Bananas

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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.