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?"