Becoming a geographer

“I must admit”, my Danish housemate Andreas uttered to me, “When I first saw you I was surprised when you told me you were here to study geography”.

It was totally forgivable. There I stood – my petite, hibiscus and quinoa salad-moulded figure tanned by a seemingly endless stint on a sun lounger in Marbella; long bleach blonde hair tumbling over my Barbie-pink v-neck t-shirt; boobs propped up on a ledge of foam rubber and lashes laden with mascara. It didn’t look like I was going to last five minutes among a class full of studious budding physical geographers.

At first, my curiosity for world economics and contempt for the bores of batholiths earned me the affectionate nickname ‘the closet human geographer’. I was a difficult one to integrate. It took some months, perhaps a year or more before I was fully enrolled: happily wearing square-framed spectacles, oversized shoe laces and spending my weekends attending giant vegetable shows.

It was a slow yet beautifully discernible transition. I remember our first school trip: It was just six weeks into the start of our degree course, when we were forcefully frogmarched to Dartmoor to spend a week in November in a granite mansion with no heating.

On that week, I cried. I recall being knelt in the wilderness, the howling rain driving into my left ear, trying to dig soil out of the ground with a plastic 2ml spatula. That’s when I cracked. I’d tried really hard to embrace all that this new experience had to offer but now, tears began to roll down my face. I was cold, wet, windswept and hungry. In that moment of bleakness, I conducted a quick calculation in my head: This semester alone had already cost me in excess of £10,000. I had turned by back on the business woman I once was. No longer did I attend canapé-fuelled meetings in four-inch stilettos and talk sales figures with other hair-extension clad women. No, here I was – having kissed goodbye to a handsome pay packet and already £10,000 in debt – crouched in a peat bog on Dartmoor in the middle of winter. There was no turning back. What on Earth had I done?

At the end of a long, wet and tiring week, we took one final visit to the Tor summit. Our lecturers, clad in Burghaus green waterproofs stood like toy soldiers whilst the undying enthusiasm for geology was clearly visible on one teacher’s face as he ran around trying to assemble the students for more study. As everyone reluctantly gathered in a circle around an apparent xenolith I stepped to the front. Being a mature student (a ripe 24 years old) I didn’t want to replicate the extreme disinterest of the rest of the group; who were worn out, hungover and just about ready to crawl under the duvet and watch Netflix. With a feigned look of fascination on my face I leaned forward, crawled onto the rock and ran my hand over the xenolith. A million thoughts raced through my mind and I suddenly realised that this little piece of foreign rock caught among the batholith when it formed 20,000 years ago was under the palm of my hand and actually- that was pretty damn awesome.

In time, I learned to embrace all things geography. Whether it was sitting on the floor of a lecture hall in our spare time trying to place Singapore onto a giant map of China (how many geography students does it take to work out Singapore is not a city in China?) or timing water and it slowly dripped through a lump of soil into a measuring cylinder at a rate of one drop per minute, I was there, fully signed up, and ready to learn.

As I grew into geography, golden locks and manicured talons grew out into sombre dirty-brown tresses and dirt-tipped stubs. Fitted t-shirts and hotpants were gradually replaced with unfashionable fleeces and ill-fitting waterproof trousers. In our matching outdoor-wear, like comrades on the front line, I knew I was safe – I wasn’t going to be judged here.

I studied hard. Although I’d always had an environmental conscience and a love for the great outdoors, it wasn’t easy to re-train from robot-like selling of commercially produced fashion products to delving into the science of Earth’s systems and producing maps, presentations and written-reports on them. Moreover, I had absolutely no relevant qualifications- everything I achieved at that place I had to teach myself from scratch.

My reluctant but nevertheless relentless studying and slightly enacted thirst for knowledge slowly but surely morphed into a true and burning passion. For pure fear of ‘not getting my money’s worth’ I wasn’t prepared to leave any stone unturned.  Conscientiously reading everything and anything that was suggested to us, including a grand total of seven text books cover to cover and possibly thousands more journal articles, the more I knew about this planet the more I became determined to save it. In fact, I took my geography degree so seriously I even developed geographic tongue (disclaimer for when you inevitably tap that into Google: mine is nowhere near that bad, although I did have South East Asia on the tip of my tongue for a short while).

Things that once seemed abstract or irrelevant to me suddenly seemed immensely fascinating and disconcertingly close. When it came to rainforests I became a committed conservationist; when it came to deserts I became a total alluvial fan (sorry Harry, yes, I did nick your line). When it comes to geology, no longer would I just glance at a rock and think nothing. It became a monument of beauty- I began to really appreciate a good cleavage when I was looking at one. (I promise that’s the end of the lame geography jokes, I was just highlighting the fun we had…)

You see, it is through deep learning about the issues that affect our planet and inevitably all life that inhabits it that inspires one to take action. Of course my job was never to take action in the form of recycling the odd bottle, or even going out there with an enormous net and trying to scoop out a few thousand of them myself… it wasn’t to stand outside Hinkley power station holding a sign that says ‘Don’t make us all fry’, or go vegan alone or refuse to drive my car. I had one destiny, and that was to become the driving force behind policy change that invariably stems from the most influential group of all: The people.

Those tea-fuelled nights ironically spent burning electricity, throwing trees into the waste paper bin and eating rainforest-derived palm-oil laden peanut butter straight from the jar whilst reading hundreds upon thousands of articles were never in vein, because through the written word my purpose is to spread knowledge in a form that is engaging, simple, captivating and inspiring.

I’m not sitting here thinking “What the heck do I do with a geography degree?” (The question I have received a sum total of 68 times since completing my final assessments). I have a mission, and that’s to inspire every single person who reads my words to think… to vote… to choose wisely- and if they want, to wear green waterproofs and let their hair grow out, because, well, there is something rather liberating about it.

And yes, I know you’re still somewhat perturbed by the images of geographic tongue. Here it is, in case you’re still wondering.