World Mental Health Day: Is Oxbridge right for you?

It seems fitting to me that World Mental Health Day coincides with the first couple of weeks of the Oxbridge Michaelmas term. It’s the start of a new academic year, with bright eyed, busy-tailed freshers flooding the tradition-filled streets and buildings of those academically-hallowed buildings, and I can guarantee they are already struggling, physically from hangover, and mentally from being in a hormonal and intellectual hot house.

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Kenya 7: Kenya’s bizarre expat regime

In this age where the battle for equal rights across race and gender is highly topical, particularly in the Western world, Britain’s colonial past has of course caused a few controversies.  Yet while the future of the statues of Cecil Rhodes, who has become the symbolic epitome of everything wrong with Britain’s colonial past, expats in Kenya appear oblivious to what all the fuss is about.

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Kenya 6: Things I will miss about Kenya

While my initial plan was to stay in Kenya for three months, I am instead opting to leave after three weeks. I could get quite verbose on my reasons for choosing to leave Olepangi Farm but I would rather use this post to celebrate the things I will miss about Kenya. This trip has been my first time in sub-Saharan Africa and it has been an eye-opener (and ear opener too – I can recognise quite a few animal sounds now!).

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Kenya 5: The realisation I’m not good at relaxing

We are generation busy. Doodle polls are needed to be able to get a group of friends in the same place at the same time and that time is normally six weeks away, if you’re lucky. We’re busy with work, we’re busy with socialising – whether with people we actually want to spend time with or those we feel we ought to network with, we’re busy doing life admin, we’re busy doing various hobbies. Spontaneity is dead to millennials.

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Kenya 4: Nanyuki and the privilege guilt

You know all those times you see video footage from developing countries that show people living in ramshackle huts or seriously run down buildings, surrounded by rubbish and ill-looking animals? Well, there’s something about a screen and thousands of miles between you and what’s on that screen that desensitises you to it, I’ve found. Seeing it in person though at Nanyuki, a market town in central Kenya, caused a simmer of disquiet when viewing through a car window screen that bubbled into guilt once I got out and walked around.    

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