Travel Pathology

It is a crisp, clear, beautiful Sunday morning. And instead of hiking the Craigs or walking the meadows, I am inside my dorm room with over 50 tabs open on my browser, writing research papers. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My plants are in the hallways strategically placed to receive the afternoon sunshine from the only southwest facing window in the flat. They didn’t sign up for a postgraduate program, so they shouldn’t have to grow pale in color and miss out on the beautiful weather too. I am a very empathetic plant owner.

The number of assignments due this week has compelled me to make the responsible choice of staying home today rather than participating in my usual Sailing club activities. For those of you who don’t know, I randomly joined the University Sailing club which entails going on weekly voyages in the North Sea. However, grad-life comes before pirate-life, so I instead have been spending half my day googling “examples of a systematically conducted literature search”. Which is a shame, today would’ve been another lovely day to capsize.

I have been growing slightly hungry as the afternoon carries on. Earlier, I went to start prepping pasta; however, our kitchen knife has gone missing, and I don’t particularly enjoy cutting tomatoes with butter knives. In a feeble attempt to band together against poverty, my flatmates and I have scrounged together a few essential cooking items that we share communally in the flat. Along with a basic chef’s knife, we’ve gathered a cutting board, pots, pans, spoons, plates, and a wine opener. It was glaringly obvious when the knife wasn’t in its usual spot within the drawer it shares with only four other pieces of cutlery. I checked the neighboring drawers and the sink, but the knife was nowhere to be found in our sparsely equipped kitchen. So, I gave up, made another cup of tea to stave off my hunger, and returned to my dormitory to resume my coursework.

Hopefully, the knife shows up. I have no idea why a knife would go missing, but it is spooky season, so my mind is having fun dreaming up scenarios in the theme of a murder mystery. Suspects include the six flatmates, one female guest estimated to be in her mid-twenties, who has resided in the residence for nearly an entire week under the guise that she is a ‘childhood friend’ of the resident in room 4, and one other unnamed visitor, a male presumed to be in his early twenties. He has been observed from the safety of my second-floor window coming and going from the flat, though his ties to the residency are unknown. All I know about him is that he has a black umbrella, which I first noticed leaning against the wall in the entrance hall one rainy afternoon when I returned from the library. Naturally, I assumed it belonged to one of my flatmates, so I thought nothing of it as I turned to lock the door behind me, feeling slightly irritated that I had found the front door unlocked. Then, one evening as I was leaving the flat, I saw the man in the courtyard, wielding the very same umbrella. Not much gets past me, guys, just saying.

The last time I saw the knife was yesterday afternoon. In fact, I am the last person to have used it as far as I am aware. I used it to crumble my feta cheese for the tomato pesto I crafted for myself. In good-roommate fashion I washed it immediately after use, then left it to dry along with my other dishes as I went back to reading my fantasy novel. Now that I think of it, the knife wasn’t on the drying rack this morning when I went to put the dishes away…

But who could have used it between 6:48 pm on Saturday, October 14th and 10:22 am on Sunday? Further examining the clues, the apartment contained the smell related to fried rice and chili sauce this morning. The garbage was half full, with a food wrapper depicting noodles conveniently lying towards the top. Furthermore the tea kettle was hot! A common cooking technique for cooking ramen noodles. These are dishes that, to my knowledge, don’t require cutting knives, and there were no other dishes used or left out.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I do declare, there has been a MU—-moderate inconvenience to my cooking plans for the day.

You have probably wondered what I am doing conducting a blog post in this very scene rather than resuming my coursework. Valid, however, I hit a wall with my literature search and thought it could be helpful to write my weekend events instead!

Last Friday was the 13th, which lead me to seek out activities to the theme “spooky season”. I also had a friend in town, and together, we tentatively planned to grab some cocktails at the “Potions Bar”, maybe walk through one of the many old cemeteries of the city, watch an episode of ‘Scooby Doo’ and be in bed by 10pm. Texting the group chat we all planned to meet up at 7:30. Of course, once I arrived, we found the place to be entirely booked out. When am I going to learn that you always have to book things in advanced in this city?

Ditching the potions bar, we wound up doing a pub crawl that ended with a deep-fried mars bar and getting home at 1am. GO KAYLIN! YOU DID IT! You did something YOUTHFUL and slightly detrimental to your circadian rhythm and liver! And you didn’t yawn ONCE! Look at you go!

What can I say? I think it was the cheap beer and the live Irish bands with their fiddles. That is a genre I can dance to. I can’t seem to self-choreograph a dance that goes well with Doja Cat, but I can absolutely swing and jump and Dougie to “The Galway Girl”. Grandma says its becasue “it’s in my blood”. So there you go. 

With that said, the missing knife has mysteriously turned up. And I am starving. So I will go and make myself some pesto and conclude my Sunday with a little more reading. Here goes Week 5 of the term!