'D of E Feet' should not be a legitimate condition.

If you ask me, the Duke of Edinburgh Award is a damn strange way to show your worth to universities and employers. It all makes very little sense to me, and if I (as a participant) can't understand it, then who exactly can???

I returned this week from my silver level expedition. What this equates to in layman's terms is three days and two nights of gahbdajbshsjba in return for part of a certificate. Obviously this sounds like a fair and sensible exchange. And in each of these three days, seven hours is to be spent hiking and completing an additional productive 'aim', all before retiring to a tent to not sleep or eat substantially in the cold and wet for the rest of the evening. And what exactly is this supposed to teach us? Survival skills? I still have none other than how to use a supermarket and to stay alive whilst spending the night in a synthetic bag. Team work? In many ways, we were mainly bonded together just by a fear of each other letting the general public know just how ugly we can look if left to the mercy of Mother Nature, and that's not going to help me get a degree.

But perhaps you can tell - I'm not so outdoorsy.

Well okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit. I had fun. I mean, stick four friends together in miserable rain (3 thunderstorms in 2 hours, to be exact) and it's not going to be all bad. If anything, you get some good 'bantz' out of it. Or more specifically, one of you is bound to do something ridiculously stupid like falling in a river, and the rest will be able to enjoy laughing at you for the rest of the time and telling anybody who'll listen that yeah, you really did just fall in a river. In between all that you just eat and gossip, and that's not bad either. In this way, it was a great time.

But of course the sheer pain caused by freakin' heavy backpacks and too-small walking boots, getting wetter than you ever thought possible (I'm talking osmosis kind of effects here, where water was passing in and out of all clothing in equal measure) and the biting cold of sharing one sleeping bag between two people because both your stuff is all soaked also equates to a horribly miserable time.

The thing is, you don't really remember the pain so well, only the amusing stories to pass on. And this is really bad, because as much as I remember screaming at the rain clouds and threatening to commit some godless sin if it didn't stop spitting at us, my brain seems to have blocked out the physical memory of how cold and generally crap it all felt - and that is exactly how people end up repeating such debacles, focussing only on the laughs, and not on the pain. Naturally, this only leads to further self-loathing as only you can be held accountable for committing yourself to Hell 2.0. It's such a vicious, vicious circle.

For now, however, I think I am relatively safe. Two days later and I'm still trying to recover my feet enough to walk normally (or at the very least, so as not to give the impression that my bladder is constantly full) and so I am quite firmly sticking to the resolution that, seeing as we passed, I never have to hike or camp ever again. The guys in my team, as short-sighted and, well, 'guy-ish' as they are, have it in their brains that they'll manage gold level next year (FYI that means another day and night of pain, people) but I pride myself on my guts in refusing to go along with such a scheme. Instead, my friend and I are considering the finer side of camping. 'Glamping', if you will. This is the clever/preposterous idea that camping can be made comfortable and enjoyable by having tents with appliances and three square meals a day. In truth, sitting in my miserable scrap of polyester this past week whilst watching other campers with their bacon sandwiches and television sets in dry, heated vans has led me to believe that camping could be alright if only it were.. well, better. And so the likelihood of our investigating 'glamping' (that's 'glamour camping', for you uneducated ones) has increased to about 63%, a notable increase from me of the previous year, to whom camping was simply unnecessary if it meant pitching a tent any further outside than your back garden. Of course, I also have camping at Reading Festival to deal with in a couple of weeks, but really, I'm pretty sure the deal is that you sleep in a nice patch of mud anyways, so no problems there.

Basically, the conclusion here is that nature is not quite as scary I had thought; but it is damn miserable at times. Credit here goes to Prince Philip in some measure (that's the Duke, halfwits) and The Other Phil, our assessor and the man fated with the ability to either pass or fail us. But let's be real honest here: if we'd failed, you would not have been able to get me back out there.

Just call me nature girl.

Actually, don't.

'Whack? Man, That's Lame...'

As an English Language student, I know more about the complexities of crafting words than I actually care to know. I know when a word is a post-modifying adjective or a complement, or an adverb is posing as an adverbial just for kicks, or when all of the above actually want to be defined as an adjectival phrase so as to make life that little bit harder. I spent a week studying the different types of pronoun (singular, possessive, 3^rd person, yadda yadda yadda) and the moods of different sentence types and really, there’s only one sensible conclusion to draw: it’s all irrelevant.

As a ‘young person’, I seem to use more made-up words than I do Standard English anyway, and that makes more sense to me. It’s not a new idea so don’t credit me, but English is evolving - and at a pace that confounds all of us. It always has done; it’s the natural progression. If it didn’t then we wouldn’t have any language at all – how do you think it all ever started? Words simply don’t always mean the same thing anymore. To my age group, ‘whore’ or ‘ho’ is an acceptable term for a friend, male or female (although many older people see it as a kick in the teeth for feminism) and ‘gay’ hardly ever refers to homosexuality. Nine times out of ten the person saying it has no issue with homosexuality, although older generations think we’re being inexcusably offensive. We just don’t see these words in that way. A standard conversation with any one of my friends nowadays will inevitably involve the words ‘filth’, ‘beef’ and ‘gwanin’’, and none of these words will be used in its usual capacity. ‘Filth’ is a greeting, or a murmur of agreement. ‘Beef’ is a bad situation (often used in verb form, ‘to beef’, when you are getting angry with someone or starting some trouble) and ‘gwanin’’... Well, that’s a made-up term that I’m not even sure makes sense to us. The effect of this new language is surely pretty standard-textbook to anthropologists, psychologists and the like; it separates us from the ‘adults’ and the others in our peer group that we have no desire to communicate with. It creates a group identity, improving social cohesion (as they say). And it’s more than a little bit fun. It’s a bit like 40-year-olds looking back at the time they claimed everything was ‘to the max’ or the best put-down they could muster was ‘face!’, or even as I look back to when I was seven and tacked the word ‘not’ onto the end of every sentence to be cool. Not. It’s not a surprise to anyone, yet there are always people moaning - “Speak properly! Pronounce your T’s!” I just think it’s nice.

Slang, or colloquialism to be precise, is a natural convention of human interaction and also, in my opinion, quite a good indicator of societal progression. After all, not everything that I say to my friends is trivial, amassing to a general waste of oxygen. Young people talk about topical events, too. The conversations just sound a little different, key politicians being referred to as ‘this-or-that douchebag’ and the general state of the world being reduced to ‘just a bit shite, really’.  The level of slang that pertains to my group seems to increase when there are more issues present in our lives than when we are relatively stress-free. Exam season was an explosion of synonyms for ‘bad’ (filthy, grosty, grubby, rancidity) whilst the long summer was ‘tasty’ or ‘sick’ (resurgence thanks to The Hangover films) and spent with my ‘homies and sistas’. We’re hardly ‘street’ so I guess we use this language ironically, but it’s still amusing when relating stories to outsiders and having to clarify on the sentence, ‘he was beefin’ up deep, give me some correlation sista’.  For the inexperienced in cult-youth language, there’s always Urban Dictionary, a site that I often have to run to in order to suss out teenage rants (and I still don’t know what ‘ratting’ means these days) and that really is a blessing. It also shows how determined we are to maintain this part of our culture. There isn’t a name for our generation yet – there’s no more Teddy Boys or Mods – but maybe in twenty years or so anthropologists will be able to suss out a term to describe our incredibly diverse group. Even if it’s ‘that anomaly in our educated society’. That’ll be one for the Dictionary.