"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.

MMVIII

NYE was a chips-and-Depeche-Mode nightmare. Well, nightmare is too strong. It was a slog though. And cranberry juice does not become any less disgusting when you dump a load of wine in it. Or champagne, or both. (Note to me, stop mentioning berries in this blog.)

Spent all of yesterday at the park going, "Misha, are you cold?" "Misha, are you cold?" "DO YOU FEEL ILL MISHA??" until he told me to shut up in that crushing way six-year-olds do, and suddenly I realised I'd turned into my great-aunt Zina.

I finally GET IT about Ted Hughes. Have been reading him constantly and oh my god, why did I not see it before? The guy can blow your head off with words.

Oh, and, provided I get 3 As this year, I may end up...

here.

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.

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.