Looking Back and Looking Forward, or [+back]

I have two further months of relaxation to look forward to, followed by nine constituting the final year of my Bachelor’s degree. As such, I will dedicate some of my summer to prep work on my dissertation, the topic of which I am in the process of narrowing down with the help of my supervisor. What I do know with certainty is that I shall be building upon my research into liquids (i.e. “r” and “l” sounds) in the extinct dialect of St Kilda, which I mentioned in a previous entry and presented at an undergraduate linguistics conference in Aberdeen.

I am overjoyed at having managed to get straight A’s in Year 3, putting me on the road towards a First, which would really help me secure entry into and funding for a Master’s programme. It wasn’t easy, I admit – the days and nights spent over books and papers have been quite testing. For that reason, I once again used the time between the end of exams and my departure home to catch up on both friends and volunteering. I assisted with the collection and sorting of student donations to the SHRUB cooperative again. To illustrate the sheer volume of material passing through our hands, let me say that we collected nigh on half a tonne of food from a single accommodation complex, about a half of which was suitable for food banks – and food constitutes only around, say, 15% of the total donations! In addition to that, I have continued and will continue working at the Czech nursery as a teaching assistant.

I want my summer to be at least a bit productive, and so I am finally learning Hungarian and preparing a new film (fortunately I have managed to align this with a creative peak), which I am hoping to shoot during August and September in Edinburgh. I have plans for the school year proper, too: for a start I want to pilot a “buddy system” mentoring scheme for first-year Celtic students under An Comann Ceiltach, building upon the exam revision sessions I have organised in the last two years. In my personal life, I wish to be more active and start rambling and camping regularly.

Perhaps the greatest challenge I have set myself is taking a course that has three lectures a week at 9 AM. But I have been looking forward to Linguistic Fieldwork and Language Description since Year 2, and have had to get up for 8 AM for most of my life so far, so I’m sure I can manage.

That’s about all the things I can think of to write about at this time, apart from politics, which I feel has now been discussed beyond ad nauseam [1]. What remains for me to do is to once more express my gratitude to the Kellner Family Foundation for their continued support and never-ending willingness to run the gauntlet of British bureaucracy with me.

[1] But if you insist, dear reader, then know that two years ago I cast my vote in favour of Scottish independence, and my position on this matter has not changed. As such I perceive the current situation as a unique opportunity to open the EU up to the possibility of accepting an independent Scotland in their midst, in spite of the predictable and infantile protest on Spain’s part which in the past were a major factor. While a Green voter myself (in both Czechia and Scotland), I have complete faith that Nicola Sturgeon can play this convoluted political game (let us not pretend it is anything but) with greater success than anyone else.