These were all caught with a dream catcher.

At the Colosseum, Rome

Sunday afternoon. Today is a quintessentially British Sunday afternoon bathed in dappled, yet deceptive sunshine. The kind of sunshine that allows optimistic young ladies to go outside in dresses and skirts - much to the delight of young men and those who also like to indulge in a spot of celsius denial - and for casual drinkers to flock to beer gardens before the inevitable patch of low pressure sweeps over the city again, vindicating the ubiquitous weary acceptance of the unfortunate English climate. In true British style, happy people, riding an - albeit tenuous - exuberant, vitamin induced wave of jubilation, comment on the sunshine to those they meet in the street, implicitly admitting their subservience to Seasonal Affective Disorder. 

For me, Sunday afternoons conjure up sprawling notions of rest, warmth and large, soft sofas. The very phrase ‘Sunday afternoon’ makes me think of cinnamon, the smell of freshly baked bread, and the smokey aura of a log fire. These pleasant figments of my imagination - well, material memory - are complemented by a soundtrack of soft, low-tempo easy listening music, and the image of carelessly flicking through movies so rooted in the fantastical they are only appropriate on such a self-indulgent day. It makes me hopelessly sentimental and romantic, and will continue to have such a blissful effect until I stop carefully plucking out of my memory the majority of Sundays I have lived through not filled with cinnamon scented air and the sunshine kissing my shoulders. 

But I continue to censor reality and let my romanticism tell me that these memories are intrinsic to the notion of ‘Sunday’. Despite my lazy Sundays being increasingly characterised by anxiety and preparation for the week ahead, my memories act as a soothing agent, allowing me to look out of the window and into the clouds and remember the smell of kitchen spices and the feeling of soft cotton on my skin while I deal with the world. If only all days had such a connotation. 

I have stored the first four days of journal entries on my phone, which I have conveniently forgotten to bring with me to the internet cafe - more will follow

After moving into the volunteer house last night, life has become much more sociable. We started the day by going for lunch at Hasty Tasty (where I paid a wonderful £2 for a milkshake, scrambled eggs, beans and toast), and I lamented about the failure of my envisaged ascetic diet of rice and lean proteins that would enable me to return slightly thinner. Afterwards, we took our first proper trip to the marketplace. The market’s offerings were fairly homogeneous, with a large proportion of stalls trying to flog similar goods. There was a lot of fabric and scarves and dresses in traditional African prints, along with more Western clothes and shoes - I even saw rip off Ralph Lauren polo shirts - although some were in a rather bizarre state; shoes often rode solo. There was a fruit and vegetable, spice and dried fish market, which was bustling with charismatic tradesmen, striking African women in stunning prints who were balancing huge baskets on their heads, those simply buying their weekly supply of fresh food, and a sprinkling of Western tourists - or ‘mzengu’s’ (translated literally as ‘white person’), as we’re referred to here. I bought several metres of material, a brightly coloured patchwork bag, a bag of fresh passionfruit, two scarves and a notepad. I probably paid about 300% of the local price for my purchases, but the exchange rate here is such that paying £6 instead of £2 for a scarf isn’t particularly injurious. The market was certainly an authentic Tanzanian experience - and I suppose as are most things if they involve near death encounters with stray dala dala’s travelling relentlessly fast like a ball in a pinball machine.

After I had dropped a couple of hundred g’s (the equivalent of around £20), we went to a rooftop bar called Shooters for a mid-afternoon beer. I must admit that I felt both a little cliche and a little like an old colonialist as I sat overlooking the marketplace while drinking my beer and wearing my somewhat contrived ‘Africa appropriate’ outfit. At least it wasn’t a gin and tonic, though…

We got onto a relatively quiet dala dala (and when I say relatively quiet, I mean there were only around eight people stuffed into the back of the Tanzanian equivalent of a cheap people carrier) and spent the rest of the afternoon sunbathing on our ‘beach’ - a patch of soft, reddish gravel framing the right side of our house. We then showered and got ready to go out for dinner with Rashid for the last time before half of the volunteers left and before he went off to Dar es Salaam on business for the week. We piled into taxis and into Rashid’s car (there were 6 of us in the car, but according to Rashid, “if there are 6, we can drive”) and arrived at Babanusa around 8pm, and contrary to much advice - or hear say; it depends on your experience I suppose - we arrived as simply a group of white kids dressed in days old H+M dresses, who’d desperately tried to pick up a sun-fried complexion with some deftly applied concealer. After being placed in the ‘VIP’ room (you become VIP if you’re in a party larger than 10, apparently), Rashid arrived as our connection to the Swahili world. Babanusa resembles a canteen; the serving area consists of trays of meat, peas, curries, rice, mash, soup and vegetables. We got plates of every carb rich delicacy available and probably grossly over ate. After eating I experienced the familiar post fast food malaise that I always associated with MSG use in Britain. I think I must just have an aversion to carby, fatty food…

Later on, we exchanged stories in what has come to be known as ‘story time’ - essentially a period of glorified gossiping about boys, friends and why we’re all socially inept under our covers. After surrendering to our impending 6am wake up call, we all went to bed.

(I’m finding that my journal entries are ending quite anticlimatically since the backwards excitement of the robbery…many apologies)

My family is dysfunctional. Come on, it’s the 21st century; we don’t have to hide it anymore. The floodgates have been destroyed: on a daily basis we’re reminded as well as consoled by the media and families around us that we’re not the only ones harboring pierced and tattooed rebellious teens, obsessive parents, people with anger issues, people with unlimited prescriptions of Prozac and adults who are rather too close to the milkman/postman/their piano teacher. We’ve finally admitted that we don’t need to conceal ourselves behind curtains in order to be judgmental.

And you’d think that since all of our pathologies are now on show - or at least are permitted to be on show - we shouldn’t have to hide our disastrous family dynamics anymore. Wrong. We seem to be slightly in denial about the whole detachment from the wholesome nuclear family thing, albeit in a quintessentially British tongue-in-cheek sort of way. We like to giggle light-heartedly about our husband’s cluttering of the family room and we will happily throw in the odd flippant remark about our wife’s slow dissolution into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder over Sunday lunch (accompanied by a comical looping of the finger next to the temple, naturally), but we still do not want the outside to know the ins and outs of the true extent of our family’s dysfunctionality. Which is a shame really, as I think it’s rather comical.

From the outside, I suppose my family is ‘normal’, just like our house and the furniture inside of it (if one is aiming to please my mother, they could even extend the rating to ‘good’). But just like so much modern decor and its superficial purpose, look closer and there are flaws and deviations. My ‘outer’ family comprises of the brink-of-retirement father, the working mother, the college attending, fit and healthy son, and the smug daughter who gets to tell the world she goes to Cambridge. But below the ‘outer’ normality and confined between the walls of 12 Windsor Road, there is a realm of ‘inner’ dyfunctionality: a realm characterised by consciousness of madness, anecdotal exchange, dinnertime debates and frequent hypertension. My father’s utter ineptitude to fit into the framework of the ‘traditional father’ is what makes him so interesting and endearing, and my mother’s role as the only barrier between our household and anarchy is both an important and hilarious one. My brother’s latest obsession with his diet, body, motorbike and all things manly also throws another interesting element into the mix, as does the Cambridge student’s frequent struggle with debt and money control (whom if you haven’t guessed yet, is me).

I find that I often talk about the madness and ridiculousness of my family, but I’ve never thought about attempting to write about it. And it’s bizarre, as it’s a topic that has a boundless bank of inspiration. So I’m going to write about it. My Daily Mail parents, my protein-absorbing brother, and me, who I guess I talk about quite a bit already.

Over the past few days I have been consumed by a vicious circle of laziness, restlessness and boredom. I’m bored but I’m lazy, I’m lazy but I’m restless, I’m restless but I’m bored… Each element feeding into one another. Okay I’ll stop now before I start sounding like an Alanis Morrisette song, but essentially, I have nothing to do and I’m starting to feel like if I spend any more time in bed I may as well become grafted onto it, at least then I may attract some media attention or interest. My brain feels both simultaneously dead and in desperate need for rejuvenation. My concentration levels have plummeted (I can only read the first few lines of a book or article without throwing the towel in and succumbing to just one more episode of House), I’m so bored that I’m finding solace in eating pure and unadulterated junk food, and I have not burned more than a single calorie through exercise for around…ooooh… 5 days now? I’ve diagnosed myself with the condition of SUMMER HOLIDAY INDUCED, CHRONIC FUCKING BOREDOM. In my head, this summer should have ebbed and flowed with relative ease - I mean, I break up from University, go to Greece for a week with my friends, kill a couple of weeks, move into my house, kill a few more weeks and then go to Africa for a month. It seems that this tenuous template which, on a surface level, sounds interesting and fulfilling, drastically fails to account for those weeks inhabiting death row, and those stray bouts of 24 hours in which I can do nothing but eat nutritionally devoid foods, move myself around the house to new environments that facilitate my procrastination, and watch, again, far too many episodes of House MD. The illustrious phenomenon of ‘the lazy day’ is such bullshit. When does ‘taking it easy’ just become too much?

To punctuate my days of boredom and monotony, I’ve tried undertaking different tasks to soak up the time. Such constructive tasks include: sleeping for 14 hours per night, trying to write different blog entries (and subsequently failing due to a sudden aversion to any project taking more than 10 minutes of concentration), putting ridiculous clothes on and singing to my mirror, and, here’s the big one, trying out my trial membership for eHarmony of course! Yeah. I’m not really sure why I did it either. Precipitating factors may or may not include a lack of programmes of interest on Sky and the serendipitous placing of an eHarmony advert. Either way, I shamefully spent a significant portion of my invaluable time deciding whether various adjectives were ‘not at all like me’ to ‘completely like me’. And since we all don goggles of optimism when filling out questionnaires that could glean us the partner of our dreams, I ended up sounding pretty fucking good. Although I did add a drop of realism when I answered ‘true’ to the statement about not telling a shop assistant if they had given me too much change. Tehe. I blame capitalism. 

So when I had FINALLY finished wading through the endless pages of descriptive adjectives that blur the lines between sounding like the pinnacle of morality and an emotional trainwreck, I was given a few ‘sample matches’ to look over. And just because I was feeling adventurous, I even selected the ‘I am willing to look worldwide for my potential soulmate’ option. Ok, 3 matches. Cool. Nice. I’m excited. Even though I can’t see my potential soulmate’s pictures (apparently not paying the monthly subscription enables you to be less shallow), I click on the first one, a ‘Mike’ from Michigan, USA. He’s 21, he likes music, science, cars, women… Oh. Hoping that Mike will redeem himself from the intermediate judgement I’ve made that he is just a regular lad, I scroll down to his ‘the 3 things in the world i’m most grateful for’ box, and sure enough, one of the things he’s most thankful for is his Audi A3. So far, I’m unimpressed. Next, I turn to Alex, 25, from the er, Cayman Islands. Shockingly, Alex is an accountant. He doesn’t really reveal much about himself apart from an affectionate and succinct, “I’m a nice guy x”. Not really interested either. Finally, I stumble upon Tom, 22, from London. His page is headed 

by one of the longest ‘about me”s I’ve seen, intricately outlining his desire to take conversation “to a new level” and to “transcend mere similarities”. He sounds a little insane.

So brilliant, after revealing every nuance and idiosyncrasy of my personality I’ve ended up with a guy who values an Audi over his family (and probably thinks Lynx Chocolate will actually induce salivating in women), a guy who is too cliche to be real, and a guy who seems so in touch with his emotions that he runs the risk of harbouring some psychological pathology. I think I’ve given up. What’s a girl to do? 

Anyone who has been keeping up with the Arab Spring will be aware of the situation in Bahrain: a state in revolt that is arguably the most shrouded in secrecy of all the revolting Arab states, and a state at the centre of the tensions in international politics. Bahrain is a small country in the Middle East under the rule of the Sunni Muslim royal family, the al-Khalifa’s. There are two dominant branches of Islam in Bahrain, and despite the Shia Muslims holding the numerical majority, the Sunni Muslims constitute the monarchy, the aristocracy and, generally, the government. Following the lead of Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Yemen, in March, Bahrain’s Shia majority began to demonstrate across the state, protesting against the Sunni dominated autocratic regime. This led to the Bahraini government officially classifying Bahrain as in a state of civil emergency. Acting upon this implicit cry for assistance, the Gulf States - headed by oil-rich, global power Saudi Arabia - stepped in to bolster the military strength of the Bahraini state and to subdue those in revolt. And it seems to have succeeded - on June 1st, the al-Khalifa family announced the end of the state of emergency and supposedly, the return to normality. 

However, underneath this projection of political neutrality, the social fabric of Bahrain has been torn apart. After torturing and killing revolting Shias, the Bahraini state is now pursuing a type of institutional cleansing. Hundreds of Shia workers have been suspended from their public-sector jobs, many private-sector businesses have purged their ranks of those suspected to be Shia revolutionaries or sympathisers, and banks have been told to provide records of employee absences on the days of prominent revolutions. Sunni councils have voted to exclude Shia representatives in opposition parties, and Shia doctors have been forced to work in hiding in order to avoid arrest. Indeed, words like “traitor” have become contagious in the Sunni spheres. This kind of national segregation, discrimination and division is undoubtedly only persisting without civil unrest due to the presence of Saudi and Gulf troops, who are serving to both maintain the Bahraini political order and to pacify any nascent revolutionaries.

However, if we can learn anything from the ethno-religious civil wars in Africa over the past decade, it is that this kind of passive discrimination and verbal contempt from the dominant faction in a state (I’m implicitly referring to the Hutu - Tutsi division in Rwanda) is but a precursor to more intense division, hostility and eventual violence. If a civil war is sparked in Bahrain - and especially if it involves attempts at ‘cleansing’ by one group or the other - the question of intervention facing the United Nations, and indeed the Western portion of the international arena, will be incredibly complex. The United Nations will surely not want to allow another Rwandan-style genocide to occur, but its actions will undoubtedly be constrained by the relationship between the Western powers and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi’s, allied to the Bahraini Sunni ruling family and of course concerned with the well-being of their own troops, will pose a significant problem for the United Nations, who’s consenting member states (particularly the United States, Britain and France) will have to choose between breaking an amicable relationship with the Saudi’s - and of course, potentially jeopardising future oil relations - and attempting to save the lives of thousands in Bahrain.

So as we can see, the dissolution of Bahrain into civil war is something that both the Arab powers do not want to see happen and the UN powers are reluctant to contemplate a response to. However, if Bahrain does fall into a state of civil war or genocide, it will illustrate the grinding tensions between power politics, intervention politics, and most importantly, oil politics. And furthermore, an intervention - or a lack thereof - will be both a tool to gauge liberal progression on the humanitarian front, and the limits of apolitical trade on the international stage. 

Twitter me!

Human rationality is always something I’ve found interesting. As disappointing as it is to not be able to sustain the Enlightenment’s appraisal of rationality, it’s fun to investigate rationality and reason - both its antecedents and its outcomes. This article is particularly interesting as it links long-term rationality to seemingly bizarre environmental and physiological factors. Who would of thought that drinking a litre of water before making a decision about, say, investment, could end up making you richer? Perhaps we can even make a connection between drought-ridden states and their economic rationality..? (Sadly I’m only half kidding.)

I am forever plagued with grand plans to write literary epics and scholastic dissertations on topical and world issues. However, I rarely get past the thesis. There’s always something that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t quite fit the puzzle. I think Cambridge and meticulous logic has ruined my - perhaps flippant - former self! Oh well, I’ll wait until after graduation.

Tomorrow is my first Part I Politics exam. I don’t feel too nervous about it, which is surprising as the 24 hour time frame before an exam is usually when I am reduced to a neurotic-turned-listless shell of a human being, cramming information to the point of cardiac arrest. I put this down to two reasons (not necessarily dichotomous) - one optimistic and one pessimistic, naturally: 1) I am feeling pleasantly relaxed about this exam because I have worked consistently throughout the year, have revised steadily and therefore have no need to frantically skim through books in order to garner the knowledge I should have acquired in week one of Michaelmas, and 2) I am not feeling particularly unsettled as, deep down, I realise that these exams don’t count for anything and are not the gateway to a future opportunity (as A-Levels were). Simply, I just have to gain a pass and I’ll be back next year. Now although I don’t just want a pass grade - actually, I predict that I would feel significantly deflated if I got a third (or even a 2.2, but I’ll never admit it) - it’s nice to know that I really will have to do spectacularly badly on the day to get such a mark. 

So while I sit here in the library taking notes on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and trying to compartmentalise all of the offshoots of thought that are playing baseball with my synapses, I’m thinking about which movie to watch later on. I watched Hotel Rwanda yesterday and a couple of documentaries about the various African civil wars that have littered post-colonial history. I think that expanding the limits of personal study is vital when pursuing a degree that has a high risk of leaving the outside world boxy and cut, drawn and quartered on ideological lines. Seeing things from a purely academic perspective can sometimes miss the point, just as much as relying solely on tabloid news sources for information about the world. While tentativeness is sometimes frustrating when trying to compose an argument borrowing knowledge from all areas of social science and humanities, I think it it still of paramount value to trying to create an argument on pre-set ideological lines. For this reason, I am still a little nervous about tomorrow. Originality is the most valuable endeavour, but also the most difficult and contingent. Eeeesh. 

So far, Cambridge has been good to me. Michaelmas term was an 8-week-long stint of madness characterised by essay-crisis-after-essay-crisis, sleep deprivation that’s seemingly part of Cambridge’s pathology (but was curiously welcomed by me - knowing my body was running on Red Bull gave me the consoling tap on the shoulder I required every now and again to assure me that I was working hard enough), cold, cold cycle rides, a distasteful amount of cheap white chardonnay, illuminating lecturers, extremely rigorous supervisors, bizarre Cantab idiosyncrasies like drinking societies, pennying, swaps, and the archaic vocabulary designed to keep outsiders firmly outside, and integration with an entirely different class of people. I guess one could say I had a blast. 

But now the first term is over, I can’t blame not turning up to lectures on not knowing where the department is, I can’t repeatedly make excuses about missing deadlines because of rookie errors with time management, and I most certainly can’t get away with writing fairly descriptive, one-dimensional papers just because I went on some kind of quasi-public school mixer and got ‘LITERALLY lashed’ the night before. If the truth be told, I’m actually quite nervous about going back. Despite having completed my first term, there is still something wondrous and enchanting about being in Cambridge that instils both excitement and determination and fear and (a subtle sense of) nausea into me. It’s most certainly a result of the combination of the rich academic history practically leaking from the walls of the ancient buildings that comprise Cambridge’s city centre, and the fact (that I quite often have to remind myself of when I’m considering skipping a library visit for a shopping trip) that I’m living and studying in an epicentre of intellectuals. Just picturing the image in my head is raising my blood pressure by a couple of notches.

I found the first term stressful and tormenting enough without having the added pressure of impending exams. This term I fear I’m going to explode. Time management is not one of my strong points, and paired with a passion for burning the candle at both ends (as my mother would say in disdain), I quite frequently end up practically pulling my hair out while trying to finish an overdue essay at 3am. As much as I tell myself this process won’t repeat itself next term, I know that it will (who said fatalism wasn’t daunting?).