new glass to be stared through

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.

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?"

Socrates - always good with legs

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.

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

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.