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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aren't we all.

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

And so the epic term trundles to an end.

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

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

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

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

I can't WAIT for the holidays.

Celine Dion & The Raven

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.

If you approach me at a bus stop...

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?"

Coming for to carry me home

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

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.

September

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.

Xi

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.

I aaaaaaam the one and only

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!!!!!