The Real World(tm)

The main problem with the real world is that, in a sense, you are protected from many of its little vagaries when a student. Now, as a student I had to pay bills, and one week I ran out of money so lived off a loaf of bread and a box of Tesco Value eggs. (Okay, that’s a tiny fib. I still had some herbs, and after three days a housemate took pity on me and gave me half a cup of rice.) At the same time, though, I didn’t worry about, say, council tax. That was nice.

The depressing part is that you don’t realise that you’re free of all this nonsense. In fact, you bewail how difficult life is and how completely fucking unreasonable British Gas are. That is still true. What you don’t realise is also how completely fucking unreasonable the council tax people are. And the water board people. And don’t get me started on that family below me with the child that’s teething. No one’s fault, sure, but the child seems to have an uncanny knack of stopping crying approximately 0.1 nanoseconds before my alarm goes off in the morning. If that’s not completely fucking unreasonable then I don’t know what is.

Before anyone comes in on their high horse and whinges at me that this is just the real world and what everyone has to put up with, and not everyone gets to spend four years faffing about on the government money ETC ETC BLAH BLAH can it please be noted that the above statement probably applies to everyone. At least I moved out at eighteen and learned about the whole British Gas thing, and that you can make a variety of increasingly desperate meals with naught but eggs, bread, and seven inventive tricks with oregano. My younger sister often tells me that I lived in fairyland or four years and never dealt with the problems of THE REAL WORLD and NORMAL PEOPLE. That might be true, but she still lives with our parents at the age of twenty-one and works part time in a takeaway. I was talking to my mum about water bills, and she piped up in genuine confusion that water was something to be paid for.

This is less a disorientated graduate problem and more of a disorientated twenty something problem, I realise. Still, university tricks you into thinking that you’re dead worldly and capable of taking on everything so it’s rather a shock when you work out that they really are all still out to get you.