Beep beep

So, car insurance.

I am no longer a Young Person according to official statistics. The other day I had to fill in a form and it was with great melancholy I ticked the '25-34' box. As such, today's news stories about the car insurance industry technically don't affect me, as I am theoretically skipping into the world of 25+ married person car insurance. In theory I am stability itself.

So why, exactly, my premiums have gone up is a puzzle.

Cars are essential in today's world. I wish they weren't. I would love to get rid of my car and not have it as a necessity. Unfortunately, this would involve living in an area with decent public transport links, or indeed not working in the countryside. Both of these things are facts in my life, so I pootle on with my car. Mr DG cannot drive, so it's very definitely my car and my bills for petrol, for insurance, for car tax, and for repairs. Weirdly, I found these things slightly easier to afford when I was a student. All of the above bills have shot up exponentially in the seven years since I passed my test.

I have had very few jobs where didn't need my car to get too and from work, starting from pretty much as soon as I passed my test, which I passed about a month before my eighteenth birthday. I have a feeling that every 'group' of friends needs at least one person with a car, which has pretty much consistently been me. It makes finding work easier, it gives you a bigger list of places to live. I would feel a bit lost without my car, now.

I worry about people who have to jump straight into the new world of driving, and how they'll cope with the bills as they rise steadily. I can still afford to keep my car going, although that said my fan belt sounds like it's on the fritz and if it goes before the end of the month I'm going to have to sacrifice a pair of tights and make do. Hell, I can't afford to not keep my car going – there's no way to get to my work by public transport, and the walk would take about six hours on a good day.

I don't know if there's a point to this post, per se, other than to ponder if car insurance firms don't put out daft ideas like 'Make new drivers only drive during the day!' (so sucks to be 20 and work night shifts, then) to try and distract the rest of us from the fact that it's getting more difficult by the year to still run a car. I'm no Jeremy Clarkson, bleating on about my civil rights to drive cars at whatever speed I wish. I'm thoroughly aware of the environmental impact of cars, which if I walk and take public transport everywhere I can. But in this country, if you live outside a major city, a car is a grim necessity.

I wonder.

Feeling slightly left behind (this time, avoiding libel!)

I had a very weird experience in work the other day. We have Radio 1 on in work, despite all being way too old for the demographic. (I want Radio 6, other staff want Radio 5, some losers want Magic, weirdly on that list Radio 1 is the middle ground. We all like Scott Mills.) Anyway, it chirps along in the background, excluding occasionally howling abuse at Fern Cotton. No one really listens to it, but it keeps the office from weird silence.

No, really, I'm going somewhere with this.

Anyway, the radio was chirping away, and I was vaguely aware of Fern Cotton and another female presenter talking cheerfully about a hot new boyband, and how the lead singer was the only one worth looking at. Christina, my desk buddy, suddenly gave a shriek.

“Disorientated Graduate! That bloke they're talking about! You went to school with him!”

[n.b. Christina went to a different high school, but in the same small town – the crossover of people known is fairly high.]

Anyway, I listened properly and gave out a small shriek myself. “OH MY GOD, I DID!”

He's the closest thing from my school year that constitutes a celebrity, obviously excluding my upcoming fame as a writer. He was on a popular talent show, albeit without getting through to the live shows or having too much TV time, and dated a famous female singer for quite a long time. Then they broke up, and an ex-colleague of mine, who lives opposite the chap in question's parents, informed me she broke up with him because he 'didn't earn enough money, and she wanted a man to earn more money than she did'. I am, as such, failing to name any of the people involved so I'm not sued for libel. (DISCLAIMER: I would also like to point in that I have no idea if the aforementioned story is true, and is probably just slightly malicious gossip. Amusing, though.)

Anyway, I did some googling and was highly amused to see that the chap in question is in fact the lead singer of an up and coming boyband of whom even I've heard of, although he's got a lot of fake tan and a bit of a perm involved.

Then I felt a bit depressed, and a little bit old as well. Or possibly that I'm getting left behind, a little bit, mostly because one of my dearest friends just had a baby and has now made a lovely little family. One of my fondest (and fuzziest) memories of aforementioned friend is in our first year at university when we got legless at a Rocky Horror themed night at the union, and I think we're still on the Union website in our underwear, convinced we look sexy. Now she's a mother, and a radiant one at that. And someone I still remember singing in the Year 3 Christmas play has a song on Radio 1.

I am aware that I'm pretty awesome, honestly. I'm doing well in my life, and at a party this weekend a group of us celebrated the genuine leaps ahead we've made in the last twelve months in our lives. One of the problems of being a graduate – and perhaps, simply being this age – is that occasionally I'm blown away by the achievements on my peers, and I feel a little behind. I know I'm not, and goodness knows I don't want to be a pop star or indeed a mother; still, it's a strange feeling.

Guide to Freshers Week?

It's Freshers Week across the country for many students, or alternatively it's about to start. I've been reading the various 'Guide to Freshers Week' in papers with a sense of arch irony, wondering if many of the articles are in fact writing for graduates who chortle at the stereotypes and remember their own Freshers Week fondly. After all, no student is reading the paper, right?

It was at about this point I remembered my first day at university. I moved into university owned housing, a self-catering house for six girls, and on the first day three of us sort of awkwardly banded together and desperately tried to make tea for the others. We all had biscuits, too. I felt very cunning, because I'd read the UCAS guide to making friends and it was very emphatic that making tea was a great way to make friends. The only downside is that Frances managed to make a round of tea, first.

About a week later, more comfortable in each other's presence and with a few vodkas in us, Frances mentioned that she didn't actually like tea. She'd only made it and drank it because that was what she'd read in the UCAS guide. I gasped. So did Sandra. Turned out we'd all tried the same cunning trick.

(True story: Frances really doesn't like tea. I've seen her drink it once since, when she was desperately trying to work out what her pregnancy cravings were. Turns out that it wasn't tea, but she felt it was a fair guess.)

My own Freshers Week was an awfully long time ago, but I do know that Freshers Week is a lot more fun when you're not a Fresher. Still, it's the start of a great time. Plus, in what feels like an eternity away, you'll be sat on the internet and reading Freshers Week guides and feeling horribly nostalgic, particularly as you have to be up early for work tomorrow. Alas.

Quarter life crisis

I turn 25 in two days. I am trying very hard not to have a quarter life crisis about this. It feels like a tremendously big number, and my brain has spent the last few weeks punishing me for this. I've been finding myself ominously going through all the stuff I haven't done with my life; I haven't got that high-flying job, I haven't yet blossomed into a sinewy twenty-something with perfect skin and hair, I haven't got a cat, I've barely travelled in any meaningful sense, I haven't written a novel. Well, actually, I have done the last one, technically speaking, but I don't think that Lord of Rings fanfiction when your 15 counts. Also, I'll be spending my birthday at my parents so I can use their garden. The last birthday event at my parents? I was SEVENTEEN.

I've read a lot recently about turning 25 – what can I say, my generation really enjoys a bit of naval-gazing – and mostly it makes me feel wretched.

SO. Instead, I've been trying to make a list of all my achievements thus far that the seventeen year old me would have been proud of. Apparently this is the best way to think of it.

1. Passed my driving test and NOT KILLED ANYONE.

Now, there are people out there who wouldn't be impressed by this. These people did not see my driving lessons. Not only have I been driving for eight years, I have gone to and from Scotland more times than you can shake a stick at BYMYSELF. Once I drove a car from St Andrews to Cardiff. It wasn't my car. It was a borrowed car, and the seat didn't move far enough forward for me to touch the pedals the whole way down. And I still failed to kill anyone. SUCCESS.

2. I have a degree!

The title of the blog is a hint on that one, but it's easy to forget that having a degree is a really big achievement. To be honest, the seventeen year old me was just hoping she'd pass the AS-Levels.

3. I have managed to acquire a husband.

This is not an achievement, per se, mostly because in this one I've just been lucky and I don't think that 'being settled' is a universal achievement. Still, managing to organise a wedding is an achievement in itself.

4. I get to write sometimes.

Not that often. But I do get paid to write, both in my day to day job and outside of it. I manage to produce something for here on a semi-regular basis. I feel myself moving very, very slowly, to doing this professionally.

5. I have my own place.

Do I own it yet? No, of course not. But I've boomeranged and I've got out today. In today's world for people of my age, that's definitely an achievement.

6. I've managed to become a reasonably rounded human beings.

A true story, and one shared by many graduates: I was picked on at school. Horrendously. And once, Dad took me to one side, and he said: “Look. One day, you'll be driving past that lot in a car that you own, on the way to your nice job, and you'll see that lot queuing for a bus with hordes of kids, and they will look old. You'll have made something of yourself. You'll have won.”

He's not quite right yet. The nice job has yet to materialise. But occasionally I hear of the people who made my life hell, and, well, I seem to have improved since I was in high school. They haven't.

So fingers crossed, I will spend my birthday eating barbecue food, drinking copious amounts of red wine and feeling good about myself. Until the hangover, which is a totally different issue.