, who’d have thought university drinking games would be so hard to wrap your head around? I sat around watching them play ‘beer goggles’ and ‘the triangle game’ for so long and for most of it I was beyond clueless of what exactly was going on. I grasped it in the end, definitely skills I’m going have to remember for when I go in a month.

Jack was round mine on the Tuesday following, I told him it was only because his birthday present hadn’t arrived in time, and I needed to give it to him. Though, I think we’ve both gotten to the point where we’re just making excuses to see each other as much as possible. It was the first time he’d been to mine, or over my way at all as he lives a twenty-minute drive from mine and everything we’ve done has been over his way. It was a pleasant surprise he said, because my city is very infamously a shithole. It was a good day though, he met the dogs and my family (which I’m sure he was just as terrified about as I was meeting his family at his party) and we watched The Social Network. The dogs were so distracting I genuinely couldn’t tell you what happened in it. However, the girl who plays Anna in The Vampire Diaries was in it.

He was here again on Friday, another day of movies though not nearly so distracting. We watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, both movies he had never seen and both ones I believe are musts once in your life. He enjoyed them both which made me incredibly happy. One of my biggest joys in life is sharing the things I love with the people I love so I did watch him watch the movies more than I watched the movies themselves. That night we headed to my friend Molly’s house for a farewell party before she moves for uni. Another great night, I drank a bit, watched Jack play beer pong and pool and we played ‘For the Girls’ in which I was nominated most likely to become friends with Kylie Jenner and most suited to become President of the US. Both I completely disagree with. Jack and I walked home, while mine and Molly’s houses are only a half an hour walk apart, the walk back in the middle of the night felt like hours. Jack was also drunk, and it was awfully like I was walking home a five-year-old on the verge of crashing from a sugar high.

The day before Georgia and I tripped into town for some football boots. She met the dogs, we went to Nando’s, and then I sat for an hour in Sports Direct while she handed me boxes of shoes and tried on ten pairs just to end up with the second set she tried on. I decided that day that I’d be a great girlfriend, because I have such a supportive nature that anyone could drag me into anywhere while they shop or game or do something they enjoy, and I will cheer from the side-lines no matter how much interest I have in the situation at all. I like to see others happy, and I will do what I can to support that for them.

It's Sunday as I write this now, and last night I got drunk. Like actually really drunk. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t quite keep my balance and everything was another level of hilarious drunk. And you could tell too, Katie and I stumbling around a Wetherspoons arm in arm laughing about something. I’m sure nothing was actually that funny. The night started off with a plan to go to a themed pub night and dance to old music and drink a lot. The pub was full of 50-year-old men, and the drinks were expensive, and the music wasn’t even that good. So, we ended up in Wetherspoons, drinking two pitchers each and gossiping about men. It was genuinely the most fun I’ve had in ages; Katie is one of those friends you can talk to about nothing for hours and it’s so mad to think this time last year I didn’t know her at all. That’s exactly what I mean by you never realise how fast life can change, because this girl who I barely even considered a friend 6 months ago, has now become one of my favourite people and it’s been the same with so many people I’ve met this year. Everyone’s moving next week, and it’s hitting how much I’m going to miss them. Life is starting to move really fucking fast, we’ll all be moving on, and I can’t quite decide if it’s a good thing or not that I’ve still got a month to go until I move on too.

I always mark Georgia’s birthday as the end of summer, because it technically is. Now Georgia has entered her 19th year of life, and I’m just 3 months behind her. Summer no longer feels like summer. My brother is back at school, most of my friends have moved into their uni accommodation now, Georgia starts her job on Thursday and Jack starts a full-time training programme tomorrow. So that leaves me, three weeks exactly until I move, left behind with nothing to do and no one to see. I started this post discussing how fast life changes, and reality has just hit again. This ‘making the most of the month I’ve got left’ has turned into ‘fuck I can see my friends 3 more times before I’m off’. It’s hit me now, that everything’s changing, and the excitement is beginning to be overrun by anxiety. I’ve made the most of the last week since getting drunk, Elly, Katie and I went to some 1920s mini golf arcade thing that was incredibly fun and I’m hoping to go with Jack before I leave. I saw Spider-Man: No Way Home in cinema for the fourth time, slept at Jack’s and then went back to his the day after I left to watch movies in the shed he claims is his house. The Queen died, that was something. And with the new week, real life is punching me in the face. I’m thinking the next three weeks will just be prep, settling back into the routine of Netflix and my bedroom, what summer has always been. Jack is staying over Friday night, Brooke is coming up on Saturday and we’re going to see Daniel Howell’s We Are All Doomed.

There’re still things to look forward to. But as Summer shifts to Autumn, the decay of the trees and nature to prepare for new beginnings is such a perfect metaphor for how I feel inside right now.