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It was an impromptu visit to Turtle Bay after I’d caught a chill spending the day at university not wearing enough.

I asked my boyfriend to bring me some socks, tights, jumpers, blankets, anything that might revive me.

When he picked me up, I pulled the warm socks on quickly, scrambled into the tights in the car, and then put the skinny jeans back on over the top.

Then we decided to go into town for dinner.

Telling myself that black tights under jeans with pumps looked just about acceptable, I got out of the car in the state I was in, and stomped off to the restaurant, leaving my bag in the car.

As soon as I walked in and we sat down, I put my coat over my chair and went to the toilet. As usual women were loitering around the mirrors and so I squeezed my way out and went back to my seat.

No longer than three minutes later, I decided there was no way I could eat a meal with this many tight layers around my waist and with feet this uncomfortably hot. Instead of the usual excited anticipation at the thought of food, instead it filled me with dread as I imagined having to force food in to this already painfully tight waistband arrangement.

“What should I do?” I asked my boyfriend.

“Go to the loo and take them off” he replied.

“But I can’t just carry a pair of thick grey socks and tights across the restaurant?”

“Take your coat”

“Put my coat on to go to the loo!?”

“Well you’re gunna have to”

Imagining the alternative option, which would be to get up and carry my coat to the loo, which I decided was even stranger, I put the coat on, zipped it up, and confidently strode to the toilets.

I took the first available cubical and began to undress, remove the tights and socks, and re-dress. Having successfully completed this, shoving one sock into each front pocket along with the pair of tights, I then stood there for a second unsure of what to do. Could I walk into a toilet and leave again without flushing?

I decided that to keep up the appearance of behaving normally, I should flush the toilet. It felt rather odd flushing an empty toilet, but who was any wiser? It was only me that was ever going to know the truth.

So I confidently walked out, only to see the same girls standing by the mirrors as the first visit, no less than 5 minutes previously. At this moment it flickered across my mind that flushing the toilet might not have been the best option. I must admit they were much quicker to move out of the way this time as I tried to get to the sink to wash my hands… again.

“That’s much better” I said when I got back to the table, hung my coat back on the chair, sat down, and we proceeded with our meals as planned.

Afterwards, the waitress came over to take our plates, but I still had a bit to finish. She said she’d come back.

Soon after I finished my meal and, in getting ready to leave, I put my coat on.

Around 10 minutes later she returned. She hesitated at the bowl of half-eaten chips and looked at me asking “Are these done with?” I leaned back in my chair, gesturing in an exaggerated manner that I was fully satisfied and that she could safely take them away. In doing so, I began rubbing my belly, and drawing attention to it by announcing “Yes thank you, I’m completely stuffed”.

She glanced at my hand-rubbing-belly action which made me look down. Then, I suddenly realised to my horror that I had this bulging, lumpy belly that could not be explained by eating too much nor by being pregnant. At least if it was a child, it was a very peculiar shaped one.

Quickly, I announced “Oh, that’s just a pair of socks!”

The sudden realisation of what I’d just said hit me as she gave me the weirdest look I’ve ever received from a waitress in a restaurant. Not that I make a habit of getting waiting staff to give me strange looks.

I just smiled and gazed at her as if to say “That’s completely normal, do you not bring socks into restaurants in your pockets?” as she slowly stepped away.

I left the restaurant fully conscious of my new alien-baby, and lay my hands over it in an attempt to conceal it as I pushed through the crowds in the half light.

Despite my efforts, I definitely caught the eye of woman of similar age to myself who had spotted my little cover-up. I could read it in her face that she knew. She was thinking, ‘That poor woman has stuffed her coat with socks and is pretending she’s pregnant. How very, very sad…”

“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.