31 December 2022 - 7 mins read time

Hello, friends!

It’s official: the exponential curve, n = 11.3e^(1.14t), can be fitted pretty well to my posting frequency—at this rate, the much-anticipated post #5 is due in… 2025 :)

Jokes aside—with my tendency for nerdiness revealed—hi! Despite the enormous challenges the world continues to face, I hope 2022 was good for you. It was good for me—incredibly so. My lack of posting does not reflect a lack of activity, quite the opposite. My year was full, probably the fullest of my life. The rollercoaster saw long library sessions and beautiful birthday celebrations, early-morning swims and late-night pub-crawls, photoshoots with friends and jam sessions with strangers. I broke bread with people who I grew to love, and I heard their stories. Then, wonderfully, I participated in making new stories with them. I met people from every corner of the earth, and I laughed heartily with them. I learned and cried and grew. Truly, I exit this year a different person from he who entered.

As the days unfolded, I desperately desired to write here, post photos and the like—but it all came and went too quickly. Perhaps this motivates having (sigh…) Instagram or similar, to share with lower friction, in real-time. Now, I have too many memories to summarise—I can hardly express all that happened.

Fortunately, I had my trusty camera with me for the ride. It took a moment for my peers to feel comfortable with my lens permanently in their faces (my sincerest apologies, peers), but soon enough, I became a fly on the wall: organically capturing the life that I lived in Edinburgh. I am so grateful that I undertook this mission (consider my sincerest apologies revoked!!!), for I now have special memories etched for eternity. You underestimate how much you will forget in time—the little, seemingly mundane moments prove to be deeply meaningful even just one year later. The result of my camera-habit is a video compilation, which summarises my experiences better than the boring bullet-point alternative.

Now, a very important disclaimer: I was initially hesitant to share these clips… Not because I have anything to hide, but because they naturally portray a distorted view of my experience. Of course, I did not film the quieter, sadder moments, though such moments existed in abundance. Some days were hard, and on those days, I left the camera at home. Moreover, the videos are special to me because of the people in them, but they’re arguably quite boring otherwise. Please don’t expect a coherent narrative arc where you get to know the characters and the story underneath. In fact, someone described the assortment of clips as just “25 minutes of you and your friends laughing.” Guilty as charged, with no apology owed—we laughed, I filmed.

That disclaimer aside, if you are interested in seeing a glimpse of my Edinburgh experience, you can watch it here:

The video above ends in August, when the academic year concluded. I submitted my dissertation at this time, entitled “Revisiting Discrete Gradient Estimation in MADDPG,” and I wrote a formal blog post about that here.

In the hustle of submitting and bustle of celebration, the chapter of my MSc then ran out of pages. Alas, it felt that there was much more to write at the time—the depths of my friendships and my love for the city only continued to grow. Nevertheless, goodbyes needed to be said, as we all spread across the world, into our next seasons.

For me, rather than jumping into my next season immediately, I wanted to take some time off—time away from studying, working, stressing. My student visa had some extra time on it, which enabled me to spend a few more months in the UK. I seized this opportunity, for I wanted to explore Scotland more—not just Edinburgh, but head elsewhere and taste some adventure.

Through the platform Workaway, I embraced two opportunities: 7 weeks working at a hostel on the Isle of Skye, and 4 weeks working at a guesthouse on the Isle of Jura. This period was many things for me, but ultimately, deeply meaningful. It was certainly not always easy (I’ve cleaned enough toilet bowls for the next while), but I spent many hours alone in thought, contemplating the year gone past, and the chapters that await. I hiked in the beautiful Scottish highlands, met fascinating people, and had some good hang-out sessions with myself. I questioned the nature of work, the philosophy of cleaning, my desire to build rather than consume, the difficulties of a cyclical life, the struggle of surface-level interactions and the yearning for deep relationships, and more. I went with a list of questions written down for myself, and I returned with no answers, only more questions. I hope to write further about some of these musings, in future.

After this time away, after facing many bogs (of both varieties), I headed back to Edinburgh for graduation. I successfully passed my degree (woop woop), and an old man tapped me on the head with a very old hat—the ‘Geneva bonnet’. Hence, I am officially a University of Edinburgh alumnus!

Over the graduation period, I had many special moments reconnecting with friends and celebrating our achievements. We caught-up and traded stories and laughed and partied and then, once more, said farewell. An “until-next-time,” really. From this came another (brief) video:

And now? I am back home in South Africa, enjoying the sun and the sand, and trying not to get too burnt (currently failing on that front). It has been so special spending time with family and friends again, as we partake once more in community together. I start my job next week, as a “Junior Research Engineer” at InstaDeep, and I can’t wait! I am eager to embed myself into Cape Town life, and begin working—begin building.

As for this blog, I am unsure what the future holds. Truthfully, this medium was an experiment for me: a goal not to use Instagram and its ilk to share ideas; rather, to create an intentional space—I write here intentionally, and you read it intentionally. Did it work? In some ways, yes. Putting my thoughts down was a fantastic way to understand them, and I received wonderful responses from those who engaged with my writing. Unfortunately though, the friction was too great to provide useful updates: writing a post took a lot of energy, and the result was only 4 posts—from a year filled with far more than 4-posts-worth of content. I have ample photos to share, which presently sit unseen.

I like writing and I want to be better at writing, so I plan to continue writing—such is the path to being a better writer, I am told. Without the exciting “travel blog” aspect of being in a different city, I aim to shift to essays, to share my ideas about the world. More on that, TBA, I suppose.

For photos and other creative pursuits, I have conceded that I need not demonise all social media absolutely, and that my focus should be on using a platform healthily, rather abandoning it altogether. Thus, my New Year’s resolution is, in a sense, to be creative publicly again: via a music outlet (under the moniker Saint Casio) and a photography outlet (under the moniker Raincoat Rhys). Returning to social media is frankly quite scary, but I’m going to try my best to do it sustainably.

Follow me on those places, if you wish, or don’t—no problem either way :)

And until next time, adios!