Day In The Life: Ben Wills

Ben Wills is an aspiring writer who is new to blogging. He campaigns for the UK premature baby charity and his blog started out as a way of raising awareness of premature birth, the issues around it and the way it can affect families. The blog has grown to include his random thoughts on a wide range of things. He lives on the Wirral and is married, as yet without children.

This is a day in Ben’s life.

You might think that a detailed description of a Sunday may involve various kinds of relaxation; I wish! Having decided to apply for a PhD, something of an impulse decision, I’m now frantically writing up proposals and application forms as this #DayInTheLife shows.

Thankfully I still had time for a lie in this morning eventually getting up at 9am. All thoughts of a brisk, refreshing walk down the prom were soon quashed by a slushy-icy covering of the wrist-breaking kind. My half stroll became a two minute walk into the yard, a couple of strides across the garden and back in again before I had time to warm up the surrounding concrete. Reluctantly, work began at 10.

Apart from half an hour’s light relief disguised as a ‘lunch break’, the ensuing eight hours alternated between searching for journal articles, reading said articles, writing a paragraph or two of research proposal, deleting one of those paragraphs and sighing. Eventually, the number of paragraphs had come to count for what was required by the word count and I gleefully emailed it off for further scrutiny. Then, having neglected my blog for a couple of weeks over Christmas, I settle down to write my first blog post for a month, thankfully completed in far less time and with the help of Man City v Arsenal on the radio. At last, tea could be eaten with my brain satisfied, if fried.

Tea was rather more interesting than usual as it involved the very last memory of Christmas – the final Christmas pudding. For some reason we make three Christmas puddings every year, one large, one medium-sized and one small (a la Goldilocks). The large one disappears on Christmas Day, the medium-sized one on New Year’s Day and the small one whenever we fancy it: this evening, we fancied it.

So it was, replete with the last slither of pudding, that I sat down to enjoy what promised to be an intriguing final session of the Masters snooker final. Unfortunately, only an hour later, I was getting up from my comfy spot on the sofa after what had been a disappointingly one-sided, hence short, affair. Brain still aching from the day’s exertions, I settled down for a while to enjoy a coffee-table hardback, a book full of photos of Earth from the International Space Station. Brain and eyes suitably soothed, I find myself finishing off this piece and about to collapse into bed early in preparation for a new week.

Ben is taking part in my #DayInTheLife project, a series of posts where people write about their typical day. If you would like to take part, please fill in the form on my blog post here.