Long distance friendship

Long distance friendship starts being a problem in university, for most people. Even if you don't move too far away from home, chances are that some friends will do so, and visits may take place across the country, dossing on floors and seeing what other student unions look like. There's the beginning of a sense that your friendship network spreads across the country, sometimes even the world.

(And here's a fun story for you, young 'uns – we didn't have Facebook when we started university! It used to just be for students, and only permitted universities got to have it – St Andrews was possibly the first in the UK to be accredited, in my first year in 2005. I have no idea how we all kept up with each other beforehand.)

Most UK universities are hubs. You're more likely to meet someone from a different town than from the town you're actually studying in, excluding possibly the London universities. With an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook in most universities, you're also more likely to make international friends. Forced together into new circumstances, and possibly also a result of your age, you make firm friends. Then you all graduate, and chances are you all go to different parts of the country.

How do you maintain these friendships? Even worse, if you move home, and all of your friends have moved away, how do you keep a circle of friends at all?

I'm lucky in that I have a strong friend network from 'home', from 'university', and from that weird subsection of people who started as friends of friends and then became my own friends. That said, I have this topic of long distance friendship on the brain, firstly because Mr DG has a university friend staying this weekend who's travelled from Down South, and because it's my birthday next week. Parents have very kindly allowed me use of their garden and barbeque, and said I should invite friends if I want. (God, it's like being seventeen again.) So, I asked 'local' friends in an effort to overwhelm a house that I no longer live in and realised that there's about three people.

That was a shock.

The point is that I still have many friends, and I don't feel lonely. In fact, my social calender is currently fairly stuffed in terms of seeing various friends! It's just the nature of the friendship that changes. It's more difficult to 'just nip out for a drink', being that it involves hopping towns and checking diaries. However, it leads to more big social activities and more long weekends, chilling out and chatting.

It takes more effort, and I will be the first to admit that I am a terrible friend in terms of travelling to people – I need the odd weekend off, which explains why I am sat at home watching the trampolining at the Olympics and blogging rather than socialising with my husband and his friend, although we'll be eating together this evening.

The point is that the friendship stays strong. It's a pleasure to see people again, and I hope they're glad to see me! I'm lucky in that at least most people seem to be roughly between the lowlands of Scotland and the Watford gap, so not too big a distance considering, despite the issues with the rail network. It takes work, but then, that's true of most things worth doing. It's just a change, that's all – but then, it seems to be a change that most graduates are sharing these days.

(Long distance romantic relationships are a whole different kettle of fish. There just isn't enough blog space in the world to tackle that one, or at least not today!)

Graduate Myth #11: You Will Marry Your University Boy/Girlfriend (and live happily ever after)

Surely we all know this one is a myth, right? You'll go to university, meet someone, have a wonderful time with them but then slowly drift apart as you meet exciting and new people, until that university relationship is nothing more than a fond memory...

Actually, no. I have just married my university boyfriend. For me, at least this is one myth that's actually true.

YAY!

We married on a glorious sunny day in St Andrews on St Patricks Day, a date chosen by accident. Friends and family gathered in the place we met, mixing together 'uni' and 'home' life perfectly. The day was amazing, not perfect but perfect to us. Students and graduates and people who had never been to uni danced with varying skill and alcohol levels, and all in all a good time was had.

I don't think Mr DG and I will have a happy ever after, in the Disney sense. I've spent today catching up on the housework, and he's been at work, and we will still have money problems, and job problems. We still need to think about the practical things in life. I still need to blog. (Under tax changes we will be £200 a year better off as we have no children. Discuss.) However, we are happy in the now, and we can go together to the future and all that cheesy stuff.

We met at university and now we are double-barrelled graduates (we took each other's name and created a new unit) so in terms of this myth, for me at least, I can safely say that if you want it to be true, it will absolutely come true.

(Normal posting to resume soon.)

Undergraduates: unexpectedly terrifying

Still pimping out for any guest posts people want to send towards me!

In the meanwhile, a couple of vignettes from a few days back at the alma matar.

Within a pub, on a society pub crawl I have basically crashed via knowing some of the older participants

Me: Man, I used to love those old X-Men cartoons.

First year student: What, X-Men Evolution?

Me: No, the ones that were on before Live and Kicking, remember?

First year student: What's Live and Kicking?

Me: I NEED ANOTHER DRINK.

At a flat of a friend, with her younger flatmate.

Flatmate: Yeah, she's like a mature student or something, she was born in 1989!

Me: I WAS BORN IN 1987 LESS OF THE MATURE.

Flatmate: Some of the first years were born in 1994!

Me: Excuse me while I go and cry in the corner and look up Botox treatments.

Man, I'm getting old.

Comedy review: Sarah Millican

Sarah Millican: Thoroughly Modern Millican, 27/10/11, Southport Theatre and Convention Centre

I got tickets to see Sarah Millican on my birthday. In these innocent, halycon days (well, August) I did not know the grim truth that she was a panellist on Loose Women. That was a horrible shock courtesy of a sick day, especially when I realised it wasn't a co-hydromal inspired hallucination.

As such, I was still looking forward to seeing Sarah Millican, but when we got to the venue and realised we were possibly the youngest people in the audience (well, at least in the bottom 10%) the alarm bells started ringing. Plus the plastic glasses of wine, although this is, to be fair, now standard across the board.

In the end, I didn't need to worry. It was a fab night indeed. The comedy was like the stuff off the telly, i.e. homely, relationships, weight, and so on. Although I like surreal comedy as much as the next person, it was something that I could absolutely identify with. “You can absolutely have breakfast in bed if you're single. Leave a Twix by the bed before you go to sleep.” Plus, she was completely filthy, so the two things together, personally, made me snort with laughter. She was very good at dealing with the audience of, yes, mostly middle-aged women. (You think that that sort of audience doesn't get drunk and heckle a lot? Clearly you didn't see Take That this summer.)

It's not comedy to set the world alight, and I suspect that although the audience was probably a little older due to being Southport, Land Of The Pensioner, the comedy probably does appeal more to older people. That's okay. I'm basically a pensioner at heart myself. But all in all, it was a very good night out, for a Wednesday in Southport. My main quibble? The bar was out of wine by the interval. I have never been so outraged. I still enjoyed the second half, though, even without a glass of wine in my hand. That's fair praise, right there.

Party like it's 2005

I have recently been to a few Social Gatherings – okay, boozy birthday house parties – of people that are mostly graduates. This in itself isn't too much of an interesting blog post, as all I can say is that getting absolutely plastered as a graduate is just like getting absolutely plastered as a student, with the exception that ageing in general means that the hangovers get longer and more painful. I don't think I can blame that one on being ill-prepared for graduate life. Alas.

However, at a recent gathering we were all sharing horror stories about being students, including the Spanish test in which I solemnly informed my tutor that my sister was a tall man. Or my old housemate who forgot in an exam whether North and South Korea were, in fact, different countries and went for “the two warring areas”. Amazingly, though, we got to the point where we were comparing our respective careers, and the difficulty of trying to explain our lives to people.

“Oh,” giggled one friend, who is training to be a solicitor. “You'd think mine would be straight forward, but a six year old asked what I did.”

“And?”

“She asked if being a solicitor meant I had to solicit people!”

There are worse graduate careers, we all agreed, before rolling off the sofa laughing. Then we played Articulate for three hours straight, wherein someone thought “Nice jumper, place in between Pakistan and India?” was in fact Arran rather than Kashmir.

Truly, our respective educations were worth it.