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.