Here is the latest blog by our student graduates.

 

 

               

               

 

                                Phoebe Inglis-Holmes is an honours year multimedia journalism student, aspiring radio presenter, music festival obsessive and green tea connoisseur.

 

 

 

Since graduating I seem to have hit the fast forward button. I appear to have zipped through my thirties and forties and landed somehow, unceremoniously, in my fifties.

This past weekend was filled with friends who were duly bored and were making lots of evening plans to fill this boredom gap. Despite a few invites out, I didn’t once entertain the idea of really going - all I wanted was a quiet, relaxing weekend in.

The alarm bells to herald this newfound retirement-worthy mentality should have started going off then, when my friends started shooting one another questioning looks, but I didn’t feel concerned as I sipped my afternoon tea.

I ventured to the hairdressers on Friday afternoon to get my fringe trimmed, and - although I thankfully wasn’t tempted by a blue rinse - the absolutely banging music that was on the soundsystem, a new dance essential mix, didn't even once make me consider heading out that evening, despite it usually leading to me dancing around the hairdressers like a woman who’s never heard music before. I only truly realised my sudden transition to pensioner when my fabulous hairdresser asked what my plans were, and my response was ‘I’m going to do the gardening all weekend’.

His alarmed face was enough of a jolt for me to realise something was most certainly wrong. Yet I skated through it, went to a late lunch meeting, turned down a beer in favour for another earl grey and arrived to Saturday morning feeling bright and fresh as a daisy, just as my friends were beginning to post proclamations of their own hungover deaths on Twitter, and texting me to announce that if I didn’t deliver them a McDonalds in two minutes then our friendship was over.

Ignoring them all, my boyfriend and I donned our rubber gloves (because gardening gloves would be a step too far in the old-age admission) and began weeding the garden. It was all going smoothly - we were making idle chit chat about the birds in the garden, I was pondering just how many cups of tea I could indeed drink in a day - when I heard a solemn clunk and was suddenly filled with pain.

Of course, my young and healthy body was deciding to stage a protest against the ancient activity of gardening, and an old injury, a disc in my back, had begun to grumble exactly like a grumpy old woman would. Several heat packs, baths and much moaning later, we decided to go for a swim at the local pool to try and loosen it off, and lasted a grand total of two minutes in the water with all the young and rowdy whippersnappers before we decided it was too loud, and too cold, and vacated the premises. They were lucky, in my new found old age, that I didn’t ask to complain to the manager.

But my lesson has been learnt; I must grasp onto the last bastions of youth for as long as I can, not run straight to middle age. So in fear of waking up with white hair, next weekend I’ll be swapping the gardening for gin.