THROW CARROTS.

Lysias, ink, grapes

2008-10-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

"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!"

2008-07-06T23:02:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-06-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-06-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

...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

2008-06-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-06-05T01:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-27T01:27:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-02-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

feel very well.

Pietas Pie

2008-02-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-30T13:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

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!"

2008-01-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-02T07:59:00.000-08:00

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.

Odes to ashberry vodka

2007-12-26T08:52:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-12-21T14:21:00.001-08:00

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

2007-12-17T06:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-14T09:42:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-12-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T05:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Bananas

2007-11-29T05:24:00.000-08:00

At some point this morning I realised the only conversations I'd had with people so far had been about either the history coursework or the Oxbridge interviews and it was clear that that was basically how the day was going to progress, so I feigned illness ("Oh Naomi, I feel so sick, can you tell Miss J I've gone home? okthanksbye") and just came back here, where one banana sandwich and a vitamin C drink later, I feel much better. Away from the general hullabaloo it becomes clear that these things - unis, interviews, Assessment Objectives, textbooks, historians, prefect duties, emails, colleges, BMATs, ELATs, memory sticks, free periods, exam boards, Track passwords, library books, ink cartridges, homework diaries, student forums, prospectuses, predicted grades, actual grades &c. &c. &c. - are a lot less important than they're made out to be. And there are so many things that are more important.

Just reread this and remembered how lovely it is -

Coffin Path Poem

My habit of late-light walking
will mirror my life, how in its twilight
I'll rush out saying, how beautiful -
has it been like this all day?

Helen Farish

Celine Dion & The Raven

2007-11-25T07:29:00.001-08:00

In the space of two and a half hours, I have had a brief stressathon about absolutely everything in the world (see below), eaten a whole cooking apple, felt sick (naturally, cooking apples are the fruit of Satan and not for eating, that's why they're called COOKING apples), walked around the house digging my nails into my hands and singing along to Dexys Midnight Runners, tried to read Edgar Allan Poe for English, felt even more sick (because EAP is annoying and The Raven is stupid), fallen asleep curled into a ball and woken up half an hour later with Celine Dion in my head. Remember her song, A New Day? No, neither did I until just now. Did I dream about Celine Dion? I don't know.

(Last night I had a dream that I ended up at Durham, only because there was no room for me in the college I had to live in a hut. Then it turned out that Charly was at Durham as well...somehow...and she lived in the hut with me, and for some reason all we ate was cottage cheese.

Premonition?)

State of life, currently, insane. All I need to do is get through this next week. This involves:
a) NOT getting stressed out over the horrible, horrible history coursework that is blatantly not going to get handed in on Friday
b) NOT getting stressed out over whether or not I have [insert random imaginary stomach condition here]
c) NOT getting stressed out over the 3rd.

Oh, the 3rd. The 3rd, the 3rd, the 3rd. I had a mock interview with Mr L on Monday that went badly, really, really badly, so badly I couldn't look at him properly the next day; I have a suspicion he told Chadders about it because Chadders came and gave me a long "reassuring session" on Thursday and now both the Latin teachers are treating me like a bit of a headcase...and then I had a second mock interview yesterday with someone who may or may not have been Mrs C's dad, which went incredibly well - I mean, I actually said things that made sense, using real words and everything, and afterwards I got really nice feedback and was told I had "a really good chance". So the real thing could genuinely go either way.

Does it matter? No, it doesn't/Yes yes yes it does. Not sure what the right answer is.

ARRRRRRGHHHHH I AM LOSING ALL SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE. This isn't like me.

It doesn't help that Glavshit has truly lived up to his name recently and been an absolute bastard with regards to history coursework (a long-winded, badly phrased question on the comparison between Tsarism and communism in Russia). Having spent all term going through the course at a snail's pace and giving unreasonable D grades to everyone except William, he decided we had to write the first, only, final draft of the coursework in one week - NEXT week. Which is massively inconvenient timing and oh, he knows it and is delighted. I won't go into the grisly details but the past week has been a haze of arguments and despair, with no real result except he now really hates me and Immy, and knows we hate him. Not what you'd call a good working relationship. My policy this week will be to do as much of the work as I can without actually killing myself, and whatever gets handed in on Friday...well, he can just deal with it.

I'm going to have a bath, drink some milk and read the Metamorphoses.

Or Mum's Easy Living magazine, so I can pretend that life is all about buying wine glasses and making casseroles.

One, two, three

2007-11-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

1. When in doubt, write yet another poem about a certain family member you have a strange relationship with, add it to the WEIRD POEMS ABOUT MY WEIRD GRANDMOTHER pile, and feel guilty about it for days afterwards. This is clearly the way forward.
2. I've randomly lost weight. Stress? Tapeworm? Hours of wandering the streets of Beckenham before Russian lessons?
3. Cambridge interview on the 3rd. NO - I mean YAY - I mean - erm...

Annie is mediocre. Oh noes!

2007-11-10T01:09:00.000-08:00

The fact that I can't seem to be able to join in with the others' discussions about "voice" and generation gaps and such on the Pomegranate forum, and have just failed to write any kind of insightful entry here about poetry, suggests I'm maybe not the kind of person who thinks very hard about their own poems. I don't know, is that a bad thing? As soon as I start thinking about my own writing, about whether I have a "voice" or not or what exactly a voice is and should I even have a voice yet, my brain tends to seize up in a kind of semi-panic and thinks, "No!No!TooThickForThis!NoInsightHere!GoAndDoSomethingElse!Now!" My whole attitude to poetry at the moment seems to be to just lurch through it with no direction. I have no specific aim, I have no damn CLUE about anything...and I suppose I don't intend to. This probably makes very little sense.

The only thing I am thinking about a lot at the moment is how crashingly mediocre my poems have been lately. It's been ages, AGES since I've written something and actually thought, "Yeah. You know what, that...that ain't bad." It feels like I'm going round and round this cycle, which goes something like this:

I write something very patchy;
I work on it a bit, it turns into a big lump of words;
I show it to other people, get feedback etc.;
I grit my teeth and get back to working on it;
the lump-of-words starts protesting against all this WORK being forced on it, until it literally feels like it's wrestling with me or something, like some brattish toddler;
I get slightly weary, start obsessing over tiny things and religiously reading thesauruses;
Real Life rears its ugly head and dumps a pile of essays/phone calls/social commitments/dentist appointments on my head;
I start to bitterly resent the lump-of-words, which I know has only had about 70% commitment put into it;
eventually I decide that - oh deary me! - it's all getting a bit much, decide to leave it "for now" until I'm less busy or more inspired or both;
"for now" becomes "forever". And that's it - a big lump of words, a 70%-type effort, an elephantine, mediocre slush.

Yeah, OK, so what I've just described is like the birth of the average poem, I know, and I'm all too aware that the poem that just hits you in the face comes once in a lifetime, but it really depresses me that currently I can't get past the mediocre slush phase.

Mediocre poems make me so bloody angry, especially my own mediocre poems. But at the moment that's all I seem to be able to write. TRYING NOT TO doesn't work, trying makes it even worse. This isn't "writer's block" or anything, because I am still writing. It just happens to all be shit. No, not shit - just very average. And that's actually worse - you know, I'd rather be incredibly, incredibly shit sometimes than drifting around in the middle all the time.

Someone said I had a "signature style" over on the Pom forum, but I don't think so. I don't want any kind of signature style. Not at the moment. I'm young, I'm so inexperienced it's laughable, I want to have a hundred different styles and be a thousand different poets. I want to pretend to be Anna Akhmatova and Auden and Dylan Thomas and Frank O'Hara and Lavinia Greenlaw and Christopher Logue and everyone else first, I don't want to be recognisable at all.

If I do have a style and this is it I'm not sure I want it.

Anyway, enough woe-woe-woe. INSECURE WRITER, hold the front page!...Or not. Here are some happy things: having a lane all to myself in the pool today; Who Loves The Sun by The Velvet Underground; bus drivers who let you sit down before driving off; the word "avocado"; and my dad randomly deciding to bake bread this evening for the first time ever:

"Why are you baking bread?"
"Because we have no bread...but we do have lots of FLOUR!"

Och, c'wa, Catullus, stievlie nou. Be sweir.

2007-11-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

There's a part of me that would love to be fluent in Scots just so I could read Douglas Young's Scots translations of Catullus. The above line, by the way, means "Catullus, stop this, stand firm, become stone" (in the English), and I'm kind of inclined to make it my mantra - you know, the poem's about trying-not-to-fall-back-in-love, but muttering "Och, c'wa, Annie, stievlie nou. Be sweir" while getting trampled on on the bus might be quite a good anti-stress tactic.

On Monday I saw a neurosurgeon about the Spine Of Doom. It was a waste of time. He made me walk up and down for ages, poked me with a needle and spent ages asking me where I was applying for university. Then he stared really intently at the MRI scans for ages and slagged off Russian medical technology ("We were getting these kinds of scans in the EIGHTIES!"). His final verdict: "Hmm. It's strange. Hmmm. I don't know. Call me in three months."

Tomorrow is Oliver's annual bonfire night extravaganza: food, drink, fireworks, sparkler fights. I've been writing a poem recently that isn't about fireworks, but in my mind takes place in November, and so it features loads of really quite obvious references to GUNPOWDER and SPARKLERS and stuff. I need to straighten it out. Anyway, tomorrow should be good. I shall wear my red beret for the first time this winter! It's really sad that that actually makes me excited.

Just old light

2007-10-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

Ill. Ill and babysitting. Misha is currently "playing karate", thankfully with a pillow and not with me, while blasting an old CD he found called HUGE HITS 2003, which contains some delightful songs I'd completely forgotten about (What's Your Flava by Craig David, The Cheeky Girls, Holly Valance's pop career etc.). I'm having a pointless and confusing argument with Dom about...I don't even know what. On bloody Facebook. And drinking tea with raspberries and lemons and honey. It is disGUSTing. I'm like the world's worst sick person - other people just get on with it, drink their tea and take their antibiotics and slob around happily, but I turn into this crazy, miserable moron. Who yells at her brother when he tries to get her to dance to Liberty X.

The last time I was ill (phantom feverishness during exams doesn't count) was during Arvon actually, when I had bronchitis and kept furtively taking painkillers and steaming my face three times a day. And worrying that everyone there thought I was weird for doing so. I remember at one point Paul Farley said, "Why is she ALWAYS under that towel??" Also the 2-year-old daughter of the centre directors was terrified of me because she thought I was a ghost, and I had to poke my head out from under the towel to reassure her that no, I wasn't a ghost, just a silly girl who goes slightly manic when ill.

Anyway, currently I'm sort of trying to decide which essay to send to Pembroke - the pretty good Ovid one from last year or the godawful Virgil one from last week? And reading Ovid's Art Of Love again. I LOVE him - he's such an arrogant, hilarious, stingy ("Guys, try to AVOID giving girls presents, there's no point...Girls, DON'T ask poets for presents, you know we're all poor anyway..."), flirtatious bastard. Is it wrong to have a crush on someone who a) has been dead for just under two thousand years and b) is a complete wanker?

The Girl With All The Hairy Poems

2007-10-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

My lasting memories of doing live radio:

not being able to find the building, walking up and down Marylebone High Street in despair and having to have a cup of tea in a cafe called Marco Polo to calm down;

realising the building was, er, right next door to Marco Polo;

being offered about ten million glasses of water once inside;

meeting Amy Blakemore again, being incredibly nervous together but both grateful to have someone to be nervous with;

Mr Gee, Russell Brand's resident poet on his Radio 2 show (I didn't know Russell Brand had a resident poet...) giving us handy tips such as, "Don't EVER pause. Even if you can't think of anything to say just keep talking and think of something to say WHILE YOU'RE SPEAKING" which sounded impossible;

Mr Gee also being annoyingly snide about FYP: "So this FOYLES thing, what was the prize? Book tokens, was it?";

once inside the recording room place, wearing silly headphones and Tessa Dunlop running around with apparently no idea what was going on;

TD's first question, to me: "Would you vote for a politician with GREY hair or BROWN hair?" and me thinking, "What??" and continuing to think, "What??" while saying something stupid which my brain has happily forgotten;

having to answer questions about what it's like to be a teenager and universities and parents and boyfriends and that kind of thing, which was kind of tedious but TD was being all chatty and funny and hyper so it didn't seem so bad;

Amy reading out her (fantastic) poems;

reading Labyrinths and then being asked to read it again because I hadn't explained it before I read it, so they wanted to hear it twice to be able to understand it (that was a bit weird); realising halfway through reading Strawberry Blonde that both my poems were about hair - complete accident; thinking that if anyone remembered me from this it would be as Hair Poem Girl or The Girl With All The Hairy Poems or something similar;

doing my usual thing of raving about Foyle/Arvon/the others and them looking slightly terrified at my enthusiasm;

afterwards everyone running around being all, "Yes yes that was fantastic you MUST contact us if you ever need anything look here's my email write to me anytime you need anything darling" - bollocks, obviously - and Tessa Dunlop as I was walking out the door saying, "And look darling, don't worry if you don't get into Cambridge, Oxford was the worst three years of my life, those places compLETEly fuck you up, you know - WRITE to me! Cheerio!" which I took as an interesting piece of advice. (Incidentally, I have an offer from Manchester - ABB. Which is doable.);

looking for Dad, who was supposed to be giving me a lift home, outside and finding him with a massive red weeping eye and screaming, "Oh my God, have you been mugged???" - he just had conjunctivitis. Which I now have.

If you approach me at a bus stop...

2007-10-15T04:10:00.000-07:00

Half-term holiday drifting by in a jumble of guacamole, shoes and unfinished books. Guacamole might just be one of my favourite words ever, although Sunday's enchiladas were quite literally (well, not literally) death-by-green-stuff, so I've had enough of it for a while. I've also spent too much time in shoe shops recently, only to buy shoes for school. No one really knows this, but I have kind of a dormant shoe fetish that tends to be unleashed the minute I walk into a shoe shop; the downside is that because my feet are so insane I can't wear about 2/3 of women's shoes. This can be quite distressing when half of me is whizzing around Office inwardly squealing "OMG PURPLE SHOES!!" and the other (sensible, boring) half is remembering that I'd rather be able to walk. Sigh.

Anyway, trivia, trivia. So one half-term came and went, my grades were OK: A1s in Latin, A2s in English (understandable, English tends to be my sleep-time these days), an A2 in History from BRETT and a B3 in History from Glavshit. Also UCAS is done. I never want to go through that again. (My choices in the end, by the way, were Cambridge, Durham, Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester. Let's see what happens.)

And I also have about ten books to read (which makes today's planned trip to the Poetry Library a bit nonsensical). Because there are only two people in my Latin class, when Hannah's ill I basically have "Loner Latin". It makes Mr L's lessons a bit rubbish because he goes all awkward, gives me some work and then calls off the lesson and skedaddles, but Chadders is great: we either do a HUGE amount of work, which being a complete nerd I really like, or we just talk about random stuff. On Friday we talked about random stuff, specifically linguistics, which I wanted to know more about and he turned out to be an expert on. It was really interesting, but then fast forward to the end of the lesson and suddenly I'm being given photocopied notes that he took in his postgrad years and a book called Literary Theory by Terry Eagleton, AS WELL AS some history textbooks I asked for earlier. I had to get a lift home, otherwise I would definitely have looked like a (muggable) idiot staggering through Catford.

So all those books are now in a big book tower next to my desk. They make me feel all intellectual - well, they would if I was actually reading them. The Literary Theory book is actually really good though - better than Chadders' notes, which are so illegible that I can only make out random phrases here and there - "the prison-house of language" "ILLNESS IS THE FRACTURE OF MYTH" etc. - but the book is really well-written and actually quite funny. Well, it has this sentence in it -

"If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary."

I mean, a) I just love that that would be his initial reaction, and b) doesn't it give you the urge to approach someone at the bus stop and murmur that?

Anyway, off to the Poetry Library now to waste time I don't have getting poetry books I don't need. It's all good. On Friday, by the way, I'm on BBC London at 11.15pm with Amy Blakemore, talking about...er, poetry shizz, I suppose. Foyle, Arvon, that stupid question "What poets do you like?" which I can never answer properly. I don't really know, but hopefully this will be easier than the BBC Russian thing because at least here I can actually speak English, so there won't be any chance of having to stop and whisper, "Errrr...how do you say 'sestina' again?"

Some thoughts for Sunday afternoon.

2007-10-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

It is possible to write an entire English coursework in five hours as long as you are prepared to accept that it will be shit.
*
Excess cheese sandwich consumption is probably the reason why I keep having nightmares about being broken into little pieces.
*
When a Brazilian guy chats you up on the bus to Waterloo the natural reaction is to be flattered. The natural reaction is not to become confused and scared and weird and spend the rest of the day quietly hating yourself.
*
If I was a Russian Orthodox Christian in 1666, I like to think I would be one of those who defied Nikon's reforms, became an Old Believer and moved to the Urals. In reality though I'd probably just accept that now everyone had to make the sign of the cross with three fingers, not two, because at the end of the day does it really matter that much?
*
The above explains why I'm not religious.
*
Girls who totter about everywhere in stupidly high heels that SHOULD kill their feet and leave them crippled with achilles tendonitis and yet are somehow fine? I hate them.
*
When I'm upset I generally can't stand talking to people, in fact all I can do then is mope around and make lists and write bad poems and sit there going all melancholy over beans on toast and see how long I can go without saying anything. Basically I like to just avoid people.
*
This makes me a crap girlfriend.
*
Injury is dull.
*
The BBC show is on Tuesday and yet - whisper it! - I don't actually know anything about Russian poetry.
*
Rest? Please? Soon?

Cutting onions into moons

2007-10-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

Having someone else read your poem out loud is very surreal. I still don't know the name of the guy who did it last night, but I liked the way they did it - even though at the time it was EXCRUCIATINGLY embarrassing and I was tugging at my hair so hard it almost fell out. Anyway, he read it well, although - and I suppose this is natural - it sounded different in my head. He read it quite slowly, for a start, and in my head it was always meant to be read really really really fast, like some frenetic advert. This isn't me complaining: it's just different interpretations or something, I don't know.

Yesterday also proved that I'm not very good at the whole canapes-and-mingling thing. My tactic is basically: Drink. Eat. Babble. ("Tiny banoffee pies you probably wouldn't touch in any other context? Why thank you, I'll have SIX!") So at one point Daljit Nagra asked me which poets I liked and all I could think to say was "ERRRRRRRRRRRR I really like YOU, actually!" Cringe, cringe, cringe. And then when I tried to plug Pomegranate to Helen Mort, I spent ages circling her trying to work up the courage and then finally just went, "Are you Helen Mort????" ("Yes.") "Have you heard of Pomegranate? No? Er (brain turns into banoffee pie) it's like...for YOUNG POETS...and like...anyone can submit and like...will you? I mean would you? I mean are you interested? Erm. Have a flyer!" Only we'd run out of flyers, so what I actually gave her was a piece of paper with www.pomegranate.me.uk written on it in Adham's gel pen. And what I didn't realise was that she was standing with another girl who was also a poet, and I didn't offer her a flyer, so basically I insulted her.

Awesome PR, Annie, just awesome. (Charly gave the other girl - Bridget Collins - a flyer later, and we talked and she was really nice. So that's OK, but also aaarggh.)

There was also the podcast, which had me going yada-yada-yada at the speed of light due to sheer nerves, and then reading out my poem badly. But it was really good to see all the other winners and they all seemed like pretty fantastic people, and their poems are brilliant - it took an hour to get home and I spent the whole time buried in the anthology (well, the stapled-together sheets of winning poems). Also - free books! Tobias Hill's Nocturne In Chrome & Sunset Yellow, which I was actually planning to get, so score - it's got this amazing sequence called A Year In London in it. And a selection of Shakespeare's verse selected by Ted Hughes, and Two Barks by Julie O'Callaghan which to be honest I'm a bit confused by - they're basically children's poems? Not that I'm against children's poetry, but...well, anyway.

All in all, an interesting evening.

It made today's extravaganza of UCAS finalising, English coursework, Tsar Nicolas II, cold rice salad and helping the classics department set up for Open Day incredibly dull and depressing, not to mention the impending weekend of - oh, let's see - work, work, work, work, work, work...

Coming for to carry me home

2007-09-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

A quick update because I should be doing many many things right now, such as research for my Russian oral or an essay on Nazi ideology or making dinner for my wonderful family, but am so tired that I've decided to just conk out in front of the computer for a mere ten minutes. Today was Whole School Photo Day, which only happens once every eight years or so (I've never been in one), and it involved standing in the cold (and later the rain) for an hour while each year group was painstakingly arranged on the massive platforms they'd set up on the field - from us year 13s right through to the 3-year-olds from the nursery. It took FOREVER. And I was surrounded by guys who insisted on singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and God Save The Queen or trying to start a Mexican wave or a mass humming session until one of the teachers screamed at them to shut up through a loudspeaker.

Meanwhile we saw some random tourists quite blatantly sneaking into the school gates to take pictures (to which it has to be asked: WHY?), and at one point some fat man in a grey t-shirt started hanging around on the edge of the field staring at us and taking pictures, OF US, on his camera phone.

"Who's that?" I asked Anna, who was next to me.
She shrugged. "Paedo?"

The actual taking of the photo took about a minute. And then afterwards we all nearly fell down the steps because we could no longer feel our feet.

Fobbity-fobbity-fob

2007-09-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

School has presented all the sixth formers with 'fobs'. These are little electronic devices that have our personal details on them, and we have to 'fob' into the school (i.e. put the fob against a sign on the wall outside the sixth form entrance) and when we leave 'fob' out again. Why? I don't know. I think it's one of those pointless new shiny things the school installs every time it slips further down the league tables (see also: unnecessary repainting of the toilet corridor, sporadic "smoothie bar" at lunch, etc.) Anyway, this is by far the least important thing I could be writing about right now.

New Blood on Monday, at the Poetry Cafe, was terrifying. I mean, I'm not sure I actually read for the full fifteen minutes, but it was still quite hard not to burst into flames with fear in front of that mike. Yes, it IS possible to set yourself on fire through fear. I'm sure it is, I came close. But it was OK really, people listened, people seemed to enjoy, and at the end a man tapped me on the shoulder and said "Well done!" So you know, at least I pleased that man.

I read the following, in this order:
1. Strawberry blonde. Because it's easy to read.
2. Summer In The City.
3. Underneath An Irn-Bru Sunset. A mistake: I've changed the first stanza of this 20,000 times and changed it AGAIN on the bus into Covent Garden - as I was reading it I realised the new version was still wrong and got very annoyed - when will this poem FINISH itself?
4. Sorrento. It felt weird reading this, just because of the...history. Let's not dig that up.
5. Crash, which I was really worried about reading and so when the time came I just DID it, really really fast and mad, and I think people liked it because they a) laughed and b) clapped. So yay.
6. The acrobat's daughter. And I mentioned Charly!
7. Too Many Storms.
8. Margarita.

The other two, Heather Phillipson and John Stammers, were amazing. I didn't get to talk to either of them unfortunately, because JS left after the first half and I rather stupidly dashed off at the end without saying goodbye to anyone, and felt rude all the way home. But I Facebooked a hello to HP so that's OK.

Back in Real Life (not that poetry isn't real life, but you know, I tend to think of everything that happens, like, here - school, friends, family, shopping for shoes that don't fit properly, and so on, as real life, and so everything like the forum, the Foyle bunch, poetry readings, poetry-writing, Pomegranate and reunions is just some separate, wonderful poetry land where I'm a different person and...yeah. It's hard to explain)...anyway, back here school is trundling along. Or thundering along, with all the force of ten tonnes of homework and the monster that is UCAS.

I've picked a Cambridge college - Pembroke. (And a Durham college, St. Cuthbert's Society. Cuthbert is a great name. That's not why I've chosen it, though.) As luck would have it a girl who used to go to our school is now in her final year doing Classics at Pembroke, so Mr L has asked her to come and have an "informal chat" with me on Friday. Well, it was just an informal chat at first, and I was looking forward to it because I can ask her loads of questions about Pembroke and Classics and Cambridge and actually get straight answers, and also ask her "HOW, HOW, HOW DID YOU GET THROUGH THE INTERVIEW?" But then Mr L added, "And as she's here we thought we'd give you a little...mock interview."

"What...on FRIDAY?"

"Yes. Just a few nice questions."

Yeah, I'm sure they'll be nice. Gah. Mr L has actually turned into a bit of a git recently. He's Oxbridge coordinator, so most of what's been spewing out of his mouth has been OxbridgeOxbridgeOxbridge, "And WHY have you not written your box statement yet?" and so on and so on. I know he's supposed to do this, and he's not the only teacher but still, it's annoying. And he's become unnecessarily mean in Latin lessons too, nitpicking at every piece of work I do and every point I make. We were translating a bit of the Aeneid recently (book 12) and I translated a phrase said by Latinus in a kind of archaic and old-fashioned way (probably because the notes I was using were from a book published in about 1890) and he started sniggering at me. WHICH, CONSIDERING IT WAS A FRIDAY AFTERNOON AND I WAS REALLY DAMN TIRED, WAS BLOODY IRRITATING. And I protested that, well, maybe I MEANT to translate it old-fashionedly, Latinus is after all QUITE OLD and so it makes sense that that is how he would talk. Yes? And Hannah backed me up, and Mr L then left me alone. But there's still just this constant...nitpicking. I don't feel I can do anything right.

Maybe he's pushing me deliberately in the run-up to Cambridge applications. He's going to be disappointed when...I mean if...I mean, WHEN I get rejected. (If or when?)

I'm going to shut up about this before I get panicky. You know what goes well with writing a Hamlet essay? Rachmaninov.

Really bad news/really good news

2007-09-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

1. Osteochondrosis. That's all I'm going to say about it.
2. Foyle Young Poets 2007. Me. The last poem I entered. Crash. The 'afterthought' poem I only entered for the hell of it.
Oh. Em. Gee.

September

2007-09-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

The last time I wrote in here was before I went to Moscow, and since then I've returned and started school. Everything feels up in the air at the moment - there are all these New School Year things to be getting on with, the usual mix of admin stuff and trying to memorise the worst timetable I think I've ever had. My English class has sixteen people in it, some of whom let's just say are not exactly my best friends - the other English class, logically, has three people. Then there's history, which is a mixed bag because on the one hand there are only four girls and we're being taught a Nazi Germany module by BRETT, the kind of teacher who can only be called by his first name and can only have that first name written in capitals because he's that amazing. (And really, a surname would just take the edge off a name like BRETT.) But on the other hand Glavshit, sadistic nutcase history teacher from year 12, is still around, and will be teaching us Russian history. Joy.

The sun is all Septembery gold, people have new haircuts, the year 12s are smug, the year 7s come up to about my waist...autumn usually makes me so happy. I was in Moscow on September the 1st, which is a really huge day over there because firstly it was the city's 860th birthday and secondly it was the first day of school (even though it was Saturday), which in Russia is a MASSIVE deal - they don't have any lessons, they just have parties and all the first-graders get initiated into the school with a big ceremony etc. Everywhere it all felt so new: the children's songs blasted out from loudspeakers in school playgrounds, the fifth-grade girl with her blonde hair in two thick ribboned plaits, walking home ahead of me, her legs (knee socks, shiny shoes) in a confident rhythmic strut on dirty pavement; the identical rucksacks all over Moscow, the flimsy 84-kopek textbooks, the teachers on the underground with their arms full of flowers. And because of the anniversary the streets in the centre were all closed to traffic, people waving flags and milling around, the sky (clouds specially, expensively removed) a freezing blue. I went to a poetry reading on the Patriarch Ponds (the setting of the scene in The Master And Margarita where we meet the Devil and Berlioz loses his head), and there was this guy reading Mayakovsky's Backbone Flute and it was incredible.

The next day I had to take myself and Misha home, as well as an envelope that contained two X-rays of my knee, an MRI scan of my back (all these tiny snapshots of various parts of my spine curving in a way that Dr Socrates later said was "wonky", "unnatural", "wrong"), and some notes on an ultrasound concerning problems with my liver I didn't even know I had, and some turd-coloured pills to take before meals and some white pills to take after meals.

And all of this in Russian, so that everyone else seems to know exactly what's wrong with me (or they don't know what's wrong with me but they can speculate) and I'm just hearing these words that aren't on the A-level Russian syllabus and have no idea what's going on.

I don't know. I don't really know what to say about it or how I feel about it or anything. I don't even know how to end this entry because on the one hand it's September and it's new and there are things to be done and I'm busy and and happy and stuff, and on the other hand...on the other hand. I spent a year and a half being mad and obsessive about all the weird pains and clicks and being told, "ANNIE, YOU'RE AN IDIOT, STOP WORRYING" and believing deep down that I was an idiot and I should stop worrying, and now suddenly it turns out I was right all along.

And the stupid thing is that I still don't know what I was right about.

The sea as quiet as light

2007-08-16T04:53:00.001-07:00

It's been a trundly sort of week (classics-related heart attack on Tuesday aside), just building up to going to Moscow tomorrow. I read Christopher Logue, found the above line and thought it was brilliant. I had a dull and overpriced haircut in the tiny hairdresser's just outside Krispy Kreme, made one final attempt to read Caesar and gave up. I spent Tuesday morning listening to recordings of Allen Ginsberg on the Poetry Archive - I don't really like him but the recordings were quite good, although what Ginsberg himself would say if he knew I was calmly doing the ironing while listening to Howl: Part 2 ("Moloch!") I don't know. I also stared out of the window at the rain and ate strawberries, and so in the afternoon ended up writing a Ginsberg-esque poem about rain and strawberries. This isn't as interesting as it sounds. I also went to the Tate, and bumped into Lorraine Mariner in the Royal Festival Hall toilets.

And then, yeah, exam results came today - I say that casually, as if I haven't been worried AT ALL. Went swimming this morning to take my mind off it all until the school opened, and played little mind games with myself at first: "If I do x lengths in y minutes, I'll definitely get an A in Russian" etc. But then I just forgot about it and swam.

The results? Well.

A in English, which I got the least number of marks for in all my subjects, weirdly enough.
A in History - only losing 4 marks in that godawful Russia paper where I babbled on and on about Anna Akhmatova.
A in Russian - FULL MARKS. HOW? I'M NOT COMPLAINING BUT SERIOUSLY, HOW?
And A in Latin - full marks in Literature 2 and Unprepared Translation.

So that's that. Now there's A2...

In the meantime, I'm off to Moscow tomorrow, for a week's work experience with a medical journal (do I want to go into medicine? Do I want to be a journalist? No and no. But maybe it'll be interesting), and then another week of just relaxing in the city. Sorry. That's wrong. You can't relax in Moscow, it's actually too insane for that. And that's why I love it.

NO.

2007-08-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

I just read this.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2241711.ece

No. No no no NO.

What are they thinking? Whoever came up with this, I would genuinely like to know what was going through their minds when they decided this. So not many people are taking Latin and even fewer are taking Greek. THIS is not going to change that. Who in their right minds would choose a subject like this new "classics" A-level, where they're expected to cram in two languages along with a bunch of history, philosophy etc.? Greg Watson says Latin A-level is "intimidating" - well, excuse me, but this kind of set-up seems even more intimidating. Screw that, it seems impossible. I know people who were intimidated by Latin A-level because they're not that crazy about learning the language, so they took class. civ., and EVERYONE I know who does class. civ. loves it, they rave about it so much I actually sometimes wish I did it. If all that changed and they suddenly had to learn two languages along with Alexander the Great/Greek pottery etc. I don't think any of them would be happy. This isn't going to make loads of people take classics. It'll make even less people get into it, because it's clearly INSANE.

I mean...leaving aside the sad fact that such a good course as Latin A-level (and no doubt Greek) is being scrapped, how is this going to work practically? How are Latin, Greek, ancient history AND class. civ. possibly going to be combined into one subject? OK, so apparently students will be able to "specialise". How far, though? How much Latin will there be? How much Greek? Maybe one lesson a week, for both languages? And then if this course is available to everyone, like class. civ., regardless of how much Latin/Greek you've studied, then there'll be some people who have done Latin GCSE, some who haven't, some who've done Greek...how will they sort out how much to teach, and to what level? It seems obvious that the language part of it at least just WON'T work. And what will be the next step? Oh, let's just drop Latin and Greek altogether, it's too much of a bother really...

It won't prepare people for classics at uni. How can it? Sure, so it mirrors the kind of set-up at universities but they won't go into as much depth in anything. And to think, if I'd been a year younger I would be forced to go through this absolute bullshit. God, it's so STUPID. This entry could probably have been more structured but I'm too plain angry to argue elegantly.

Socrates - always good with legs

2007-08-09T03:26:00.000-07:00

Bad news first. Last week I went to see the GP again (who incidentally is the mother of Jake, a boy in my year, and has lots of pictures of Jake on her desk which is really weird when I'm trying to tell her something serious). She swivelled my knee this way, that way, this way, that way, and then said, "It's growing pains."

"Sorry?"

"Yes, growing pains. There's nothing really you can do. Cartilage, you see, it should harden and resolve itself by the time you're about nineteen or so."

"Nineteen."

"Yes."

"Sorry, just...sorry. NINETEEN???"

So that's that. Apparently I'm supposed to just adopt a policy of Ignoring It, while at the same time avoiding things which "aggravate" the poor ickle pathetic knee. What a conundrum. Meanwhile, a few muscles in my back have been talking amongst themselves and decided that, "Hey, you know what Annie could really do with now? You know what's missing in her life? A nice bit of back pain!" Only it's not just a bit. It's the worst back pain I've ever had. It makes the Great Back Pain of Summer 2006 seem like a little bruise, and to be honest I'm really scared about this, it's never been like this before. I spent most of Wednesday pacing up and down the living room, rubbing my spine and sobbing. Not good.

I then went for a furious swim that was actually powered by sheer rage ("You want pain, you stupid, useless, good-for-nothing muscles? HERE! HERE'S - SOME - MORE - BLOODY - PAIN!" Just to clarify, I wasn't actually saying this aloud. For one thing it would be quite hard to do while swimming.) Anyway, the parents have decided that when I'm in Moscow the week after next I should go and see their old friend from uni, who is now a doctor specialising in this kind of crap. It's quite weird because his nickname at uni was apparently Socrates (I don't know why), and so my parents keep saying things like, "Yes, make sure you tell Socrates about the orthotics" and "Socrates will know what this is about, he was always good with legs" and I get really confused for a second.

Anyway. Let's not dwell on this or I'll start panicking again and panicking will lead to more pacing and tears. On Tuesday I took Dom to Open Mic - he used to write poetry, ages ago, but then stopped due to writer's block/lack of confidence/whatever and I kept trying to make him start writing again and he kept refusing. Anyway, so we went to Open Mic, and it was really good - I didn't read anything because I have nothing to read, but there were quite a lot of regulars and familiar faces, including a South African woman who we saw last time, who read these amazing poems that were like half-song half-spoken word. And one guy read a poem that contained the immortal line, "My arse wept for the Lord God Almighty." (It was about porn.) The only bad bit was when some guy was reading this weird poem and occasionally stopping to say stuff like, "Are there any IMMIGRANTS in the audience?" and "Any BLACKS or SLAVS?" Then when he sat down someone at the back called out, "Are there any vaguely provocative fascists in the audience?" and the room went kind of quiet. Fortunately Niall said something like, "God, can you feel the LOVE in this room??" and made a joke and the subject was swiftly changed. Apart from that, it was a great night.

And afterwards when we were walking down Betterton Street, Dom said he really really liked it, and he EVEN said that he might start writing poems again, and at that point I was so happy all I wanted to do was kiss him only he suddenly went, "OH MY GOD THERE'S A POWER RANGER IN THE WINDOW!" And sure enough there was a life-size model of a red Power Ranger in one of the windows above us. It was terrifying.

And later we saw Orlando Bloom coming out of the theatre where he's performing at the moment, and all these teenage girls shrieking and running down the road to see him.

Yesterday I went to the Poetry Library for the first time. Well, actually, I went there once years ago, but that didn't really count - this time I got a membership card and spent about three hours in there, perusing all the books and magazines. And drooling. I got out two books from Christopher Logue's War Music series (Kings and The Husbands) and The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck and Errata by Michael Donaghy. The trip was only spoilt a bit because at one point I was standing there reading Vicki Feaver and had so much pain in the back area I actually felt faint, and had to go and sit down for a bit.

This means I have eight books to read before going to Moscow next week, although I think it can now be safely said that I'm not going to read Caesar by the end of this summer. I tried to find some more interesting bits I could just skim through - like the death of Pompey in The Civil War - and even that was boring. It's just not going to happen. Sigh. I'm a bad classicist.

I did, however, read Harry Potter earlier this week - Harriet leant it to me after I went round to her house on Monday to see her new kittens. I only have this to say:

a) Not exactly bed-time story material for small children, is it?
b) That was quite a finale.
c) 9-year-old Snape, bless his little cotton socks.
d) I LIKED the big twist. Oh yes.
e) But the epilogue was lame.

The Shower Of Snot

2007-08-01T03:20:00.001-07:00

I saw The Simpsons Movie yesterday, which involved a ridiculously long trek to the cinema in Greenwich just because, in Boris's opinion, "the seats are more comfortable". (Which is balls. They're very ordinary seats.) I was worried that it would be a really bad film and completely destroy my faith in the show or whatever, but actually it was good - it basically felt like watching three episodes of The Simpsons back-to-back, so that at some point I did start to feel like I'd had a bit of a Simpsons overload, but overall - highly recommended. There was a trailer before the film that was practically wetting itself over "2007 -THE SUMMER OF CINEMA!!!!!" and showing clips from films I frankly didn't want to watch. Shrek 3? Transformers? John Travolta as a woman? Hmm.

It was very very hot yesterday, so everything felt vague and dream-like. I had to guide Dom and Alex B to the cinema, since they didn't know the way and apparently had never heard of streetmap.co.uk. Sorry, I have to stop grumbling. I wasn't really sure of the way either (Greenwich is a BITCH to get to anyway) and had to concentrate quite hard to try and remember where it was we were meant to be going, which meant that I was walking in front scratching my head and going, "Er, right...Westcombe Hill...that's...familiar...BLACKWALL TUNNEL!!...YES!!!..OK..." while they argued about something behind me. Alex B has written a new novel. THE HORROR, THE HORROR. It's not nice to slag off people's efforts, and I do like Alex although he's not exactly my closest friend, and it's good that he's creative and he doesn't just play violent video games or spend his time happy-slapping people or whatever, but...I've read his first one...Well, when someone takes basically ALL their inspiration from fantasy novels, manga and Greek mythology, I think the result can only be either absolutely amazing or terrible. And this...this is not amazing.

Anyway, he says he's now working on a trilogy about the Trojan war. He's prolific, at least.

Nothing much else to report. Seeing Dom a lot. His postcard from Cyprus just never came; we think it might have gone to Estonia instead of England. Also, Immy is moving out of her house, having finally had enough of her egotistical wanker of a dad. She seems pretty chirpy about it - from everything she's told us, the past few years of living with him and his crazy girlfriend have been awful, and she's going to live with her mum. I almost had a heart attack when I heard this because her mum lives in Milton Keynes, but then she told me they're getting a flat in Honor Oak which is practically next door to the school, so that's OK.

This is yet another example of how Everything Lately Has Been Changing.

Dad has come back from Russia, but my brother is still there, at my grandparents' dacha. Until this year, the dacha had no shower, and we basically had to wash about once a week out of a tub (primitive living, it's what the Russian countryside's all about). This summer, however, my grandad decided to build a brand spanking new shower; he made it his Big Project, and built a really sturdy shower which he then painted a brilliant white, all in time for Misha's arrival.

On Misha's second morning at the dacha, he got up very early, went exploring around the house, and found a tin of green paint.

The shower now apparently looks like it's been splattered with giant snot. My grandad is actually devastated.

10:58am and the day is basically over.

2007-07-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

(Warning: this entry does not bring out my good side.)

I can tell today is basically not going to go anywhere. No plans, should therefore be reading or something - The Secret History, or the book of Russian poetry I bought a few weeks ago, or something out of the pile of Books I Have To Read For School. I've come to terms with the fact that I probably won't get round to reading Caesar because he's intensely boring and I can't get through a page without wanting to sleep, even when I read it aloud in the slightly nasal voice I always imagined Caesar would have (don't ask me why). There's other things as well, a pile of books Mr L gave me, and a tonne of books to do with my individual assignment for history that I promised myself I would read and maybe even take notes on. OR I could do something else. I could write a poem! I started one last night, but then realised that as I was writing it the only thing that was going through my mind was whether or not it would sound good read aloud at open mic, and it hit me that I was deliberately writing a very open-mic-ish poem, and I wasn't sure whether I liked this and got confused and stopped and watched All About My Mother instead. That's a point, I could watch a film. Or I could call someone. Or tidy my room. Or get dressed.

There are a million and one things I could be doing, but no, instead I'm spiralling into a pit of self-diagnosis on Google, reading articles I don't understand about voltarol emulgel, biting my fingernails, calling my dad in Russia ("Do you know if aromatherapy can help?" "No." "Oh, OK. Um. Bye then.") and basically driving myself up the wall and let's not even go into what I saw on Google Images.

There are some days when you wake up and you may as well have "I AM A NEUROTIC MESS PLEASE DON'T TOUCH ME" worn as a sign around your neck. Today is one of those days.

It's just...(OK, I don't want this blog to be a whingefest and I promise not to go on about this too much, in fact I will shut up as soon as I've typed this, but) the last time I wasn't injured in some way, be it the Back Pain Of Last Summer or the Ten-Month Foot Problem or the current Random Knee That Really Has No Business Being Strained, I Haven't Done Anything That Could Possibly Have Led To A Strain, For God's Sake...well, it was May 2006. I've been in some kind of pain - yeah, OK, MODERATE pain, I'm aware that I'm not DYING, thanks - for over a year. And it's getting boring.

I'm bored of worrying about which gel to use when, or if such-and-such a pill is going to have funny side effects, or if wearing a certain pair of shoes is going to leave me unable to walk by the end of the day, or, or, or, or, OR.

And yes, you may point out, "But Annie, have you not noticed that the more you worry about this kind of crap the worse it seems to get? That actually about half the problem seems to be that you could probably get a First from Oxford in Making Mountains Out Of Mole-Hills, that NOBODY ELSE is as obsessive as you are about it, that the real problem is not voltarol emulgel's inability to fix your knee, or the fact that your back might - MIGHT - be getting worse again, or anything else, but that you choose to sit here and panic about stuff that hasn't happened yet? Annie, don't you think it's time you got a grip?"

And you would be absolutely right.

And it wouldn't make any difference.

"It was nice meeting you," said the tree.

2007-07-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

Just got back from work, which was SO quiet and SO dull that for the last hour all I was doing was standing by the radio, switching from rubbish Xfm to rubbish Heart and having the will to live sapped out of me by Hard-Fi/Daniel Bedingfield/Hard-Fi again. Oh, and after that I went to Body Balance (which is a kind of yoga/pilates/T'ai Chi class that makes me feel all stretched and zen and lovely), although that was a bit of a stressathon today because I've strained my knee a bit and I kept feeling paranoid that the stretching would make it worse, and also I hadn't shaved my armpits so there was a bit of a Welcome To The Jungle moment every time I did a sun salutation. Why am I telling you this?

A writer called Marie Phillips is about to publish her debut novel, Gods Behaving Badly, which imagines what would happen if the Greek gods and goddesses all shared a house in modern-day Hampstead. So in the book Aphrodite is a phone sex operator, Artemis is a professional dog-walker, Dionysus is a DJ who runs a nightclub called Bacchanalia and so on, but they're still gods, so Apollo is apparently responsible for global warming and Ares spends his time trying to figure out how to stir things up in the Middle East. In the middle of all this is woven an Orpheus/Eurydice-style story. It all sounds like hilarious stuff, and although I have to say the extract I read from the book was a little bit disappointing - it was kind of bland and one-dimensional, to be honest - maybe the rest of it will be quite good. In any case I'll hopefully get my hands on it.

Obviously the rest of the world at the moment is devouring or has already devoured Harry Potter (I wonder how many blog entries have mentioned the damn guy this weekend? Gazillions probably), and I'll have to do the same at some point. Dad is in Russia right now, where apparently they're selling copies of HP in English as well as Russian, and not for very much either, so I've asked him to bring me a copy. Gotta know who dies and all that, although I expect it'll be coming to a t-shirt near me soon.

In other news...well, Dom and I are going out. As in, Going Out - yes, with a capital G AND a capital I. It seems so surreal considering...everything. I mean, three months ago seems like three years ago, and, er, yeah - I'm not sure I want to explain. But I'm very very very happy at the moment. (Except he's currently buggered off to Cyprus. But I've been promised a postcard.)

And I'm sprucing up old poems and editing stuff to send to the Foyle Young Poets competition - this is the last year I can enter so I'm firing everything I can at them, so to speak. (Now there's an image in my head of me literally firing poems at the judges with a gun or something...) There's something weirdly satisfying about spending ages doing nothing except looking at a poem, tapping a pen on the table, moving a comma, changing one word, then looking at the poem again...It feels simultaneously like the most productive and unproductive thing in the world.

Xi

2007-07-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

It's just this squiggle I can't write,
not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.
This pause: no life-change, no great insight -
it's just this squiggle I can't write.
These underrated words: could. Might.
Who knows? For now there's time, there's this.
It's just this squiggle I can't write.
Not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.

Yuck. Triolets just don't do it for me. I wrote that yesterday while very tired, and knew straight away that it would be one of those poems I would never have time to go back and work on, but I felt I should preserve it somewhere so I've preserved it here. Really, how can you say everything you want to say in eight lines - actually five lines, two of which repeat themselves - without sounding all simpery and twee? Poetic twee. I can't do it. And I disagree with myself completely on "Uncertainty is bliss" - uncertainty is not bliss, it can be liberating and exciting sometimes, which I think is what I meant, but "bliss" is the wrong word. But if I change it, I'll have to change the sixth line too - to what? To be honest, there's no time to work on this. It's going in the MIGHT POSSIBLY SALVAGE THIS ONE DAY IN THE DISTANT FUTURE pile. Moving on.

Greek. I knew I would like it, but I didn't know how much. It's fantastic. Really, really intense (the teacher, Theodora - when someone figured out her name meant God's gift, Eve, a woman in the class, went, "OH!!! OH, that's BEAUTIFUL!!!!" and Theodora blushed a LOT - anyway, Theodora said we would be at intermediate level by the end of the course, so...we're moving pretty fast). It's a mark of my geekery that all I'm doing lately is declining nouns and putting accents over words and actually enjoying it. And I like the routine of it too: getting up, getting the train and tube to UCL, going down to the little classroom; being in the classroom with the four other students (all of whom are older than me - there's a Latin teacher, a postgrad and undergrad in English, and an older woman called Eve who's "just doing it for fun"), and all of us ploughing through the Greek, translating hilarious little stories - "Dicaeopolis works all day and groans and says, "O Zeus! Life is hard!!!" - and then eating lunch somewhere, doing more Greek, highlighting stuff, underlining stuff, and then lectures in the afternoon. The day before yesterday there was one from Peter Jones, author of Reading Greek and Reading Latin and a book I've got called The Intelligent Person's Guide To Classics, which must be the ponciest book title ever, but it's a great book and he's AMAZING. And yesterday there was a lecture by the UCL guy Stephen I've-Forgotten-His-Last-Name-Dammit, which was also really good.

So, Greek - as brilliant as I expected, and more.

In other news...tomorrow is...well, I suppose tomorrow could be called the first date. Which seems RIDICULOUS, considering how long this has all been going on, but it is officially, I suppose...er, that. I don't really know how I feel about this. Excited? Scared? The usual, then. One half of the brain going "YAY! OMG YAY!!!" and the other half thinking, "He is soooo going to come to his senses tomorrow." Hmm. I'm going to stop talking about this because I don't think I can be fully articulate.

Yesterday was prizegiving at school. I won the Ancient Languages Reading Cup, an adorable little goblet I could actually drink out of, and it has my name inscribed on it at the end of a list of previous year 12 ancient language readers. Prizegiving was boring as hell as usual, the only funny bit being when we had to sing God Save The Queen and all the language teachers refused to sing it, and Mr M The Poncy Plato-Quoting Drama Teacher stood there with his hands in his pockets, wearing his best "I am a rebel I am above this kind of crap" scowl. The food afterwards was rubbish too.

It meant I was so tired when I got home that I didn't do any Greek homework, and so I have to go now and will be scribbling it all down furiously on a train packed with commuters. Woohoo.

A flashback

2007-07-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

12-year-old Immy: "Would you ever ask a guy out?"
12-year-old me: "What? No WAY. No, I'd be so embarrassed - how do people do that? I could never do that!"
12-year-old Immy: "Yeah, me neither. Can I use your strawberry gel pen?"

Hmm. Well.

So much for that.

I aaaaaaam the one and only

2007-07-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

Didn't write anything in the past week, not because nothing happened, but because (yesterday's strawberry and raspberry picking extravaganza aside) it was all extremely boring. This may have had something to do with a lot of people I know disappearing to Snowdonia to wade through mud for educational purposes (one of whom was the person mentioned in the previous entry, which is why that issue is still kind of unresolved and I have NO idea what's going to happen now, and am scared nothing will, but ANYway). In the meantime, we all stayed at school for Activities Week and, yeah, they tried, they really tried to make it fun. But when the rest of the school is on various trips and there are literally about TWENTY of you left, well...being trapped in the place becomes even more unbearable than usual.

There was first aid, and a "world trade game" (let's not even go there), and a "World Cinema Day" which was actually quite good because I got to see Pan's Labyrinth and a Japanese film called Kamikaze Girls - one of those films that are frothy and insane and pure escapism, and made me want to wear a frilly dress for the rest of the day. But, you know, I could have watched films AT HOME. There was a treasure hunt around London which I refused to attend. There was a German-born WW2 survivor who came to talk to us, only it turned out he was a little bit too senile - he remembered with amazing clarity his stay at some hotel in Frankfurt in the 60s but couldn't remember anything about the actual war. ("Did you feel afraid leaving Germany?" "Well, I don't know, I was only about four at the time.") It meant that I felt bad for feeling a bit, erm, bored, because he'd obviously had a tough childhood, but...

And of course, Personal Statement Hell. Ugh, personal statements. There are some people who've been taking it oh-so-seriously, like Oliver who's practically written a thesis on himself, and there are others who just haven't, like Alex whose statement contains the phrase "orgy of maths" (and he refuses to remove it), and Alistair who (for ancient history) has written, "I am Alistair son of Hector. I like dead people, deader people and really really really dead people. I also like swords." I've fallen somewhere in between. But I'm just so, so,

SO

bad at writing about myself. It's the one thing I can't write. It's why at least 3/4 of the poems I write aren't about me, and the ones that are are always the hardest to write, and are always the ones I'm terrified of showing people. It's really annoying actually. I've always wanted to be able to write really raw, personal poetry, something that when you read it you just KNOW it's me. That's kind of like...that's my goal with every poem I write. I always want it to be really clear that it's from MY perspective, not anyone else's. But then it never quite works because they're hardly ever about me, they're about...well, people in comas, and people with ginger hair, and people on crash diets, and then "literary" crap, writing about literature - The Tempest, The Master And Margarita. My current poem-in-progress, the first stanza is about Ovid, being in exile, writing his Tristia, and while it's fun to write and I think it works OK as a first stanza, well...it's not ME, it's just me pretending to know what it's like to be in exile. And really, who wants to know what I think about that when I clearly don't even know what I'm talking about?

I mean, obviously everything you write is written from your perspective in some way, it's got YOUR stamp on it, but I still just really want to be able to write loads of poems that are just fully me: my life, my world, things that have happened to me. Maybe I'm not that kind of poet (hahahaha - "poet"). Maybe I just haven't lived enough. Yet.

Anyway, so, personal statement. Can't do it, for similar reasons. I would much rather talk about something else than myself, which is why the PS is currently full of crap about How Ovid Is, Like, Totally Amazing And Like, Yeah, OMG, but doesn't have anything else in it, really. Apart from one disgusting paragraph where I manage to compare myself to Virgil without meaning to - MUST REMOVE THAT ASAP.

Tomorrow is my last day of school. Everyone else stays behind until Friday and for that I laugh at them, but as for me - it's Greek Week!!!!!

Wow. Eek. Goddd.

2007-06-27T13:00:00.001-07:00

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.

"And the crack in the tea-cup opens/ A lane to the land of the dead."

2007-06-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

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.

On not catching trains to Aberdeen

2007-06-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

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...

Honey sandwiches at dawnbreak

2007-06-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Mood swings and roundabouts

2007-06-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

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...

Thinking systematically.

2007-05-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

Number of days since Friday: 3.

Number of emotional headfucking problems reeling around in the brain before the sixth form ball: many.
Number of pieces of bad news received just before the ball: 1.
Number of solutions to this: 1. Alcohol. Lots.

Amount of fun had on the Dixie Queen paddlesteamer: a lot.
Number of times attacked buffet: 4.
Number of teachers caught dad-dancing to The Proclaimers: 3.
Amount of crazed dancing done: lots and lots and lots.
Number of pictures of me doing crazed dancing currently floating around the internet: thankfully only 1.
Number of times Tower Bridge went up for us: 2.
Number of terrible pictures of Tower Bridge taken on camera phone: 17.
Amount of alcohol consumed: good question.

Amount of time spent flirting drunkenly with someone I really shouldn't have: too much.
Consequences of this: disastrous.

Number of people who persuaded me to come to the afterparty: 4.
Verdict on afterparty venue: YUCK.
Verdict on afterparty music: YUCK.
Verdict on afterparty drinks: YUCK.
Amount consumed regardless: Erm?
Amount of time spent making the aforementioned flirtation even more complicated: about an hour, in total.
Number of solutions to this: 1. Drink. More.

Amount of dancing done to music I hate in the middle of a heaving mass of sweaty people: a lot.
Number of guys who attempted to take advantage of my distinct lack-of-brain: 3.
Number of times rescued by Harriet: 3. (Boy do I owe her one.)
Number of solutions to this: see above.
Size of ego by this point: non-existent.

Number of times I was made aware of how incredibly skanky this club actually was: 1000.
Number of gangs hovering in and then eventually outside of the club: 1.
Number of gunshots made at the club while I was at the window: 2.
Number of glass shards on cheek: 2.
My reaction to this near-death experience: non-existent.
Number of minutes it took me to realise it would be a good idea to move away from the window: about 5.
Final reminder of how disgusting the place was: then. At which point we left.
Time of arrival at home: 7am. Ish.

Number of muscles not aching for the rest of the weekend: like, maybe 3?
Number of minutes not spent hating self: maybe 4.

Number of thoughts about HIM: 398,762.

Overall verdict: oh fucking god, what have I become?

"a leftover baked potato can be damp, slippery, and simultaneously gummy and crumbly"

2007-05-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

The sun comes out, everyone runs to Primark to buy brightly-coloured vests and sunglasses and stupid hats, businessmen drip ice-cream down their suits, toddlers turn strange shades of sunblock green, teenage girls get arrested for shoplifting. This is what I saw in town this lunchtime. (And it's the second time in a month I've seen a teenage girl get arrested for shoplifting in Primark - dear oh dear, what is happening to humanity etc. etc.)

Meanwhile I'm consuming tea and satsumas and crumbly baked potatoes (not with Patrick Kavanagh, as the Galway Kinnell poem goes), reading Heart of Darkness in a bad Italian accent and not really having much contact with the outside world. Facebook doesn't count. I had a conversation in normalspeak with Harriet yesterday, but it was pretty short and went something along the lines of

"I'VE FORGOTTEN ALL MY GERMAN!"
"Do you have an exam tomorrow?"
"YES!!!!"
"Well, good luck."
"I'M GONNA DIE!!!!"
"Stop it."
"I'M GONNA DIE!!!!"
"STOP-"
"EXAMS!!!!!"
"EXAMS!!!!!!!!!"
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"

Not exactly in-depth. I keep meaning to ask her if I can go to her house on Friday before the ball to get ready, because going straight there from home and having to get squashed by buggies and wheelchairs on the bus while wearing a dress is probably not wise, but I feel a bit funny about doing it because I know she's bringing Hugh and if he's at her house too there'll be a bit of a gooseberry situation. Not that that would bother ME that much - I could keep out of the way, talk to her parents or something (not her crazy dad though, last time I saw him was when he said to Alex B, "My God, you must have a MASSIVE cock!" - I can't remember in what context this comment was made though). All I really need is a place to get my hair in order and plaster myself inexpertly with make-up and try to make sure I look nice and not just like some weird velvet aubergine.

And maybe with some company around beforehand I might actually feel a bit more excited about the whole thing than I am now. I don't know why I'm so unbothered by it - everyone keeps talking about it, and there have been a few good rumours spread about people in advance so there will probably be some kind of drama that'll keep us all entertained for the next month and a half. And it looks good on the leaflet. It's in a BOAT. There's a dining room that looks weirdly like the one in Titanic (hopefully not an omen). The tables have all the napkins folded into that funny fan-shape. There are cocktails. There's a live band. Tower Bridge will open for us. And the name of the boat is the Dixie Queen. I mean, that is a BRILLIANT name. Why am I not thrilled to bits by this?

Maybe because I sort of know how the night will turn out - not badly, in fact probably quite well, but at the end of the day I just KNOW there will be a feeling of anticlimax. Harriet will spend the night getting off with Hugh and then running to the toilet to tell me she wants to break up with him. Sophie is going to try and pull Mr Amy because she thinks he fancies her because one time he said she looked like Mischa Barton (this whole episode is going to be weird and wrong...but maybe funny). (For the record, she doesn't look anything like Mischa Barton.) Then Immy&Alex will be intertwined with each other all night, Sam will be sexist, Dom will make awful puns on EVERYTHING in sight, everyone will be manically happy and everyone who is 18 will be drunk. I will eat/drink/dance/laugh too much, while wishing that Raaheel or Boris were here because they probably wouldn't be taking it as seriously as everyone else. (They're both shunning the event on the grounds that they have better things to do, and good on them.) If the headmistress comes and if she makes a speech like she did at the modern languages dinner I will kill myself. And then it'll be over and everyone else will go to the afterparty (in Catford! Rock on!) but I'll go home via the insane night bus because the next day I'm expected at KING'S CROSS, PLATFORM NINE AND THREE QUARTERS, for a way more enjoyable day and evening.

What is wrong with me? I'm not usually so pessimistic.

Well, anyway. In other news, I've written half a poem. There's no last line and the first verse is a pile of ew, so I'm trying to change it and then I'll show it. Once again, it's a poem that isn't about me. At all. Maybe the ball will inspire a few poems, who knows...

Watch out, the world's behind you

2007-05-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

It probably wasn't the best idea to start this while in the depths of Exam Hell, since for a while (20 days and counting) all I'll have to say is stuff like, "Got up, wrote an essay, revised Latin, ate lunch, panicked, procrastinated, continued procrastinating, ate dinner, revised Latin, tried to write a poem, was too tired, went to bed". This is the kind of cycle my days are starting to take, and I doubt it makes a great read.

Nevertheless, I feel I should keep writing in here, if only because I'm in the middle of the Post-Lunch Procrastinating Period (PLPP) and don't feel like writing another Fart of Darkness essay just yet. This is what my Saturdays have turned into. I'm trying not to get miserable about it, since misery, as Thursday afternoon showed, just leads to chocolate marshmallow bingeing and yelling at younger brothers. And if I were to divide everything into nice, sensible lists, I'll see everything is in fact more fine than not fine:

THINGS THAT ARE FINE
1. I'm not dead.
2. There are just twenty tiny little days until Exam Hell is over, and all that's required of me is just to get through them one at a time.
3. I have an outfit for pruuuuuuuuuhm (aka the sixth form ball) next Friday, which I finally pieced together today.
4. I won a poetry competition yesterday. And OK, it may have been with a poem I LOATHE TO THE UTMOST DEPTHS OF MY SOUL THAT MAKES ME WANT TO RIP ALL MY HAIR AND ALL MY TEETH OUT AND CLAW MY EYES OUT OF MY BRAIN WITH MY BARE HANDS WHENEVER I SEE IT but it's still nice to win something.
5. There was an old lady in the street today who dropped three twenty-pound notes and they went flying off in the wind, and it was me who ran down the street and actually jumped in the air to catch them, and she was very very grateful and it made me glow inside.
6. I think it needs reiterating: I'm not dead.

Therefore all that I need to do is forget all the rubbish stuff (examsexamsexamsmyleghurtsIfeelsickJesusChristIcan'tfindmyCicerobooksIcan'topenmypursebecausethere'safivepoundnotecaughtinthezipexamsexamsexams) and just breathe.

And I think (because everyone else does it) I'll end on some poems today. OK, they're poems I wrote essays about this morning, but they're still good poems (and the essays were OK too).

SONNET 65
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

SONNET 147
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve,
Desire his death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

By Shakespeare. Obviously.

So I finally did it. Again.

2007-05-18T05:27:00.000-07:00

Having resisted for over three months now, I've gone and done it, gone and got YET another blog despite the fact that I KNOW I'm rubbish at keeping blogs. Of the five thousand or so blogs that have been created by me over the years, about two have more than one entry in them. All have been abandoned after a few weeks, mainly because...I don't know, maybe because I'm just an idiot? Because I'm one of those old-fashioned types who finds it easier to commit to a proper, real-life, notebook journal than this kind of virtual 21st-century thing? Computers make me a bit queasy, which is stupid really considering the amount of time I've been spending on them recently. I have an English exam in exactly one week, there are still a few sonnets by Shakespeare that I barely know, and what do I do? I waste time getting a blog I'm unlikely to commit to. But then..."Time you enjoy wasting was not wasted", as said by John Lennon, T.S.Eliot or Bertrand Russell, depending who on the internet you want to believe. So...

^That, folks, was my first paragraph, and that is usually another reason why I abandon blogs: rubbish first paragraphs.

I also abandon blogs because of the terrible names I create for them and this is no exception. This name IN NO WAY AT ALL reflects who I am, really, because

a) I am not a relatively unknown suffragette from the Women's Freedom League who in 1909 hired an airship and flew over the Houses of Parliament throwing out carrots and Votes For Women propaganda leaflets, and

b) I really hate the women's suffrage movement. Specifically, I hate learning about it - sure, it's great what they did for women and everything, but when it comes down to it, their alliances with Labour/the Liberals/whoever, and their pious little war duties, and even their hunger-striking, window-smashing, throwing-themselves-under-horses days are just really, really DULL. (And here I am in my first entry blathering on about it all.)

But I gave myself this name because throwing carrots at the Houses of Parliament is kind of brilliant, and if I ever have to throw stuff at someone/something, I'll want it to be carrots.

So, moving on from that...I'm here because I tried Livejournal (many times), and also Diaryland (from the ages of 12-14) and Windows Live Spaces, but I've never had one of THESE, and they're pretty, and shiny, and maybe I'll stop being a blog slut and commit to this one. Although God only knows what I'll put in it - I get the feeling this is the kind of place for Mature Stuff, poetry or reviews or musings about current affairs, and not just for offloading the usual "waahwaaah school suuuuucks being a teenager suuuuuucks ooh biscuits" kind of thing. Maybe it'll be for poetry. Maybe I'll have an exciting mix of poetry and current affairs musings and snippets from my own WILDLY exciting life. (...Maybe this will be the last entry...) Or maybe it really will just be me and my rambling. Which, you know, is not so bad.

How do people end these things?