Friends until the end?

With the arrival of the film The Social Network and its membership count surpassing 500 million this year, it is now fair to say that the Facebook website has finally become a stable fixture in popular culture and the collective social consciousness. From a commercial perspective, it is a businessman's dream, as its success begets more success, is self-perpetuating, is analogous to the snowball effect: The more people that came on board, the more were encouraged to jump on after them. Once it had exceeded the number of members of competing sites such as Bebo, Friendster and the rest, its victory was pretty much assured. Of course, often with soaring success comes escalating criticism, and this particular phenomenon is no different.

The first major attack that I became aware of was the criticism of Facebook's privacy policy, or more accurately, how it tends to be changed to the detriment of the user with no prior notice to them. Brought to my attention first by the announcement of someone I knew named David, and subsequently by a series of technology articles in print and on the radio, it focused on how any material that concerned any given user, for example a photograph, once uploaded to the site, remained the property of the site and could be used in whatever way deemed fit. Not surprisingly, this was met with protest, and the corporation - after all this time I find it hard to describe it as such - was forced to do a u-turn. What their exact position on the matter is now I am unaware of, and don't really care. Having kept this blog for years, I'm not uncomfortable with aspects of myself up there on the net for all to see, though thinking about it now, that medium allows you to have ultimate control over what others see of you, whereas Facebook does not. Got trashed some night and someone was there to photograph the evidence and upload it? Well, too bad. It's out there in cyberspace now, and there's nothing you can do about it except 'untag' yourself.

I can only see this becoming a problem if I become an item of popular public interest. Not something I'm seeing on the immediate horizon, I have to say.

More pernicious is the discussion of the concept of a Facebook friend. As the subtle social divides that distinguishes one person's type of acquaintance from another are more or less absent on facebook, some discussions initially centred on the 'appropriateness' of Facebook friends: One article I remember was a college professor writing about how friend requests from some of his students, while presenting a valuable opportunity for academic networking, raised some issues of how much access to his private life he felt it was appropriate to grant them via the site. Other discussions following similar veins abound. Alongside them though, were the ones that centred on the validity of the concept of a Facebook friend, full stop.

The latter bone of contention has come to occupy centre stage recently, particularly with the story of Simone Back, a woman with a history of self-harm who posted on the site that she had taken an overdose of prescriptions drugs directly after she had done so, and subsequently died without any of her 1082 online friends coming to help her, despite the fact that in real life some of them lived quite close. It was a scenario I found depressingly unsurprising.

Unenlightened luddites would have us believe that online interaction is the preserve of the socially inadequate, those with few friends. If - and that is a very big 'if' - that ever really was the case I think we're all agreed on the fact that those days have passed. Indeed, to focus on that is missing the point. It is the quality of the relationships forged online that is of interest more than anything else. In the early days, it was great for groups sharing minority interests, and the gay community was one of the lucky minorities to have the face of itself transformed for the better by it. In the early days, people were united almost passionately by shared interests. Now social networking is pretty much for everyone, things have changed.

Platitudes like 'Facebook friends aren't real friends' are not exactly the greatest flashes of insight you'll ever come across, but similarly-themed discussions are out there, with people trying their damnedest to put their finger on what now is appearing to make some people uneasy, and this is what I'm coming to.

I deactivated my Facebook account a while back out of frustration with the relationship I had with some people whom I was friends with online, but not before I gave out alternative contact details to a lot of the people on my friends list, purely because I didn't want to lose touch with some of them. Some of these were people I had yet to meet in real life. The interesting thing was, my problem was not with the lack of a physical relationship with them, it was with what I felt was the lack of a meaningful relationship with others. Others - crucially - that I knew in real life, that I had known in real life before I added them as friends in Facebook.

I returned, eventually. Facebook is useful for maintaining contact with people who are not based in the same geographical location as yourself, and I felt it pointless to deprive myself of that opportunity because of issues I had elsewhere. Another friend said I shouldn't deprive the online community of my hilarious updates, but I'm bragging now :-)

I thought about it for a while, and I think I've come to a kind of realisation about networking via the site.

I've never been bothered by the lack of interaction on Facebook with some anonymous hot bear I've 'friended'. Indeed I've ended up meeting them in real life after a while and it's been great. With the friends I've always had, the ones I would turn to if anything went wrong, I've found Facebook useful sometimes, but funnily enough, my online interactions with them are no more than with anyone else on my friend's list. But it's when one I come to the grey area of casual acquaintances, that the problems arise.

Facebook excels at allowing you to maintain casual contact with someone. You don't have to actually get in touch with them to find out specifics. It'll be in their status updates, profile information, and uploaded photographs/videos. In connecting you with others, Facebook paradoxically allows you to keep a certain distance from them, in essence keeps you from getting in touch with them by staying linked to them.

Another way of looking at it is that you can become a spectator of people's lives, your face pressed up against the glass, seeing everything that is going on in their life, but no more than that. It has been hypothesised that this can contribute to the feeling that people with depression can suffer from, that they are always on the outside, looking in. His excellency Pope Benedict has gone on record as saying 'that they [Facebook, MySpace] also isolate people from real life interactions and deepen the digital divide by excluding those already marginalized.' It is possibly the closest he will ever come in his life to making a lucid, relevant statement.

I have had friend requests from people whose company I would not say I enjoy in real life, and I am already friends with some people with whom, to be frank, I enjoy a less than satisfactory relationship in real life, at least, by my standards. Deleting them is not a straightforward process. It's the online equivalent of snubbing someone at a mixed gathering who you would otherwise tolerate for the sake of a civil group dynamic.

I don't think Facebook created this problem, it just facilitates it, holding up a mirror to how some relationships are conducted in the real world. Some of these relationships are less than stellar, but that's life. But if Hell Is Other People, is Facebook its seventh circle? Who knows, but the site is not unstoppable, and one day could find itself going the way of Levi Strauss. In the meantime, as more people come on board, social interaction will continue to rely on it to a certain extent, in the way that it has come with the growing popularity of mobile phones. And I'll resolve to take it with the pinch of salt, and work on where the problems are in real life, and give something to the people who actually give something to me. I suppose that's my advice to everyone about it.

On coming out.

You'd want to have been living under a rock not to know that Gareth Thomas, a prominent Welsh rugby player, has recently come out as a gay man, after splitting up with his wife and subsequently letting his fellow players in on the secret he had kept to himself for over 15 years. I first came across the article in the Mail Online (someone else had linked to it, you must understand, and I was curious) and of course the overall tone of the piece was a touch on the overwrought side. Sometimes I almost feel like rolling my eyes: Thomas is quite close in age to me, yet he only recently went through a process that I - and the average gay men of my age - went through the same 15 years ago. He faced his sexuality for the first time at the age of 17 and he denied it. Now, after buckling under the inevitable psychological pressure, he's decided to accept it. What does he want, a medal?

Of course it's never that simple, and it's got me thinking about the whole coming out process. Thomas's statement that he wanted to prove himself as a player first is perhaps fair enough, and there may be some truth in the statement that he would never have made to the highest echelons of rugby if he had come out at the start of his career. Still, there exists the assertion in the essay On Coming Out, a sub-section of the pamphlet With Downcast Gays, that 'posing as heterosexual and thus identifying with a group comprised at least in part of oppressors of gay men, he was a traitor to the gay cause'. It's an assertion that is certainly applicable in many circumstances, the question is, is this application universal? Is it applicable here?

Yes and no, I think. In spite of the macho culture surrounding rugby, it still is made up of predominantly middle-class men who happen to have had a smattering of education in their youth before turning pro in adulthood. I find it hard to believe that if he had come out, say, ten years ago, it would have raised many eyebrows. It was the twenty-first century, for Christ's sake.

I can just about understand someone subsuming their sexuality for the sake of a career that they love very much. When he said he wanted to 'prove himself as a player first' however, you can read this to mean that he wanted to prove that he wasn't a supposedly weak man afraid of confrontation, as many gay men are (still, unbelievably) stereotyped to be. Being gay in rugby was probably never really the issue, being physically weak was. And it's highly likely that this denigrating stereotype was picked up by the players when they first started playing in secondary school. Can you imagine the coach at that time doing anything other than reinforcing it? When I was in school, our coach certainly didn't.

In an interview on the BBC website, he speaks of how he hopes that by coming out, being gay will be less of an issue for the next generation of rugby players. He'll most likely achieve something in this regard, but he would have achieved more if he had come out earlier, when his career was at his peak, when he had by then proved himself, but when he still had substantial achievements ahead of him. But then, he knows more about the rugby environment, the players and the fans, and that's what's interesting. Was his decision to stay in the closet based on his close-quarters observation of those around him? No-one makes any attempt to hide or apologise for the pervasive homophobia that exists in football, and that is a reflection on the vermin that are involved with that sport, from the managers and players, right through to the fans. In general, homophobia in rugby doesn't make headline news. Is it because the players, managers and fans are more enlightened, or are they just more discreet about it?

Interestingly, he makes the point about how understanding the gay community was in allowing him his closet, even after it was common knowledge in some circles there that he was gay. In the pamphlet I referenced previously, this is railed against, and deemed a form of self-sabotage for the gay community. Perhaps this is true, but I've never been comfortable with the shrieking glee with which certain gay men out closet cases. Unless of course, the latter are anti-gay in their public life.

I'm not going to judge. He's come out before it's too late for him to have a happy gay life, as it were, and the only person he ultimately has to answer to is his ex-wife. And while his visibility would have been crucial to the gay cause once upon a less-enlightened time, it is not so much now. Except, it would appear, to the cause of gay rugby players. And he's not altogether bad in the attractiveness stakes. Like one of these people who get better with age...

I can't imagine the world of football/soccer ever being this accepting, though. I think that would be too much of a leap for their mankind. But with such a bunch of ugly skinny things, who cares?

I'm baaack!

After a rocky couple of months locuming in London, I've landed a permanent job in Three Bridges, a thirty minute train ride from Clapham Junction. So, not unsurprisingly, I'll be moving to that area to minimise the morning commute. My experience of London's gay communities has been going according to plan, it has to be said. First I land a place on a direct tube line to Soho, and now I'm moving to South London, not far from Vauxhall. Yay!

The job I'm starting, in a month, looks like it'll be good experience and will pay well, though I'm anticipating a challenge to say the least of it, as I won't have a dispenser.

I've taken the password off this thing, as I've left Barts now and am not really conscious of what people will think.

In other news, I recently happened across the website of a personal trainer who operates near Liverpool Street, a chap called Nick Mitchell, whose website can be found here. I was impressed, as the sites of most personal trainers are poorly designed in general, and don't always back themselves up with established scientific evidence. This one was different. A solid website, with lots of reference to clinical journals, and with assertions that resonated quite substantially for me.

So, an appointment was made, and I got to meet the man himself. I was told I would be pushed beyond my limits, in spite of bleating and moaning, and would inspire questions from my friends along the lines of 'Fucking hell, Denis. What have you been doing?'. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, the price tag for the 12-week 'Muscle Up' package was similarly substantial, and as I'm in a bit of a financial hole at the moment, it's going to be a while before I can do it. But I will do it. After just a couple of comments from me about my lifestyle, he told me I was insulin resistant. I looked this up, and the list of symptoms described my problem down to a tee. I was sold.

Other that that, life goes on as usual. Had a few drinks last Saturday, brought a hot musclecub back to mine, and spent most of Sunday trying to shake off a hangover. Recently, I've been told by more that one person that whenever I'm out I always seem to be drunk. Lies, damned lies!

Denis Ryan, MRPharmS.

I finished up with Barts and the London NHS trust about a month ago today. I got signed off by my tutor, passed my registration exam, and recently received my registration certificate in the post. So now that I'm a fully-fledged member of the profession, what are my thoughts on it?

I don't know.

It's been a challenging year. For at least the first half of it I felt overwhelmed by everything I had to learn, and only started to find my feet after Christmas. The amount of information I had to assimilate was pretty vast, and I always felt like I was playing catch-up. I didn't particularly mind this, I knew the learning curve I had to put up with is a feature of hospital pharmacy, and I certainly learned more there than I would have done if I was in a shop for a whole year. At the start of the year, I was as nervous as hell approaching patients, and it took me 20 minutes to extract the required information from them. Dealing with people when they're in that position of vulnerability takes some getting used to. Towards the end of the year though, I was pretty much dealing with upto 8 patients in two hours, and confidently getting all information I needed from them, with the minimum of support. I also got used to the ins and outs of a hospital dispensary, which is more than a bit different to a community one. I've also got some recognition for a project that I did while at the hospital, being asked to display a poster at regional level, and also won a prize for a presentation I gave with a colleague. All in all, I've overcome a few barriers and got some props. So where to from here?

See above. Returning to hospital as a qualified pharmacist would mean working towards getting a clinical diploma over the next three years. Not a problem, if it was what I genuinely wanted, but while I've managed to make a decent fist of hospital pharmacy over the last year, I'm still dubious about committing to it in the long run. I'm still not at home on the wards, and my tutor for the year picked up on this: We're both pretty much agreed on the fact that it's the technical side of things that I'm suited to. My main motivation for doing a hospital pre-reg was for the learning. I hadn't much of a clue about the clinical side of things, and I felt that whatever I ended up doing, I should start out by learning about this first. The jury remains out on whether I'll return to it, though.

So. On I go. I'd like to take some time out from it all, but I need to keep the money coming in if I want to stay in London. I've already spent some time locuming at a pharmacy at Gatwick airport, and that was a bit busy to say the least of it, but it seems to have passed off without incident. All I have to do now is find some more work, and SOON. Of course, corporations the world over are using the current economic climate as an excuse to lay off staff left right and centre, and drug companies are no exception, which is a pain, as I'm thinking of making inroads there. Well, it's either that, or just coast along in community for a while.

After our registration exam a while back, we all met up, and were discussing where we are going to go from here. I was relieved to hear that at least one other person was feeling that while he liked the course at uni, he wasn't too much into working as a pharmacist, and was thinking of returning to teach it instead. If there's one thing I liked doing this year, it was organising and presenting information and learning things from the 'ground up'. Hopefully I'll find an outlet for this in the future.

Other than that, London is cool, and I'm planning on hanging on here for a while. The only current fly in the ointment is that I have to find somewhere else to live soon. I've resisted the urge to move to the gay triangle of Vauxhall/Kennington/Oval. Somewhere west, like Ealing, maybe.

Where I find time for another entry...

It's hard to believe that this coming week will mark the halfway point of my year's contract in my job with the trust I'm currently working in. So, what are my thoughts?

- Working full time sucks, unless you are blindly in love with your job. I haven't got around to half the things I'd planned to do in London since I moved here, so I'm going to have to make a list and vow to try and achieve one of each of the things on it every weekend.

- I'm currently working in a hospital that is right across the road from where I live. The convenience of this is immeasureable, though I haven't yet (surprise!) got around to doing all the early morning fitness stuff that I swore I would do now that I have an extra two hours in the day to play with. Having said that, it rocks to be able to stay in bed until 8am and still have time for breakfast, a shower and brushing my teeth.

- British Military Fitness is going well, and I had a fitness assessment recently, which highlighted my 'inner core strength'. I still need to work on my running though, and I'm still a bit rubbish at doing press-ups for any length of time. Still, I'm almost ready to move up to the intermediate level of the class. The battle for a six-pack continues, though. In one corner: the fitness instructor who makes us run until we're almost dead. In the other corner: my predeliction for cream-filled chocolate choux buns.

- While nothing beats a good night out with cool people and lots of alcohol, the next day is always a waste. Unfortunately the world is a much greyer place without the occasional vat of beer, and it may be better to resign one's self to this rather than stay in and be miserable at weekends. London was made for going out in, after all.

- Having taken lack of organisation to previously-unheard of heights at uni, I'm now having to seriously modify some deeply ingrained habits just to put down a reasonably productive and responsible week at work. We were given a mock state board exam a while back, and the results (for all of us, not just me) show that there is still quite a bit of gaps to be filled in my knowledge.

- I think I'll be trying something other than hospital pharmacy for a while after I finish here. To pay off my student loan, if nothing else. I wouldn't mind working for a drug company for a while, but most of them are located out in the sticks, and I want to stay in London for the immediate future. While some parts of hospital pharmacy are cool, I still don't know if I'd ever be any good at it in the long term, and the first three years in a hospital as a registered pharmacist are very general, and I'd have to work in areas that I've no interest in before I'd have a chance to specialise.

- The above mentioned, I'm still learning a lot. Most likey more than I would if I was in a retail outlet all year. At the moment I'm doing a rotation in a cardio-thoracic hospital, and while I always sucked at this when I was at uni, I'm now slowly getting my head around how all of it works. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be getting the chance to see some heart surgery, which should be pretty cool.

- I really don't like having to stick this blog behind a password, and I may well end up reversing this later on, but for the moment this is how it has to be. Another thing is that I don't really have much to write about right now: Brighton was such a voyage of discovery, but since I've moved up here, it's been all work and no play (though I may write about my recent first night at Stark Bollock Naked at The Hoist later on!).

- Does anyone know how to turn around and study after a day at work? Granted, where I am at the moment can be quiet, and there is occasionally a chance to get out the books, but come 5pm, my brain is a pile of mush, and then I have to turn around and learn about such things as guidelines on secondary prevention of heart failure and myocardial infarction.

Oh well. Onward ho. It can be gratifying to occasionally hear that all the other people I graduated with are going through occasional patches of feeling fed-up with having to get up early every morning and only getting two days off out of seven. At least I got to go home over Christmas, and see my family, and New Year's in London was really rather excellent.

I've taken off all of next week. Part of it is to try and catch up on what I have to learn (boo!) but I'm also going to take it easy and visit a few sights and do a few things I haven't gotten around to doing here thus far.

Next on the cards. Go and see Milk...

Bloody hell!

Two posts since I started my job. This really is taking the piss. Not that there is much to write about. The time seems to fly by, and I'm not really marking it in the way that I used to when I was at college. The adjustment to nine-to-five grinds on slowly, though it's hard to believe that by Christmas, five months will have passed in this job.

The story so far? Getting used to how things are done was a big of a struggle at the start, but I seem to be getting there, albeit a bit slowly at times. My strike rate has gone down somewhat, purely due to the current lack of spare time on my hands, and I'm much more conscious of squandering my spare time by languishing in bed with a hangover, with only two days out of seven to play with. I found out that I was rostered to work on St. Steven's day, which would have put paid to any plans to return home for Christmas, but I managed to get someone to cover me, so on the 20th, I'll be flying out of here, with my new recently-renewed-in-the-nick-of-time passport. One piece of feedback I receive at work every now and again is how I need to work on my time management. It's not difficult to see why...

With regards to work, something else has come up. As much as I've never directly mentioned my place of work by name, if someone at work were to stumble across this, it would not require a rocket scientist to work out the identity of the author, and that is actually what is after happening. Add to this the fact that a lot of employers are googling the names of potential job applicants, and also that the online presence of healthcare professionals is something of a hot topic at the moment, and I've decided that from here on in, I'm going to have to make this blog accessible only by password. I'm not entirely sure how the process works, but I think anyone who wants to read this will have to have a google account, and once I've granted them access, will have to log in using the username and password that they would use to access their google account. I'm not a fan of this in general: I think that what I do in my spare time has little bearing on or relevance to what I do for a living, but unfortunately the time has come where I have to cover my ass.

So there you have it. In the next day or two, I'll be changing the settings on this thing, and a password will be needed to read it. If you want this password, e-mail me at denis.g.ryan@gmail.com and everything being cool, I'll give it to you.

And now I'm off to get ready for work tomorrow. Oh fun...

FINALLY!

... I manage to sit down and write another post 2 months after my last one. To say that the routine of having to get up early five mornings in a row out of seven comes as a shock to my system would be understating it somewhat, and to say that I am finding it hard to keep up with certain extra-curricular activites would be understating it even more.

The graduation has been and gone, and a laugh was had. My name appeared in local paper The Argus that day. Never one to be outdone, of course, Brooksy got his own section, complete with photograph.

We've all moved on now, and it makes me sad that we will most likely never again get together as a group again like we used to. The night of the graduation we all got together in the pub for one last time, though I had to leave, as I wasn't able to get the following day off from work, which I had already started at that stage.

I am now firmly esconced in East London, in Bethnal Green, in a hospital residence, paying £400 a month, which for that area is a great deal. I've already sussed out the area, and I smiled to myself when I found out that I happen to be on a direct tube line to Soho, a mere 15 minutes away. I haven't yet located a Kung Fu class up here yet (there are loads, which makes choosing one a bit difficult) but I have joined British Military Fitness and am going three times a week in Victoria Park, which is just up the road from me. I'll have that six-pack yet, even if I have to resort to anorexia nervosa!

I'm almost two months into the job, and slowly starting to find my feet. The interaction is not 100% ideal. There has been at least one rottweiler encountered already, and some of the people I work with... well... let's just say we didn't initially click. Still, when I have moments of despondency, I remind myself of how lucky I am that things have worked out the way that they have. I'm getting paid again in two weeks, but still have £500 in my account. It's a long time since I've had that level of comfort. Long may it continue.

Having said that, I start my rotation in General Medicine tomorrow, and the manager of the dispensary I'll be in in the afternoons is supposed to be blunt, to say the least of it. Fingers crossed things will work out.

The London Underground, which always seemed so metropolitan in films, fast loses its sheen when you have to take it during rush hour. Thankfully, where I live makes using it unnecessary for most of the journeys I have to make to work during the coming year.

I've already discovered the nuances of London nightlife (the Royal Vauxhall Tavern - yeah baby!) and met some very nice people up here, including Rick, who I met in XXL last night and brought back to mine. Apparently, it says somewhere in my accommodation contract that I'm not supposed to use my room for 'improper, immoral or illegal purposes'. Oh well, I don't think anyone saw us...

Wednesday night will see me fly out to Holland to meet the dutch side of the family, as my cousin is getting married there. Unfortunately the easiest option once again was to fly with DireAir (Ryanair). Hopefully it'll be the last time I fly with them, and hopefully not because the plane plunges out of the sky, which is what almost happened on a recent flight with them that I read about in the news.

Anyway, off I go. I had a stinking hangover earlier today, and while it's more or less gone now, I'm still a bit tired. A night in front of the couch for me, I think...

The end of my degree

When the results came out last Friday, and I saw that I had got through with a 2.2, my initial feeling was relief. A 2.2 was what I expected to get, but I knew that I had been cutting it fine with some subjects and the main thing was that I could continue with my plans for London. Then I had a look at the sheet overall to see how the year got on, and saw that a lot of 2.1s and firsts were given out. Add to this the fact that everyone who exchanged comments with each other seemed to get higher than me, and a bit of the shine was taken off my achievement.

As undertakings go, this one seemed to get harder towards the end, and in the last few months it was becoming an uphill struggle to the finishing line. The lack of money was really starting to get to me, and Andy passing on around the time of my exams didn't help either. It would be fairest to say though, that I could have just worked harder. Throughout my entire degree course.

Of course the whole experience of the last four years couldn't possibly be summed up by a number, and I know that I most likely got more out of Brighton than anyone else in my class. Some of the memories I will always have:

- Snogging four blokes at the same time in the Bulldog
- The two threesomes I had
- Getting entangled with Daffy, and subsequently finding out what it was like to long for someone who will never be available to you
- Copping off with a guy who felt that as long as he didn't take off his underwear while in bed with me, he wasn't cheating on his boyfriend (who happened to be in prison)

Yes, yes, I know: a trend is starting to emerge. Other things:

- Being on the piss for a solid week during international student orientation week
- Turning 30 while in first year
- Seeing Hot Foreign guy, whose name I will now reveal as Roberto Martin-Arrabal, naked in the gym showers
- Going into the Bulldog for the first time
- Going into Shwarz bar for the first time
- Changing myself completely by shaving my head and growing a goatee, and consequently getting a lot more attention from all the Brighton bears
- Drinking in the Winchester
- Moving twice during second year and still managing to pass my exams
- My first proper Gay Pride festival in 2006
- Walking out on my first pharmacy job because I hated the supervisor so much
- Trying to sell food waste digesters to the public on the street
- Skinny-dipping on Brighton beach at 2:30 in the morning.
- The Pharmacy Ball
- Getting fitter than I arguably have ever been in my life by learning Kung Fu

And of course, making friends whom I will always remember and never leave behind (you lot know who you are!).

The night before my flight back here, I went for a walk around what I knew would be one of my last nights of being based in Brighton. To be sure I'll be back, but for the forseeable future it'll be as a short-term visit. I don't think I could fully quantify what the experience of all of it has done for me, and if there ever is one place in which I could see myself putting down roots, Brighton would be it.

Before I left to come to Brighton, I was humming and hawing about whether to stay in Dublin and do the degree in Psychology and Maths that I had been offered, and if doing Pharmacy was just taking the safe option. In that regard, I know now for sure that I've made the right decision.

So there it is...

Yesterday morning the academic transcript arrived, with a breakdown of all my grades. It had the grades for all the years I sat exams throughout the course, not just my final year, and I noticed that the grades I got overall this year haven't been so good since I finished first year. I got 69% in my research project, 67% in Business studies (which I never had any interest in), and 65% in my practical clinical exam, an exam I could have failed, as I missed my allocated time slot thanks to taking the wrong time off the exam timetable. I was also VERY lucky: 40% in one exam, 45% in another, and 52% in an exam which required 50% to pass. I had trouble calculating my overall average, so I rang the school office to ask them and they told me it was 58%, 2% away from a 2.1. My first instinct was to think how I could have gotten into the next honours category if only I had gotten a few extra percent here and there, but now I can't be bothered. What I'm going to put on my CV is 'second class honours (58% average)' and then include the good marks under the sub-heading of 'Results of note'.

Overall, I don't think it's going to matter. I couldn't have got a better pre-reg than the one I ended up with, and I don't see myself being held back in any shape or form. The only thing that is ruled out is further academic study, and there is no way in hell I was going to do that anyway.

So. Great times and a great job at the end of it. And four years in one of the coolest cities on the planet. That'll do me.

I PASSED!!!!

Oh joy, oh rapture, I'm off to London!

I didn't break any records, but the main thing is that I got the degree, and I'm off to London, to a good teaching hospital. I've got the opportunity, all I have to do is take advantage of it.

WOO HOO!

More to follow when I can be arsed...

Hoovers and third-party molecules

My dreams have been getting extremely weird lately. Again.

There's always been the odd one where I wake up going 'What the FUCK?" - especially when I've initially woken up but then gone back to sleep again - but the ones I've had in the last few days have taken the biscuit.

The night before last:

I'm in a pub with my pharmacy project supervisor, where we are drinking together as part of a group. Playfully(!) he grabs my goatee, and starts to tug REALLY hard on it. "I'm going to have to pull this off!" he says, refusing to let go, and pulling as hard as he can. I struggle, doing everything I can to make him let go. Eventually he relents. Later on, I'm talking to him about the graduation ceremony that will be taking place at the end of July. "You're not going anywhere" he says, which I take to mean I won't be going to the ceremony, "You've left out key points in your thesis." "Such as?" I ask queriously. He responds by pointing out that I never discussed third-party molecules that mediate receptor-ligand binding. It was the fevered rantings of my imagination, of course: The existence of such molecules has never been established, but I'm making a note of it here anyway, in case the circumstances that transpire mirror those of Kekulé. If those molecules end up being discovered, you read about it here first boffins!

Last night was really taking the piss, though. In this dream, I left my house, which I think was in London, to get a hoover, as there was some inexplicable and urgent need for hoovering to take place somewhere. I acquired the hoover, which was yellow and grey, the same colours as that fancy Dyson one that doesn't lose it's suction, but was of modest, common-garden standard hoover dimensions. Satisfied, I started to make my way home. I arrived at what looked like an overground railway station, but felt like an underground transport facility, as it was dark, and the station was housed in what looked like an aircraft hangar. For some reason, I had to cross from one platform to another by crossing the tracks. Hoover in hand, I jumped onto the tracks, walked across, and then prepared to climb up onto the other platform. It was then I noticed that my hoover was stuck in the tracks, and no amount of yanking at it would set it free. Then I was a train, driving along the same line, coming right for me. "For God's sake, Denis! Leave it behind!" shouted someone who apparently knew me. I left the hoover behind, and walked away. I looked back, just as the train was riding over where the hoover was, expecting to hear a crunch. Instead, I saw a jet of water shoot up from the location, between the carriages. I was mystified, but wanting to dissociate myself from the incident, I turned around and kept walking. Then I looked back again.

There had been a pile-up. The train had derailed, and the carriages had all piled up on one another. Time to leave, I thought, hurrying towards the exit. All of a sudden, I noticed I was still carrying the same hoover. Well, the cleaning does need to be done, I thought, I may as well hang onto it. That I should question the fact that I was carrying a hoover that should have been previously crushed under the wheels of the train on the track didn't dawn on me for one second. My friend and I headed towards the exit turnstiles. "For God's sake, ditch the hoover", hissed my friend, "Otherwise you'll get us all into deep shit!". I refused. I had fought long and hard for this hoover, and some house in an nearby location needed to be cleaned. Holding the hoover over my head, I walked through the turnstile. Apart from attracting a few comments from the railway staff, no-one stopped us...

And then I woke up.

Hoovers always occupied a substantial position in my childhood. I had a fetish for them up until I started going to school, and there are many photos in my life album that show me playing around with them. One is of me in the garden, playing with a makeshift one that I had fashioned out of a cardboard box and a hose (after I busted the family household Nilfisk one day while playing with it, my parents had ruled the genuine article out of bounds). It would appear that this aspect of my subconcious has surfaced again, though why that is is anyone's guess.

The source of the other dream is painfully clear, though. The results of my finals are out tomorrow at 2pm. If I fail any of the exams, and have to retake in August, I'll lose the job in London that I hung out so long for, will end up in some crappy village dispensary somewhere, and won't be able to go to the graduation ceremony. Please God don't let that happen.

PLEASE!

My Bloody Valentine

I was dimly aware of the existence of this lot back around the time they were gearing up to release Loveless, in 1993. I saw someone I knew wearing a t-shirt with a picture of the group on the front of it. Their stare looked somewhat vacant, and combined with the long fringes they had then made them look like derivatives of the Manchester baggy scene, even if their name alone was interesting. I didn't really think much about them after, for quite a while.

It was only in time, when the single that was released from Loveless, 'Soon', started to get played on indie stations at night, that my interest was piqued. My taste in music was music was starting to lean towards atmosphere and texture at that time, and the vocals and swirling guitars in that song fitted the bill perfectly. Around that time, Billy Corgan out of the Smashing Pumpkins cited the production by Flood and Alan Moulder on the Loveless album as a substantial reference point for him. And so, around the year 2000, when I started making money for the first time after college by working in IT, I went out and bought it.

It was that album, and Radiohead's Kid A, released that year, that I'll always remember when I look back on starting work in Dublin and the music I got into then. Initially, I found that the sound on Loveless was quite uniform, and the songs tended to run into one another, were sometimes indistinguishable from each other. My taste in music was still a bit towards more linear and compact song forms, and Loveless was like an album-long song with different movements. Now that my taste has shifted towards longer moodier more layered stuff, the Valentines are firmly up there in my top 10 bands (NOT like the sodding Jesus & Mary Chain whom loads of critics claim were ripped off by MBV).

I did some more searching around, heard some more, and then heard about the legend that was The Holocaust, a noise piece at the end of the song 'You made me realize' that they expanded on (and increased the volume of!) in their live sets. At the time of reading all of this, the band had gone into one of the most epic hibernations in the history of rock music, and I had given up all hope of ever seeing them live with my own eyes.

Until recently, when I heard they had reformed, and were playing a series of gigs in London. My partner in gigging and drinking crime, Sarah Al, was duly contacted, and her presence requested (not to mention her payment, as I was too broke at the time of booking to pay for the tickets. Thanks babe). I contacted another friend, to gloat. "Wear earplugs", he warned me. "They can be ferociously loud".

We arrived Monday night. We came to the door of the venue and I did the usual last-minute frantic fumble for my ticket and eventually found it. Then I noticed that they were actually giving out complimentary pairs of earplugs. Just how loud can this lot be? I thought.

It's been a long time since I've been to a live gig, so memory does not serve me well, but I don't ever remember being at a gig as loud as this. The thing was, I can honestly say the experience was all the better for it (and I say experience, because that's what it was. Using 'songs' in this context would be like describing Francis Bacon's renderings as 'drawings'). There was no new material here - it's definitely nothing more than a reunion tour at the moment - but that was fine by me. I was there for the aural assault, the experience, the epiphany, not to mosh to power chords. I got pretty much all of these things. I got the trawl through Loveless (I'm still not too familiar with its predecessor, Isn't Anything). I got great background visuals. I got to ogle the cool Fender Jazzmaster guitars (I'd first fallen in love with these when I saw Robert Smith play one on the video for 10:15 Saturday Night). I got The Holocaust.

They launched into You Made Me Realize at the end. I knew then that anyone of a delicate disposition was in for it. The background visuals went from dreamy and surreal to stark and minimal. The end of the musical section was reached. The noise began. It grew, expanding to fill everyone's sensory space, roaring. People with loosely secured hair found it being moved back from their faces. The noise rose and rose, and then hit a plateau, where it was held for quite a while. A good 15 minutes altogether. I looked around and saw people looking towards the stage solemnly. Not everyone, though. Some people decided that they'd had enough, and walked out of the main hall. But there was no way I was going anywhere.

And then it ended. Quite abruptly, just like in the song. After The Holocaust came the exodus. We left too.

It wasn't a flawless performance: The vocals should have been higher in the mix, and they didn't play Loomer, my current all time favourite of theirs, but it came close. Save for these things, it would have been perfect. As was always the case, there was zero interaction with the crowd, or inter-song patter.

I saw loads of people make use of the earplugs at various stages during the night, especially towards the end. I didn't.

Ages ago, I bought the guitar chordbook for the Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. In it were a series of interviews Billy Corgan had given with some guitar magazine with his personal take on guitar playing and songwriting. One of the things he talked about, was how to motivate yourself and persevere, when you feel that geniuses before you have taken songwriting and the guitar to seemingly unsurpassable heights. In another interview he gave, he recalled how he heard Soundgarden's singing and riffing on their BadMotorFinger album, just before they were going in to record their debut Gish, and wondered how he was going to compete with that. Obviously he overcame that mental obstacle, but there's something of that with this band.

Anyone experimenting with heavy distorted or slow guitars in the future will inevitably be compared to My Bloody Valentine, amongst other bands. Part of it is lazy journalism, but part of it is that their fingerprints will be all over a lot of left-minded guitar playing for some time to come. But like Corgan, you can't help but think if something this incendiary has already been done, trying to surpass it might simply just be a waste of time.

Nah, but fuck it, it's going to be a bitch.

It's over!

The last while has been utterly mental. Manchester bear bash, death of someone who I've known for quite some time while living in Brighton, exams, funeral of said friend, more exams. But now, thank God in heaven, it's over. The last few days:

Thursday 5th June:

5pm: Leave exam hall after last exam and take advantage of the complimentary drinks in the Student's union. Everyone gets hammered. People cry, as they realise they may not see each other again ever. Denis also gets hammered and tries to bribe lecturers into giving him pass marks in the exams.

6pm: Denis and Dan break off from the crowd and go drinking elsewhere. We end up in a bar splitting a bottle of wine between us. Dan falls over. We move outside, away from the eyes of the bar staff.

10pm: June comes to collect Dan. Dan leaves. We hug each other goodbye in the pub.

11pm: Denis goes home, collects himself, and then decides, for some reason unbeknownst to everyone least of all himself, that he wants more alcohol, so heads into town to meet the rest of the class.

12am: Denis meets rest of class in town at nightclub. Denis and class shake their booty. Emotions run high, with all the alcohol, and the last-night-together feeling. Denis hugs them all, telling them it doesn't matter, that he loves them.

2am: Denis and class leave club. Damien decides that all the blokes should go skinny dipping. Never one to need a good reason to take off all his clothes, Denis goes for it. As Denis re-emerges from water, he sees a crowd of girls with digital cameras, all pointed in his direction, with flashes going off. Denis shouts at them, warning them that the pictures had better not end up on facebook.

2:20: While getting dressed, Denis realises that his underpants is missing. Denis demands to know where underpants is. No-one knows. Denis gets dressed without underpants. Another girl indignantly demands to know who took her shoes.

2:30: Everyone decides to go to Legends nightclub, a gay nightclub. Two of Denis's straight male classmates pull girls in there.

6am: Denis finally makes it home, falls into bed.

Friday 6th June:

12pm: Denis wakes up with a thundering hangover. Forces self to get dressed and heads out to Falmer to watch the Pharmacy lecturers play the final year pharmacy students at cricket. Students buck tradition of being trounced by the lecturers, by trouncing the lecturers.

3pm: Denis, Dan and others head off for pint with lecturers. A laugh is had.

6pm: Denis heads into town for more alcohol with class. Lots of alcohol is drunk. Denis tries to get into Walkabout, a horrible Aussie sports bar (the rest of the class have gone in there), but the arsehole bouncer on the door won't let him in. Denis goes home.

Saturday 7th June:

2am: Denis gets home, and sleeps for the best part of 24 hours.

RIP Mizz 'Flee

Andy Howarth, sometime commentator here under the handle of 'Flee, and contributor to the blog BN2 Beeyatches, passed away early this morning. He was 37.

Below is the most recent photo I have of him (left), taken last July at his civil partnership, with James.



Farewell, honey. It was fun propping up the bar in the Bully with you all those times.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!

Yesterday turned out to be an uninspiring day. I toddled along to the sixth floor results noticeboard to find out the result of an assignment I handed in ages ago. I passed, but the result was less than stellar. I was furious, partly because the guidelines for what was required for the finished work were unclear, and I know that's at least part of the reason why I didn't do so well. I went home, resolving to e-mail the course co-ordinator and at least get to the bottom of why I hadn't done well. I had yet to hear from the hospital I interviewed at last week, and felt in my heart that I hadn't done well enough to get a place.

Today I came into uni to work on a presentation that I have to give tomorrow, and to do my laundry in preparation for the Bear Bash at Manchester for the weekend. I was still smarting from the mark I got the day before, and was moaning about it to anyone who would listen. Specifically, Denise and Karina, with whom I was having coffee when I first came in.

Suddenly my phone rang, with a blocked number. Sensing that it was the hospital, I excused myself from the girls, and went into a quiet corner.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Denis, this is Fiona here from [London Hospital]. You had an interview with us last week."

My heart sank. It wasn't the chief pharmacist, but his deputy. He had probably delegated to her the task of telling me I was unsuccessful.

"OK"

"We've had a chance to review your exam and interview, and you've done very well..."

"OK..." My heart sank some more. I anticipated she was about to begin her next sentence with 'but'.

"...and we'd like to offer you the position".

OhMyGodDidSheJustSayWhatIThinkSheSaid?

To say that my heart skipped a beat would be an understatement. The woman asked me if I needed time to think about it. "No" I managed to squawk, "I'd like to accept."

After that, it was just small talk about how they'd formally notify me by post.

So, to my absolute disbelief, I have managed to snag a hospital in London for the next year. And not only that, but one of the premier teaching hospitals in the UK.

It would be understatement to say that in the last while, my faith in myself to make a success of myself has waned substantially, and the future was looking uncertain. To say that the phone call I received today goes someway towards helping would also be downplaying things.

So. Operation Soho.

Status: Success!

HOT!

One of the kissers is gay porn star Eric York, apparently.

I turned 33 yesterday.

It passed with little fanfare but large hangover, thanks to the party I went to on Saturday night (and like, where did that massive bruise on my arm come from? And how did I get food all down the front of my pants?)

A special mention to Luke Brooks, who also had his birthday yesterday. He is 2.

The continuing saga of college

Well, it's not like I have anything else to write about (except for that time on Tuesday night where I went out for a friend's 30th birthday party and we stayed out until 6am and my 30-year old friend got hilariously drunk and in the grand old student tradition robbed a traffic cone and one of the girls we were with decided she wouldn't be outdone and robbed a sandbag from the same roadworks site but anyway I digress where was I?).

I still haven't scored a job for after graduation. I have accepted that I most likely will be working in a community pharmacy for a year. This is fine by me in some respects, as it would be a gentler introduction to working in the field. The only thing is that because I'm going to be working in a relatively confined space for a year, I have to make sure the supervising pharmacist who takes me under his wing isn't the kind to soar high into the sky and then drop me, i.e. relatively sane and decent with people who sometimes need things explained to them more than once.

Having said that, I'm still keeping an eye on the hospital sector. I recently applied to a hospital near Birmingham. The location certainly wouldn't be anything approaching my personal preference, but I figured I might as well try. It turned out that I didn't even get shortlisted for an interview. I was a bit annoyed with that, but figured that at least it saved me a long train journey, and I sent them a mail asking them for feedback on my application.

They said my application was strong, as usual, but that while I listed my pharmacy experience, I didn't specifically mention what I gained from it. I took this on board, and also the advice of one of the tutors at university who said that I should emphasize the hospital experience I gained from within my course (I previously tended not to think of this as an asset, as every pharmacy student does it throughout their course). I redid my CV, and sent it off on Thursday for another vacancy that has arisen in a well-known London teaching hospital. I wasn't very optimistic, as the Birmingham hospital had about 60 applicants for one position, and as the London one is a popular hospital, it was bound to have even more.

I must have done something right, as I got a phone call the next afternoon, asking me if I would like to attend for interview this coming Wednesday. They asked for my e-mail address and said that they would send on the details. I haven't got them yet, however, so I'm ringing them on Monday morning.

It's all a bit of a juggling act at the moment, as I have a presentation to give in 10 days, a draft of my thesis to hand in at some point this coming week, and now I have to prepare for this interview as well, which by all accounts is supposed to be a fairly gruelling process, according to the people who have done it already.

I picked up my graduation pack earlier in the week, which felt a little weird. It had all the arrangements for the ceremony in it, along with a brochure for gown hire. I've bought the tickets, and reserved my place at the ceremony. It feels a little strange that the whole degree will be over and done with in just over a month (not to mention scary: all I can think about is how much I still don't know, and how I'll eventually be responsible for the drugs that loads of people will be taking). At this stage, I'm fairly confident of passing (the introduction for my thesis was well received: my tutor told me that as long as I keep writing as I am, I'll be fine), but I can't yet put a finger on what kind of degree I'm going to get.

In the middle of all this, I've almost forgotten that I'll be 33 next Sunday. I've plans to celebrate with the venerable Luke Brooks, who'll be 2 this year on the same day. Other than that the Bear Bash in Manchester will be the following Friday, so that should suffice. Fingers crossed there'll be some hot furry action, though I am NOT looking forward to the 7 hours on the bus (all the cheap rail tickets were gone. Aaarrrggghh!)

Now back I go to that wretched dissertation...

A random conversation from the Pharmacy Ball

Me: "My ass has really come on in leaps and bounds since I started going to Kung Fu."
Claire: "Yeah, me too! Check out my Kung Fu ass. Yeah!"
Me: "Yeah, check out my Kung Fu ass! Yeeaaaahhh!"

Enter Denise, another Kung Fu student.

Denise: "Hey Guys, whatchya at? Kung Fu asses?"
Claire & Denis: "Yeah, check out our Kung Fu asses."
Denise (not to be outdone): "Well, check out MY Kung Fu ass. Yeeahhh!"
Claire, Denise, and Denis: "We got the best asses! Kung Fu, yeeahh!"

Enter Sinéad, a non-Kung Fu student.

Sinéad: "Wow guys, your asses look really great. I think I might take up Kung Fu."


I blame the four free glasses of red wine before dinner.

Reactionary old gits?

I've just been out to get my free copy of GScene in the Bully, and after leafing through some of it in RedRoaster coffee shop (who happened to have a good album by someone called Loop Foundation playing over the speakers), I found out that a conviction against former Tory Brighton councillor Peter Willows has been overturned in an appeal.

For those of you who don't know this story, it goes something like this.

At a civic ceremony for the then new mayor of Brighton a while back (August 2006), Peter Willows, a member of the Brighton Conservative Party, made a comment that 'all gay men are paedophiles'. He made this comment to Paul Elgood, a Lib Dem councillor and himself a gay man. At the end of the ceremony, Willows was re-approached by the councillor and James Ledward (the editor of GScene) and taken to task on it. When asked by Ledward if he thought that Elgood too was a paedophile, he said no, but that 'all other gays are'. It was an isolated and somewhat pathetic incident, and Willows really should have known better, but he refused to recant or apologise. Matters were complicated some more by the fact that Willows sat on the Brighton Community Safety committee, which had pledged to make LGBT safety its top concern at that time. He really should have kept his mouth shut.

The conservative party refused to take action, so Ledward went to the police. He made a complaint on the grounds that Willows committed a public order offence. Willows went to trial in December 2006 (after not bothering to turn up for the first hearing) and after a fairly pathetic defence by anyone's standards, he was convicted and subsequently resigned as tory councillor for the region he represented.

It was the aftermath that held my interest the most. One man, a friend of Peter willows, was interviewed in The Argus and said that the conviction was unjust, that too much of the law had been brought to bear on the Councillor and (if I remember rightly) that he had merely exercised his right to free speech. That friend of his was gay. The opinion underpinning the editorial in the newspaper at that time was that poor old Willows, being a 75 year old war veteran, should have been left alone. I came away from all this with a few things.

The standard defence that is trotted out on behalf of an older person who comes out with racist or homophobic comments is their advanced age. Why? Is it because they grew up in a time where the mainstream was less tolerant than it is now? The assumption behind all of this is that they have absorbed the values of the time when they were younger, and have since reached the point where they can no longer take on board newer ones, or adjust to what is going on around them. As lines of reasoning go, it's bollox, but when you think about it, it is the pernicious undercurrent that informs a lot of the ageism that you see around today: Older people are physically more frail, therefore they must be frailer in mind and intellect as well. They're not as resilient or adaptive as their younger counterparts, and therefore are not as useful as members of society in general. Blah blah blah. It is the logic that sees the elderly experience great difficulty in securing gainful employment, to name one of the many problems that are thrown their way.

The flip side of the coin is that Willows has been around for a long time. He's been living in Brighton and Hove for quite some time now, so will have had some exposure to the gay community. He's had a great deal of time to amass the wisdom that is the preserve of those who have been around for longer than the rest of us. He's seen more of the world and has seen more of the suffering wrought by wars than the average bloke, so by now he really should, at the very least, have some bit of wisdom and humility in his current dealings with people. His age is no defence. None at all.

Also, you have to wonder about that friend of his, a gay man friends with a man who obviously has issues with gay men. What does that say about the self-respect of the former? The way it worked out in court *could* be likened to the killing of a fly with a sledgehammer, but no-one else was prepared to do anything else.

One pet peeve of mine is that point about free speech. It's somehow seen as a violation of someone's personal rights when they are taken to task over making homophobic comments, and that casual homophobia is still acceptable, nay expected, in everyday circles.

Whenever I hear this, I think, if you replaced the homophobia with racism, would people still find it acceptable, if slightly unpalatable? Not at all, and like I've said before, homophobia can almost be put into this category at this stage. The fact remains though, if Willows had been racist instead of homophobic that day, his feet wouldn't have touched the ground and the door wouldn't have hit his ass on his way out. But because he was being homophobic, a case wasn't automatically made, and when it eventually was, it was done so in an awkward and haphazard way.

It's like this: Willows is a politician, and in a public position. There is a certain responsibility that goes with this position that he wasn't willing to live by. He tried to have his cake and eat it. He was fed an enema and...oh you get the picture.

Willows was a serial homophobe. When LGBT police liaison officers went on a fact-finding mission and training course to San Francisco previous to that time, he attacked them in the press, and the result was a tabloid feeding frenzy which resulted in the officers being followed and photographed in San Francisco nightclubs. It was more than a little invasive for the officers in question, but Willows was never cautioned by his own party, and again refused to apologise for it.

Ledward said his fundamental motivation for going to court was:

"...for every young LGBT teenager who is taunted and bullied at school for being different because bigots in public office have for years been able to spout this type of hate without being challenged."

He was running for office himself later that year, but denied that this was also a factor in his pursuit of this case. The first reason is honestly good enough, and I don't give a shit if he was looking to bolster his public profile or not. He did the right thing.

Alas, it looks like the right thing has been undone. Surprisingly, the editorial in The Argus seems to have executed something of a U-turn, and has now summed up the result of the appeal quite well:

"This is not a case of common sense triumphing over political correctness. It is a vindication of a narrow-minded minority's urge to slap crass labels on those who exercise their freedom to live their lives the way they choose."

Indeed.

Did I mention...

that I passed that Psychopharmacology exam? Yay me!

Perhaps there's something to be said for the divine power of prayer. Or the journal article on depression I managed to cram into my brain the night before.

Graduation ceremony arranged for 30th July. My own attendance at it might not be such an outlandish possibility after all.