Lysias, ink, grapes

I am in Cambridge.
It’s a weird feeling.
Here's what's weird:
a) There’s hardly anyone around except Intensive Greek students, mathematicians, a few theologians (apparently – I haven’t seen any) and older people. And choral scholars. There aren’t even that many tourists.
b) The tourists that are here mostly stand outside the Super-Duper-Fantastic Corpus Christi Stephen Hawking clock, with its flashing lights and random perching insect. They literally just stand there with their mouths open.
c) I know loads of people from Bryanston and yet I don’t know anyone.
d) There’s no kettle. Therefore no tea, for now. This is distressing.
e) We’re going to have this week of work and then it’s Fresher’s Week. And it feels like no one quite knows what to do with themselves, whether we should be working or being all WOOHOO NOW WE ARE FRESHERS, or both. Or indeed, both…
f) My Greek is apparently now AS-level standard.
g) The College cat can walk on the grass.

And the weirdest thing of all is that I live here now. Like, I’m not a tourist.
I have a card and everything.
Is that not INSANE?

So long to the RAVE CAVE

"sceptrum, i, neut. Sceptre; phallus; kingship."

A small example of why I've missed Latin during the past fortnight of GREEKORAMA. The day after I make my offer for Cambridge (yeah, see how I dropped that in) I'm already translating Aeneid 9 like a good little loser. What can I say, I'm so excited.

Bryanston never had a chance. If I'm completely honest, the way I'd been imagining G(r)eek camp - as a kind of two-week long Arvon-for-classicists staying in the kind of school that apparently needs its own Greek theatre - meant that it could only ever have been an anticlimax. I mean, I had a really good time: I learnt shitloads of Greek, obviously; I swam in the pool; I drank gallons of coffee; I sang in the choir; I went on biscuit rampages; I drank in the bar, I attempted to dance on one leg in the "rave cave" (a joke of a room where they have strobe lights and one CD that they play every single night) and when I had too much work in the evenings I joined the library crew which was conveniently situated right above the rave cave. I went to all the lectures, which were mostly fantastic: they included Edith "I'm mad, me!!" Hall being her feminist self, and David Raeburn doing a reading from Homer, Euripides and Callimachus which was one of the most amazing things I have EVER seen in my life. I also sat by the pond, pratted around in the Greek theatre, played cards, and danced to the Macarena right through the building. I did not swim in the fountain, have sex in the bushes, pass out in a corridor or get hospitalised or expelled. (Some people did.) And I made lots of nice friends without actually bonding with anyone. One forlorn Plato-sodden night I texted this to Immy and she texted back saying, "Dude, you're not looking for a life partner" and she had a point.

So it wasn't the TWO-WEEK LONG BACCHANALIA a few people had hinted it would be, but I got a lot out of it and I MAY come back next year. If someone else pays...

(On the way home, by the way, our coach crashed into a car in a village called Nether Wallop. Because no one was injured this is allowed to be hilarious.)

This coming month, I have to wade through lots of Virgil and Cicero. I think Latin will always remain my true love.

He said "hand that pen over to ME, poetaster!"

My most productive week in AGES. Two sestinas and a poem about Massachusetts! And I'm not even doing July NaPoWriMo. Sadly both sestinas are silly and foaming at the mouth with emo (mainly because I was trying to find out whether sestinas were better when written in a big fast almost-stream-of-consciousness whirlwind rather than labouring over every end-word - still not sure really, and wondering if they aren't just simply annoying). Then on Thursday I went to the first of Roddy Lumsden's "50 States" readings at the Scooterworks Cafe - 50 poets, 50 states of America, huzzah, 50 poems. It was really good. I took Immy, and we sat there and sipped our neverending caffeine drinks, played Connect 4 and got the giggles over Idaho like the cool people we are. THEN Roddy comes up to me, says that the person doing Massachusetts tomorrow night has pulled out and would I like to do it instead?

And I thought: WARGH MASSACHUSETTS WHAT.
And I said: "Yeah, sure!"

And went home to eat Wikipedia. In the end the poem was hardly about Massachusetts at all - all vaguenesses and INSERT-CRAP-EMILY-DICKINSON-REFERENCE-HEREisms - but it did win me a bottle of bourbon. (Roddy: "Are you eighteen now or will I get arrested if I give this to you?") Earlier that night I became possibly the first person ever to get turned away at the bar for trying to order a glass of milk.

So, writing poems, learning Greek, hanging around in this glorious town that I live in. I've been a bit stressed lately for no reason - well, for REASONS, but not actual important ones - and it's made me kind of ill (stomach currently not digesting anything that isn't porridge. Or occasionally Cheerios). So I'm thinking of turning over a new leaf. The "Life Is Insane And You Can't Control It No Matter How Hard You Try So Stop Being Such A Bloody Capricorn And Be Happy" leaf. Let's hope it works.

Also, this. It's true.

Today I went to the Poetry Library and read Rosemary Tonks books out of the rare and out-of-print section. I am, sometimes, very easily pleased.

Are we going to prom or to hell?

Gaaaaah. Just got back from a party in Maidstone. Have spent all morning sitting on the floors of various trains. In about eight hours I have to be at school wearing a ridiculous dress for the sixth form ball, which...yeah. God. Sentences. Goawaysentences.

I'm not hungover at all, just exhausted. Evening basically consisted of firstly drinking too much wine too fast forgetting I have a stomach bug, suddenly remembering I have a stomach bug, lying down behind a sofa for ages, and then spending the rest of the night talking to Charly/Antho/a few other people, and helping to look after drunks. It was quite fun actually - I mean, not looking after drunks, but just seeing people again. Also spent a bit of time wandering around having stupid earnest conversations with people ("Yeah, I mean - yeah! YEAH, totally!") and quoting things at a guy dressed as Hamlet. He looked like he was going to throw up at one point so I said, in a kind of I'm-not-really-taking-the-piss-out-of-you-but-I-am way, "O, what a rogue and peasant slave are you" to which he yelled in my face "FUCK YEAH. HONEYING AND MAKING LOVE OVER THE NASTY STY!" and ran out of the room. So yeah, that was...I'm not really sure why I just remembered that actually.

Am tired, tired tired. Very pale too. I will look like a corpse at the ball. Oh God. I want to go, but not now, not today. Just got that line from Heathers in my head: "Are we going to pruhhhhm or to hell?" Really want my pyjamas. My lovely pyjamas. Only I know if I get changed into them now I will never be able to get changed out of them. It's really dark and it's blatantly going to rain and oh heck, I have to get to school myself which means walking through town in a dress in the rain, OH WORLD GO AWAY.

At least, because I have no desire to drink tonight, at all, I won't repeat the ridiculous drunken fiasco of last year's ball. (Gah.) And it's in a house/manor thing this year, not on a big lurching boat, so...that should be interesting. I am looking forward to it. Should really stop typing. OK, I will read for a bit, then have lunch, then bath, then get ready, then stagger out of house. Yes, a plan. At the moment I'm reading One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (which has been on the To Read list for years and years) and it's quite good; I'm not hooked but I like it. It has Ken Kesey's sketches in it, which is nice. Pictures of men who look like their faces are falling apart.

My face is falling apart. What is this quintessence of dust?

Full stop.

...That's it. Hamlet copped it, the Third Reich has fallen, Manderley is burning, Turnus is in the underworld. I've finished my A-levels. I did well in about three of them. My room is full of pieces of paper. And today I am hosting a birthday party for ten ten-year-olds.

Mark Pilarski says

The smarter you play, the luckier you'll be.

Because life is indeed like poker (i.e. I don't really understand it and just throw cards down blindly, instead stacking all the chips into patterns and rolling my eyes at anyone who takes it seriously).

Verbs of fearing...

Saw the doctor yesterday (a regular feature of my life at the moment). We talked about all the knee/back/leg/foot problems of the past two years and he said that because of all this it was probably best that I avoided wearing what he called "fashion shoes" (i.e. anything that looks good) and stuck to wearing trainers whenever possible. Cue me sighing vainly.

He also looked at my feet and said, "You know, you have practically no fat on your feet."

I said, "Well, is there anything I can do to GET fat on my feet?", imagining a diet of chocolate milkshakes or something, to which he guffawed - he is the kind of man who never laughs but guffaws - and then replied, "No, not really. It's just the way you are."

So, yes. Am torn between feeling so worn out by the whole thing that I don't care anymore, and on the other hand wanting to fall to my knees (ow) and scream "WHEN, WHEN WILL THIS END?" Because none of it is exactly life-threatening and obviously I'm thankful for that, but on the other hand it's so, so annoying and makes me feel about ninety-five. (Dr E also said yesterday "It usually affects older people, you're quite unusual", which basically amounts to, "Yeah, you're a bit of a freak"). And also it's got to the point where I can no longer distinguish between health problems that are serious and ones that aren't, which AS WE ALL KNOW was not something I was good at in the first place, but all this is just making it worse.

Par exemple: elbow pain
Normal person: "Oh look, my elbow hurts. I'll take some painkillers in a sec."
Annie: "OH NOES! MY ELBOW! OH MY ELBOW! OH THIS IS CLEARLY LINKED TO ALL THE OTHER STUFF! OH ME! OH MY! WHAT HO! WHY WHY WHY" *collapses in panicked heap, etc*

And I miss running. SO much. I watched a runner go past me yesterday in the park and just thought, "You lucky BITCH."

Anyway, anyway. Bright sides: it's a beautiful day, I have strawberries, I also have ice-cream, and I think I'm ready for the Latin exam tomorrow. "Revised" just now by reading the whole of my Latin grammar book - all 149 pages - only I say "revised" because I was watching Casper at the same time so how much I actually took in is questionable. It's quite distressing, by the way, when you go back to a film you loved when you were little and realise it's actually a bit shit. (See also: Honey I Shrunk The Kids).

Thankyou, Dana

In a moment (alright, during an extended period) of madness I deleted this. Then I realised it felt a bit like - well, not like losing a limb, but definitely an eyebrow. So here it is, the return of the eyebrow. Minus about ten entries, but whatever.

Things are a bit odd.

I don't really feel like myself at the moment. Which is far less dramatic or interesting than it sounds. Head's all over the place and for the first time in my life I have insomnia, and basically never sleep except when I'm not meant to: in Kew Gardens, at Poetry Unplugged (oops), outside the Turkish shop in Penge. Dad is loading me with herbal remedies. The physio reckons improving my posture will solve all my problems. The funny thing is I don't feel stressed, and certainly not about exams. I just...

I know what the problem is and don't want to say, which makes this a bit of a non-entry.

I also want to read some chick-lit. Any recommendations?

where the fruit is

Because I want to blog but have nothing to blog about except baked potatoes, Blake parodies and a hatred of water polo, have instead a big PLUG of Pomegranate, the third issue of which came out last week. There is some awesome stuff there, I've just had a big binge on it. This poem by Sophie Mackintosh just made me look out the window and give a deep, long, slightly OTT sigh of (brief) contentment.

P.S. On Monday after the Greek lesson I was collecting the books and I asked one of the year 7s, "Was it OK?" and she said "It was fantastic." It made me glow a bit.

It's all gone a bit J. Alfred

On Tuesday I had a hospital appointment (a check-up) and slept in. Went, sat around, read Heat magazine, unexpectedly found out I had a broken toe, got stranded waiting for the bus in the wasteland that the hospital is situated in, which was depressing. Afterwards I COULD theoretically have made it into school for English, but I thought, "No. No. I'm going to go into town and buy a CD." And walking into the shop, it was deserted and some guy was picking his nose and they were playing Vienna by Ultravox and that was it really, it was All Aboard The Misery Express for the rest of the day. The rest of the week was spent Trundling Along In The Horse-And-Cart Of Melancholy until on Friday evening I suddenly wrote two psychotic poems in one hour and then sat there for ages questioning my sanity. Do you follow?

I've lost my drive, my mojo, my VA-VA-VOOM. I've forgotten how to look forward to things. Everyone else will be in the library at school planning their gap years or their summer holidays or weighing up university options - this place has NIGHTLIFE, that place has a PIRANHA TANK IN THE LIBRARY - and looking so driven and excited, and I'm just sitting there chewing my face off trying to remember why I applied to Arghbridge in the first place. On Monday I was supposed to teach Greek to year 7s with a girl in the year below called Rhiannon, and they asked us to "say something about ourselves" first. I started to say "Errr there's really nothing interesting about me" but then Chadders leapt in with "Annie has an offer to read Classics at Cambridge and Rhiannon hopes to follow!!!!" and the year 7s blinked as one, Rhiannon gave a nervous smile and I actually wanted to throw the board rubber in his face. That's not a normal reaction, is it?

Sorry, this is so uninteresting. I'm just another overexamined teenager feeling the pressurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre.

Just watched Unreported World which Mum recorded for me. It was about Russia, and its basic premise was "Putin is a BAD MAN, look at how miserable everyone is!" - the guy travelled to all the backwaters of the country, to these villages where there's no gas and the people don't have anything to do except sit in their freezing hovels and drink themselves to death. Nothing I didn't know before, sadly. What was more interesting was my Great-Aunt's reaction to it (incidentally, she's a firm supporter of Stalin and won't accept any criticism from him because "life was better then"). She was, er, slightly incensed.

Her: "It's all RUBBISH. You BRITISH just LOVE to criticise us, don't you? He just went and deliberately found the most pathetic Russians he could so you could all sit here and say, "Oh, how terrible it must be to be Russian" - what's the POINT in sending resources to those places when there's only about five people living there?"
Me: "That's still five people though."
Her: "They can move somewhere else then!"
Me: "But they don't have any money."
Her: "Yes, because they SPEND IT ALL ON DRINK INSTEAD OF DOING THEIR JOBS AND BEING GOOD CITIZENS."
Me: "Well, that's because they don't have anything else to live for."
Her: "What about GOD?!"

And then later:

"Putin is a good man. He has done so much. Russia is a great country, Anichka, don't you ever forget that."

So there you go. I can sort of see her point, but Russia is Suicide Country No.1...OK, I just checked and it's actually second to Lithuania. Still - it kind of shows SOMETHING isn't right. On a related note, I was blathering on in my Russian lesson on Thursday (using bad grammar etc. etc. etc.) and saying something about how, "Russia has experienced many problems recently" and my teacher rolled her eyes and gave this weak smile and said, "Russia is always experiencing problems. That's just the kind of country it is."

But that's not all it is.

What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

Now that I'm back from beautiful fantastic Arvon, now that everything has settled back into how it was three weeks ago, some things are starting to occur to me. Firstly, I don't actually want a degree or a career thanks, I just want to write poetry all day, every day, and live on a diet of biscuits and trifle with FYP written on it in cream. Yes.

Because I'm too much of a conformist moron, though, I will probably end up doing those exam things that people keep talking about. And it has only just occurred to me that when they come around I'm not going to have some out-of-body experience so that some other girl with my name does them instead. There will actually come a point where I sit down at a desk and open a paper of some sort and see a question and have to answer the question. USING WORDS.

And that means that now I have to work. I actually have to stay awake in Brett's lessons, I actually have to make notes on The Sick Rose and not just whisper to Immy, "How big do you reckon Blake's penis was?", I have to write essays, I have to find the brain that I left on a bus several months ago and actually remember how to use it or the next four months are going to suck immensely.

(Small voice in back of head: "or you could just...NOT.")

I don't

feel very well.

Pietas Pie

And so it's February - limbo-month, love-heart-month, cheap-googly-eyed-teddy-bear-month. Also Arvon-month, for the second and last time, although I'm trying not to get too excited about that just in case it turns out it's not real (I did exactly the same thing last year, refusing to believe it wasn't all just a crazy dream right up until the evening of the first day - and partly not until then.)

There is a man outside Charing Cross tube station who sells the Big Issue standing on one leg. London is wonderful. It's also wonderful because of this man's photos. Aren't they amazing? I'm very tired (so what else is new?) because I just got back from a day of classics lectures. Lots and lots and lots of Virgil, and plummy Oxford professors with weird pronunciation (EE-nee-as for Aeneas, EE-lee-ad for Iliad - is that normal?), and people I had actually heard of (Edith Hall! who is MAD) and a few slightly weird points (apparently Aeneas "stays pretty much the same throughout the Aeneid" - er, what?). My note-taking fluctuated a bit due to random bursts of sleepiness, so for one lecture I wrote masses of stuff, while I've also got another page that only has four points on it:

"Juno is Joan Collins on speed."
"Mad, hairy, passionate lionman"
"PIETAS. PIE."
"ancient sandwich"

and also many many stickmen.

Meanwhile I'm not exactly a model of pietas myself. I am neglecting my family, who are currently arguing over the fact that my brother hasn't done his homework, I am neglecting my duties because writing about Nazi Germany WOULD BREAK MY SOUL, I am neglecting my country because I haven't spoken a word of Russian since Thursday, and er...I can't really think how I'm neglecting "the gods", but today Mum said, "[uber-religious] Great Aunt Susan is coming to stay soon! We'll all have to give up meat for Lent!" and I swore loudly, so it's fair to say I'm going to hell.

BOOM

Recently Immy said to me, "All your poems have loads of...STUFF going on. There's always someone yelling or something flashing or some kind of movement or something. I think you should try writing a calm poem. Something where everything is just...peaceful."

So, bearing this in mind, the poem I've just written contains the words leaping, flash, grinning, blasting, liquified, scramble, fizz, split, yanked, flailing, clinging. Maybe because I'm not generally a very violent person, all my repressed violence comes spewing out when I write. In this big ugly cloud.

"Although mild-natured in person, in her poetry she was quite the little psychopath." (Minor Poets of the Noughties, Salt Publishing, 2097)

I don't know what I'm on about. I'm very tired.

Essentially, effectively, fundamentally

How not to tackle history coursework, no. 782 – fill every other sentence with unnecessary adverbs in order to flesh out points that are wrong anyway.
How not to tackle history coursework, no. 783 – spend half an hour staring at an empty yoghurt pot, then write a bad poem about Salvador Dali.
How not to tackle history coursework, no. 784 – deface your notes by colouring in Marx’s beard, giving him a Santa Claus hat and drawing a speech-bubble that says “Labour theory of value, innit”.
How not to tackle history coursework, no. 785 – say that everything is a paradox.

Vostok

Something to be grateful for: that no one (I think) saw me by the post box on Tuesday morning, in the rain, trying to jam a soggy letter to the Greek summer school at Bryanston through the hole while gale-force winds flipped my flimsy umbrella inside out and my beret flapped around my head.

In the past year I've been through about five umbrellas, destroying them on walks to school, losing them when they fall out of my bag at bus stops/post offices. The one I have now is a pathetic polka-dot Primark thing that spends all its time blowing inside out and making ominous creaking clicking noises, as if to say "Yes! Yes! Any day, any minute now I am going to break, I am definitely going to collapse like a squashed daddy-long-legs and this is going to happen at the most inconvenient moment possible and you are going to curse and curse me and call me all sorts of rude names you know can't technically be applied to me and this will be hilarious."

In short, I need a big fuck-off umbrella, black and serious and sturdy, big wooden handle, etc. (Also: the word 'umbrella'. It used to be one of my favourite words, with the umbr bit reminding me of shade and shadows and stuff - from the Latin - and then the lovely feminine ella at the end - yeah, I'm incredibly nerdy like that. Then Rihanna ruined it.)


Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

I'm in two minds about Bryanston. I'm scared it's going to be full of posh kids. And other people's opinions about it have ranged from "BRYANSTON WAS THE BEST TWO WEEKS OF MY LIFE OMG" to "Er. It was two weeks of Greek." We shall see.

Vostok was rejected from Bristol this week. She also turned eighteen and got a camera.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!"

An entire lifetime's worth of boasting that I've never had a paper cut (a pathetic thing to boast about, I'll admit) has just come to an abrupt and bloody end. I just gave myself my first ever paper cut on an M&S voucher and it is tragic.

This time yesterday I was on the M1. This time the day before that I was in Portmeirion, the freaky village in Wales where The Prisoner was set (built by some eccentric "for the preservation of beauty", apparently - and you can rent a villa there! Although why on earth would you want to?). In Snowdonia I also went for epically long walks, did some unsuccessful fishing, and also thought about how UNDERRATED Wales is. I've been defending it to the "But WHY?" brigade at school today - Wales is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I adore it.

I also went down a mine..."where a million diamonds...shiiiine!" - ugh, sorry. Miners in the 1850s had such an insanely dangerous existence - 15 minutes of their day were devoted specifically to "debating" just so the monotony of their job wouldn't kill them - it seems ridiculous and shameful that before this trip I basically associated miners with Margaret Thatcher and/or Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho. Really want to write a poem about Blaenau Ffestiniog now. There's a poet who got obsessed with miners or something and wrote trillions of poems about miners, I remember Paul Farley mentioning him - but I can't remember his name. Help?

Coincidence of the year (well, kind of) – William got pooled from Jesus to Pembroke to do Modern Languages. And Oliver got into Selwyn. Dom didn’t get in, which…well, let's not go into my current opinion of Corpus Christi.

At lunchtime Raaheel sat down at our table and said, “Guys, I wanted to ask you something. I Googled my name and it came up with this blog that was saying how Hannah was wrapping her own present from Raaheel because Raaheel can’t wrap presents, and it went on and on like that, saying all this stuff, and I got SO FREAKED OUT because it was ALL TRUE!” It was amusing.

I like to think that one of these days I’ll write a proper, informative, interesting, intelligent, epic and beautiful post that will bring the blogosphere to its knees and have people weeping at their keyboards. But frankly-Mr-Shankly I'm a bit too self-obsessed.

Aren't we all.

ETA: Just looked at some other blogs and apparently we're not.

MMVIII

NYE was a chips-and-Depeche-Mode nightmare. Well, nightmare is too strong. It was a slog though. And cranberry juice does not become any less disgusting when you dump a load of wine in it. Or champagne, or both. (Note to me, stop mentioning berries in this blog.)

Spent all of yesterday at the park going, "Misha, are you cold?" "Misha, are you cold?" "DO YOU FEEL ILL MISHA??" until he told me to shut up in that crushing way six-year-olds do, and suddenly I realised I'd turned into my great-aunt Zina.

I finally GET IT about Ted Hughes. Have been reading him constantly and oh my god, why did I not see it before? The guy can blow your head off with words.

Oh, and, provided I get 3 As this year, I may end up...

here.