Milestones

Hello! It’s me again, in case you have forgotten who I am. For those of you who spend most of their days on Facebook, obsessively checking my wall and searching desperately for any trace of a blog update (and let’s face it, you are only human), I apologise! It’s been a relatively busy month and, by the time I cycled home in the evening, my motivation only extended as far as watching Danish crime drama or sitting on Facebook waiting for other people to update their blogs with images and a genuine sense of enthusiasm about almost everything that they do. Bewildering.

Several Saturdays ago, I hopped on a double-decker Intercity train for my first excursion to Amsterdam. This it itself is not a particularly weird thing, the train ride is only half an hour and I am sure that many Utrechters, indulge in a similar pastime. There is, however, a slightly peculiar twist when you get off the train in a new city to find your brother waiting in the foyer having already had a walk around (‘I don’t like it much’) after a gig in Den Haag the previous evening. It was nice that this change of scenery could coincide with an opportunity to reflect on the previous three weeks with one of the people best equipped to empathise with the contrast from my home life and it was very refreshing to be walking around somewhere alongside somebody with an equally confident grasp of basic map reading. After spending much of the day just walking around and absorbing atmosphere of the place (tinged with a slight smell of Cannabis), it was a great pleasure to join the rest of Out of the Blue for an awesome steak and a trip to a Whisky café with the largest menu of single malt I have ever seen!

Daily life has continued in a relatively firm routine. I am in the Conservatorium seven days a week (apart from today, when the ‘really-quite-serious-okay?’ ailment of manflu has got the better of me), practising, going to classes and rehearsals, or drinking copious amounts of 40p ‘espressochoc’. I feel lucky that I have managed to manoeuvre myself into a relatively varied timetable, flicking between chamber music lessons, jazz theory classes, classical saxophone concerts and free improvisation rehearsals. Meanwhile, TDS/BDS (see previous posts) has become less of a novelty and more a necessity of life. The main problem I am experiencing whilst cycling is the ‘menopause simulation effect’ (or MSE), resulting in annoying fluctuations in temperature. As the winter draws ever nearer, I need to wrap up warm; wrapping up inevitably results in overheating within ten minutes, removing layers and becoming annoyingly cold for another five minutes! The problem is exacerbated by the deadly ‘Dutch gust’ - an inevitable side-effect of such an obscenely flat country - or by having to stop for traffic and stand there panting and perspiring in a big black coat just as the sun decides to peek it’s head round the corner of a bank of grey cloud for the first time in three days. Alas! I’m getting there though – on a good day you arrive feeling (and looking, obviously) pretty damn fine. If you get it wrong, you turn up covered in sweat and freezing cold.

The extremes of weather can also make the journey more interesting. Cycling in a downpour last week was a particularly unpleasant, yet oddly enjoyable experience; after about ten minutes of furious pedaling, with one’s jeans becoming insistent on clinging to the legs as affectionately as possible, it just become quite funny. Whether in a storm, a swimming pool or victim to a foul prank, there is only so wet you can actually get.  When you’ve managed it, someone else’s daily dose of schadenfreude.

The weather has slowly begun to turn more autumnal. I always enjoy this time of year - colours start to become more interesting and the weather more entertainingly unpredictable. The wind is always accompanied by a background rustling sound, and the canals look particularly idyllic when half coated with floating orange and yellow leaves. I apologise for my lack of photography, I’ve always been useless at it and feel particularly inferior to my friends from far reaches posting similarly beautiful pictures of amazing places. You can probably Google ‘Utrecht, Autumn’ and you’ll get the idea.  Failing that, Google ‘Utrecht’ and ‘Autumn’ separately and use your glorious imaginations to amalgamate the two. Delightful, don’t you agree?

If you’ve stuck with this long, and particularly disjointed, blog post to the end then well done! I’ll try and be a little more regular from now on, so you don’t have to go a whole month with the burden of ‘Oh god, how’s Jamie? I hope he’s alright. Jees.’ weighing heavily on your minds. Thanks anyway though – you kind, kind people.

I called this blog post 'Milestones' as it's the first one I've posted since being here for over a month. I've been trying to have a jazz-album theme to my titles but have realised how little I actually know about music...at all! Don't be at all surprised if, by the time the year is out, I've resorted to 'Greatest Hits, Vol. 5' or something similar. My godfather would be very disappointed.