Odes to ashberry vodka

Christmas in Amersham = Christmas on the outskirts of Moscow in all but location. A lot of our Russian friends (including us) have this constant battle of wanting to stick as rigidly to the customs and traditions they knew back in Russia while sliding slowly, inevitably into Britishness. (Not that 'sliding' implies it's like a downward spiral or anything.) So there are these phases each family is going through, ranging from the "We've just moved here, WTF is shepherd's pie?" phase of headscarves, sticking carpets to walls and coming to dinner parties armed with salads and jars of gherkins, right through to the "Our kids don't speak Russian and we shall lament this fact once a year by gathering together to drink vodka and sing weepy songs about the-good-old-days-of-Novgorod" phase. (My family is at the latter end of the spectrum: Mum has recently been saying, to the horror of my dad, that we should just stop celebrating Russian Christmas on the 7th January altogether because there's no point and we don't go to church anyway.)

It also means that Christmas dinner is usually an indecisive mix of British and Russian - a huge table of twenty million zakuski and rivers of vodka with a turkey tacked onto the end. Yesterday was alright - uneventful, and bearable. I discovered the glorious delights of ashberry vodka, a sweet-ish vodka made with ashberries which sadly can't be found anywhere in the UK. It is good. It is lethally good. I could actually write odes to it, but I'll spare you.

Today I went for a long long walk to try and combat the feeling that my innards were lined with lard. Was deep in thought (one of those trances where you barely realise where you're going and it's only when you come out that you see what the time is and where you are and start getting paranoid that you might have been talking aloud to yourself all this time). Ended up getting lost in the shitty backwaters of town, surrounded by sleepy bungalows and wondering if I'd walked into hell by accident.

I can't seem to end this rather useless post. END.

You mean you forgot cranberries too?

Nice easy Saturday before the Onslaught-Of-Insane-Christmas-Joy that will inevitably start tomorrow. Have been given a half day at work because it's unlikely many people are going to be coming in to paint at the cafe, on account of being too busy manically shopping etc., so I'll go in about half an hour. Dad and Misha are at Covent Garden looking at the amazing food market (I was there on Wednesday before New Blood, circling all the stalls hoping for free samples, but sadly there was just a man offering free foie gras and nothing else. When I tell people about this they're all, "WHY didn't you take any foie gras???")

Christmas should be good: we're going to see family friends in Chesham, or Amersham, or one of those places...It will hopefully be better than last Christmas anyway, where I spent the last half of the evening drunk and crying (and thinking that at sixteen I was slightly too young to be having a drunk-and-crying Christmas, which just made me feel worse. Ugh, it was a Stupid Moment, let's move on.)

Also: it was really nice to see everyone at New Blood on Wednesday, and to sit talking in that freezing abandoned fairground afterwards.

Also also: Look - it's me!

Mon papa ne veut pas que je danse la polka

Read the translation of Margarita (the fact that it's printed in the Moscow Medical Journal next to a crossword amuses me no end). It's by my grandad actually, who's kind of an occasional poet - he's changed a lot of the lines, so the sense of the poem stays the same but there are phrases I didn't write/didn't mean etc. I do like it, but if I was translating it (not that I'd be capable of doing so, my Russian's not that good) it wouldn't be the same. Which I suppose is the point. The translator brings new veg to the stir-fry.

Sorry. There was talk of stir-fry earlier, I have it on the brain.

Misha was ill today (or rather: Misha had a fever for about five minutes last night prompting Mum to squeal "Ohmydayzzzz* he's ill someone must stay at home and look after him! ANNIE!" only the fever then disappeared and he's been absolutely fine all day. Bitter, me?). So all day I've been making paper chains, playing table hockey - which I SUCK at - I mean, I don't even have to let him win, he is genuinely better than me - and just spending time with my little brother, having heart-to-heart chats etc. Well, sort of.

Me: "Misha, do you know what gifts the three wise men brought?"
Misha: "Gold, frankenstein and myrrh."

Also...

Me: "Do you ever do poetry at school?"
Misha: "No. We never do poems, we always do puzzles of poems. We have to fill in the gaps and stuff."
Me: "Is that fun?"
Misha: "No, it's really boring." Pause. "I want to write a poem."
Me: (surprised and strangely excited) "Really??"
Misha: "Yeah. But we never ever do that."
Me: "You could ask your teacher, maybe she'll let you."
Misha: "No, she says we did poems in year 1 so we don't do them in year 2 because they're not in year 2 exams."

Year 2 exams. Let's not even go there on how insane that whole concept is. But the conversation reminded me of this from a few weeks back. Not sure where I stand on this - yeah, GCSE English was like drowning in a vat of bad metaphors while Gillian Clarke cackled manically in the background and I don't remember doing any poetry at all in primary school, apart from learning some poem about ducks...but on the other hand, what are you gonna do? English Lit. at GCSE and below is always going to be formulaic if they insist on examining it at the end of the year. And if it's formulaic then it's boring, and if it's boring then about 90% of the class just isn't going to care. If people want kids to really appreciate poetry I think it's got to be done outside the classroom.

All of which now makes me desperate to write poems with Misha. Seriously, I really want to try it, although I'm not sure how to go about it exactly bearing in mind he's six and has the attention span of, well, a 21st century six-year-old. If anyone has any ideas, it'd be much appreciated. I have to babysit again on Friday and need something else to entertain him with other than relentless table hockey.

In other news, I just spontaneously fell off my chair. Oh, gravity.

*OK, Mum didn't actually say "Ohmydayzzzz", but it would have been SO WONDERFUL if she had.

All I want for Christmas is a melodica

What better way to celebrate the start of real, hardcore winter (for the UK anyway, back in my hometown this would be nothing) than for the central heating to break? So now I'm wearing a stupid amount of clothes and drinking two cups of tea simultaneously.

Bah Humbug! yesterday (at the really lovely Betsey Trotwood pub on Farringdon Road) was a good way to start the holiday, even though I left it with kind of mixed feelings. The atmosphere was great, all mince pies and fairy lights and stuff, and we recognised a few people (and Roddy Lumsden actually came up to me and apologised for rejecting me for Magma, which was totally unexpected but nice. I said he really didn't need to apologise). There were some people performing there who were fantastic: it would be stupid to name everyone I liked (mainly cos I, er, can't remember all their names), but you must check out Nick Mulvey, who performed in the freezing cold basement and was absolutely amazing. Parts of the day were so good they made me want to pick up a pen and write a poem ASAP, about anything. During the Generation Txt poets, for example, I was sitting there listening and outside the window there were all these 63 buses going to Honor Oak and I kept thinking, "God, I really need to write a poem about the 63 to Honor Oak." Or anything else, really - candles, chandeliers, beer stains. Had an idea for a poem at one point and wrote "C, C, C" on my hand, but when I came home I couldn't remember what the hell "C, C, C" was supposed to mean.

Also, having seen the guy playing the melodica in Excentral Tempest I've decided I desperately need to find one and learn to play it. Seriously, if you have a spare melodica...

However, me and Adham found that getting through an all-day poetry event without drinking (we were possibly the only people there fuelled by tea and mince pies alone) meant serious poetry fatigue by about 8pm. This may have also had something to do with the fact that...not everyone was that good. Again, not naming names. (Not that they're going to read this, I know, but still.) So the combination of that with sheer exhaustion meant that I came away from it not exactly full of the joys of Christmas & poetry as I was at first, but kind of deflated and bleary-eyed. But in more of a good way than a bad way.

Anyway, so that started the holiday well. School finished on Friday in its usual last-day tide of carols, secret Santas and random distribution of Capri-Suns. Also, Immy has an offer from Christ Church in Oxford, for biology, which is FANTASTIC and made me jump around the house in happiness. Regarding Cambridge, I actually don't care very much anymore if I get an offer or not, but this waiting around is so irritating. I just need to KNOW, and whatever.

On a random note - one of my poems, Margarita, just got translated into Russian and published in the Moscow Medical Journal. Of all places. That poem, and also Teaspoons and The Passenger (yeuch, can't stand the latter anymore) are going into some pamphlet anthology which is being published in Russia. Bizarre is not the word. I've had nothing to do with this and haven't actually read the translations yet. But hey, as Christmas presents go, that ain't bad.

And so the epic term trundles to an end.

Feeling of things being wrapped up, teachers not being bothered, a sense of "putting the toys back in the toy cupboard" as Dom once called it. In the past two days all I've done is dossed around in the library, played Hamlet Snakes & Ladders ("Oh no! You have killed Polonius. Move back two places!") and drawn elaborate patterns all over my Aeneid notes so they're practically illegible. Oh, and I wrote half an essay on Pushkin's Queen Of Spades for Russian. Queen Of Spades: so, so boring.

BRETT came into our last history lesson today saying "Now I don't care if it's the last week of term, we are going to learn about the Reich Chancellery!" and ended up telling a long story about how he got set on fire at a barbecue when he was 18. Glavshit has reverted back into Nice-Glavshit Mode and our lessons now consist of making notes on our individual assignments while listening to his collection of opera music.

Spent lunchtime (after eating our Last Ever School Christmas Dinner - oh, how I'll miss that limp turkey ham!) watching Hannah wrap her own Christmas present from Raaheel, because Raaheel apparently can't wrap presents to save his life. I pointed out that this blatant waste of wrapping paper was not environmentally friendly and was accused of being a cleverclogs.

What else, what else? My entire family is ill, including Misha who is currently lying on the bed behind me moaning pathetically and reading George's Marvellous Medicine. This means tomorrow's planned trip to see sumo wrestling on ice (I wish I was making this up) has been cancelled. Oh, the Oxfam Poetry thing last Thursday was wicked by the way. Luke Kennard, Barbara Marsh, David Morley, other amazing people. And Todd Swift plugged Pomegranate for us, which was nice. Kind of sad that that's the first one I've been to and they're not doing them anymore.

I can't WAIT for the holidays.

new glass to be stared through

Yesterday was...well, I've been asked "How'd it go?" about a million times today and I still don't have an adequate response. I genuinely have no idea what happened exactly - it feels like some surreal dream, something someone else did and I just saw the film. In years to come I'll remember it as a blur of climbing ridiculous spiral staircases, sitting on massive sofas, eating chocolate biscuits, being told "WE ARE NOT GOING TO MAKE YOU EAT A TENNIS BALL", getting trapped at the market by the rain, standing by the river and briefly wanting to cry, then sitting in that FREEZING room and talking and talking and talking, and burning my tongue on a mushroom, and then at the end standing at the entrance to Pembroke for ages trying really hard to resign myself to the fact that I'd probably never see it again.

I don't know. After this entry I'm just going to stop talking/writing/thinking about it. Feel like the past month or so has been this colossal tide of Oxbridge Fever, and I accidentally got swept along in it even though I never intended to, and now I've been spat out the other end I can see how stupid it all is, but I still feel kind of...deflated.

If there was ever a time to write "anyway" in big capital letters, this is it.

ANYWAY.

Now that the recent insanity has subsided I actually have free time - I mean actual genuine free time, not time spent procrastinating while twenty thousand unfinished thingamajigs await. Yesterday I bought Ciaran Carson's First Language for £3; not really sure what to make of it yet. I think I like the idea of his poems a lot more than I like the poems themselves - a problem I have with a few other poets actually (Ted Hughes, Mayakovsky sometimes). The entry title is a line from his (otherwise patchy) 4 Sonnets, which I read on the bus coming home, staring out the window and feeling slightly morose while a drunk guy nearby yelled "TOMMY TOMMY LISTEN TO ME" down his phone. It felt apt.

Also reading my first novel in about six months - Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (should there be two l's in that or one? even the edition I've got can't seem to decide), which has been on the To Read list for a while. So far, awesome. I don't know why I feel the need to tell you what I'm reading - maybe because it feels sort of new and fresh and exciting to get new books, break their spines, read the first pages for the first time, and so on. Simple pleasures.

P.S. Current favourite silly Latin word - "ubiubi". It means wherever. I haven't been so delighted since the discovery of "plumbum" (meaning lead), and keep getting urges to incorporate it into 'Ruby' by the Kaiser Chiefs - as in: "ubiubi ubiubi! aaaah aaaah aahaaaaaah..." No one finds this entertaining except me.

This-time-tomorrow syndrome

Past two days have been full of rain and jam sandwiches (but not rain-and-jam sandwiches). Should be doing something, and I'm pretty sure it's not reading my brother's Horrible Histories books. But the Hamlet essay is boring (Laertes, Horatio, Fortinbras. Boring) and anything to do with tomorrow makes me nauseous. If I read sodding Antigone one more time I'll actually throw up. Searched for pictures of my interviewers on the Cambridge website just to see what they look like - kind of cuddly-looking, mainly, with beards and glasses and things, and there's a woman with a nice scarf who once played Clytemnestra in an adaptation of Sophocles' Elektra. So it's just a nice chat with Clytemnestra then.

Not such a comforting thought, really.

The whole family has decided to come with me, "because we've never been there and we want to see what it's like". I have no real problem with this, but plan to abandon them at the earliest possible moment. And Alex and Oliver have their interviews tomorrow too, at Girton and Selwyn respectively, but I don't think I'll see them (certainly not Alex, since I keep hearing Girton is 10000 miles away) and don't want to anyway. Basically I think seeing or speaking to or being with anyone I know would just make me more nervous. I don't actually want to speak to anyone right now either. Would much prefer to just shut down from now until about 6pm tomorrow.