Er, well, where to start. How much should I say? Would a list help? I think a list would help.
1) Cambridge yesterday. NO contest, all thoughts of Oxford are gone gone gone. I've had great fun telling people I've fallen in love with Jesus, but that joke will soon get old.
2) But really, I have fallen in love with Jesus, and that's not good because getting my hopes up in this way is just...not wise. Not at this stage, where I've probably screwed up history and anyway all the other classicists at the open day were cleverer than me. But Dr Clackson was Such. A. God. And it's really beautiful. And Annieshutupnow.
3) Before that though, it was the classics dinner on Monday. And oh it was fantastic. There was food, there was wine, there was Mr L drunk as a skunk which is ALWAYS an amazing sight. Rumour has it he once got so smashed in a pub that he stood on a table and yelled "SUM PIUS AENEAS!" Unfortunately nothing like that happened on Monday, but he did slag off a lot of teachers and talk about philosophy in that beautifully stupid way drunk people do.
4) I was not drunk, but merry. My toast (which I was forced into making) was: "I am brilliant. Classics is brilliant. Prawns are brilliant." I personally think it's very poignant.
5) And at the end of the night, I somehow ended up sitting next to Dominic, and we, well, we got talking, as in talking properly. In fact we didn't stop talking until I suddenly looked at my watch and saw that if I didn't leave, like, NOW I'd miss the last train (and I had to go to Cambridge the next day), and it was really awful because I didn't want to leave. Then he walked with me to the tube station and it was dark and raining and windy, and it was at that point that, FINALLY, it all came out - both of us said exactly how we felt, with none of the stupid coyness and awkwardness of the past month, and I think we both wanted to say more but we were standing on the platform and my tube was just THERE, I didn't want to go and he hugged me and that seemed to last a very long time. Then I really had to get on the tube, so I did - but it didn't matter anyway because I still missed the last train at Victoria.
6) I waited at Victoria for an hour, sitting with some family that consisted of a mum, a dad and about fifteen sleeping children. It was surreal.
7) Eventually a train came that took me to a station that was an hour away from my house.
8) It was cold. It was raining. I walked all the way home.
Wednesday, 27 June 2007
Sunday, 24 June 2007
"And the crack in the tea-cup opens/ A lane to the land of the dead."
So before I thought that, if pushed, I would probably have to say that maybe Auden was, overall, my favourite (non-classical) poet. Well, now I know he’s my favourite poet.
Only for Auden would I wake up at 5am and have leftover ravioli for breakfast, for example. OK, I didn’t actually have to get up at 5, I could have slept in for longer, and nor was the ravioli that necessary, really. But anyway, that’s what happened, so that by 7 o’clock the Oxford Express was already coming out of London and I was on it, snoozing.
The event itself, which was at Christ Church, was…interesting. I mean, it was really good, and the whole day was just a bit bizarre, for some reason. I got in and drank tea in the same room that the Christopher Tower thing had been in, and there were a lot of (it has to be said, mainly old) people generally ignoring me, and so I wandered around the college for a bit. (There were a few younger people around later, by the way – including Rees Arnott Davies, another CT winner, although our paths just didn’t cross for the whole day somehow, so I never spoke to him.)
It started at 9.30, in a different room. First there was some general talk about Auden, and Peter McDonald spoke and someone who had known Auden told us a few anecdotes that I’ve helpfully forgotten. (I took tonnes of paper with me but in the end felt too self-conscious – or lazy? – to take notes.) Then three poets who had been to Christ Church read some of their poetry. Olivia Cole was FANTASTIC – her first collection’s coming out soon and I reckon it’ll be worth buying. She read this one poem about Mussolini playing tennis that was just brilliant, and I think it helped that she had the kind of voice that’s perfect for reading aloud. Tim Kendall was alright – bit too much nature poetry which isn’t really my thing to be honest. And then Anthony Thwaite, who was hilarious and has his Collected Poems coming out soon, and plugged it shamelessly.
Morning refreshments found me basically drinking tea and wolfing down shortbread, having kind of a standard yes-I-come-from-Moscow-yes-it-is-a-very-interesting-city conversation with an old woman called Anne. (I don’t want to sound snobbish or anything, but these conversations come up very often – basically every time someone inquires about my surname – so I kind of tend to reel out the usual answers to the usual questions without thinking.)
The next lecture was about “Auden and Film”, and they showed Night Mail, the film he collaborated on with Benjamin Britten. My view was a little bit obscured by a woman in front of me, who was wearing a big straw hat with green badges all over it even though a) we were indoors and b) it was a stupid hat, but I leaned to the left a bit and it was OK. It was really bizarre, actually, the way post used to work in those days, and the rhythm of the steam trains and the men in their flat caps and that old, Audenesque English landscape – well, it was all quite touching, actually. I thought about our local post office downsizing into a corner in the back of WHSmith and felt a bit sad.
After that the actor Neil Dudgeon read some of Auden’s poems, and this was the best bit because he read all the ones I love – a few early ones, like ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’, ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love”, and then Musee Des Beaux Arts, In Memory of W.B.Yeats, September 1st 1939 (which someone later pointed out was basically Auden imitating Yeats – NEVER noticed that but it’s sort of true, look at the title). He read some later poems too, On The Circuit (“God bless the USA, so large/ So friendly, and so rich.”) and Talking To Myself (apparently Larkin really slagged that one off).
The best bit, however, was when he read As I Walked Out One Evening. It was probably the highlight of the whole day, because this is my favourite Auden poem, I think, it was the first one I read and that was when I was first getting into poetry and it's just – it’s just so perfect. As he read it, a clock started chiming somewhere. It was noon, so the bell rang 12 times, as he read
“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.”
and so on. And it was incredibly sombre and haunting, AND THEN as he got to the last stanza:
“It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.”
At that third line the chiming stopped. And I was just like, “WOW.” It was such a brilliant, perfect moment. I actually had chills running down my spine.
It was lunchtime after that – in the Harry Potter dining hall! Actually apart from the amazing location, lunch wasn’t that great. I managed to sit in a seat that was in between two groups of people, and I spoke to them but wasn’t really near enough to be fully part of either conversation. And opposite me was some guy whose nametag read Dr. Bubb or Dr. Blubb or something (seriously), who was really boring and wouldn’t talk, and took about half the potatoes but didn’t offer them to anyone else, and at one point he actually got out his Blackberry, at the table – which is just rude. My one attempt at talking to him went like this:
Me: “So, are you a big fan of Auden then?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “No, not really.”
Pause.
Me: “Do you work in Oxford?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “Yes.” *eats potatoes*
I left lunch pretty quickly. Took a walk around Oxford for a while – up some cobbled path – watched students sauntering along, thought, “Wow, they’re so relaxed, so at home – this is like – they LIVE here. That’s so…amazing.”
It suddenly occurred to me then that I’d been to Oxford three times in three months, and that at some point, without meaning to, I’d fallen in love with the place. Which is just a big pile of oops.
Anyway, came back to CC and then there was a panel discussion with Peter McDonald, John Fuller (!), Peter Porter (!) and Simon Armitage (!). (My brain: “That’s Simon Armitage. THAT’S SIMON ARMITAGE! SIMON! ARMITAGE!”) JF’s just written a huge book about Auden, so he rambled quite interestingly. PP just rambled (sorry, but he annoyed me a bit). They discussed things like Auden’s attitude to Yeats, and what he would have been like as a poet if he hadn’t gone to America (still great but different, was the – kind of obvious, really – conclusion). After that there was a tiny break, and then there were two more lectures – “Auden and Music” and “Auden and Opera”. I was quite tired by now, but the music lecture was pretty good – it was all about him and Britten, and they played some extracts of their collaborations (which are damn good). They even played some of Funeral Blues, which apparently started out as a funny poem which Britten put in a cabaret-style arrangement. Needless to say, THAT was amazing.
By the time the opera lecture started I was shattered and kept drifting off, and it didn’t help that oh dear god, the opera guy was dull. I don’t know what the point was – Auden wrote, like, one article about opera for Vogue once (of all magazines!) and this guy basically dissected the article, which really meant he described random operas at length and then told us Auden’s opinion on them. A bit of a low point, then, and it went on for about fifty years.
Afternoon refreshments – tea, shortbread, chat – and then Peter Porter, John Fuller, Simon Armitage and James Fenton – OH MY GOD, some train in the distance just blew its horn and it sounded EXACTLY like Beethoven’s Fifth!!! Er, anyway – they read some Auden and also some of their poetry. PP was once again annoying, the rest were good, especially SA who read some poems about how he and Glyn Maxwell (who I love) went to Iceland just like Auden and Louis MacNeice did.
And then Peter McDonald did a little summary of everything, and that was it – the day was over. There was optional evensong, which I’d been planning to go to, but I was bloody tired by then and my arse hurt from sitting down (sorry), so I left and wandered around Oxford for an hour and a half. That in itself would require another massively long entry, and I’m sure at some point I’ll write some uni-panicking splat in here, but let’s just say that at 7.30 I got the bus back and was home by 10.30 due to traffic jams and stuff.
It was, overall, a bloody amazing day.
This entry was loooong. Today was Work Hell, tomorrow is the classics dinner, on Tuesday I’m going to Cambridge for the first time ever, and on Wednesday I get to collapse.
Only for Auden would I wake up at 5am and have leftover ravioli for breakfast, for example. OK, I didn’t actually have to get up at 5, I could have slept in for longer, and nor was the ravioli that necessary, really. But anyway, that’s what happened, so that by 7 o’clock the Oxford Express was already coming out of London and I was on it, snoozing.
The event itself, which was at Christ Church, was…interesting. I mean, it was really good, and the whole day was just a bit bizarre, for some reason. I got in and drank tea in the same room that the Christopher Tower thing had been in, and there were a lot of (it has to be said, mainly old) people generally ignoring me, and so I wandered around the college for a bit. (There were a few younger people around later, by the way – including Rees Arnott Davies, another CT winner, although our paths just didn’t cross for the whole day somehow, so I never spoke to him.)
It started at 9.30, in a different room. First there was some general talk about Auden, and Peter McDonald spoke and someone who had known Auden told us a few anecdotes that I’ve helpfully forgotten. (I took tonnes of paper with me but in the end felt too self-conscious – or lazy? – to take notes.) Then three poets who had been to Christ Church read some of their poetry. Olivia Cole was FANTASTIC – her first collection’s coming out soon and I reckon it’ll be worth buying. She read this one poem about Mussolini playing tennis that was just brilliant, and I think it helped that she had the kind of voice that’s perfect for reading aloud. Tim Kendall was alright – bit too much nature poetry which isn’t really my thing to be honest. And then Anthony Thwaite, who was hilarious and has his Collected Poems coming out soon, and plugged it shamelessly.
Morning refreshments found me basically drinking tea and wolfing down shortbread, having kind of a standard yes-I-come-from-Moscow-yes-it-is-a-very-interesting-city conversation with an old woman called Anne. (I don’t want to sound snobbish or anything, but these conversations come up very often – basically every time someone inquires about my surname – so I kind of tend to reel out the usual answers to the usual questions without thinking.)
The next lecture was about “Auden and Film”, and they showed Night Mail, the film he collaborated on with Benjamin Britten. My view was a little bit obscured by a woman in front of me, who was wearing a big straw hat with green badges all over it even though a) we were indoors and b) it was a stupid hat, but I leaned to the left a bit and it was OK. It was really bizarre, actually, the way post used to work in those days, and the rhythm of the steam trains and the men in their flat caps and that old, Audenesque English landscape – well, it was all quite touching, actually. I thought about our local post office downsizing into a corner in the back of WHSmith and felt a bit sad.
After that the actor Neil Dudgeon read some of Auden’s poems, and this was the best bit because he read all the ones I love – a few early ones, like ‘Control of the passes was, he saw, the key’, ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love”, and then Musee Des Beaux Arts, In Memory of W.B.Yeats, September 1st 1939 (which someone later pointed out was basically Auden imitating Yeats – NEVER noticed that but it’s sort of true, look at the title). He read some later poems too, On The Circuit (“God bless the USA, so large/ So friendly, and so rich.”) and Talking To Myself (apparently Larkin really slagged that one off).
The best bit, however, was when he read As I Walked Out One Evening. It was probably the highlight of the whole day, because this is my favourite Auden poem, I think, it was the first one I read and that was when I was first getting into poetry and it's just – it’s just so perfect. As he read it, a clock started chiming somewhere. It was noon, so the bell rang 12 times, as he read
“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.”
and so on. And it was incredibly sombre and haunting, AND THEN as he got to the last stanza:
“It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming
And the deep river ran on.”
At that third line the chiming stopped. And I was just like, “WOW.” It was such a brilliant, perfect moment. I actually had chills running down my spine.
It was lunchtime after that – in the Harry Potter dining hall! Actually apart from the amazing location, lunch wasn’t that great. I managed to sit in a seat that was in between two groups of people, and I spoke to them but wasn’t really near enough to be fully part of either conversation. And opposite me was some guy whose nametag read Dr. Bubb or Dr. Blubb or something (seriously), who was really boring and wouldn’t talk, and took about half the potatoes but didn’t offer them to anyone else, and at one point he actually got out his Blackberry, at the table – which is just rude. My one attempt at talking to him went like this:
Me: “So, are you a big fan of Auden then?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “No, not really.”
Pause.
Me: “Do you work in Oxford?”
Dr. Bubb/ Blubb/ Bleh: “Yes.” *eats potatoes*
I left lunch pretty quickly. Took a walk around Oxford for a while – up some cobbled path – watched students sauntering along, thought, “Wow, they’re so relaxed, so at home – this is like – they LIVE here. That’s so…amazing.”
It suddenly occurred to me then that I’d been to Oxford three times in three months, and that at some point, without meaning to, I’d fallen in love with the place. Which is just a big pile of oops.
Anyway, came back to CC and then there was a panel discussion with Peter McDonald, John Fuller (!), Peter Porter (!) and Simon Armitage (!). (My brain: “That’s Simon Armitage. THAT’S SIMON ARMITAGE! SIMON! ARMITAGE!”) JF’s just written a huge book about Auden, so he rambled quite interestingly. PP just rambled (sorry, but he annoyed me a bit). They discussed things like Auden’s attitude to Yeats, and what he would have been like as a poet if he hadn’t gone to America (still great but different, was the – kind of obvious, really – conclusion). After that there was a tiny break, and then there were two more lectures – “Auden and Music” and “Auden and Opera”. I was quite tired by now, but the music lecture was pretty good – it was all about him and Britten, and they played some extracts of their collaborations (which are damn good). They even played some of Funeral Blues, which apparently started out as a funny poem which Britten put in a cabaret-style arrangement. Needless to say, THAT was amazing.
By the time the opera lecture started I was shattered and kept drifting off, and it didn’t help that oh dear god, the opera guy was dull. I don’t know what the point was – Auden wrote, like, one article about opera for Vogue once (of all magazines!) and this guy basically dissected the article, which really meant he described random operas at length and then told us Auden’s opinion on them. A bit of a low point, then, and it went on for about fifty years.
Afternoon refreshments – tea, shortbread, chat – and then Peter Porter, John Fuller, Simon Armitage and James Fenton – OH MY GOD, some train in the distance just blew its horn and it sounded EXACTLY like Beethoven’s Fifth!!! Er, anyway – they read some Auden and also some of their poetry. PP was once again annoying, the rest were good, especially SA who read some poems about how he and Glyn Maxwell (who I love) went to Iceland just like Auden and Louis MacNeice did.
And then Peter McDonald did a little summary of everything, and that was it – the day was over. There was optional evensong, which I’d been planning to go to, but I was bloody tired by then and my arse hurt from sitting down (sorry), so I left and wandered around Oxford for an hour and a half. That in itself would require another massively long entry, and I’m sure at some point I’ll write some uni-panicking splat in here, but let’s just say that at 7.30 I got the bus back and was home by 10.30 due to traffic jams and stuff.
It was, overall, a bloody amazing day.
This entry was loooong. Today was Work Hell, tomorrow is the classics dinner, on Tuesday I’m going to Cambridge for the first time ever, and on Wednesday I get to collapse.
Monday, 18 June 2007
On not catching trains to Aberdeen
Not a lot has been happening. Well. There has been this onslaught of recurring dreams lately, in which I still have a heap of exams to do and I'm not ready and there's always some Huge Obstacle that's stopping me getting to school like (as in last night's dream-adventure) being on a train that goes to Aberdeen instead of London; I'm hoping these dreams will stop soon. Also, various emotional/personal headfucks that refuse to lie down and die have meant that I've been acting like a complete and utter teenager lately - this climaxed in a big revolting mess on Thursday afternoon, when I came home from school and spent a full hour sobbing into my pillow, then started looking for a specific set of photos that I wanted to rip up, didn't find them, and hated myself for the rest of the evening for being such a...well, such a 17-year-old. Let's not dwell on that.
I wouldn't say life is majorly stressful at the moment, but there are a few things just sort of simmering beneath the surface that when I think about them make me want to break stuff. Sat outside with Boris in a free period and we had the most depressing conversation, in which we both concluded that, yes, year 12 has been one of the shittiest years ever. I mean, for me it wasn't as bad as year 10 (the Female Holden Caulfield days) but it was still slightly worse than year 8 (the Mild Bullying & Ostracism days - incidentally, I found out recently that the word ostracism comes from the Ancient Greek word "ostraca", which means "pieces of broken pottery", because the Greeks used to ostracise people - send them into exile for 10 years - and to decide who they were going to ostracise they would all write their votes on a piece of broken pottery. So...I thought it was interesting, although writing it just now I'm wondering if I got that right. Will have to check.) And yeah, so we were writing the form report today and reading back on it there have been good times this year, but, overall, year 12: a bad year. Something about even numbers...thank god there's no year 14.
And generally odd-numbered years have tended to be quite good (year 11), so roll on next year!
Uni confusion has also been bubbling. All I can say about that is YES, I will apply for Cambridge (although even thinking about that right now seems really presumptuous considering I haven't got my grades and probably screwed up history), and YES, I will go to the open day at Jesus College with the school next Tuesday, and NO, I don't really have an opinion on Durham, and NO, I will definitely not be applying for Leeds because the classics course at Leeds just looks indescribably rubbish. So far, those are the only conclusions that have been reached.
It's not all been doom & gloom & stress & hormones though. Honest. There have been laughs, even though they've been strange ones - like when we were all sitting on the grass outside the common room on Friday and Raaheel came along, and William called out, "Yo! Raa to the Heel!" and NOBODY ELSE found it funny except me, and I was laughing for about ten minutes straight and am STILL giggling about it three days later.
And yesterday, for Father's Day, we went to some Midsomer-Murders-esque village in Sussex and went to a cafe where we had tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, and it was all very nice and civilised. Then later I found one of those wonderful old bookshops and bought some poetry books, and then we went to the beach for a bit but it was cold and crap so we went home.
Also, I have a LOT to look forward to at the moment. First up - I am so excited about this - on Saturday Christ Church in Oxford is having a conference day thingy (that's how I've been describing it to everyone - it's a conference day thingy) on Auden, and Christopher Tower gave my school a free ticket as a prize, and Mr Amy gave the ticket to ME, so - I'm going. General reactions to this have been like: "WHY do you want to spend a day listening to people talking about, er, some poet guy?" but I can't wait. Mind you, I don't know how I'll manage to get to Oxford by 8.45am (get up at...4? 5? hmm), but still. I WILL get there.
Then there's a classics dinner on Monday. It's not really a school event - I mean, it would be, but Chadders says he couldn't be arsed to fill in a tonne of paperwork for it, so what will happen is that everyone in the sixth form who does Classical Civilization or Latin will meet up in some restaurant in Soho and then we'll just somehow bump into the classics teachers.
Then it's Boris's birthday, then Harriet will finally have the birthday party she's been postponing since her birthday in APRIL, then...then...I've definitely forgotten something. Well anyway, and then school will be over and I'll be learning Greek for a week at King's College and eeeeeeeeeee, summer!
So, not a lot has been happening, but...lots is GOING to happen. And look at me, I'm actually keeping up this blogging lark.
Hope those trains to Aberdeen aren't symbolic in any way...
I wouldn't say life is majorly stressful at the moment, but there are a few things just sort of simmering beneath the surface that when I think about them make me want to break stuff. Sat outside with Boris in a free period and we had the most depressing conversation, in which we both concluded that, yes, year 12 has been one of the shittiest years ever. I mean, for me it wasn't as bad as year 10 (the Female Holden Caulfield days) but it was still slightly worse than year 8 (the Mild Bullying & Ostracism days - incidentally, I found out recently that the word ostracism comes from the Ancient Greek word "ostraca", which means "pieces of broken pottery", because the Greeks used to ostracise people - send them into exile for 10 years - and to decide who they were going to ostracise they would all write their votes on a piece of broken pottery. So...I thought it was interesting, although writing it just now I'm wondering if I got that right. Will have to check.) And yeah, so we were writing the form report today and reading back on it there have been good times this year, but, overall, year 12: a bad year. Something about even numbers...thank god there's no year 14.
And generally odd-numbered years have tended to be quite good (year 11), so roll on next year!
Uni confusion has also been bubbling. All I can say about that is YES, I will apply for Cambridge (although even thinking about that right now seems really presumptuous considering I haven't got my grades and probably screwed up history), and YES, I will go to the open day at Jesus College with the school next Tuesday, and NO, I don't really have an opinion on Durham, and NO, I will definitely not be applying for Leeds because the classics course at Leeds just looks indescribably rubbish. So far, those are the only conclusions that have been reached.
It's not all been doom & gloom & stress & hormones though. Honest. There have been laughs, even though they've been strange ones - like when we were all sitting on the grass outside the common room on Friday and Raaheel came along, and William called out, "Yo! Raa to the Heel!" and NOBODY ELSE found it funny except me, and I was laughing for about ten minutes straight and am STILL giggling about it three days later.
And yesterday, for Father's Day, we went to some Midsomer-Murders-esque village in Sussex and went to a cafe where we had tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, and it was all very nice and civilised. Then later I found one of those wonderful old bookshops and bought some poetry books, and then we went to the beach for a bit but it was cold and crap so we went home.
Also, I have a LOT to look forward to at the moment. First up - I am so excited about this - on Saturday Christ Church in Oxford is having a conference day thingy (that's how I've been describing it to everyone - it's a conference day thingy) on Auden, and Christopher Tower gave my school a free ticket as a prize, and Mr Amy gave the ticket to ME, so - I'm going. General reactions to this have been like: "WHY do you want to spend a day listening to people talking about, er, some poet guy?" but I can't wait. Mind you, I don't know how I'll manage to get to Oxford by 8.45am (get up at...4? 5? hmm), but still. I WILL get there.
Then there's a classics dinner on Monday. It's not really a school event - I mean, it would be, but Chadders says he couldn't be arsed to fill in a tonne of paperwork for it, so what will happen is that everyone in the sixth form who does Classical Civilization or Latin will meet up in some restaurant in Soho and then we'll just somehow bump into the classics teachers.
Then it's Boris's birthday, then Harriet will finally have the birthday party she's been postponing since her birthday in APRIL, then...then...I've definitely forgotten something. Well anyway, and then school will be over and I'll be learning Greek for a week at King's College and eeeeeeeeeee, summer!
So, not a lot has been happening, but...lots is GOING to happen. And look at me, I'm actually keeping up this blogging lark.
Hope those trains to Aberdeen aren't symbolic in any way...
Friday, 8 June 2007
Honey sandwiches at dawnbreak
And then it was the end, and suddenly there was a heck of a lot of free time. (Let's not mention A2 courses, personal statements, uni decisions, prefect duties or other thingamajigs, eh?) Today was, as I always knew it would be, epic. There was me waking up at four in the morning because I'd gone to bed at nine the night before, and a few honey-sandwiches-at-dawnbreak (washed down with milk). There was a gloomy bus ride to the hospital a few hours later, during which I felt more and more ill and nervous, couldn't stop reciting Ovid's Amores 1.2 over and over in my head, and listened to two old women behind me talking about their hair.
There was the hospital appointment. I now have orthotics, which are, for a start, not as big as I thought they would be (I was dreading some kind of massive brick-like monstrosities that would only fit in the biggest of trainers or something like that, but they're pretty small really) - they're also quite comfy, like having cushions in your shoes. And I am now just a teensy bit taller because of them. So.
Then there was the bus ride home again, and I started making up a poem in my head - I swear, about 75% of my ideas for poems come to me on the bus, which is why no matter how much they suck, no matter how many times I end up on some crowded bus listening to a crazy woman singing Amazing Grace (this has happened) I will never stop taking the bus.
At home I started feeling ill. Steamed my face. Three times. Drank tea. Went on the internet. Tried not to think about a) Ovid, b) Cicero, c) any kind of Latin vocab/grammar. Didn't work. Read the OCR Mark Scheme for Latin AS-level. Suddenly wanted to cry.
And then all of a sudden it was 1:30pm and I was standing in the lobby, having one of those completely mindless small-talk conversations with Amy who was about to do her economics exam, and I was clutching some paracetamol thinking, "Should I take them? Should I? Am I being silly? Should I?" And I went up to Mr P who was the invigilator and said in a very tiny voice, "I don't feel very well" but he was running around with some woman in a red skirt so I don't think he quite heard me.
Then there was Hannah, who came up to me, wailed, "I don't know ANY CICERO AT ALL! I'm going to FAIL!" and ran off. I stood there, alone, and there were about 10000 year 11s who were about to do their history GCSE, and I thought, "Oh, those were the days - history GCSE, which I thought I'd failed and then it turned out I'd got an A* - God GCSEs were really not that bad...mind you if I told them that they'd probably crucify me...OHMYGOD I want to be sick."
Mr L (Latin teacher 1) came by and was all like, "Alright?" but I didn't really answer him because his face was sort of swimming in front of my eyes. THEN - HE came along. Thingy. Whatsisface. And I hadn't seen him since that night, and while there was a part of me that was kind of hoping to never have to talk to him ever again, there was also another part that was hoping that when we did get round to talking, there would be some kind of...difference. Like, some kind of acknowledgement, at least, of what had happened. But no. It was the biggest nothing of a conversation. It was all him saying, "What have you got?"
And me saying, "Latin."
And him saying, "Oh right. You OK?"
And me saying, "No actually, I'm a bit ill." And waving my paracetamol in an overly-cheery sort of way (why do I do that? why do I always act happier than I am?) and saying, "Immune system's decided to give up on me."
And him nodding. And then Boris came along and wanted to talk to me about the barbecue he's having at his house on Sunday, and so that was it. And I realised that yes, that really was it, we were just going to carry on as normal. Like, good-friends-who-just-quietly-resent-each-other. Yep, sounds like a plan.
Boris left, and I got very sad and sickly, and then Chadders (Latin teacher 2) appeared, and I must have looked like death in human form because he was very kind and reassuring and just generally wonderful. I felt better then, and he went off down the corridor on a cloud of godlike superior Latin knowledge.
And the description of the build-up to the exam has been longer than I was planning it to be. We went in. I forgot how to spell my surname for five seconds; that was a scary moment. Then we began (there were SO many people in the room - all the history year 11s, plus me and Hannah doing Latin, plus economics, plus drama, plus Alec who does Japanese - it was really claustrophobic) and my ill feeling cleared and just over three hours later it was all over. I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't say that, you know, it went well or anything, but...Well, the commentary paper was on two pretty easy-peasy bits (in the pro Milone, the bit where Cicero pretends Milo is waving his bloody sword and going, "Through me alone may justice, equality, laws, liberty, modesty, chastity remain IN THIS CITY!" Love that bit. And the Ovid was 1.7, the one where he hits her and pretends to grovel - SO much to say about that, and SO glad it wasn't smelly old 1.3). And then the essay paper...well, this year is the first year to do Ovid, so the Ovid question that came up was just the most simple, the most obvious, the most BEAUTIFUL question. There was actually so much to say that my essay ended up being a bit kitchen-sink-esque, but hopefully not in a rambly way. By the time the translation paper got handed out I was tired as hell, and the story was a bit doom-and-gloom, as usual (something adapted from Tacitus - the death of Otho, a real tearjerker), so at first I was a bit sluggish and confused, and then I got a grip and I think that was fine too.
And then. That. Was. It.
My other exams have generally been...OK. English seems like another age ago now, but I remember generally feeling a bit smug and pleased with myself afterwards (which didn't last long because I then went and made a tit of myself in the evening...) History was the worst, what with the suffrage paper asking crap questions about trade unions and then my art-and-culture essay on Russia being full of Mayakovsky and without any mention of Lenin - at all. I mean, Mayakovsky is slightly more relevant to art than Lenin, but still, Lenin is Lenin. Russian was Russian. I did it, but there were probably mistakes I didn't see.
But now I'm free, free, free, free. I can probably write poems again! (I'm sure the recent block has been exam-related.) And also, the latest issue of The Rialto came in the post today and it's full of good stuff. There's an essay on Auden, and some stuff about Fleur Adcock, and generally loads of good poems including this one by Julia Casterton, who actually died in March and so is given a special mention in the issue.
CONSIDER THE LILIES by Julia Casterton
I've been considering these lilies since they came out,
probably planted by my neighbour when she got bored with them in the pot,
staked up by John in two clumps beneath the pollarded trees.
As is usual with lilies, they're acting as if they own the place.
I water them every night my cooled-off bathwater.
Unlike the roses, they show absolutely no gratitude.
The hibiscus looks desperate for water, and drinks greedily,
but these lilies can take it or leave it alone. I am the supplicant,
pardon me for breathing. They breathe their cool whiteness over the whole garden,
calming it all down, easing the panic of the drought.
I go out to look at them shining in the night, taking it easy.
They boss the place. They never heard of Solomon or his glory.
There was the hospital appointment. I now have orthotics, which are, for a start, not as big as I thought they would be (I was dreading some kind of massive brick-like monstrosities that would only fit in the biggest of trainers or something like that, but they're pretty small really) - they're also quite comfy, like having cushions in your shoes. And I am now just a teensy bit taller because of them. So.
Then there was the bus ride home again, and I started making up a poem in my head - I swear, about 75% of my ideas for poems come to me on the bus, which is why no matter how much they suck, no matter how many times I end up on some crowded bus listening to a crazy woman singing Amazing Grace (this has happened) I will never stop taking the bus.
At home I started feeling ill. Steamed my face. Three times. Drank tea. Went on the internet. Tried not to think about a) Ovid, b) Cicero, c) any kind of Latin vocab/grammar. Didn't work. Read the OCR Mark Scheme for Latin AS-level. Suddenly wanted to cry.
And then all of a sudden it was 1:30pm and I was standing in the lobby, having one of those completely mindless small-talk conversations with Amy who was about to do her economics exam, and I was clutching some paracetamol thinking, "Should I take them? Should I? Am I being silly? Should I?" And I went up to Mr P who was the invigilator and said in a very tiny voice, "I don't feel very well" but he was running around with some woman in a red skirt so I don't think he quite heard me.
Then there was Hannah, who came up to me, wailed, "I don't know ANY CICERO AT ALL! I'm going to FAIL!" and ran off. I stood there, alone, and there were about 10000 year 11s who were about to do their history GCSE, and I thought, "Oh, those were the days - history GCSE, which I thought I'd failed and then it turned out I'd got an A* - God GCSEs were really not that bad...mind you if I told them that they'd probably crucify me...OHMYGOD I want to be sick."
Mr L (Latin teacher 1) came by and was all like, "Alright?" but I didn't really answer him because his face was sort of swimming in front of my eyes. THEN - HE came along. Thingy. Whatsisface. And I hadn't seen him since that night, and while there was a part of me that was kind of hoping to never have to talk to him ever again, there was also another part that was hoping that when we did get round to talking, there would be some kind of...difference. Like, some kind of acknowledgement, at least, of what had happened. But no. It was the biggest nothing of a conversation. It was all him saying, "What have you got?"
And me saying, "Latin."
And him saying, "Oh right. You OK?"
And me saying, "No actually, I'm a bit ill." And waving my paracetamol in an overly-cheery sort of way (why do I do that? why do I always act happier than I am?) and saying, "Immune system's decided to give up on me."
And him nodding. And then Boris came along and wanted to talk to me about the barbecue he's having at his house on Sunday, and so that was it. And I realised that yes, that really was it, we were just going to carry on as normal. Like, good-friends-who-just-quietly-resent-each-other. Yep, sounds like a plan.
Boris left, and I got very sad and sickly, and then Chadders (Latin teacher 2) appeared, and I must have looked like death in human form because he was very kind and reassuring and just generally wonderful. I felt better then, and he went off down the corridor on a cloud of godlike superior Latin knowledge.
And the description of the build-up to the exam has been longer than I was planning it to be. We went in. I forgot how to spell my surname for five seconds; that was a scary moment. Then we began (there were SO many people in the room - all the history year 11s, plus me and Hannah doing Latin, plus economics, plus drama, plus Alec who does Japanese - it was really claustrophobic) and my ill feeling cleared and just over three hours later it was all over. I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't say that, you know, it went well or anything, but...Well, the commentary paper was on two pretty easy-peasy bits (in the pro Milone, the bit where Cicero pretends Milo is waving his bloody sword and going, "Through me alone may justice, equality, laws, liberty, modesty, chastity remain IN THIS CITY!" Love that bit. And the Ovid was 1.7, the one where he hits her and pretends to grovel - SO much to say about that, and SO glad it wasn't smelly old 1.3). And then the essay paper...well, this year is the first year to do Ovid, so the Ovid question that came up was just the most simple, the most obvious, the most BEAUTIFUL question. There was actually so much to say that my essay ended up being a bit kitchen-sink-esque, but hopefully not in a rambly way. By the time the translation paper got handed out I was tired as hell, and the story was a bit doom-and-gloom, as usual (something adapted from Tacitus - the death of Otho, a real tearjerker), so at first I was a bit sluggish and confused, and then I got a grip and I think that was fine too.
And then. That. Was. It.
My other exams have generally been...OK. English seems like another age ago now, but I remember generally feeling a bit smug and pleased with myself afterwards (which didn't last long because I then went and made a tit of myself in the evening...) History was the worst, what with the suffrage paper asking crap questions about trade unions and then my art-and-culture essay on Russia being full of Mayakovsky and without any mention of Lenin - at all. I mean, Mayakovsky is slightly more relevant to art than Lenin, but still, Lenin is Lenin. Russian was Russian. I did it, but there were probably mistakes I didn't see.
But now I'm free, free, free, free. I can probably write poems again! (I'm sure the recent block has been exam-related.) And also, the latest issue of The Rialto came in the post today and it's full of good stuff. There's an essay on Auden, and some stuff about Fleur Adcock, and generally loads of good poems including this one by Julia Casterton, who actually died in March and so is given a special mention in the issue.
CONSIDER THE LILIES by Julia Casterton
I've been considering these lilies since they came out,
probably planted by my neighbour when she got bored with them in the pot,
staked up by John in two clumps beneath the pollarded trees.
As is usual with lilies, they're acting as if they own the place.
I water them every night my cooled-off bathwater.
Unlike the roses, they show absolutely no gratitude.
The hibiscus looks desperate for water, and drinks greedily,
but these lilies can take it or leave it alone. I am the supplicant,
pardon me for breathing. They breathe their cool whiteness over the whole garden,
calming it all down, easing the panic of the drought.
I go out to look at them shining in the night, taking it easy.
They boss the place. They never heard of Solomon or his glory.
Saturday, 2 June 2007
Mood swings and roundabouts
Last night I woke up from a dream about (I shit you not) women's suffrage (unfortunately I can't remember what happened exactly, I just know Sylvia Pankhurst was involved...BIZARRE), and then proceeded to stare up at the ceiling for half an hour, sweating and having a mild panic attack about everything. I actually wondered if I was getting ill, which only made me panic even more, so that by about 3:30am I was in a complete tizz and my teeth were actually chattering. Then I tiptoed downstairs and got a glass of water, standing there in the kitchen in the dark looking up at the sky outside, and calmed down and felt much better.
Took some Bach Rescue Remedy before going back to bed, and for some reason wondered if anyone had ever written a poem that mentioned it. I don't know if there's any kind of poetry website that has a database of poems sorted by topic, so you could just type in something like "snow" or "toast" or, well, "Bach Rescue Remedy" and it would give you all the poems that EVER mentioned that thing. There probably isn't, but there should be. Anyway, it made me want to write a poem about it (especially because the ingredients sound kind of - well - "5 x dilution of flower extracts of Rock Rose, Impatiens, Clematis, Star of Bethlehem, Cherry Plum in a grape alcohol solution" - there's got to be a poem in that, surely?). But I'm completely dry on the poem front at the moment, on account of being driven insane by exams and internal emotional dramas. That poem I mentioned ages ago that was half-finished? Still half-finished. And you know when you leave a poem half-finished for too long, you sort of stop caring about it, and it takes effort to get back to it and sometimes you just have to leave it? Well, yeah.
Friday is the end of everything. Friday is going to be an epic day, really. I have to wake up at the crack of dawn and get the bus to the hospital out of town, because - FANFARE - I'm seeing the orthopedist again and this time he's (probably) going to give me the special shoe sole thingies that will fix my right foot! This is going to be AMAZING. My foot hasn't been normal since I injured it in September, and now I'll be able to, like, wear whatever shoes I want without worrying about whether I'll want to rip off my foot with a chainsaw by the end of the day.
And then after that I have to leg it home, eat lunch and leg it to school and do the last exam - Latin - of all the exams that could have come last, it had to be Latin, the most important one - and then that's it.
It'll be quite symbolic. Exams will be over, foot trouble will be over. THEN I can start thinking about Emotional Shit (i.e. the aftermath of last week, see previous entry) which has been put on the backburner for now, which I am not currently thinking about. (OK, I'm thinking about it now. Damn. Anyway.)
In the meantime - actually revised a bit today, sprawled on the sofa surrounded by Cicero notes (apparently I looked so miserable that Mum had to ask, "What's wrong?" to which I said, "Life is shit, since you ask", and she uttered the most irritating phrase on the face of the earth, EVER: "Oh, pull yourself together"). Wrote ten thousand essay plans. Now I should probably go and read some Russian book. Yesterday Dad gave me a book of short stories by some Russian writer and said they were really good and I should definitely try them, they'd be great for revision etc. So I started reading them and they were OK, quite good in a horrendously boring sort of way - the kind of stories where nothing REALLY happens, people just meet on trains and in supermarkets and have some really meaningful conversation like:
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing really. Just...surviving."
"Yes."
"The sun is really big, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Yes."
And then they stare into space for a while and you're supposed to get some sort of idea of "things left unsaid". Pretentious arsewipe basically. Only then I noticed that loads of words were spelt wrong, and that there were all these grammar rules I thought I understood which were now looking really confusing and muddled on the page. And I asked Dad about it and he was like, "Oh yeah, he writes like that, it's full of slang and bad Russian". How exactly is that good for revision then? I mean, you wouldn't recommend Trainspotting to someone learning English, would you?
So now I'm reading some of Anna Akhmatova's prose. She wrote a little bit about her and Mandelstam and some other writers, and about St. Petersburg before the Revolution, which is quite interesting (and the stuff about Mandelstam is sad, really, considering how it all ended). Also started reading Rubicon by Tom Holland because Alistair who wants to do ancient history at uni has been raving on about it all year. It's OK - a bit breathless at times, which I suppose is what all the reviewers on the jacket meant by "exciting", only sometimes I wish he'd slow down a bit. Still, if it's a lively narrative zip through the rise and fall of the Roman Republic you're after, then you probably can't beat it. And I only started reading it because I felt like I didn't know enough about that period but actually I've realised I knew more than I thought I did (funnily enough, from endless Latin unseens...).
So, now comes the painful moment of ripping-myself-away-from-the-damn-computer...
Took some Bach Rescue Remedy before going back to bed, and for some reason wondered if anyone had ever written a poem that mentioned it. I don't know if there's any kind of poetry website that has a database of poems sorted by topic, so you could just type in something like "snow" or "toast" or, well, "Bach Rescue Remedy" and it would give you all the poems that EVER mentioned that thing. There probably isn't, but there should be. Anyway, it made me want to write a poem about it (especially because the ingredients sound kind of - well - "5 x dilution of flower extracts of Rock Rose, Impatiens, Clematis, Star of Bethlehem, Cherry Plum in a grape alcohol solution" - there's got to be a poem in that, surely?). But I'm completely dry on the poem front at the moment, on account of being driven insane by exams and internal emotional dramas. That poem I mentioned ages ago that was half-finished? Still half-finished. And you know when you leave a poem half-finished for too long, you sort of stop caring about it, and it takes effort to get back to it and sometimes you just have to leave it? Well, yeah.
Friday is the end of everything. Friday is going to be an epic day, really. I have to wake up at the crack of dawn and get the bus to the hospital out of town, because - FANFARE - I'm seeing the orthopedist again and this time he's (probably) going to give me the special shoe sole thingies that will fix my right foot! This is going to be AMAZING. My foot hasn't been normal since I injured it in September, and now I'll be able to, like, wear whatever shoes I want without worrying about whether I'll want to rip off my foot with a chainsaw by the end of the day.
And then after that I have to leg it home, eat lunch and leg it to school and do the last exam - Latin - of all the exams that could have come last, it had to be Latin, the most important one - and then that's it.
It'll be quite symbolic. Exams will be over, foot trouble will be over. THEN I can start thinking about Emotional Shit (i.e. the aftermath of last week, see previous entry) which has been put on the backburner for now, which I am not currently thinking about. (OK, I'm thinking about it now. Damn. Anyway.)
In the meantime - actually revised a bit today, sprawled on the sofa surrounded by Cicero notes (apparently I looked so miserable that Mum had to ask, "What's wrong?" to which I said, "Life is shit, since you ask", and she uttered the most irritating phrase on the face of the earth, EVER: "Oh, pull yourself together"). Wrote ten thousand essay plans. Now I should probably go and read some Russian book. Yesterday Dad gave me a book of short stories by some Russian writer and said they were really good and I should definitely try them, they'd be great for revision etc. So I started reading them and they were OK, quite good in a horrendously boring sort of way - the kind of stories where nothing REALLY happens, people just meet on trains and in supermarkets and have some really meaningful conversation like:
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing really. Just...surviving."
"Yes."
"The sun is really big, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Yes."
And then they stare into space for a while and you're supposed to get some sort of idea of "things left unsaid". Pretentious arsewipe basically. Only then I noticed that loads of words were spelt wrong, and that there were all these grammar rules I thought I understood which were now looking really confusing and muddled on the page. And I asked Dad about it and he was like, "Oh yeah, he writes like that, it's full of slang and bad Russian". How exactly is that good for revision then? I mean, you wouldn't recommend Trainspotting to someone learning English, would you?
So now I'm reading some of Anna Akhmatova's prose. She wrote a little bit about her and Mandelstam and some other writers, and about St. Petersburg before the Revolution, which is quite interesting (and the stuff about Mandelstam is sad, really, considering how it all ended). Also started reading Rubicon by Tom Holland because Alistair who wants to do ancient history at uni has been raving on about it all year. It's OK - a bit breathless at times, which I suppose is what all the reviewers on the jacket meant by "exciting", only sometimes I wish he'd slow down a bit. Still, if it's a lively narrative zip through the rise and fall of the Roman Republic you're after, then you probably can't beat it. And I only started reading it because I felt like I didn't know enough about that period but actually I've realised I knew more than I thought I did (funnily enough, from endless Latin unseens...).
So, now comes the painful moment of ripping-myself-away-from-the-damn-computer...
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