Vostok

Something to be grateful for: that no one (I think) saw me by the post box on Tuesday morning, in the rain, trying to jam a soggy letter to the Greek summer school at Bryanston through the hole while gale-force winds flipped my flimsy umbrella inside out and my beret flapped around my head.

In the past year I've been through about five umbrellas, destroying them on walks to school, losing them when they fall out of my bag at bus stops/post offices. The one I have now is a pathetic polka-dot Primark thing that spends all its time blowing inside out and making ominous creaking clicking noises, as if to say "Yes! Yes! Any day, any minute now I am going to break, I am definitely going to collapse like a squashed daddy-long-legs and this is going to happen at the most inconvenient moment possible and you are going to curse and curse me and call me all sorts of rude names you know can't technically be applied to me and this will be hilarious."

In short, I need a big fuck-off umbrella, black and serious and sturdy, big wooden handle, etc. (Also: the word 'umbrella'. It used to be one of my favourite words, with the umbr bit reminding me of shade and shadows and stuff - from the Latin - and then the lovely feminine ella at the end - yeah, I'm incredibly nerdy like that. Then Rihanna ruined it.)


Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

I'm in two minds about Bryanston. I'm scared it's going to be full of posh kids. And other people's opinions about it have ranged from "BRYANSTON WAS THE BEST TWO WEEKS OF MY LIFE OMG" to "Er. It was two weeks of Greek." We shall see.

Vostok was rejected from Bristol this week. She also turned eighteen and got a camera.

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.

All I want for Christmas is a melodica

What better way to celebrate the start of real, hardcore winter (for the UK anyway, back in my hometown this would be nothing) than for the central heating to break? So now I'm wearing a stupid amount of clothes and drinking two cups of tea simultaneously.

Bah Humbug! yesterday (at the really lovely Betsey Trotwood pub on Farringdon Road) was a good way to start the holiday, even though I left it with kind of mixed feelings. The atmosphere was great, all mince pies and fairy lights and stuff, and we recognised a few people (and Roddy Lumsden actually came up to me and apologised for rejecting me for Magma, which was totally unexpected but nice. I said he really didn't need to apologise). There were some people performing there who were fantastic: it would be stupid to name everyone I liked (mainly cos I, er, can't remember all their names), but you must check out Nick Mulvey, who performed in the freezing cold basement and was absolutely amazing. Parts of the day were so good they made me want to pick up a pen and write a poem ASAP, about anything. During the Generation Txt poets, for example, I was sitting there listening and outside the window there were all these 63 buses going to Honor Oak and I kept thinking, "God, I really need to write a poem about the 63 to Honor Oak." Or anything else, really - candles, chandeliers, beer stains. Had an idea for a poem at one point and wrote "C, C, C" on my hand, but when I came home I couldn't remember what the hell "C, C, C" was supposed to mean.

Also, having seen the guy playing the melodica in Excentral Tempest I've decided I desperately need to find one and learn to play it. Seriously, if you have a spare melodica...

However, me and Adham found that getting through an all-day poetry event without drinking (we were possibly the only people there fuelled by tea and mince pies alone) meant serious poetry fatigue by about 8pm. This may have also had something to do with the fact that...not everyone was that good. Again, not naming names. (Not that they're going to read this, I know, but still.) So the combination of that with sheer exhaustion meant that I came away from it not exactly full of the joys of Christmas & poetry as I was at first, but kind of deflated and bleary-eyed. But in more of a good way than a bad way.

Anyway, so that started the holiday well. School finished on Friday in its usual last-day tide of carols, secret Santas and random distribution of Capri-Suns. Also, Immy has an offer from Christ Church in Oxford, for biology, which is FANTASTIC and made me jump around the house in happiness. Regarding Cambridge, I actually don't care very much anymore if I get an offer or not, but this waiting around is so irritating. I just need to KNOW, and whatever.

On a random note - one of my poems, Margarita, just got translated into Russian and published in the Moscow Medical Journal. Of all places. That poem, and also Teaspoons and The Passenger (yeuch, can't stand the latter anymore) are going into some pamphlet anthology which is being published in Russia. Bizarre is not the word. I've had nothing to do with this and haven't actually read the translations yet. But hey, as Christmas presents go, that ain't bad.

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.

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?"

I aaaaaaam the one and only

Didn't write anything in the past week, not because nothing happened, but because (yesterday's strawberry and raspberry picking extravaganza aside) it was all extremely boring. This may have had something to do with a lot of people I know disappearing to Snowdonia to wade through mud for educational purposes (one of whom was the person mentioned in the previous entry, which is why that issue is still kind of unresolved and I have NO idea what's going to happen now, and am scared nothing will, but ANYway). In the meantime, we all stayed at school for Activities Week and, yeah, they tried, they really tried to make it fun. But when the rest of the school is on various trips and there are literally about TWENTY of you left, well...being trapped in the place becomes even more unbearable than usual.

There was first aid, and a "world trade game" (let's not even go there), and a "World Cinema Day" which was actually quite good because I got to see Pan's Labyrinth and a Japanese film called Kamikaze Girls - one of those films that are frothy and insane and pure escapism, and made me want to wear a frilly dress for the rest of the day. But, you know, I could have watched films AT HOME. There was a treasure hunt around London which I refused to attend. There was a German-born WW2 survivor who came to talk to us, only it turned out he was a little bit too senile - he remembered with amazing clarity his stay at some hotel in Frankfurt in the 60s but couldn't remember anything about the actual war. ("Did you feel afraid leaving Germany?" "Well, I don't know, I was only about four at the time.") It meant that I felt bad for feeling a bit, erm, bored, because he'd obviously had a tough childhood, but...

And of course, Personal Statement Hell. Ugh, personal statements. There are some people who've been taking it oh-so-seriously, like Oliver who's practically written a thesis on himself, and there are others who just haven't, like Alex whose statement contains the phrase "orgy of maths" (and he refuses to remove it), and Alistair who (for ancient history) has written, "I am Alistair son of Hector. I like dead people, deader people and really really really dead people. I also like swords." I've fallen somewhere in between. But I'm just so, so,

SO

bad at writing about myself. It's the one thing I can't write. It's why at least 3/4 of the poems I write aren't about me, and the ones that are are always the hardest to write, and are always the ones I'm terrified of showing people. It's really annoying actually. I've always wanted to be able to write really raw, personal poetry, something that when you read it you just KNOW it's me. That's kind of like...that's my goal with every poem I write. I always want it to be really clear that it's from MY perspective, not anyone else's. But then it never quite works because they're hardly ever about me, they're about...well, people in comas, and people with ginger hair, and people on crash diets, and then "literary" crap, writing about literature - The Tempest, The Master And Margarita. My current poem-in-progress, the first stanza is about Ovid, being in exile, writing his Tristia, and while it's fun to write and I think it works OK as a first stanza, well...it's not ME, it's just me pretending to know what it's like to be in exile. And really, who wants to know what I think about that when I clearly don't even know what I'm talking about?

I mean, obviously everything you write is written from your perspective in some way, it's got YOUR stamp on it, but I still just really want to be able to write loads of poems that are just fully me: my life, my world, things that have happened to me. Maybe I'm not that kind of poet (hahahaha - "poet"). Maybe I just haven't lived enough. Yet.

Anyway, so, personal statement. Can't do it, for similar reasons. I would much rather talk about something else than myself, which is why the PS is currently full of crap about How Ovid Is, Like, Totally Amazing And Like, Yeah, OMG, but doesn't have anything else in it, really. Apart from one disgusting paragraph where I manage to compare myself to Virgil without meaning to - MUST REMOVE THAT ASAP.

Tomorrow is my last day of school. Everyone else stays behind until Friday and for that I laugh at them, but as for me - it's Greek Week!!!!!

Wow. Eek. Goddd.

Er, well, where to start. How much should I say? Would a list help? I think a list would help.

1) Cambridge yesterday. NO contest, all thoughts of Oxford are gone gone gone. I've had great fun telling people I've fallen in love with Jesus, but that joke will soon get old.
2) But really, I have fallen in love with Jesus, and that's not good because getting my hopes up in this way is just...not wise. Not at this stage, where I've probably screwed up history and anyway all the other classicists at the open day were cleverer than me. But Dr Clackson was Such. A. God. And it's really beautiful. And Annieshutupnow.
3) Before that though, it was the classics dinner on Monday. And oh it was fantastic. There was food, there was wine, there was Mr L drunk as a skunk which is ALWAYS an amazing sight. Rumour has it he once got so smashed in a pub that he stood on a table and yelled "SUM PIUS AENEAS!" Unfortunately nothing like that happened on Monday, but he did slag off a lot of teachers and talk about philosophy in that beautifully stupid way drunk people do.
4) I was not drunk, but merry. My toast (which I was forced into making) was: "I am brilliant. Classics is brilliant. Prawns are brilliant." I personally think it's very poignant.

5) And at the end of the night, I somehow ended up sitting next to Dominic, and we, well, we got talking, as in talking properly. In fact we didn't stop talking until I suddenly looked at my watch and saw that if I didn't leave, like, NOW I'd miss the last train (and I had to go to Cambridge the next day), and it was really awful because I didn't want to leave. Then he walked with me to the tube station and it was dark and raining and windy, and it was at that point that, FINALLY, it all came out - both of us said exactly how we felt, with none of the stupid coyness and awkwardness of the past month, and I think we both wanted to say more but we were standing on the platform and my tube was just THERE, I didn't want to go and he hugged me and that seemed to last a very long time. Then I really had to get on the tube, so I did - but it didn't matter anyway because I still missed the last train at Victoria.

6) I waited at Victoria for an hour, sitting with some family that consisted of a mum, a dad and about fifteen sleeping children. It was surreal.
7) Eventually a train came that took me to a station that was an hour away from my house.
8) It was cold. It was raining. I walked all the way home.

On not catching trains to Aberdeen

Not a lot has been happening. Well. There has been this onslaught of recurring dreams lately, in which I still have a heap of exams to do and I'm not ready and there's always some Huge Obstacle that's stopping me getting to school like (as in last night's dream-adventure) being on a train that goes to Aberdeen instead of London; I'm hoping these dreams will stop soon. Also, various emotional/personal headfucks that refuse to lie down and die have meant that I've been acting like a complete and utter teenager lately - this climaxed in a big revolting mess on Thursday afternoon, when I came home from school and spent a full hour sobbing into my pillow, then started looking for a specific set of photos that I wanted to rip up, didn't find them, and hated myself for the rest of the evening for being such a...well, such a 17-year-old. Let's not dwell on that.

I wouldn't say life is majorly stressful at the moment, but there are a few things just sort of simmering beneath the surface that when I think about them make me want to break stuff. Sat outside with Boris in a free period and we had the most depressing conversation, in which we both concluded that, yes, year 12 has been one of the shittiest years ever. I mean, for me it wasn't as bad as year 10 (the Female Holden Caulfield days) but it was still slightly worse than year 8 (the Mild Bullying & Ostracism days - incidentally, I found out recently that the word ostracism comes from the Ancient Greek word "ostraca", which means "pieces of broken pottery", because the Greeks used to ostracise people - send them into exile for 10 years - and to decide who they were going to ostracise they would all write their votes on a piece of broken pottery. So...I thought it was interesting, although writing it just now I'm wondering if I got that right. Will have to check.) And yeah, so we were writing the form report today and reading back on it there have been good times this year, but, overall, year 12: a bad year. Something about even numbers...thank god there's no year 14.

And generally odd-numbered years have tended to be quite good (year 11), so roll on next year!

Uni confusion has also been bubbling. All I can say about that is YES, I will apply for Cambridge (although even thinking about that right now seems really presumptuous considering I haven't got my grades and probably screwed up history), and YES, I will go to the open day at Jesus College with the school next Tuesday, and NO, I don't really have an opinion on Durham, and NO, I will definitely not be applying for Leeds because the classics course at Leeds just looks indescribably rubbish. So far, those are the only conclusions that have been reached.

It's not all been doom & gloom & stress & hormones though. Honest. There have been laughs, even though they've been strange ones - like when we were all sitting on the grass outside the common room on Friday and Raaheel came along, and William called out, "Yo! Raa to the Heel!" and NOBODY ELSE found it funny except me, and I was laughing for about ten minutes straight and am STILL giggling about it three days later.

And yesterday, for Father's Day, we went to some Midsomer-Murders-esque village in Sussex and went to a cafe where we had tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, and it was all very nice and civilised. Then later I found one of those wonderful old bookshops and bought some poetry books, and then we went to the beach for a bit but it was cold and crap so we went home.

Also, I have a LOT to look forward to at the moment. First up - I am so excited about this - on Saturday Christ Church in Oxford is having a conference day thingy (that's how I've been describing it to everyone - it's a conference day thingy) on Auden, and Christopher Tower gave my school a free ticket as a prize, and Mr Amy gave the ticket to ME, so - I'm going. General reactions to this have been like: "WHY do you want to spend a day listening to people talking about, er, some poet guy?" but I can't wait. Mind you, I don't know how I'll manage to get to Oxford by 8.45am (get up at...4? 5? hmm), but still. I WILL get there.

Then there's a classics dinner on Monday. It's not really a school event - I mean, it would be, but Chadders says he couldn't be arsed to fill in a tonne of paperwork for it, so what will happen is that everyone in the sixth form who does Classical Civilization or Latin will meet up in some restaurant in Soho and then we'll just somehow bump into the classics teachers.

Then it's Boris's birthday, then Harriet will finally have the birthday party she's been postponing since her birthday in APRIL, then...then...I've definitely forgotten something. Well anyway, and then school will be over and I'll be learning Greek for a week at King's College and eeeeeeeeeee, summer!

So, not a lot has been happening, but...lots is GOING to happen. And look at me, I'm actually keeping up this blogging lark.

Hope those trains to Aberdeen aren't symbolic in any way...