It took seven years, but finally the plant that my dad brought back from Madeira has bloomed!

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After my French adventure, I returned to Bangor University to complete the final year of my degree. The thing was, it wasn’t the same. Time doesn’t stand still. Just because I was away having this massive experience certainly did not mean that everything was the same when I returned. For a start, most of my friends who had started at uni at the same time I did had already graduated. I also felt like the older generation, which in a way I was, as during the time I was away, there had been some massive changes in the higher education funding system, which were starting to trickle down into social change. Whereas my generation collected our grant cheques after enrolling, the new kids had fees to pay.

I was drinking heavily and smoking yet bizarrely I had this fantastically healthy vegetarian diet. This was the year I had next to no money, as the student loan cheque was miserly for the final year, and even with the money I had saved from my summer jobs (working in a fish factory and then driving a tractor on an arable farm) and working in France, I was still pretty skint. I don’t know what I lived on half the time, but I was the skinniest I’ve been in my whole adult life since. I remember it being a totally mad year, filled with strange people, strange experiences and strange ideas.

Personally, I was into occult and esoteric theories and practices, but my degree work also took a strange turn into the unseen world. One of the courses I studied was about the symbolists and dadaist art and literature. While looking for material on the subject, I found masses of scholarly works on the subject. In between staying up too late and drinking, I would sit for hours in the library poring over anything on the subject, and there was a lot of it. At one point I was particularly interested in Rosicrucianism, and wrote a paper on How to become a Fairy (Comment-on devient fée) by Joseph Péladan. Bangor Uni has an extensive Welsh library collection, not all of it in the Welsh language luckily for me, which is filled with books on the Celts and other pre-Christian cultures. As you have probably guessed, I didn’t own a television back then.

I also got very interested in existentialism and angst, only this time I was looking at it from the outside rather than experiencing it directly. For the first time I was glad that I had experienced such misery during my teens as I could relate to the difficulties in existence as not just being about me, but being universal. Just to impress you (or not) I will name-drop a few authors I read that year, Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, J-P Sartre. To make it all the more interesting was the context of the end of the millennium that I was living through myself. It was all rather surreal.

I hooked up with a random ripped-jeans wearing guy during the time I lived in this subjunctive universe. Not only was he a vegetarian and spoke French, but he also saved up his beer bottles to recycle, which I thought was just fantastic. This was cutting-edge stuff back in 1999.  It was so great to finally meet someone who was totally on my wavelength, who “got” me, that I could be myself with. I spent several months where I was fulfilled with my academic work and was living life to the full outside of the library. Somehow I even managed to make it through my finals and get a 2:1 degree.

Then the letter arrived. I had been accepted to work abroad for a year in Guadeloupe. I had applied months before to go on another language assistant programme and had almost forgotten about it. In any case, I didn’t think I would be selected for one of the overseas posts. It was a rare opportunity, but I felt as if I’d just got my life going. I was enjoying my life, I didn’t want to leave Mr Ripped-Jeans, but if I didn’t take the chance, wouldn’t I always regret it?

Find out what happened next in Part Five.

As I mentioned in Part Two, a large chunk of my motivation for following a languages degree was the opportunity to live and work abroad. I left for Annecy, a beautiful town in the French Alps in the autumn of 1998, to take up a post as an assistant teacher of English for primary schools. I had no experience of teaching, and the schools had no experience of foreign languages as it was something new the French government had dreamed up, seemingly over a long business lunch with plenty of wine.

I really enjoyed working with the kids, although it was a pretty steep learning curve. Getting to work was a challenge: I would get the bus from outside the hostel where I lived in the pitch black at 7.11am, and have to change buses twice to get to my destination. All in all it took almost an hour to get to school, but I didn’t really mind. I loved planning my classes and doing all the fun activities such as playing games and singing songs. I had always been a natural introvert, but I discovered that I enjoyed leading the kids. Hearing them put together even the simplest sentences made me feel proud because I knew that it was me who had taught them that.

The other thing that was great is that we were paid, and although it was not a lot of money, it was the first time in my life that I could go out and buy something rather than have to worry about how I was going to pay for it. Funnily enough, I never got into retail therapy in a big way, but it was nice to be able to have the freedom spend money should I want to.

Living in shared accommodation was something I was used to from being a student, but as nearly all the other people were French or from other non English speaking countries, we all spoke French all the time. It was fantastic for my language skills and I can honestly say that the only times I spoke English was when I was teaching (at a very basic level) or on the phone to my parents once a week. The experience of living in another country also taught me that it’s one thing to know things in theory, but something else to experience them first hand. Just as an aside, the French language does not distinguish between the words “experiment” and “experience”. They are both “l’expérience”. You experience life by experimenting with it!

Before long, I had managed to get involved with a guy. This time it was an Italian bloke who was 12 years older than me, and to be honest, wasn’t really that attracted to. We had very little in common. I suppose that I was trying to find my feet in a foreign country and there he was. Weirdest of all, I was happy to have the “status symbol” of having a boyfriend. My self esteem around men was so poor that I was just grateful that someone wanted to be with me!

If am totally honest with myself, the warning signs were there all along. On New Year’s Eve, he got so drunk and abusive that my friend and I left the party at the hostel and got in a car with some guys we hardly knew and headed up to the mountains. We ended up in the ski resort of Le Grand Bornand, where a friend of a friend’s boyfriend worked in one of the restaurants. We all went up to this guy’s flat and were smoking various random substances, when someone called the police. It had nothing to do with us, it was some woman in the restaurant whose bag had been stolen, but I got it into my stoned little head that the cops were going to bust us and I would be deported. My friend and I ended up sitting in a doorway opposite the restaurant for 30 minutes in temperatures of -5 celsius until the cops went.

I should have finished with my boyfriend there and then, but he talked me round and after a few months I moved in with him. I had joined the local rock climbing club (which he didn’t like), and throughout the winter we would climb up an indoor wall. However once the weather started to get better would go for days out. After one such day, after returning to Annecy, we decided to go out for pizza. I got back at around 8pm and he went totally mad, and started getting physical which was when I knew that I had to get out of that relationship. Fortunately, I had only a few weeks before I was due return to the UK.

After I returned home, I promised myself that I would never stay with someone who made me feel less than safe with them ever again. I gained so much that year in terms of my fluency in French, and also learned some valuable life lessons. I also gained quite a bit of weight The weird thing was that I kept in touch with this Italian guy, we’d speak on the phone a couple of times a week. Then slowly it dawned on me, I was the one keeping the contact going, even though I’d wanted out of the relationship and had only stayed because it seemed easier. Yet if he called and I was out, I would call him back, but if I called and he was out, then I would call him back. What would happen if I stopped making all the effort? Yes, you’ve guessed it. I finally confronted him on his lack of interest and ended up hanging up on him due to the total frustration of the conversation. I never heard from him ever again.

To this day, I still believe that no relationship is better than the wrong relationship. That doesn’t mean that your partner has to be perfect, but you deserve to be in a relationship that is right for you rather than trying to make yourself conform to someone else’s idea of the perfect partner. You have to take responsibility for your own happiness.

Coming next: Part Four - Back to Bangor

The cinnamon and dark chocolate give a rich, velvety flavour. The original recipe called for maple syrup, but I replaced this with just enough demerara sugar to take the edge off. As I was cooking for my mother who has type 2 diabetes, I was being conscious to try to use as little sugar as possible. Best of all it was really easy to make, a great dessert!

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I made these cookies with half the sugar recommended in the recipe and they taste great!

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Gnocci served with broccoli and home made red pesto (and a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds)

Check out some other Wordlessesses

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The vegan standby in London seems to be the falafel wrap. Seriously, everywhere you go, there it is. On my first night, I found my way into Beiruit Express on the Old Brompton Road. I actually managed a nice meal for under a tenner in a posh bit of London, so I was quite impressed. Said wrap came with a mixed salad and I ordered a fresh orange juice with bits in, loads of vitamins, yeah! The only drawback was that as you sit at the counter there’s the kebab meat thing twirling round, so if you’re of a sensitive disposition, maybe not for you. There are tables, but I just sat at the counter, all alone.

Around the corner from the workshop venue was Kensington High Street. This meant no shortage of places to eat. On the first day I had some tomato and basil soup at Marks and Spencer, but on the second day, I discovered Whole Foods. There was no turning back after that! On the first floor there is a huge canteen with different counters and they have everything you could possibly want. Falafel wraps, grilled tofu, great selection of vegan meze - fabulous. My only regret is that I couldn’t possibly carry all the stuff I wanted to buy home with me,  so I just lived in there for practically every meal! I wonder if they do mail order…?

The continental breakfast served at my hotel was nothing to write home about, just toast and jam and some museli. No soya milk, but I like my museli with fresh orange juice so I wasn’t too bothered.

Sadly I didn’t take any photos as I felt kind of self conscious whipping out my camera and photographing random food in random eating places. Ho-hum!

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The college years - part one

As with many middle class bright young things, I found my way to University. My alma mater is Bangor University, in North Wales. In 1996, I embarked on a degree in French Language for two completely shallow reasons, firstly, French had been a subject that I got good grades in at school, and secondly, I quite fancied the idea of living in France for a year. And why Bangor? Well, that was a shallow reason too. I quite liked the scenery of the local area.

Everybody talks about how great Fresher’s week is, and in many ways it is: you get to meet new people, go to parties, no lectures, just fun. But it was also quite overwhelming for a small town girl like myself. This is how I found myself drifting into the arms of the Christian Union. I got chatting with a girl at breakfast one morning, who invited me along to some event or other. I don’t remember the details, except that there was chocolate cake. Next thing I knew, I was in the CU. Ironic, as I wasn’t particularly religious, but feeling a little lost, I guess I was easy prey. The CU had an event for every night of the week too: Monday: Prayer meeting, Tuesday: Bible Study, Wednesday: Choir practice, Thursday: Door to door, Friday: Main meeting, Saturday: Soul winning, Sunday: Church (morning and evening). Social life, sorted, although, unsurprisingly it turned out to be quite an inbred social life.

I knew I was doing the door to door thing wrong when we knocked on the door of some lass and she said she was a Taoist and started to show us the Tao of Pooh. I actually knew more about Taoism than she did, and got into an interesting discussion with her, much to the chagrin of my door to door partner. It became more and more clear that the CU weren’t interested in you actually studying the Bible either. One thing I enjoyed was the bible study, but it seemed as if you were being led towards some kind of stock answers rather than drawing your own conclusions. I found this really hard to deal with, on the one hand, here I was, the most switched on intellectually that I was ever likely to be, yet when it came to religion, I was asked to just switch off this part of myself and “have faith”. It was just too much to ask, and after a good couple of month of trying to conform to the CU’s mission, I’d had enough.

I also discovered men, which was inconvenient for the CU mission. In retrospect I would say that the CU people made the guy I liked seem that much more attractive by their antipathy towards him. A girl even said to me that this guy was Satan trying to tempt me away from the true way. If I had any doubts that the CU was full of fundies and extremists, here was my proof. Anyway, I was sick of people who saw life in such polarised terms. So I left the CU and discovered sex and drugs and rock and roll and it was damn fun!

I lived my life very intensely during the first couple of years away at uni. Everything was such a big deal at that time, good and bad. Highs were high and lows were low, and I mean low. I met stacks of interesting people, came into contact with theories and ideas which got me excited. For the first time in my life I had a circle of real friends and we would sit up into the small hours putting the world to rights. I really loved my course, I never missed lectures as it was so stimulating and fascinating. I did strange things with my hair and got bits of myself pierced. I was quite a fierce creature, very passionate about social justice and doing the right thing. I went on lots of protests and waved banners and did the things that students did. In many ways I was having a fine old time, but in others I wasn’t. Intensity has two sides, and you can come crashing down just as easily.

When I was nineteen, I was diagnosed with depression, and made my first foray into the world of anti-depressant drugs, with Cipramil. I suspect there was a bipolar element to it also, although that was never confirmed. Since I was also drinking pretty heavily at the time, and had developed a 20 a day smoking habit, that probably didn’t help. My depressive episodes were usually short-lived, lasting a couple of months at most. Short, but scary to the point where I thought I was going out of my mind. The period where I actually went to seek help was triggered after my relationship with the Satan guy went horribly wrong. To be honest, it hadn’t gone horribly wrong, we just broke up, as teenagers do, but inside my head it became something it really shouldn’t have, and for months I couldn’t move on, and of course blamed this guy for the way I was feeling. It all looks pretty pathetic looking back, but I have forgiven myself and realise that the feelings I had were very real, but I just didn’t know how to go about handling them, which was pretty scary.

The good thing was that I also learned that you can come out of the other end and every subsequent depressive episode I’ve ever had (there have been a few) at least I have known that I can get over it. As I finished my second year at University, I felt much more together and happy, but there was always the blind spot when it came to men. I didn’t know what I wanted or expected from a relationship, and this was the one area where my low self esteem from my early teens still persisted, even though I was self-sufficient in practically every other way.

I was actually quite relieved to get away from some of the bad scenes I’d got involved with at Uni and since I would be away for the third year of my degree, I would get the chance to start again (again).

Don’t miss part three: A year in France

So far I have tried a couple of recipes, namely the carrot and raisin muffins and the red pesto with gnocchi. There are many more recipes that I would like to make and try out on my entourage, but they are a little wary of this strange vegan food. They seem to think that all vegan food tastes like unflavoured TVP, so a bit of a hard sell there. It’s World Vegan Day on 1st November, so maybe that could be my day to treat them to a real vegan feast!

I like the upbeat tone of the book and Isa’s asides which include a bit of New York punk folklore here and there. The only teeny tiny thing that I don’t like is the liberal use of maple syrup in the recipes - that stuff ain’t cheap on this side of the Atlantic, that’s if you can find it! Obviously that’s not Isa’s fault…

Does anyone have any alternatives to maple syrup? Or do I just have to miss those recipes out?

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I didn’t get a pic for you (my folks already think this vegan thing is getting out of hand, I just cannot be bothered with the aggravation if they see me taking photos of my dinner!). You will just have to believe me that I cooked my quinoa with green raisins and pumpkin seeds, and it complemented my lentil dhal beautifully. Another way I’ve had quinoa is as a salad with dried mango. Yum!

Note to self: must make an effort to eat this fabulous food more often, it’s just as easy to cook as rice and couscous.

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