It's all gone a bit J. Alfred

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.

Odes to ashberry vodka

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.

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.