The Loosest of Ends

There is a special sort of nostalgia that sets in after a few weeks of living in your childhood bedroom again. Once you’ve managed to convince yourself it isn’t just a stop-gap or a few weeks home from uni, there’s an odd kind of regression that appears. The urge to, at twenty-two, adopt the habits of your sixteen-year-old self and stay up for half the night and sleep through half the day. I made quite a conscious effort to avoid that.

I write this blog post from that bedroom. Not a lot of my childhood was spent in here, as it didn’t become my room until I was seventeen, but I think the feeling is still the same. I moved back into my parents’ house after four years at university just over a fortnight ago. I’ve moved furniture, changed wall hangings, and reluctantly decided against the idea of repainting this little sauna of a room in thirty degree heat. It feels, undeniably, like a different room to the one I came home to during my A-Levels in 2022. And I am, even more undeniably, a very different person to the stress-riddled teenager that first slept in this bed. But that just places me at even more of a loose end.

This blog is called ‘At A Loose End’ after the idiom I first heard (I believe) in the Paddington Bear CD audiobooks I listened to as a child. Since then, the phrase has become a relatively significant part of my vocabulary, even more so since moving back in and deciding to outsource my boredom to my parents. I think this stage in my life, where I am out of full-time education for the first time in eighteen years, working part-time while applying for industry jobs and desperately trying to finish my MA dissertations, is where my ends are the loosest. I am and always have been a planner, but this is the one segment of my life I never accounted for: the post-education, pre-child-rearing slump. It’s a very empowering time, a time where I can choose to do almost anything without much consideration – but that doesn’t make the ends any tighter. I am still aimlessly wandering through this darker spot in my timeline.

I’m Laura, I’m a recent MA Creative Writing and Publishing graduate wrestling with the fiftieth first draft of my feminist historical fiction novel. If you want to learn more about me than you can read on my LinkedIn profile or in an anthology bio, stick around! I’ll share book reviews (if I ever finish reading them), my novel progress (if I ever start writing it), and some of the tips I learned on my two Creative Writing degrees that might help you avoid the silly mistakes I have already made (and will inevitably repeat) in my writing journey. I’ll do my best to be helpful with this blog, but if you’d rather have the chatty, unfiltered version over a cup of tea, you’ll find that on my Substack. And, if you’re properly nosy, I’ll be posting updates in real time on your favourite social media platforms.

If you are, like me, At A Loose End (or just fancy keeping me company), then you’re in the right place. I’ll stick the kettle on and call you when it’s boiled.