The time has finally come… I’ve now finished university. On Tuesday, I had my last ever exam. How mad is that? Of course, in these days of lifelong learning and the like, I may well find myself behind a desk scribbling furiously against the clock again at some point in the future, but for now my formal education is done and dusted. Madness, I say!
Some of my fellow students say that university has gone really quickly. But for me, it seems a lifetime ago that I first arrived, a young, nervous fresher from North Wales. So much has happened since then – I’ve done so much, and changed quite a bit, too. And now it’s the end of this chapter of my life, and the start of the next, as I move on into the big wide world of work, and really start trying in earnest to make it as a writer.
I started this blog just before coming to university. Almost three years, three hundred posts and thirty six hundred hits later, I’ve decided that it’s time for a change of blog title. “Student of Life” is now gone! Of course, I hope I’ll carry on learning and being a student of life, but since I’m not a proper student any more, I thought I’d go for something a bit less, er, student-y. So what could encapsulate my eclectic mix of personal ramblings, theology, science-fiction, literature, student journalism and whatever else happened to interest me at the time?
Hmmm… I’ll come back to that one. Let’s talk about one of my obsessions for a moment, the wonderful show that is Doctor Who. Did you see the last two episodes? If not, get thee to someone with on-demand or the episodes on video at once and post-haste, because Human Nature and The Family of Blood were possibly the best Doctor Who story since its return in 2005. It all begins with the Doctor having to take drastic measures to escape a Family who are hunting him down, forcing him to hide by becoming human for a time. It’s beautiful, funny, silly, scary, heart-wrenching and ends with the Doctor at his most wonderfully dangerous in a long time. While human, the Doctor describes his dreams of being a madman, an adventurer in time and space, in a “journal of impossible things”. Now that’s got quite a ring to it…
What do you think of the new design? I’ve tried to smarten it up, but there are still a few teething glitches in the formatting, the “blogs I read” list to rebuild, plus some more changes on the way. I also hope to write those articles I promised but didn’t get around to writing because of my university work. So watch out for thoughts on Life on Mars, whether God punished Jesus and various Gair Rhydd articles yet to be republished on this site!