Odd Moddities

Sorry blog!

2010-11-05T04:16:00.000-07:00

I realised that I've been neglecting this blog in favour of the Turnoff Dictionary. Sorry! Truth is, ranting about men is much more fun than droning on about my uneventful life; but I should update this blog more, because I want to record all the dull details of my everyday life so that I can read it back and remember all the things I did.

It's already halfway through Term 1 and not a lot has happened to be honest. I've decided to apply for an MA in Publishing, so I'm filling in my application at the moment. As much as I love my university at the moment and don't want to leave, I've decided that London is where I want to be. And it's where you have to be, really, if you want to be involved in the literary scene at all. Gosh, that sounds so pretentious. The literary scene.

When I started uni I was pretty sure I wanted to do an MA in Creative Writing after my degree, but I've decided against that now. I'm not sure it's worth it; it costs so much money, and I can't really see it getting me a proper job. I can write any time, and I don't need someone else to tell me how to do it. All that'll do is make me churn out books exactly like Ian McEwan. I have moments when I wonder whether I'm selling my soul to the corporate machine by taking the career path rather than the academic path after uni, and several people have told me I'd be capable of doing a PhD, with the implication that I'm 'wasting my talents'. But honestly, as nice as being an academic and pottering around reading old books and drinking coffee in library cafes and having intellectual discussions would be, at the end of the day it's the recession and I need a job.

And if have a proper job, and have money, I can afford to have a nice flat in London and potter around second-hand bookshops and subscribe to literary magazines and go to the theatre and buy lots and lots of coffee. I will always read literature, and try and educate myself in my own time, even if I'm not directly involved in academia. Plus, as good as I am at essays, I can't deny that they make me thoroughly miserable. I love them when they're done, but I'm not sure it's worth the gaping chasm of despair I fall into when writing them. I sit there for hours, staring at the screen, gulping down endless cups of tea and tearing my hair out, thinking that nothing in the world can make me happy until this essay is done. I don't want to do that for three more years!

So, publishing it is. But if I don't get onto the course I'm applying for, it's back to the drawing board. I'll just have to be a starving writer and live in poverty and squalor, wandering around the bleak city streets desperately searching for my next meal or a stub of pencil with which to scribble down my profound ideas, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, but without the grisly murder and all that. If that's meant to be, it's meant to be. Things will all work out for themselves in the end, right...?

The Comprehensive Turnoff Dictionary

2010-09-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Just to let you know that I am still alive, and that I have started a new blog. It's not a replacement for this blog; it's something completely different. Basically, I have a list of things guys do which would cause me to ditch a potential love-interest instantly. I was explaining this list to some of my friends, and they found it funny and told me it would make a good blog. So I started it. It's not linked to this blog, so click here to read it. I don't know how often I'll update it.

Hopefully I will post again here soon! Certainly when uni starts again.

Commuters.

2010-08-10T05:22:00.001-07:00

I have become your typical grumpy commuter.

I thought I would never be one of them - sitting on the train in deathly silence, jammed between a briefcase and a laptop, tactically avoiding the soulless gaze of the empty suit sitting opposite me. However, I have now decided that I like commuters. They know where they're going, they get there as quickly as possible, and most importantly, they know when to shut up and not annoy other people.

When I'm on a late shift, I don't get to travel to London with the lovely quiet commuters. I get to travel with the tourists and the people having a nice day out. Argh.

Firstly, the tourists. I know that, when I'm on holiday, I don't like to feel like a tourist, and I don't like the locals treating me like an idiot, so this is a very hypocritical rant. But honestly. In Victoria there are crowds and crowds of gormless suitcase-wheeling idiots who amble along in an aimless manner, stopping randomly in the middle of the pavement to gawp at things, so that I constantly crash into them. They don't understand that you have to press the button to open the doors of the train, and they stand at the side of the road waiting for the green man when there are clearly no cars (I find that one rather sweet, actually. They all stare at me in horror when I plough my way through the horde and stride across the road like a seasoned Londoner, probably thinking, 'She must have a death wish! She's crazy! Crazy! The man is red!'). I know that it's the tourists who are paying my wages. But still... Do they have to be so annoying when I'm late for work?

And then there's the Saturday and Sunday crowd. The other day, when I was coming home on a late at about 8.30, I had to sit and listen to their stupid, inane conversations. They don't seem to realise that no one else in the carriage wants to listen to their worthless speculations about whether they should have turquoise or pink towels in their bathroom. First I was sat next to two thirty-something women and had to listen to this: "Yeah, so my bathroom is totally lush. It's all brown tiles and floor, so, so lush, just totally lush... I was going to get some lush vanilla candles in there and make it all chocolate indulgence in my bathroom, you know, totally gorgeous." I couldn't put up with it any longer, so I moved to a quiet carriage where I could read Gulliver's Travels in peace. But then, a bunch on teenagers (I can offically talk about teenagers in a disdainful, patronising tone now I'm twenty) got on and I had to listen to this: "Yeah, I hate Saffron, everyone totally hates her, she's such a slag, she slept with Jenny's boyfriend... Did you know that she's preggers now? Yeah, she doesn't know who the father is, she should go on the Jeremy Kyle show and get a free DNA test, right? LOL!"

Gaarrggghhhhhhh. I have become so grumpy. Also, what kind of name is Saffron? Did her parents think it sounded vaguely posh? Do they even know what Saffron is? Is her brother called caviar?

Okay, rant over. Sorry.

A scene from the hospital

2010-08-03T12:02:00.000-07:00

So I went to the hospital today (after over a month of waiting for the appointment) and it was very weird.

Doctor: Hello. So basically, you are too thin.
Me: Oh.
Doctor: What is your diet like?
Me: Well, I don't really each much meat, and I never snack.
Doctor: Hm, yes. Well you may need to eat a bit more.
Me: How much weight do I need to put on?
Doctor: Let's weigh you, shall we?

*We go into the corridor to weigh me*

Doctor: Hm, looks like you need to put on three-quarters of a stone.
Me: Right. What should I eat?
Doctor: Cake. Oh, and alcohol is full of calories. Drink lots of alcohol. Especially Baileys. There are loads of calories in Baileys.
Me: Mmm, I love Baileys!

*more senior doctor walks past*

Doctor 2: What's that about Baileys? I love Baileys.
Doctor 1: She needs to put on weight.
Doctor 2: Ah, yes, good idea. Drink lots and lots of alcohol. As much as you like, as long as you don't drive afterwards, okay?
Me: Okay.
Doctor 1: I wish someone would tell me I needed to drink more Baileys.
Doctor 2: I could do with some Baileys right now.

*Random nurse overhears*

Nurse: Oooh, Baileys on ice!
Me: Mmmmm, yes, lovely!
Doctor 1: Mmmmm!
Doctor 2: Baileys!
Me: I'll definitely do that.
Doctors 1 & 2: *nodding enthusiastically* Yes, yes. Baileys.
Me: Right, well. Thanks for that.
Doctors 1 & 2 & nurse: Bye now! Don't forget to drink some Baileys!
Me: Bye!

*I turn around to see everyone in the waiting room glaring at me*

So that is how I was medically advised to start binge drinking. Life is good. I think I might go and have a nice little Baileys on ice now...

This is no Bridget Jones... well I kind of wish it was.

2010-07-16T11:56:00.001-07:00

I have a guilty secret. Yes, I love my fancy literature, but whenever I'm feeling a bit depressed about my life I read Bridget Jones' Diary. Sometimes a trashy read is exactly what you need to cheer yourself up. I think I feel an affinity with the novel because every time I read it, I am struck by how disturbingly similar my life is to Bridget's. Here are the ways in which we are similar:

She is very, very middle-class. When she talks about her "hideous middle-class singleton guilt experience" in the supermarket when she goes shopping for a dinner party, it reminds me of the time I almost had a break-down in Asda because everyone else was buying Asda Smartprice Bacon Flavour Cardboard Pieces and Asda Frozen Deep-Fried Sheep Intestine Burgers and I was buying asparagus tips and wensleydale with cranberries. I believe I wrote about that particular traumatic experience on this blog, actually.
She works in publishing. All right, I don't work in publishing yet, but according to my incredibly sketchy life plan - which takes up half a page of my pocket book and was written in a sleep-induced haze when I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking GAAHWHATAMIGONNADOWITHMYLIFE - that's where I'll be in a couple of years time. Bad: she sees her job as a 'dead-end' job and hates it. Good: she has a degree in English from Bangor and a poor grasp of spelling/grammar, and yet still managed to get into the industry. This bodes well for me.
She is terrified of growing old alone and then being discovered in her apartment weeks after her death being eaten by alsations. Admittedly she is thirty and has more reason to be worried about not finding someone than I do, as I am still twenty and young and sprightly. However, I really can't see myself ever finding anyone who meets my impossibly high standards. At least I have managed to co-erce one of my guy friends into the old 'if neither of us is married by forty...' pact. Well, when I say co-erce, I have decided it is going to happen, but I haven't exactly told him this yet. I'm sure he won't mind.
She is an obsessive calorie-counter. I'm not proud of this. Before uni I ate as much as I liked and never worried about it, and because I was still growing I never got fat. When I first came to uni I decided that no-one liked me, I didn't fit in anywhere, and I wasn't clever enough to be there. I think everyone has these worries at some point, but everyone responds to them differently; I responded by eating. I remember one shameful day when I ate an entire Christmas log for lunch, and then sat there on the verge of throwing up thinking this has got to stop. So then I went the opposite way. Once you start counting calories you can never stop, because even if you stop caring about your weight (which I have) you know how many calories are in everything. Please, never start doing it. Anyway, there are some days when Bridget eats about 5,000 calories... that always makes me feel better about myself.
She is socially awkward and always makes an idiot of herself. And to emphasize this point, I just wrote 'myself' instead of 'herself'. I always say weird things to fill silences, and am constantly tripping over in public, spilling things all over myself, walking into trees and falling down stairs. Honestly, what am I like? Guffaw.

There are differences between us. She likes smoking and drinking, both of which I hate, and she watches trashy TV instead of reading books. However, most importantly, she is a fictional character and I am not (I hope). My life would make an awful novel or movie, because nothing interesting ever happens to me. Reading Bridget Jones cheers me up because even though she fails almost all of her New Year resolutions she's still happy, and she gets her Mr Darcy in the end. It's unashamed wish-fulfilment, of course, and promotes the idea that you need to be in a relationship to be happy. But I'm not going to go on about that, because everyone knows it, and no one really cares. Sometimes, a bit of escapism is nice.

And now I've had my little jaunt to the land of escapism, I'll return to the gritty, depressing WWII literature I'm reading for next year. Which I love just as much.

(Oh, and mouse update: I forgot to take a photo, but I set her free under the shed because I think that's where the mice live. She was dragging one of her legs and kept falling over, but hopefully she made it home. I couldn't have kept her forever...)

Mice!

2010-07-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

Today started off quite well. Except that Jack inexplicably woke me up at 8am to ask if I wanted a cup of tea, which was nice, except that I was fast asleep and therefore quite obviously not in need of a hot beverage of any kind. I said yes anyway. Then, since I was up, I decided to go for a run, which was very good of me.

When I came back the cat was in the garden, and he had that bulgy-cheeked look that immediately told me he had some kind of creature stuffed into his mouth. When he saw me he spat out a poor little baby mouse onto the lawn... It was still alive and trembling. You know how quite a lot of people scream and jump on top of the nearest piece of furniture when they see mice? I think those people are weird. Seriously, I love mice. They're adorable.

So I put the cat under house arrest and then attended to the little mouse. It didn't look seriously injured but it was in shock and lying on its side shaking. I put her (I decided it was a girl) in a plastic box with some leaves and moss, crumbled up bread and a bottle cap full of water and she's been there ever since. At first she just lay there but now she's up on all fours nibbling at the bread and washing herself in the water...nawwwwwwww. I want to keep her forever and ever but I suppose it's best to let her back into the wild eventually so that she can get chewed up by another cat. I might take some photos before I do so. Last time I checked she had burrowed under the moss and was having a little nap. How can anyone think mice are disgusting?

Actually, as well as loving mice, I really like snakes. I'd like to own a snake but then I'd have to feed it dead mice which would be a bit of a contradiction. Mice and snakes and bats... It's a good thing I'm not living in the seventeenth-century or someone would probably have accused me of being a witch by now.

When I came back inside after rehabilitating the mouse, I found that the cat had kindly left half of its brother or sister on the dining room carpet. The top half. I've yet to find the legs but I'll keep you posted on that one.

Oh, and that I went upstairs and the cat had also thrown up all over the landing carpet. The cat is not in my good books. He's currently shut in the living room so that he doesn't continue to traipse around the house depositing vomit and bits of dead critters in random locations at will.

And that is how today went from being a Good Day to a Not Very Good Day. However, I have saved a little mousey life so am feeling like quite a saint at the moment. I think I'll reward myself with another cup of tea. And a biscuit.

Back from the void...

2010-07-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

Oh my! I haven't been on here in a while, have I? I can't really be bothered to write a long entry, but I will summarize what has happened in my life since I last posted.

Did lots of revision. Had a slight nervous breakdown and went home. Emailed my tutor, to the effect that everyone in the English department will now probably think I am mentally unstable, talk to me in a soft voice and look at me with big sad eyes when they walk past me in the corridor. Got medication, felt better. Returned to uni.
Did more revision. Because of lack of sunlight/social interaction, started to resemble Gollum, hunched over my desk in a dimly-lit room muttering things about Wordsworth to myself.
Did exams. Floated up to exam hall on cloud of bliss after imbibing a little too much Rescue Remedy/Kalms tablets.
Finished exams. Went on three-person bar crawl but only ended up making it to two bars. Got IDed seven times due to looking about twelve. Went out clubbing, had barbecues, lazed about watching television and generally doing nothing.
Went home because I have to work. I have to commute to London five days a week, which means getting up about 6. Feel busy and important sitting on the train, dressed in my smart clothes, amongst dead-eyed suits staring at newspapers in despair. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about my work on here, but I'm sure it's safe to say it's actually quite fun and that the free three-course lunch every day makes it more than worth the effort.
Got my exam results in a congratulatory letter from the head of the English department: a first-class honours in every module and 77.5% overall. This was the 'third-highest average of students of my profile in my yeargroup'. Not sure what that means, but I'm quite happy to interpret it as 'third best student in the year' - at least that's what I'm telling people! Anyway... That made it all worth the stress. Hard work pays off, kids.

So currently I have little money and even less time, but I am happy and having fun, and enjoying the amazing weather and carefree summer vibe. I've even been writing a bit. I'm considering beginning to publish my new story on FP, since I'm thirteen chapters in now, and if it turns out the plot doesn't work I will just kill off all of the characters in a spectacularly violent finale and end it all.

Oh, and I've stopped writing lists.

I don't need no good advice.

2010-05-27T13:46:00.001-07:00

It's a bit strange: people keep giving me advice that most people would love to hear, and yet I am incapable of following it.

My mother: "You need to do less revision and have more fun!"

My doctor: "You need to eat for England and put on half a stone!"

I know what you're thinking: "Are you crazy? You've just been given a legitimate reason to slack off and eat like a pig!" So why can't I do it? The answer is that I can't help it. I'm a neurotic freak. I can't have fun with my friends if I think there is work I should be doing, and I have an irrational fear of putting on even a single pound. I suppose I just like to control things.

We often say that our gang at university is a bit like the cast of a sitcom, I think mainly because there have been so many love triangles and dramas amongst us. In this sitcom I would be the 'the neurotic one'. Before I go to sleep I often make a list of things I need to do the next day, to stop myself from worrying about them. These lists often start: "8am: wake up. 8:15am: eat breakfast."

Don't laugh. The great thing about starting your to-do list with "wake up" is that, unless you die in your sleep, you will always manage to complete the first thing on your list. After that you are unstoppable.

Anyway, moving on. Yesterday I was doing some revision for my Seventeenth Century exam, and I stumbled upon a passing reference to a woman in an article I was reading. Although she was only briefly mentioned, this mention leapt off the page at me. She seemed like an incredibly fascinating person, and her life story was both very cool and very, very tragic. It stuck me that she could be the main character in a really good novel. I tried to find out some more about her, but there's barely anything on her. She's an enigma. Sadly, I don't think I'll ever be brave enough to be able to write a historical novel: not only would I find it near impossible to replicate seventeenth-century dress, manners, culture, speech etc. without being laughed at by historians everywhere, I just can't get into the head of an overweight fifty-year-old widow (for that is what she was). So the novel will never be written. But I'm not going to tell you anything more about the woman, just in case I do decide to tackle her story one day. I don't want you to steal my amazing idea, you scoundrel you.

I have completely gone off the idea I had for The Novel. It had absolutely no substance. I'm thinking of sticking to what I know and writing a novel about a university student, set entirely in the university library. At night. Sounds dull, doesn't it? I was thinking of making it kind of supernatural-psychological-magic-realism...y. With lots of sarcasm and humour, since that seems to be my trademark. I don't know though. The trouble is that once you publish a certain kind of novel, you have to be consistent. That's why I couldn't write a historical novel. I might be able to get away with it once... But then I'd have to do it again, and again! I can't keep up the sham of knowing stuff about history for that long! I know jack all about history!

One last thing. In times of darkness and revision, a little comic relief is always helpful. I decided to read through some of my very first novel, which I wrote when I was about thirteen. It's your typical "adventurer gathers together party of mages, warriors and rogues and travels across generic medieval fantasy land to defeat evil overlord" story. My heroine meets a Hot Guy, finds out Hot Guy is actually the son of Evil Overlord, and then defeats them both using the powers of LOVE and FRIENDSHIP, which are harnessed by (I kid you not) holding hands with her friends Captain Planet style. I practically wet myself laughing. Here's an extract so that you can wet yourself laughing too.

The man continued. “We both have power…you and me…think what a team we would make! We could conquer – we could control everything! You and me, and our powers…think…”

I rolled my eyes. “Please, have some self-respect.”

He said nothing, only carried on staring, pleading. I pointed a finger at him, and he flinched as if I had hit him with a physical force. “Take hold of my arm,” I instructed to the girls around me, and felt four hands clamp around my outstretched arm without question. I took a deep breath and grinned as the magic exploded inside of me, and I felt this tingling energy rush from them to me through their hands, where it was building up inside of me, simmering and burning like a star, getting greater and greater, overwhelming. I began to deliver my final speech.

“You are nothing but evil, greedy and power-hungry; this house is far more than your vile family ever deserved for the things you did. Yet instead of accepting this great kindness, you continued in your evil, ungrateful, destructive ways, lying and cheating and deceiving innocent people to help you achieve your selfish goal – but of course, you will not achieve it. I suppose you thought you were very clever, preying on young girls and risking their lives so that they could do your dirty work for you, but unfortunately for you you picked entirely the wrong girl. I would never be on your side, or help you, or even spare your pathetic life; the only thing you deserve is to be destroyed. You will be missed by no one.”

From the passionate terror welling up in his eyes, I could tell that he could feel the intense force of magic building up inside of me as well. He scrambled back up the steps, keeling over his throne, clammy hands gripping onto the wood and he begged with me silently and audibly to save him.

“Please…” he began an a quivering voice, “my son is a Protector, and I am…you can’t…”

It was time. “Goodbye,” I said, and then the power erupted.

With a mighty roar like a thousand raging thunderstorms colliding in the sky the blinding light surged from every inch of every one of us and exploded from my hand, not letting a single corner of the room escape from its burning fury, hitting everything in its path with the force of a gale or a crashing tidal wave, formidable bursts of magic coming again and again, tearing through everything in the room with unbridled wrath. I heard the man’s short but agonizing wail through the ear splitting roar as the magic blew him to millions of pieces, and I felt the power slice into the ceiling of the house and tear apart the rafters with a groan, crashing through into the sky above, even penetrating the very clouds. This destructive power was flooding into me through my feet, and it was as if I was sucking it from every inch of the room and then unleashing it through my hand as a golden onslaught that was a million times more devastating. Though I could not see through the overwhelming light I knew that the house was collapsing around us, and I felt splinters rain down on my head, heard china and glass shattering, walls crumbling, wood bursting into flames – crackling and crashing and splintering and groaning and screaming filled my head, but I knew that there was nothing to be scared of as we continued to blast the evil place, purging it of everything worth destroying.

Ahaha. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Ha.

And if I am now a competent writer (I like to think I am - I hope that's not arrogant) then there's hope for anyone!

The many ways to avoid revision.

2010-05-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

It's really amazing, the things you can find to occupy yourself with when you have lots and lots of revision to do. These things include:

Going out to M&S to buy 'revision fuel'. Returning with half the store. Inviting people around to eat all the food you have bought, since it is far too much for one person.
Going out for a 'quick coffee' with a friend. Returning with shimmery hairspray, tanning moisturiser, bathroom cleaning products and 24 felt tip pens in various colours (why?).
Watching an awful movie called 'Ninja Assassin' which involves every Chinese/Japanese stereotype you can possibly think of, all rolled together with some awful scriptwriting and industrial amounts of red poster paint ("blood").
Actually talking to your parents.
Actually doing the washing up.
Bouncing on your bed with your housemates and attempting to take photos of yourself striking poses mid-air.
Baking a GIANT cake that is the exact same size, and decorated exactly the same, as your Romanticism anthology. This included painting on the front cover in food colouring, and took us about 3 and a half hours. Our justification was that it was for a friend's birthday. We didn't even get to eat it though, because when we took it to our friend's party in a local bar, they didn't have any knives to cut it with. "We're not allowed to keep knives behind the bar," the girl told us. "If you want to bring your own in though, that's fine." You what?
Taking up running. Yes, I have become a runner. My first run was a bit of a fail: I went out and returned home an hour later sweaty and exhausted, having pulled every muscle in my body, wearing no shoes and socks covered in blood. No, I didn't get my shoes torn viciously from my feet by a pack of enraged foxes. The shoes cut into my feet, so that I had to take them off and limp home. I also think I swallowed several flies. However, I went out and purchased a pair of disturbingly expensive Nike running shoes, which means that I now have to go running to offset the cost.
Designing an elaborate door sign with my name on it, in swirly letters with chalk pastels and gold leaf, then deciding after two hours that it's rubbish and throwing it away.
Fake tanning. It can take a surprising amount of time.
Shoe shopping. Enough said.

This is all I can think of for now. However, I'm sure over the next few days I will discover many new forms of procrastination, so I'll be sure to fill you in.

Might I add that revision is killing me? At least with an essay you have a word count to work towards, and once you've hit it and polished your essay to a good standard you can relax. With revision there is always more you can do. And it's not even interesting, because it's stuff you have learnt already and just forgot. I love Great Expectations but reading it for the third time, Mr Dickens' jokes are starting to get a little tired.

I think my cat has noticed my distress, and this morning tried to console me by bringing me a dead bird and sneezing its feathers all over the dining room. It was not appreciated.

Odd Moddities

2010-05-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Two of my housemates are now going out. It takes a bit of getting used to. We have gone from being the Single House to the Half Single House. Once upon a time, all eight of the people in our little gang were single. And then there were three... I am feeling so Bridget Jones right now. The other night the three of us got together to bemoan our sad, lonely, single lives. A meeting of the lonely hearts club. I am going to start watching weepy romantic movies in bed while stuffing my face with chocolate and crying quietly to myself. The last time I went on a date was three years ago.
The other night I had a dream that I was the doctor on Embarrassing Bodies. My patient was a girl who was pregnant with a crocodile. I helped her deliver it. I am concerned for my mental health.
I was on the bus the other day when one of my lecturers got on and sat in front of me. The other day he gave us an amazing lecture, which inspired me to write an essay on the topic he was talking about. He's in his twenties, is very tall and very thin, like...a massive toothbrush, has his hair gelled back, and wears giant spectacles, a brown velvet jacket and tweedy trousers that are too short for his sticky legs. He was reading a book and looked nervous. I realised I had a slight crush on him. I've always gone for geeks (well, more geek chic than actual geek) but you know the situation's desperate when you will transfer your need for affection onto almost anyone.
I have completed my essays a week before the deadline, after spending all easter stressing about them, and am now so bored that I find myself voluntarily doing my housemates' washing up. The other day I made spaghetti bolognese from scratch. I am watching daytime repeats of Country House Rescue.
Help me.

John Smith. No, not a pint of bitter.

2010-04-30T03:33:00.001-07:00

I have been musically enlightened.

Last night I went to the most incredible gig. His name's John Smith - ordinary name, extraordinary performer - and I'd never heard of him before but my friend invited me because she thought I might like him. He's a folk singer and he makes noises with a guitar I didn't think were possible. I sat throughout the whole gig in a kind of trance, practically drooling at how amazing he was. At some point I think I fell in love.

Go here: http://www.myspace.com/johnacousticsmith. Listen. Enjoy. And watch the video of him playing 'Winter', because he manages to play the guitar on his lap like it's a drum while still playing chords and I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW.

I met him afterwards and bought a CD from him which he signed for me. "Thanks Emma. All love, John Smith X." At least that's what I think it says. I can't really read his writing. He asked me if that was Emma spelt in the traditional sense, and I said yes, I don't know how else you'd spell it, and he said no, nor did he. I'm in love. My friend told him that after watching him perform she didn't think she could ever touch her guitar again, to which he purred, "No, no, touch it more..." Sigh.

In other news, Slightly Foxed came today! It's a quarterly full of book reviews, but it doesn't try to be high-brow or too intellectual; it's friendly and personalised and such. I only bought one trial copy but I received two, because the Winter issue got lost in the post so they sent me the Winter and Spring issues to make up for it. It's lovely, like a little book printed on thick creamy paper with a pretty illustrated front cover, and it's really readable. I've been reading all morning. I love getting packages at uni - it makes me feel somehow important. I want to take out a subscription to Slightly Foxed but I can't really afford it, especially since I'm now going to go blow my little remaining money on another John Smith CD. Totally worth it though.

All my essays are done! I'm quite glad I spent almost all of Easter having mental breakdowns over them, because at least I got to have mental breakdowns in the comfort of home with my mum making me constant cups of tea to cheer me up. Now, while everyone else has mental breakdowns at uni, I am going to concerts and reading quarterlies and lazing around doing basically nothing. Although I should probably start revising soon.

Book reviews!

2010-04-27T03:19:00.001-07:00

I'm back at uni! I was dreading it slightly, because I got settled into such a comfortable routine at home, but now I'm here I'm so glad to be back. When I first came through the door two of my housemates were slouching around in bed watching pointless Youtube videos, and I ran in and jumped on top of them, and it was just as if we'd never been apart for five weeks. Once I'd unpacked everything I realised how lovely my room is; it's far bigger than my room at home, and now the weather is improving it's actually warm in here and I don't have to wear fingerless gloves, two hoodies, a dressing gown and a scarf when trying to work.

It's strange to be back because my timetable is practically empty. There are revision lectures and seminars, but they're optional and only run for two weeks, and once I'm done with them I'll have absolutely jack all to do. I'll have to take my education into my own hands. I plan on spending all day in the library revising, but I don't know how long that resolution will last, because the library sucks your soul out of you. Honestly. Grey carpets, grey walls, grey ceilings, garish strip lighting, heating always on a bit too high - it's designed to make you lose the will to live. But I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Anyway, onto the point of this post... In my campaign to be more interesting, I am going to write some book reviews! Three book reviews, in fact, because my mum bought some books on the 3 for 2 offer in Waterstones and I got so bored that I read them all in about two weeks.

Brooklyn - Colm Toibin

This is a novel set in the 1950s about an Irish girl, Eilis, who moves to Brooklyn to find work. She finds work in a big department store and lodges in a house with several other Irish girls. At first she hates the big city and suffers from extreme home-sickness, but she slowly adapts to the glamour of the city, becomes more and more sophisticated, and meets a boy called Tony, whom she falls in love with. Then her sister dies (bit of a spoiler there, sorry) and she has to go back to Ireland for a few weeks to comfort her mother. Before she goes, Tony encourages her to secretly marry him to prove that she intends to return, and she does. At home, however, she meets and begins to fall for another man she knew when she was younger. She receives a good offer of a bookkeeping job, and realises that her life in Ireland would be happier than her life in Brooklyn: if she returns to Tony she will become a housewife and will never be an independent woman. Eventually, she accepts that she does not love Tony anymore. Will she return to Brooklyn out of duty to her husband, or remain in Ireland where she will be happy?

At first I thought the book was pretty dull - Toibin has a really simplistic, understated writing style. "She went upstairs to make a cup of tea, then she went to bed and revised for her exams. She took the exams two weeks later and they went well." That kind of thing. That's not a quote, because I left the book at home. There is very little description of what people or places look like, unless it's a simple inventory of a room or the colour of a dress someone is wearing. While he tells us Eilis' thoughts - her narrative voice is very naive and childish - we rarely get any strong displays of emotion from her. I was especially taken aback when she hears that her sister has died, and she barely has any reaction at all. Toibin says that she cried, but it is all skimmed over very quickly. I appreciated that he was trying to avoid melodrama, but it seemed like he had taken the opposite extreme.

However, as I got further into the book I realised that the understated prose is perhaps the best thing about it. This sounds stupid, but I realised this when I was reading the book at about ten in the evening and decided I wanted a cup of tea. "But if I drink tea now won't it stop me from sleeping?" I wondered. Then I thought, "No, it's fine, because Eilis always drinks tea in the evenings." I'd started to think about her like she was a real person. That's when it hit me that Toibin had slowly, craftily tricked me into completely sympathising with his character. She does things which are utterly idiotic, like allowing herself to fall for the boy back in Ireland - if I were her I would have kept a mile away as soon as I started to feel something - but at the end of the book you find yourself really feeling for her. So overall, I'd recommend this book. I'd class it as a light read, but it does remain with you after you've read the last page.

Nocturnes - Kazuo Ishiguro

After my rant about how much I love The Remains of the Day, I was really keen to read the new Kazuo Ishiguro book. Nocturnes is a collection of five short stories, all based around the themes of music and lost love. 'Bittersweet', 'melancholic', 'nostalgic' are all words I have heard used to describe it. All the stories are good, but none of them touched me in the way The Remains of the Day did. Ishiguro uses a very casual, familiar style of narrative, as if the narrator knows you and is chatting to you, telling you a funny story. And most of the stories are quite funny, at the same time as actually being very sad and poignant.

My favourite was "Come Rain or Come Shine", in which a man goes to stay with some old university friends who are having marriage troubles. It transpires that the husband, Charlie, has only invited the narrator, Ray, to stay because he wants his wife, Emily to see how much worse off she could have done. Emily and Charlie both see Ray as a total failure because he is single, has no career prospects and has not settled down yet. They make him feel like a pathetic charity case despite the fact he actually seems happier than they do. Alone in their house, Ray reads Emily's personal appointment book and finds that she has written some pretty nasty things about him. He tears the page in anger, then realises he has to cover up this mistake. He impersonates a dog, pretending it has destroyed the house, knocking over vases and tearing Emily's book in the process. Emily walks in the find him crawling around on all fours, boiling a shoe in a saucepan to try and recreate the smell of dog, and thinks he's on the verge of a mental breakdown. It's absurd, and probably quite unrealistic, but funny all the same. It's the sort of thing that would happen in one of my stories.

Several of the stories overlap, suggesting that the world is full of bittersweet songs and stories such as the ones we encounter in the book. Some of them seemed too similar for my liking, though there are subtle differences which I am probably too unsophisticated to pick up on. Overall, the stories were sweet and not overly sentimental, but I wasn't blown away by them. I've never been a fan of short stories, to be honest; I can't get involved in them the way I can with a novel because they're over too quickly.

One Day - David Nicholls

My friend thought I'd like this book because of its relevance to our situation in life. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation - she has a first-class degree, he has an average degree, and they both have no idea where they are going in their lives. The book then follows them over the next twenty years of their lives, charting the ups and downs of their friendship, their relationships, and their careers. They're clearly meant for each other, but of course they don't get together until the end of the book.

At first I thought Emma was disturbingly like me, and not just in the name. She graduates with an English degree, she's quirky and arty, she wants to work in publishing. The reason this is disturbing is because she ends up with a dead-end job in a disgusting restaurant and a grotty flat despite her brilliant degree. But I stopped sympathising with her after a while, because I don't think she's a convincing character, and neither is Dexter. They don't speak like real people. The amount of totally unrealistic, far-too-witty banter exchanged between them is up there with Gilmore Girls. And I hate Gilmore Girls.

The whole novel is pretty predictable in general too. Emma initially goes nowhere with her career, while Dexter travels the world and then gets a job in television, becomes a TV presenter and earns heaps of money. But then we realise that actually, Dexter isn't happier than Emma because he has no moral fibre and he's addicted to alcohol and drugs and his flashy lifestyle is nothing more than an empty shell. And then he spirals out of control, while Emma settles down and becomes a teacher and gets a boyfriend and it's all just so obviously trying to shove the question of what does success really mean in my face. And they go through all these failed relationships and the whole thing is so tediously will-they-won't-they-will-they-oh-they-almost-did-no-not-quite-oh look they did after all. And then they get married. And then Emma dies. That's not exactly a spoiler because I saw it coming for miles off. Of course, once they finally get together one of them has to die. That's what has to happen in overly sentimental books... Well, she got squashed by a taxi but at least she finally found love. Nawwww.

So I didn't really like it. Twenty years is a long time, it dragged on and on, and about ten years in I already wanted to punch both of the characters in the face. Dexter's essentially an arrogant pig and though Nicholls tries to give him all these redeeming 'but he's a good guy underneath!' features, I'm not convinced. Emma is facetiously self-critical (she clearly loves herself) and can't conduct a single conversation without hitting someone in the face with an irony sledgehammer. So I felt absolutely nothing when Emma died and Dexter (surprise surprise) got back on the bottle. But then I can be quite aggressive to fictional characters. I already want to kill half the cast of Neighbours.

Apologies for length; maybe I shouldn't have tried to cram three book reviews into one post. But I have nothing to structure my life anymore, and waffling away on this blog is probably the only thing that's keeping me (debatably) sane.

Good Day!

2010-04-23T05:25:00.001-07:00

Today is a Good Day!

Aside from the obvious fact it's Friday, here are the reasons why today is a Good Day:

It is St George's Day, when all the good folk of England run around slaying dragons in tribute to our glorious patron saint. They just played Jerusalem on Classic FM. Everyone loves Jerusalem. It's where William Blake goes all patriotic and decides that England is a "green and pleasant land", and everyone ignores the existence of "London" and the fact that William Blake is clearly a miserable old sod who hates London and everyone in it.

It is also Shakespeare's birthday. Well, we don't really know when Shakespeare's birthday was but today is our best guess. So happy birthday, Will! (We'll ignore the fact it's also Shakespeare's death day, as that would make today a Bad Day, which it is decidedly not.)

The weather is GORGEOUS and I am wearing a summer dress! Despite the fact I have not gone outside. But my window is wide open, and next door's kids appear to have disappeared somewhere which is brilliant because I no longer have to listen to them screaming "MUMMY LOOK AT ME ON THE TRAMPOLINE I CAN BOUNCE WHEEEEEEEEEEE BOUNCE BOUNCE BOUNCE ARGH WAHHHHHHHHHHH MUMMY I SCRAPED MY KNEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!" I might climb out onto the roof later and bask in the sun. Like a lizard.

Essay progress is finally being made. Words are being written. Samuel Pordage and John Dryden and I are getting it on, in a big literary threesome, in which many idea-babies are being conceived. Okay, that was a really weird and perverse metaphor, and I am going to take this opportunity to sign off because Neighbours is about to start anyway.

But to conclude, today is a GOOD DAY, and we should all be happy. The violence of my extreme mood swings does concern me sometimes!

Middle C

2010-04-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

One afternoon a week we would walk in single file to Mrs Brady's room. We had to walk down a thin corridor with windows either side and it felt like a tunnel into another world, one of fun and music, of Mrs Brady's piano and her pink flannel tracksuit and the battered glockenspiels she sometimes let us bang away on. Mrs Brady sung everything she spoke in a lovely high voice like an old lady in church: "Are you reaaaddddyyy... And, one two threeeeee..."

We all saw her as a bit of a joke when it came to our primary education but she didn't seem to mind.

Once we all queued in front of her piano and took turns to find middle C. "If you can find middle C you can work out where all the other keys are on the keyboard," she told us.

I found it easily. Other kids would stick out a finger and plonk it at random on a key somewhere near the middle of the keyboard and Mrs Brady would sing, "Not quite, try agaaaiiinnnn..."

She got old and had to retire. There was a rumour going round that she had popped her clogs and was trapped inside the old Triangle of Silence for good, but I saw her coming out of Budgens once - I knew it was her from the pink flannel tracksuit - so I know that's not true. Brady will never die.

Next time I see her I might tell her I can't find middle C anymore. She'll be surprised: "But you were so musical! All those keyboard lessons!"

I'll explain that's not what I meant; I meant I've lost that certain point in life from which everything else makes sense - the key you hit and it allows you to stumble around something that vaguely resembles a tune. "I'm all out of tune, Miss," I'll say.

Do you reckon she'll understand?

Dear everyone, I promise to be more interesting from now on. Love Emma.

2010-04-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

I would like to apologise.

Lots of my friends have blogs, and reading through them all, they're all interesting or funny or opinionated or just something engaging. No wonder no one reads this thing. It's just struck me how mind-numbingly boring my own blog is. It sounds like an even more mundane equivalent of the Mein Austausch booklet they gave me to fill in when I went on the German exchange in Year Nine. "Describe what you did on MONDAY! What did you have for DINNER?"

No one cares. No one cares that I had a coffee in Covent Garden. It's dull, dull, dull. And no one cares about my essays at all. I don't even care about them so why do I always go on about them? Perhaps I think it makes me sound clever, but really I'm not that clever at all.

So I'm sorry, and I am going to try and be interesting and funny and give my opinion on things more often in the future. It's weird. I think in my writing I'm quite good at being funny and opinionated. At least that's what people tell me. But in real life I have no personality. It's like my writing sucks it all out of me or something, or that I'm incredibly repressed and I can only express myself through fictional situations.

Anyway, to apologise for the undue boredom I have caused you, here is a picture of the pony I made friends with in the New Forest. Naaaaaaaaaaw.

My week off.

2010-04-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

I decided to take a week off from essays. Well, Monday I did some half-hearted research towards my third essay. It's kind of interesting. I'm writing about this seventeenth century poem that very few people have written on before, and since I've got no one telling me what it's about, I have to play literary detective. The poem is a political allegory and I'm trying to work out which real-life people the characters represent, as well as come up with my own interpretation of it. This is problematic for me as in all honesty, I'm a bit of a charlatan. I'm very good at parroting clever-sounding things I've read in my essays and getting high marks, but I have no ideas of my own at all. That's probably what this essay is trying to catch people out on.

Tuesday I had to go and have some blood tests. It was fine, even though she took quite a lot of blood. Despite being squeamish I've always been good with needles. One of my proudest moments in life was being the only girl in my entire form not to cry when we had the BCG injection in Year 9. After that I saw my good friend Pip. We went out for dinner, stuffed our faces, then went and saw The Blind Side. It was a sweet movie, despite obviously trying really hard to be sweet and inspirational. There was a man sitting on his own next to me, which I always find a bit sad, though I don't know why... Why shouldn't you go see a movie on your own if you're bored and just want to get out the house?

Wednesday Lauren and Tom (yes, I'm using names now - whether they're the right names or not you shall never know) and I drove out to Windsor. We had lunch, and wandered around looking in quaint shops, and then decided to get a guided tour of Eton. That's a very fancy boys' school where people like Princes William and Harry went, in case you didn't know. It was interesting, and made me very glad I wasn't born upper-class and rich and a boy, because attending Eton sounds awful. I saw the place where Shelley carved his name on the wall (at least I think Shelley did it himself - they get professionals to carve the names now but this was in individual writing). It makes me wonder if people will be looking at my graffiti in hundreds of years time. I remember when I first came to secondary school, I wrote, "I am a crumb. I am a speck of dust" on the wall behind the stage in the main hall. I'm really not sure why I wrote this... I think it's because I felt so small and insignificant. I remember this older boy came up to me when I was writing it and said, "Excuse me, you're not allowed to write on the walls," and I just looked at him like he was a total moron and carried on, and he walked off. That was such an un-me thing to do. I don't know why I'm telling you this.

Thursday I just slobbed around the house. Friday I went to visit my friend in London. Another friend and I chilled at hers for a bit and had lunch, then we went out to Covent Garden and had a coffee and wandered around just taking in the atmopshere. Then we randomly found cheap tickets to see Chicago and so went and saw that. It was all totally spontaneous, which doesn't happen very often as I am a planning freak, but I love it. Afterwards we went back to hers and chatted and moaned about boys and giggled a lot. It was just like being fifteen and at a sleepover again.

Next morning (yesterday) I crept out the house before they'd got up, because I had to get back home to go to a picnic. It was a glorious day on Saturday - not a cloud in the sky. I hung out on a field with a random collection of friends from churches I have been to, and we listened to music and just basked in the sun. There were so many thirteen-year-olds out and about, with their backcombed hair and leggings and Hollister tops and Ugg boots, and it made me realise how old I really am. I am so old. There were a group of them smoking and I was like, "How old are they to be smoking?" in this outraged voice, and then realised that I sounded like a pensioner. They did look about thirteen though. In the evening my parents had some friends round for dinner. Usually when this happens my brother and I retreat to our rooms with beans on toast and only emerge for the obligatory five minute "So how's uni?" conversation, but this time we had dinner with them. This is another sign that I am getting old.

Today was another beautiful day, so we drove down to the New Forest. I love it there because you can hang out with the wild horses, though I always think they're coming to maul me every time they get too close. There was a friendly white one I made friends with and managed to stroke. We had lunch by the sea, then went on a walk and had ice-cream. I might even have caught the sun a bit! I'm far too pale to tan so I just burn or get freckles.

I've taken loads of photos of all these things. Maybe I'll share some here, though I doubt anyone cares. Anyway, that was my week off. Tomorrow I'm back on the essay. Woop.

Post-post-postmodernism?

2010-04-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

Since my last post, I have discovered a strategy for getting my essay done. The strategy is to man up, stop whining like a pathetic little emo kid and just do some work.

So I have wound up writing my current essay about the postmodernist elements of the two novels I am studying. However, this has left me very confused. This is why I am confused:

No one really talks about postmodernism anymore unless they're being ironic. Which would make us post-postmodern.
I'm not sure it's even cool to be ironic about postmodernism anymore, because postmodernism is so clearly outdated that anyone who is ironic about it is just stating the obvious. Which makes us... Post-post-postmodern?
I don't have the faintest idea what postmodernism is. And I'm not sure anyone else knows or cares either, because isn't the point of postmodernism that you can't attach a single definition to anything, including postmodernism? In which case you can't define postmodernism as saying that you can't define anything, in which case I am now going to smash my face against the keyboard.

Sometimes I wonder whether my degree isn't just one big joke?

Anger management?

2010-04-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

Today is a beautiful spring day. It's crisp and bright; my window is open, and the sunlight is shining through the glass and warming my back. Our neighbours' grandchildren are in their garden, playing and laughing. Sounds of freedom. I am sitting at my desk, working on an essay. As I have been doing almost every day for the past two and a half weeks.

I'm so fed up. All I can think about is essays. I've finished one and started on the second. Yesterday, I decided to skim through the two books I'm writing about and look for useful quotes. I thought it would take a couple of hours, but it took all day and I still didn't finish. At about five o' clock I was still working away, even though my head hurt and my eyes were bleary - I thought I had to be almost finished, but when I looked at the book I was not even halfway through! I got really angry. Then, upstairs, my dad started snoring. I was suddenly infuriated by the fact he got to have a nap while I had been working all day, and it wasn't like I was nearly done because I hadn't even started writing the 5,000 word essay. I was so infuriated that I had this sudden desire to lash out, and so I raked my fingernails down the book I was reading so hard that I left tears in the page... And then I almost snapped my pencil in half and threw it across the room but managed to restrain myself.

I think I've got anger issues!

I'm just so, so fed up and depressed. It's the holidays but I can't enjoy them. I've been arranging to do things with friends, because I need to unwind, but I can't appreciate the things I do because I'm constantly thinking, "I should be doing my essays right now - how am I going to get them all done?" The silly thing is, I know I will get them done. I always do. But I always feel like I need to sacrifice my sanity to do so.

Anyone got any advice? How can I stop being so angry? I don't want to destroy all my books in sudden psychopathic outbursts of rage. In the meantime, it's back to essay number two... I have written about 700 words but as usual they are all absolutely awful! Hm, maybe eating more chocolate will help.

Emma's Essay Nightmare (and writing progress)

2010-04-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

I have five weeks off uni for Easter - a ridiculous amount of time, I know - but I need them, because I have been sucked into a Black Hole of Essay Doom. I have three assessed essays to write, adding up to a total of 12, 500 words. That doesn't seem like a lot when you consider that for NaNoWriMo I had to write 50,000 words in four weeks. It's different, though. For NaNoWriMo the words could be a complete pile of twaddle (man, I adore that word!). These words have to be clever words. They have to be words which will get me good marks - my degree is riding on this! And the topics I have chosen to write on are really quite hard.

Hence Emma's Essay Nightmare. I will probably update this blog moaning about my progress, or lack thereof. Here's where I stand at the moment:

Essay 1. A 5k comparison of Crime and Punishment and Hunger on the theme of subjectivity. First draft, written in barely comprehensible English, complete. I have spent literally all week sitting at my desk doing this. It drove me crazy. Today my dad drove us out into the forest and we went on a walk, just so that I could remember what fresh air and sunlight were like.
Essay 2. A 5k essay on feminist themes in Possession and Alias Grace. Haven't even started researching yet.
Essay 3. A 2.5k essay on 17th century text no one has ever heard of, which I have to research and then make up - gasp! - my own opinions about. Have not even decided what I'm going to write about yet.

Sigh. I just have to keep telling myself that it's worth having no life for five weeks in order to get a good mark for my second year. And, hopefully, a good degree at the end of it all. Which will hopefully mean a good job. Which won't necessarily mean a good life, but I think I've got that one sorted whatever happens.

On a slightly different topic - (creative) writing progress has been made! I realised that the reason I've felt absolutely no motivation to write Into the Blizzard (the Storm Awakened spin-off) is that I had no plot, and couldn't see where it was going. When I did manage to write a few paragraphs, I was writing aimlessly. So this evening I sat down and focused all my energy on writing a detailed, comprehensive plot.

Guess what: I actually got somewhere! I mean, I have a plot that I actually think is decent, and it's fairly complex, too! It's all a bit of a muddle at the moment, and I have only plotted about 3/4 of the story, meaning I still need to find a way to wrap it all up and then locate and destroy any plot holes - but I can see the story going somewhere now. I have enough material to write at least 20 chapters. That's right, it's going to be another long one. This is going to keep me distracted from those essays for a while!

The Remains of the Day

2010-03-31T15:33:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which had been on my shelf for ages, but I'd never got round to reading it because it looked pretty dull. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and oh my gosh, I can see why. It was amazing. I haven't read a book that has actually made me cry in a long time. It was just so good.

From the plot, you wouldn't expect it to be good: a butler goes on a road trip through the English countryside to visit an old friend, and reminisces about his past as a butler in a grand old English household on the way. That's it. And when I first started to read it, I thought, oh dear. Because Stevens, the main character, has this incredibly over-formal, emotionally stilted voice, and I didn't see how I was going to endure it for the whole book.

I quickly changed my mind. The narrative voice is the best thing about the book. There's something really haunting about it. Stevens is completely in denial about everything - particularly his own feelings towards the housekeeper, Miss Kenton - but all these undertones and nuances bubble up underneath everything he says, and you get this constant sense of the truth being repressed. It's painful. Stevens seems to have absolutely no interests outside of being a good butler. Even the conversations he has when off-duty are about butlering. As a reader, you want to scream at him, can't you see that you're missing out on everything that's good in life? That you are throwing away every opportunity that's given to you? But of course he can't hear you, which is incredibly frustrating.

There is one point, one sentence, where the human being breaks out from underneath the veneer of the old-fashioned butler, and this is when he realises that it is too late for him to have a future with Miss Kenton:

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

The ending verges on the sentimental - as he sits on a bench on the seafront, a random old man enlightens him on everything he's missed out on. But I didn't really care. It had my eyes watering anyway. I'm not going to say anything more about it. Just read it!

I'm sorry to go all smarmy and book review-y on you. I just had to get that off my chest. It's made me worried about my own writing, though. I don't think I'll ever be able to write anything as good as this. Technically, I'm good, but I just don't have any ideas. I'm starting to think I'll never even finish a novel, let alone publish one. And yet my parents always talk about it like it's going to happen and I don't want to let them down...

In denial?

2010-03-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Monday was the strangest day. For some reason, everyone was being really nice to me. My mum woke me up with a cup of tea, and then she brought in all these presents. I got a new digital camera, and some notebooks and CDS, and lots of books, including original 1930s/40s editions of books written by my ancestor, Cecil Freeman Gregg. Then we went for a walk, and had tea and cake and soup, and then went food shopping so we could make homemade pizza and have a feast with even more cake. And my friends were sending me messages, inexplicably wishing me a pleasant day...

I have no idea why any of this happened. It's not like I'm older or anything. It's not like I'm twenty. I'm going to be a teenager forever, right?

On a serious note, though. I'm twenty now and I need to sort out my life and do something useful. Like write a good novel. Or actually go on a date, or something. I'm getting closer and closer to the point where I have to grow up and start planning what I'm going to do with myself after university, but I really don't want to. So far all I've got is: I want to live in a quaint little flat in a slightly dilapidated building somewhere near London, occupied by lots of eccentric artistic types, and write lots of novels and articles, and wander about the city having tea with all my high-flying lawyer/accountant friends. How I'm going to finance this lovely life, I have no idea.

I might do a Masters in Creative Writing. But I'd have to get accepted onto one first, and apparently they all just teach you to churn out books exactly in the style of Ian McEwan. Which I don't really want to do. I have my integrity! (I just mistyped that as "I have no integrity" - Freudian slip?)

I have done one useful thing though! I had a job interview last Thursday, and received my offer letter today... I am officially an employee of the Royal Household! I'm going to be working at Buckingham Palace over the summer. It's going to be pretty intense - five days a week all summer with no holidays - but I'm really excited. Apparently working there is great fun, and I bet you meet loads of interesting people too. So, if you happen to be visiting London this summer and go to the palace, you might just meet me in one of the gift shops! Though if you said, "Are you Emakoke?" to me, I would look at you like you were crazy and pretend not to know what you were talking about. So don't bother.

On Saturday I'm going to visit my friend on his farm to celebrate his birthday. He has lambs! I might get to hold one! This is an immensely exciting prospect.

That is all for now. I am still young... I am still young...

More mundane updates on my life.

2010-03-13T02:19:00.000-08:00

I haven't been on here in a long time and thought I'd post a little update of my life.

Things are going really well for me at the moment. I've been getting good marks back from essays, which makes me feel confident that I am clever enough to be here. When I first got here last year, I thought I was an idiot compared to the people in my seminars, and that I wasn't cut out for university. It sounds arrogant but at school I was used to getting the top marks in everything - and then suddenly I was average. I've developed my style really quickly, though, and when I compare this year's essays with last year's I can see how much more sophisticated they are.

That might change with the essay I'm about to hand in though. I kind of wrote most of it in one day... Oops.

I've also been spending a lot more time with friends. Last year I often sat alone in lectures. I didn't have many course friends at all because after a lecture everyone would just go back to their halls of residence to procrastinate/have a nap. Now, because most second years live half an hour away from campus, we have to hang around between lectures, and that means we socialise more. I've formed a little "English Gang". It's so lovely. We went to see King Lear together, and on Fridays we meet up in this lovely authentic Italian cafe in town where they do amazing coffee and pastries. I spend far too much money on food here (I'd say I go out for dinner at least twice every week!) but since I spend almost no money on club entry/alcohol like most other students, I can afford to.

On Monday my housemates M and A are taking me to see Romeo and Juliet for my birthday! It was so sweet of them - they drew me a card on which I am on a balcony and Shakespeare is declaring his undying love to me, and inside it said that we were all going to the theatre together. It's such a thoughtful present. My other housemate O bought me loads of lovely stuff too. I'm so grateful to have such a nice house - I've heard stories of loads of people who hate their housemates and are miserable. We get along so well and are like a little family.

What else? Oh yes. Term finishes next Saturday, but I have to leave on Wednesday, meaning I miss a lecture and seminar and of course all the end of term partying. But I have to, because I have a job interview to work at Buckingham Palace on Thursday. I'm so excited! I really hope I get the job, because I think the palace would be an amazing place to work in - I'd get to meet people from all over the world. I'd have to commute to London every day, which would be expensive and time-consuming, but I'd rather do that than work in a dreary office which is the only other alternative. After the interview my mum is taking me to see Legally Blonde the musical. So if I screw up and lose the ability to speak coherent English, which happened in my Oxford interview, I'll at least have that to cheer me up.

In terms of writing, I sadly haven't been doing much lately. I'm on Chapter Seven of the Storm Awakened sequel now. I have no idea where it's going but I'm sure the story will make itself up as I go along. Over Easter I plan to pound out loads more chapters, because I get five weeks off from uni! Though I do have 10,000 words of essay to write too. Nice.

I haven't been working much on The Novel either. However, the other day something weird happened. I had an idea for something I want to include in it, and decided to jot a few words down in my notebook - and then the floodgates opened. The Novel is going to be really autobiographical, and as I was writing non-stop for about an hour I forgot I was writing about a character and started writing about myself. Self-absorbed, I know, but I think the best writing comes from personal experience. When I read it back I realised it was one of the best things I've written for a long time, and I hadn't even tried. It just came completely from the heart.

It was basically about how I used to hate my face. I mean, hate. It sounds incredibly angsty-teenager but it was a really big thing for me. I had awful skin, and I used to put my face through all kinds of torture to try and clear it up, but of course it only made it worse. I thought I was hideous and spent hours just staring at myself in the mirror wanting to punch something. Every time someone looked at me I assumed they were thinking how disgusting my skin was and it left me with no self-confidence. Whether from the fact I'll be twenty in just over a week (ahhhhhhhhhhh) or the amazing face wash I found (Dermalogica - expensive but worth it) my skin is basically spot-free now and I no longer think I'm hideous. But it was quite cathartic for me to get out all that stuff about how I used to hate myself.

Now I get to torture my character by putting her through the same thing. Muahaha.

Well I'd better go. Today I'm going to see The Princess and the Frog - it's been out for ages but I haven't got round to seeing it despite loving Disney. Then we're having tea and cake and fajitas (not together), and then I might write some more.

Happy Easter to everyone if I don't update before then!

Addicted to Romcoms...

2010-02-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

I'm terrible. I'd decided that once I finished Storm Awakened, I would stop messing about on FictionPress and focus all my attention on The Novel.

But I can't stop.

People liked The Healing Properties of Tea. They said it was sweet, that it brightened their days. It made me want to write more stupid fluffy romcoms. They're fun to write and I don't have to think about them. So now I am working on two more: another one about a crazy university society called Assassin's Guild, and one about a time travelling seventeenth century poet. I don't know where I get all these stupid ideas from, but once I'm in their grip I just can't escape.

On top of that, Storm Awakened was such a looming presence in my life for about two years that I can't let go of it. So I'm writing the spin-off about Anja. This means I'm currently writing four stories, and I'm probably never going to finish any of them, because I get bored about ten chapters in. You should see how many abandoned stories are gathering dust on my computer. One day I'd like to go on a writing spree and finish them all, no matter how bad they are, for completeness' sake. Maybe in the summer.

Anyway, that's my little update on my writing progress. It's reading week and I should be doing some work right now, which explains why I'm doing this.

Asda is a traumatic experience.

2010-01-30T09:45:00.000-08:00

I literally think I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

This afternoon my friend was driving to Asda and I asked to tag along. Asda on a Saturday is a scary, scary place. If you're not from the UK and don't know the stereotype of Asda, this satirizes it pretty well. I felt like I was about to break down in tears in the middle of the aisle because I couldn't find what I wanted and everyone kept bashing into me with their trolleys and there were some really scary people in there, parents literally screaming at their children and a woman talking very loudly about her husband's extra-marital escapades...

It was traumatising. I have never felt so pathetic and middle-class in my life. I felt like people were looking at my basket of asparagus tips and Jordan's Country Crisp and wensleydale with cranberries in absolute digust, thinking, why don't you just go back to Waitrose huh?

Oh gosh... I'm such a snob...

My jazzy weekend.

2010-01-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

I'm really tired and can't be bothered to write this blog, but I'm making the effort to try and keep it up. For the past few days I've been having one of my low periods where I lose enthusiasm for everything I love: reading, writing, socialising, even watching TV... All I want to do is sleep. These times always pass though.

To cheer myself up I'll talk about my lovely weekend.

I went home for the weekend. I love my student house, and being around my housemates all the time, but every so often I need to go home and enjoy proper food and a shower curtain that's not mouldy. On Friday night my parents took me out for a lovely meal. On Saturday, I went shopping with my mum in London. We usually just look at clothes on Oxford Street, but we decided to explore the areas we don't usually go to.

I can't believe that, as a literary geek, I have never been to Foyles, the massive bookshop on Charing Cross Road. It is incredible - there are so many books! I found books there that I thought only existed in my university library. And they have this adorable cafe, Ray's Jazz Cafe, that is full of interesting bookish-type-people and serves the best cake and coffee I have eaten in a long, long time. The interior is a bit shabby and the seats uncomfortable, but that adds to the charm. My mum had to literally drag me out of the place. She offered to buy me a book but there were so many I wanted that I couldn't choose just one, and so left with none. Which is a bit silly really, but I hate making decisions! If you are an arty type like me and live near London, I insist you go there.

Then we looked at all the little second hand and antique booksellers in Cecil Court. They were all creaky floorboards and oddly-shaped nooks and crannies and shelves that reached up to the ceiling. They were full of beautiful old books, first editions and dusty tomes that you didn't want to touch in case they fell apart, and the people in there were so lovely and knowledgeable. We have been looking some books by an ancestor of ours, Cecil Freeman Gregg, whose books are out of print and quite rare, but no luck so far. We bought a couple of recent second-hand books though, which were often less than half the price they would be in a normal bookshop.

I really felt at home there. I can't wait until I have a job, and a flat in London, and I can spend my days off writing and browsing bookshops and drinking coffee.

Sunday was spent baking, so that I could bring back lots of biscuits for my housemates. Now I am back at university and, as I said earlier, feeling down for no reason. I hope I feel better soon so I can actually write something...

Huh...

2010-01-15T13:51:00.001-08:00

Today has been a weird day. One of those days when you feel like you haven't achieved a thing, and might as well go into hibernation.

I woke up, and read a bit. Some guys came to fix our TV aerial. Then, I edited my Andrew Marvell essay again, but then got bored of that. Then... I can't remember what I did. I browsed the internet for a bit, refreshing Facebook over and over again as you do, and cut the music for a tap dance I'm teaching. I decided to read a bit more (Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy if you care). Then I decided I was tired and felt sick (I've eaten nothing but peanut butter and jam sandwiches for several days and am starting to feel like my insides are dying - hello student life) so I went to sleep.

I woke up and it was dark. All my housemates were gone. I was sleepy and confused. I felt lonely and depressed, so ate a block of wensleydale cheese to make myself feel better. It didn't work.

So I watched a random old episode of Life on Mars. And... I am still depressed and lonely and confused. I think I'm going a bit crazy. I haven't been to a lecture since Tuesday... I really need to get out of the house. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the library. I don't know, I guess life doesn't feel that exciting at the moment, and there's nothing that inspires me to write. I'm just limping monotonously through my degree, as usual...

Huh. Depressing.

The apocalypse continues...

2010-01-07T11:20:00.000-08:00

...and I don't use that word lightly. My friend managed to battle through the howling blizzard to the shop today, and apparently people were bulk-buying tinned food as if World War Three were about to break out, while the manager ran around shouting, "I HAVE NO STAFF! I HAVE NO STAFF!"

However, it's a very beautiful apocalypse. We went on another country walk today, and I took some more pictures I just have to share.

That last one is my favourite - breathtaking, no?

It's starting to drive me a bit crazy, though, being stuck in the house like this. As you've probably guessed from the fact I'm updating my blog so frequently...

MORE SNOW ARRRGGGEEEHHHHHHHH

2010-01-06T06:09:00.000-08:00

England has officially become The Day After Tomorrow.

It has been snowing all night and all day so far. People are snowed into their houses - you can't see the wheels of cars underneath the snow. The whole economy has just shut down for a day; I don't know anyone who has gone to work or school. All the roads are entirely deserted, but they don't even look like roads anymore, just massive blocks of white. My friend and I just walked to the park and we were sliding down the main roads, along with everyone else, because there are no cars.

Then we got to the park, and it was beautiful. It looked like Narnia. I'll put up some pictures later, when I've charged my camera. The lake was frozen over and the poor ducks were all huddled in one corner; trees had fallen over, unable to support the weight of the snow on their branches. We walked over the heath, and we kept falling into massive pits because we couldn't see them, and then we climbed to the top of the hill, falling over and sliding back to the bottom several times. We found a field of untouched snow that came up to our knees, then fell backwards onto it (it was incredibly comfortable) and made snow angels. We walked through the woods, through little alleys where the snow-laden trees bent over to form archways, and every time the wind shook their boughs they sent a flurry of snow falling down on us. It really did feel like we had entered a magical new world.

Then we got completely and utterly lost for two hours.

But it was quite nice. If you stopped, all you could hear was the wind and the gentle patter of snow on the leaves.

We eventually found our way out of the woods and I walked home, once again sliding down the roads. If you take a run up and then just let yourself slide, you keep going for a good five seconds. Before falling over, of course. It was so nice to see parents pulling their children down the middle of the road in toboggans, laughing and shrieking. I suppose families don't get to spend much time like that together these days.

If this snow doesn't stop, I have no idea how I'm going to get back to uni on Sunday. Right now, I'm just enjoying sitting here with a cup of tea and some cake (goodbye new year resolution) enjoying the warmth of my house, and looking out of the window at my garden, which is so covered in snow it looks like one huge marshmellow. It makes me want to write, obviously, but I have essays to do...

Edit: Some photos of the park...

Oops!

2010-01-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

Oops - I just started writing another new story.

I just couldn't help it. I was trying to write my Seventeenth Century essay, and the idea just came to me, and I had to start writing before I lost it. So now I'm writing a novel about a girl who thinks she's in love with a Cavalier poet (not me, you'll be relieved to hear, I just thought it would be a funny concept) - and then he somehow gets transported from his world into hers and she has to work out how to send him back. An idea that I'm sure has been done millions of times before, but never mind. It's fun to write! It'll probably be a shorter story, like The Window Cleaner and The Healing Properties of Tea - about 30,000 words or so.

I'm still writing the story about Anja, though - I finished Chapter Three today.

But I didn't get a word of that important assessed essay written...

I am the essay ninja!

2010-01-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

Oh gosh. My eyes are bleeding. I have just spent about six hours relentlessly writing an assessed essay for next term. The essay is about two of my favourite books, Rebecca and Jane Eyre, but in a way that makes it even harder - I have so much to say about them, and I can't fit it all into the 5,000 word limit.

New year's day I sat down and pounded out 9,000 words, thinking it was the best thing I'd ever written. But I won't lie, I was hungover from the night before, and when I read it all back yesterday it didn't even make sense. Literally, I hadn't even spelt half the words right. So today I've been editing, editing, editing, basically inhaling cups of tea to get me through it, and now it's starting to come together. But I'm exhausted, and I still have another 2,500 essay to write after this one!

Between bouts of furious essay writing I have also started my new story, which follows Anja, one of the characters from Storm Awakened. Like SA, this is basically another opportunity for me to practise my writing. SA is full of horribly flowery descriptions, so my project for this new story is to make my writing much tighter and more lucid. I'm trying to say more by saying less, through the actions and dialogue of my characters. I need to stop spoon-feeding my readers with top-to-toe physical descriptions, obvious and overblown pathetic fallacy, and unbearable blocks of stilted three-page-long expostulatory dialogue. You guys aren't stupid, I know that.

Another massive problem with SA was that most of the supporting characters had no lives outside of Kate and Jouran - they were just 2D cardboard cut-outs standing in the background. This time I'm trying to get inside the head of every character, even the minor ones, to build up genuine relationships between the characters. And I'm not trying to make my characters the ideal people I would like to be anymore. I tried to make Kate this sweet, virtuous, angelic person - I was fed up of reading about feisty kick-ass rebellious she-warriors who just played into the hands of the stereotypes they were meant to defy - but she ended up a boring, pathetic wet blanket. Anja is much different. At the beginning of the novel she has almost no redeeming features, but I plan to change that as I go along!

But I'm still starting from the same old position of having no plot beyond the first ten chapters or so. I know roughly what is going to happen, but not how it's going to happen, or how the story is going to end. I've decided it's more fun that way. I can imagine if I rigidly planned every plot point, and then stuck to it from beginning to end, I'd get horrifically bored halfway through. It just wouldn't be an adventure. The way I write at the moment, I never know what's coming next. It's great. I can decide on the spur of the moment to kill off a character, or dramatically change the plot so that the whole story veers off in another direction. Yes, I end up with plot holes, but the story always somehow manages to limp to a vaguely plausible ending. If I'm serious about the novel, I can always revise it afterwards, right?

But I wasn't serious about SA, and I'm not about this novel either, really. Like I said, I'm just practising my writing.

Exciting news though: regarding The Novel (as in, the big one, the one I'd like to try and publish, which will hopefully have some kind of literary merit rather than being fluffy-fantasy-romance-sellout-trash), inspiration has finally come. I have an Idea. Of course I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm not going to tell anyone what it is, at least not until I've written a few chapters and discovered it actually works. But it's going to involve extensive research, and I've decided that every Monday (I finish quite early on a Monday) I'm going to go and spend hours in the library with my laptop, researching and writing. I want to get a portfolio of good, serious writing built up so that when it comes to applying for a Masters I have something to show for myself. Therefore Mondays = Writing Mondays. That's my new year resolution (as well as eating less cake).

On a completely unrelated note, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year. I did. I'm now enjoying hitting the sales...this morning (pre-essay marathon) I bought a gorgeous jacket from Whistles - that's another £100 out of my magical ever-replenishing fountain of money that I don't have. I will justify this shopping habit one day, when I publish a book, or work in a bookshop/library for the rest of my life, whichever fate happens to befall me.

I'm now going to watch Family Guy, as I need some comic relief after spending half the day writing about flipping patriarchal ideology and the angel in the house and binary oppositions. Screw you, Gilbert and Gubar, you can't get the better of me!

SNOWWWW EEARGGHHHH

2009-12-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that it's almost Christmas. I certainly have. For one thing, it's been snowing, and as usual the country has gone AGHIUHEHOIHHHAAAHHHHHHH SNOW and everything has ceased to function. The roads are like ice rinks, no one can get anywhere, it takes everyone five hours to get home from work, our driveway (which is a massive hill) becomes a death trap. On the plus side, everything looks pretty. Here is our garden:

The second one is smoky because our neighbour likes to have massive bonfires for no apparent reason. Ironically, it has been snowing almost every day, but it is forecast not to snow on Christmas Day. Pah. I'm hoping that at least some of the existing snow will remain on the ground so it still looks nice.

Our house is looking pretty too. We really go to town at Christmas...lights, decorations, Christmas scented air fresheners, little bowls of nuts all around the house, and my mum has even made an amazing Christmas cake this year. Here is the tree, with some of the presents already under it (more to come though, yay!):

Doesn't it look lovely? I have also been doing lots of Christmassy things. The day after I came home from uni my mum and I went to Cologne (in Germany in case you didn't know!). They have a famous Christmas market there - lots of little stalls selling handmade gifts, food and

Gluehwein (mulled wine, of which a lot was drunk). It was great fun and it even snowed. On the first day we did loads of Christmas shopping, and on the second day we went on an excursion: a boat trip down the Rhine, and then we went to a picturesque little village on the side of the river and did some wine tasting.

Here's a picture of the Christmas market in Cologne:

On Sunday I went to a lovely candlelit carol service. On Monday my friend and I went to London for what has become our yearly tradition: we get pizza, then we go to Harrods and pretend to be posh, then we go ice-skating outside the Natural History Museum. We then usually go back to mine or hers to drink hot chocolate and watch Love Actually, but we couldn't do that this year since it took us two hours to make the fifteen minute drive home from the train station (because of the snow). The drive was actually quite fun though, because we played Christmas songs very loudly and had a singalong. I'm not ashamed to say that I love Christmas songs!

I've basically been doing anything I can to avoid the two beastly assessed essays I have to write for next term: one on Andrew Marvell and the other on Jane Eyre and Rebecca. I've been ploughing through my reading though! I've recently read Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, Germinal by Emile Zola, the first Lord of the Rings book (that was for fun, not for uni), Possession by A.S. Byatt (brilliant, I'd really recommend it), and The Atom Station by Halldor Laxness...now I'm reading The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (it's a lesbian novel I am reading for my Feminism module...it's pretty dull to be honest!).

Tonight is the Wednesday reunion. When everyone from my school comes back from university for the holidays, everyone goes to the local pub on a Wednesday. The evening consists of people hugging and exclaiming, "HOW ARE YOU? IT'S BEEN SO LONG! I LOVE YOUR HAIR!" before retreating into a corner with their close friends and muttering, "Well he's put on weight! Eurgh, she's changed so much...ever since she went to uni she thinks she's so cool," and the like. It's a bit awkward really, but it will be great to see my close group of friends, many of whom I haven't had the chance to see yet.

Christmas Day aside, I'm really looking forward to Boxing Day. There's a tradition in a nearby village where they close all the roads and hold a race/pub crawl. Basically people get into teams and choose a theme; they then dress up in costumes and make a "pram" relating to that theme. The teams have to race their pram between the various pubs in the village, buying a drink in each one. People get drunk in the morning and fun is had by all. This year our theme is safari: our pram is a jeep and we're all dressing like different animals. I'm the antelope and have spent most of today making a pair of paper mache horns. I forgot how fun paper mache was!

Anyway, I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful Christmas and New Year (if I don't update before then) filled with much loveliness, hot chocolate, mince pies and tacky straight-to-DVD Christmas movies. :)

The little black book.

2009-12-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

I've recently taken to carrying a little black leather book with me everywhere I go. Every time I have a random interesting thought, or I want to remind myself to do something later, or I am struck by something I see or hear and what to put it into a story, I scribble it down in my book. Horribly pretentious, I know, but I think it's a great idea for every writer to have one. How many times have you felt inspired but had nowhere to capture the feeling? This way I never forget the ideas I have for my stories. On top of that, it's entertaining to flick back through the book and recall how I felt at a certain time.

I suppose it's similiar to the commonplace books we learnt about in our Seventeenth Century module. Writers used them to jot down interesting pieces of rhetoric they learnt, or quotes they liked, or facts that could be useful to them. Some of these commonplace books still exist. This, for example, is John Milton's:

It's fascinating to see his actual writing (the fact I don't particularly like Milton aside). However, I think his book is possibly a little more...academic than mine is. When people see me in the library hunched over my book, scrawling things very quickly, they must think I'm a really deep and artistic person and that I'm wrtiting down something profound and intense. This is not the case. Here is a quote from my book, and it's pretty representative of the whole:

The man sitting across the aisle from me on the train is wearing my nerves down the threads and writing in this book is all I can do to stop myself from leaping across the gap, tearing the phone from his hand and jumping up and down on it repeatedly whilst screaming for him to SHUT UP. Admittedly he is speaking in a language I do not understand but this makes it even worse because he keeps laughing every few seconds and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS SO FUNNY!!!

Hm, profound. I wonder if Milton has any angry rants in his book? I doubt it.

Anyway, I think that every writer should have a book like this. We let so much of life pass us by, as if we're sitting on a bus and everything is just a blurred scenery that passes us by. We should be taking snapshots of it, even the mundane things, to look back on later. Synecdoche is the technique of describing the whole by reference to smaller parts of it - you can create the feel of a whole crowd just by describing the hats people are wearing or the sound of their voices. In the same way, the little details of life, the things we barely look twice at, can be used to create something really vivid and realistic. But we need to capture them before they slip away and we forget them forever.

Humiliation!

2009-11-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

You know when you have one of those moments that are so intensely humiliating you can't stop thinking about it for days afterwards and cringe every time you think about it? Yeah, those ones. The last time I had one was in Year 12 when I got onto the bus without realising I had stepped in dog poo, then realised by the time it was too late and the whole bus was full except for the seats in front of and behind mine because it stank so much, and I had to endure the whole journey with everyone laughing at me.

Well, I had another one of those moments today.

After a few days at home I came back to uni today. I'm at the train station, about 30 seconds away from missing my train, wearing heeled boots and carrying a heavy bag, my laptop and a suitcase. And I have to run. So I stagger to the escalator in my heels, and the escalator is full of people. I realise with delight that it is my chance to be like one of those busy and important-looking people you get in Waterloo station who run down the left of the escalator going "sorry, sorry, excuse me" while everyone else stands on the right like a lemming.

So I hoist up my suitcase, say "EXCUSE ME!" in my most busy-and-important voice, and begin to run down the left of the escalator. Then I trip, wobble in agonising slow motion for what seems like an eternity, before tumbling down the escalator in the most spectacular fall anyone has ever seen. I sort of crumple like a rag-doll against my suitcase, limbs sprawled everywhere, and then roll down the handrail of the escalator until the moving steps deliver me in a heap to the bottom. I look to see the other people on the escalator watching me with blank, dead eyes. I then have to endure the further humiliation of scrabbling around on the floor to find my ticket, which I discover I have somehow managed to tear in half on my way down.

On the plus side, I make my train with about five seconds to spare. Red-faced and wheezing, I collapse in a seat after staggering down the aisle like a drunk person, rolling over several people's feet with my suitcase on the way. When the inspector comes to check my ticket, he laughs and says, "This one's seen better days, hasn't it?"

I laugh myself every time I think back on it, even though it was humiliating at the time. That's why I thought I'd share it with you all.

Ugh.

2009-11-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update on everything...

NaNoWriMo is not going well. Oh, I'm keeping up to speed with my word count. But I realised, about four or five days in, that my novel is painfully bad. I'm going to keep on writing it, because that's the point of NaNo, but it really is painfully, painfully bad. For one thing, I wanted the allegory to be subtle. It is not. It is a massive saucepan-in-your-face allegory. It's like using...I don't know, a banana for a phallic symbol. Everyone gets it instantly. It is not subtle or clever or funny. It is just awful.

And it's boring too. I know the point of literary fiction is that nothing happens. But good literary fiction makes the things that do happen so intense that the reader doesn't get bored. In mine, it's just that nothing happens. I just spent about five pages describing my narrator sitting at the kitchen table drawing a picture of a car. This event had no significance whatsoever. I just wanted to reach my daily word quota so I padded it out with as much suffocating flowery description as my poor fingers could muster.

Oh gosh, I feel so sorry for whoever insists on reading this. I hope that will be no-one, but every time I have to explain how I can't have a social life because of NaNo to one of my friends, he or she will say, "Oh, you have to let me read your novel when it's done!"

I dread writing it every day. It's like a fat, ugly, screaming child that demands my attention, and the more I feed it the fatter and uglier it gets and the more it screams and wails and bangs its fists against the table. I can't wait until November 30th when it finally shuts up!

I haven't done my writing yet today. The fun is still to come. Today I've been busy spending some quality time with John Donne, writing an essay about his Holy Sonnets using what is quite possibly the oldest, dustiest, most obscure book the university library possesses. It was the last relevant book left on the shelf and I'm pretty sure dead moths fell out when I picked it up and prised open its withered, yellow pages. It appears to be covered in the elaborately cursive inscriptions of the last person to read it, who must have studied at the university sometime in the 70s, or possibly the Dark Ages. This was my fault for waiting until the last possible moment to crawl out of my bedroom and drag myself to the library, by which time all the decent books were taken by keen people. Now I've got to make the best of what I've got.

It is 5pm and I have written an epic 421 words. I am now going to take a break and maybe have some tea. Life is good.

NaNoWriMo!

2009-10-30T05:41:00.000-07:00

I have two essays of two thousand words each to write for Tuesday. I have completed zero words. Therefore I have decided, in true student style, that the best course of action is to sit here drinking coffee, eating a raisin and cinnamon bagel, and talking about NaNoWriMo on my blog.

For those of you who don't know what NaNoWriMo is, it's National Novel Writing Month - a competition that challenges you to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. The website is www.nanowrimo.org. And I am doing it this year...

Wahey! I didn't exactly intend to sign up for NaNo this year. I was very tempted, because I did it in '06 and found it was a great way to force me to write when I didn't really want to, and I managed to produce something vaguely readable out of it. However, I knew this year was probably the worst year ever to do it because my degree actually counts this year. Anyway, I signed into my '06 account just to see if it still existed - and was told that I was now an offical participant! Well, that was that decided then.

My NaNo this year is called Bethany's Tree. It's a weird sort of spiritual/fantasy/literary mess of a novel which I have barely planned. I'm a bit worried that the idea just isn't going to work and it'll all be a massive disaster. The basic premise is that my protagonist, Bethany, is mentally handicapped and trapped in this drab middle-class life in the country. While everyone assumes she is stupid, dim-witted and trapped inside her own restrictive mind, she actually has an incredible imagination, and the novel is about her journeys into a beautiful fantasy world reached by a tree in her garden (whether this world is real or imagined by her, even I don't know). Each chapter will switch between the real world, where her family are preparing for the Dinner Party, the biggest social event of the year, and her adventures in the tree world. And then at the end everything goes horribly wrong, but I won't reveal too much.

Yeah, it sounds weird. I have no idea whether I will pull it off. I've never been that into planning, as anyone who has read Storm Awakened will know, and I just intend to wing it as I go along. But I guess that's what NaNoWriMo is all about, isn't it?

The competition starts on Sunday. There's still time to sign up. It's hard but very fun, and if you have lots of coffee and chocolate to help you out it's very possible too. I'd recommend it to anyone who has always fancied writing a novel but never got around to it!

Brecht and Einaudi!

2009-10-25T15:58:00.001-07:00

Oh gosh, I'm already failing at blogging. It just seems like not a lot worth blogging about happens in my life. However, I had a wonderful day on Saturday and thought I would share its events with you.

I went home for the weekend and my family and I went to London together. My mum and I went shopping, then we had lunch, then my brother and dad joined us and we went to a play, then we had dinner, and then we went to a concert. Music, literature, food and clothes...ah, it was almost a perfect day.

I'll tell you about the play first. It was Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children at the National Theatre. I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy it, as almost all the plays I go to see are by Shakespeare, but I thought it was brilliant. Mother Courage is, to describe it very basically, a condemnation of war, which is portrayed as a never-ending cycle that produces nothing but death and misery. Courage, with her three children in tow, follows the army in a wagon in the hope to profit from the war by selling them provisions. She is determined to see the war through the eyes of a businesswoman and never to be caught up emotionally in its atrocities. Throughout the course of the play all of her children are lost to the war. Though of course any mother would be traumatised by this, Courage refuses to give up after each loss and continues to drag her wagon around Poland until all her children are gone. After she sings a lullaby to the corpse of Kattrin, her final child, her final words are, "I've got to get back into business."

Then she hauls her wagon around the stage all by herself, representing the endless and futile cycle of war.

Brecht makes a point of making his plays very self-referential - as in, making it obvious it's a play - which he calls the Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect"). In Mother Courage there isn't really a set, just big banners with the setting scrawled across them. There are no lighting effects, just cold, harsh white light; you can see the tech crew as they move around props to change the scene; the actors change costume in front of your eyes. This didn't really stop me from feeling involved in the events of the play, but I felt I was being invited to be an objective spectator, to evaluate whether I thought what Courage was doing was right or not. It's hard to consider war without being emotionally involved, which is why I think Brecht tries to alienate us.

The play is also frequently broken up by musical numbers. I didn't realise Brecht actually intended music to be a part of the play until afterwards - I thought the director had just randomly shoved it in to make it more entertaining. Anyway, the music was excellent. They got a guy named Duke Special to compose it; a funny little Irish guy with dreadlocks and eyeliner. He and his band would suddenly appear on stage and begin to sing. I'd never heard of him before, but he was actually very talented (he played loads of instruments), and I thought his voice was beautiful. At the end, after Courage had dragged the wagon offstage, all that remained was Duke Special banging a drum and singing. I can't remember what the song was called, but in it he sung about war. The final few lines really resonated with me. The exact words escape me but he sung something about how at least when we die we will finally be free from war.

And then he sung the final line: Unless the war goes on in hell. And then the lights went out. Amaaaaaaaazing.

***

So. In the evening we went to a piano concert at the Barbican: Ludovico Einaudi performing songs from his new album, Nightbook. I'd never been to a classical concert before so I didn't know what to expect, but it was amazing. Einaudi's music is contemporary and minimalist. He blends the piano with strings, percussion and also live electronics, and though he repeats the same motifs a lot, it just sounds amazing. When I sat in there and closed my eyes, it sounded like I was listening to a CD - then I opened my eyes and saw that there were actual people making these beautiful sounds, and more astonishingly, they weren't messing up. I can't even play two bars in front of my mum without hitting the wrong key, crying out in frustration/embarrassment and giving up. Oh, and there was this guy who had some serious skills on the tambourine. He was going mental. It was incredible.

I often use Einaudi as a backing track for my writing. I wish more people could appreciate classical music. It really annoys me how Cheryl Cole can whine 'we gotta fightFIGHTfightFIGHTfight for this love!' over a synthesized beat and everyone will buy it and it will get to number one, and yet incredibly talented people like Einaudi are stuck in this niche. People say they find classical music 'boring', which usually means they can't dance to it in a club. I understand that people connect music to memories, such as a good night in a club. But classical music is so atmospheric. Add a classical soundtrack to a film and it makes it ten times better...I mean, listen to the soundtracks for the Lord of the Rings films, for example. They are amazing. People don't even realise that when they enjoy these films they are appreciating classical music. They call it boring. Grr.

Anyway, check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB3wgiaOOvA. It's Nightbook, probably my favourite song from Einaudi's album so far, though I haven't fully listened to all the tracks yet. The song just conjures so many beautiful images in my mind. I don't need to connect it to a concrete event in my life because it inspires my imagination. That's what crap people like Cheryl Cole and Tinchey Strider and whoever else fail to do. They make songs that drunk people can dance to in clubs but that's about it. Sorry, bit of an angry, 'the young people are rotting their minds! Get off the grass!' diatribe there.

Hmm, okay. Time to do work now!

Back at uni.

2009-10-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

I've been living in my student house for a week and although term doesn't technically start until tomorrow, I have been so busy that I haven't been able to write or update my blog. Now is the first chance I have had to sit down properly.

I'm not doing brilliantly on the resolutions, but not for want of trying. I applied for a job but they never got back to me about interviews, which took place yesterday with a few more this evening. I am not joining the gym because they have put the price up and it's too expensive for me. However, I will be doing a lot of tap dancing this year, which will be good exercise. I haven't been able to write every day but I plan on starting tomorrow.

On the plus side, I enrolled in German classes and have been put in the advanced class! It's two hours a week. I'm a bit concerned because I haven't spoken the language in so long, but the tutor said I would be surprised at how quickly I will pick it up again. I have been eating much healthier - no pizza, pasta or frozen chicken kievs yet! I made an immense toad in the hole yesterday. As for being nicer to people, that is going very well. We had a house party last night which I will tell you about now.

If you've come here from my FictionPress profile, you might have read my story the Healing Properties of Tea. In one of the chapters I describe the 'typical' student house party, in which people dance with kettles on their heads, punch holes in the walls and fall asleep on piles of shoes covered in ketchup. This, I admit, was a bit of an exaggeration for the purpose of humour. Things like that happen sometimes, but when they do it's a big deal, and everyone laughs at the person involved for about a month afterwards. It's not the norm.

Our house party was very busy: my housemate O invited a lot of people (it was her birthday), and it turned out to be a lot more than our little house could actually hold! We tried to herd people down to our creepy cellar, which we decorated with cheap Ikea rugs (now ruined) and fairy lights, but it was too damp and cold and no one liked to stay down there. Instead everyone tried to cram into the living room and kitchen, to the extent that you basically couldn't see the floor/move, and there was a massive queue for the toilet. Most people just chatted, so drunken antics were to a minimum. There was only one horrendously drunk boy who stumbled in uninvited, already pretty much gone, and proceeded to spend most of the night standing in the kitchen with his torso slumped across the kitchen worktop, throwing up in our sink every ten minutes. I honestly have no idea how so much sick can come out of one person. His shirt was covered in stains - it was so humiliating. Why would you let yourself get like that? Even worse, we couldn't find anyone who knew him. At about 2am one of his housemates appeared and dragged him out of the house, at which point everyone cheered. He's not invited back, that's for sure.

Nothing much else happened, but I talked to so many new people, where usually I would have sat in a corner with people I already knew. You find yourself getting into such strange conversations ("Yeah, my friend's cat has cat AIDs, it's not allowed out the house!" and "I dropped my phone down the toilet...PRE-FLUSH!") but it's very entertaining. We invented a new code which enables you to talk about someone at the party without them realising, basically by referring to them as Frank Sinatra the whole time. I have no idea how this came about, but I must have received some strange looks when people overheard me saying, "Guys, Frank Sinatra fancies me but I don't fancy him back, what do I do?" They must have thought I was delusional. Oh my gosh, the aftermath though. We had three friends from home over to stay, and this morning I was the only person who woke up in the correct bed, in my pajamas; everyone else fell asleep fully clothed. There were bottles, cans and popped balloons everywhere, and our kitchen floor was black with dirt. We put on S Club 7 and danced around cleaning, and now our house looks presentable again.

Overall, I've been at uni for a week and it feels like so much longer. Already I've made several new friends, caught up with old ones and grown closer to people I didn't know that well last year. My housemates and I (O, M and A, the only boy) have become like a family. We'll huddle in my double bed watching TV, sit around the table eating fajitas, pop down to the shops or even go ice-skating together. I hope this continues throughout the year, even when people start to get bogged down by lectures and workloads, because it's really helping me to come out of my shell. At school I was basically the Invisible Girl, but uni is really starting to change that. It's an amazing experience.

Well, I have to go, because I'm going to see Fame with my friend from tap. I'll update this blog with something writing-related soon - and hopefully get around to some writing too!

New Term Resolutions!

2009-09-25T07:24:00.000-07:00

Summer is well and truly over now. We never have great summer weather in England, but now the weather really is herald to the autumn: every day is of the kind I love, chill and crisp with blue skies and sunshine. It's cold enough to wrap up in boots and jackets and scarves and go for long walks preceded by hot chocolate, but it's warm if you find a patch of sunlight and huddle in it.

The other exciting thing about autumn is that I start university again. I'm moving into my house the day after tomorrow. I will then spend a week sorting things out for the new term/going to house parties/sleeping until midday, and then lectures start the next week. I have such good intentions for this year, and plan to better myself in many ways. Of course, I know we all think like this, and that after about two weeks all our plans to transform ourselves into lifestyle gurus with superhero-like powers of organisation and infallible work ethics fall down in a pile of cataclysmic smoking ruin - but there's no harm in trying, is there?

Thus I present:

Emma's list of New Term Resolutions

Get a term-time job. Progress: I have managed to force myself to download and look at the application form for waitressing at the on-campus bistro. This was very mentally taxing, which leads me to wonder how I will cope with 10-12 hours a week minimum serving people ciabattas and freshly squeezed orange juice, but all I need do to negate such lazy feelings is to look at the moth-balls and spiderwebs currently gathering in my purse/bank account.
Get German lessons. Yes, I already speak German, but I have forgotten most of it in the past year, and if I went to Germany pretty much the only thing I'd be able to do is wander around panic-stricken accosting strangers with generic phrases such as, "Could you help me please, my camera is broken!" and "Excuse me, where is the youth hostel?" which would not get me very far. Progress: I have discovered that I must go to the Language Centre on a certain date to speak to a tutor about which class to be put in. I also have to pay about £150, thus increasing the necessity of Resolution 1. The biggest task, however, is not being too pathetic and shy to actually turn up at the Language Centre.
Write every day. Even if it's just for half an hour. Even if all I can manage is to write the words "Chapter Seven" and then stare mindlessly at the screen for twenty-nine more minutes. Blogging, Facebook and creating abusive signs to stick on my housemates' doors do not count as 'writing'.
Successfully complete NaNoWriMo. I did in in 2006 so I know it's possible. This is probably the worst year ever to start doing it again, since this year actually counts towards my degree, but I've made an account now and am an 'official participant' so I've already signed my own death warrant, really.
Work harder. Progress: I have got off to a good start because I have read several of my course books over the summer. This year I am going to read all my books, do all my work, actually speak in seminars, spend time in the library, and attend lectures and seminars rather than deciding I have a cold and then going into town to buy cookies and milkshakes.
Be nicer to people. I have been described as an ice queen far too many times in the past few years. This is, in fact, just a front I put on to hide my crippling shyness; I'd rather people think I don't want to talk to them than have them realise I am boring and have nothing to say to them. Well, I do have things to say, as this blog proves, but I assume they won't be interested. This year I am going to be open and friendly to everyone and if they aren't interested it doesn't matter. In particular I will be nicer to random strangers who approach me in bars/clubs. I always assume that if a guy approaches me he must be a sleaze. Well, my housemate O talks to loads of random people when we're out, and though they do sometimes turn out to be not very nice, she has met plenty of perfectly normal people and made some great friends. I must follow her example.
Eat healthy food. No more surviving on a diet of soup, toast, baked beans and cereal, thus giving myself scurvy and rickets. I play to buy loads of interesting fruit and vegetables so I can make myself smoothies and casseroles and be a domestic goddess in general.
Go to the gym regularly. Is three times a week too ambitious? Probably. My friend Pip and I have decided we are going to run a marathon (Is the London Marathon too ambitious? Probably.) which means I need to hit the running machine hard.

I will update you on the progress of these resolutions as term begins. Hopefully lots of interesting things will happen to me and I will be able to update this blog more frequently. I will also have lots of interesting literary things to talk about - since that was the original purpose of this blog I should really include some of it. English is, after all, awesome.

To the new term!

Mundanity.

2009-09-01T13:57:00.001-07:00

I haven't had time to post in a while because I have been insanely busy. I haven't been doing anything that important; just lots of mundane little things, which I will now relate to you, because I'm in that kind of mood.

I went to see We Will Rock You for the third time with my parents and aunt. We saw it in Birmingham because it's easier for my aunt to get there. Birmingham has almost become a home-from-home city for me, what with it being so easy to get to from university. It was nice to go back there and reminisce about university times: shopping trips, eating cake in Druckers, haggling with a very insistent man in the market over the sale of eight umbrellas (don't ask). It was nice to see my aunt, whom I haven't seen in years. We're very different: she lives in the country, where she has no car, computer, satellite TV or even a shower, while I'm a suburbs girl a stone's throw from London. So we don't have a lot in common, and I was worried it would be awkward, but it wasn't. She was lovely and she bought me a top with a big shiny gold owl on it I have been coveting for ages. Score. WWRY was good as always.

What else? I went to see a dance show in London with a friend. I also hung out with my friend who's just come back from travelling in Asia, and we chatted for ages. She had some pretty scary experiences, including being bitten by a venomous spider about the size of my head (I am still traumatized from the photos).

We also drew up The Oath. We both want to get fit before we go back to university, so we decided that for three weeks and three days we're going to do exercise every day and only eat healthy food. It's pretty strict: forbidden items include alcohol, chocolate, cakes, biscuits, sweets, crisps, white bread, cheese, coffee, potatoes, pasta, rice and any snacks between meals. If we eat any of these we have to do double the exercise. When I tell people about it I always hear cries of, "What? But you're so skinny!", but it's not about losing weight. It's just about being healthy. When I stuff my face with cake and drink about four cups of tea a day, as I usually do, I always feel tired and sluggish. It's been five days and I'm already feeling more alive.

I did have a nasty run-in with a bar of chocolate at my friend's house on day three, though. It literally shoved itself in my mouth. I don't know how that happened! Anyway, I did the forfeit, so it's fine.

My friend from university came to stay the next day and I showed her the joys of my village. We went to the park and had a picnic on one of the piers overlooking the lake. The weather was beautiful and the geese didn't try to kill us for our food. Then we watched an entire series of Peep Show and two movies. It was a lovely day! On Sunday I had a very successful shopping trip with my mum. We got a load of CDs, including a Rachmaninov CD for me, which made me very happy. Then I got some boots that I am so pleased with. I have been looking for some good quality leather black ankle boots, as well as some brown mid-calf ones with buckles, for ages, and then they both came along at once. They are gorgeous, and they were both bargains! The black ankle boots were £15 down from £100. I am actually in love with the brown boots. They are Kurt Geiger, originally £230, down to £71! It was still a lot of money but considering what good quality they are I am really pleased. Especially since I can never find shoes to fit my ridiculously small feet.

That probably bored the life out of you, didn't it?

Amongst doing all this stuff, I have just realised how much I need to do before returning to university, and it's making me panic a bit. I have a pile of at least fifteen books on my shelf, all of which need to be read at some point in the next three weeks. I just finished Anita and Me by Meera Syal (very good), The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (unremarkable), and have managed to plough most of the way through Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Next up is Scarlet and Black by Stendhal, which looks like the most unexciting read ever. I really don't think I'm going to get through all these books.

On top of that I'm trying to write two stories, and my friends keep phoning me and asking me to do things in the little free time I have left. I know it's terrible, but sometimes I feel almost resentful when people snap up all of my free time. I should be grateful that I have wonderful friends who want to spend time with me, and I love spending time with them, but often all I want to do is turn off my phone and curl up in bed with a book. I get really stressed. It's a weird metaphor, but this is how I feel when there are too many things demanding my time and attention: I feel like the centrepiece of a Sunday roast. I'm sitting there in the middle of the table, trying to mind my own business, but people keep on tearing strips off me until I'm just a pile of bones.

Is that too melancholy?

Ah well, I'm off to Portugal with some friends from university in two weeks. Three girls, three guys and one undoubtedly very messy apartment. Most importantly, a beach and a swimming pool. There will be plenty of time to relax there!

Crime and Punishment.

2009-08-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

So I just finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Wow, that was heavy going.

I know pretty much nothing about Russian literature. I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenin and then I read this, and that's the extent of my reading in that particular area. I have to read War and Peace for one of my modules next year, but I probably won't be conscious after finishing that, one so I thought I'd better write a blog entry now.

I'm not going to even attempt to adopt a scholarly tone for this, so here we go: Crime and Punishment is absolutely mental.

Seriously. Not a single character in the book is sane. Where do I begin? There's the main character, Raskolnikov, who murders an old woman with an axe, the reason given to justify this deed being that he thinks he's some kind of revolutionary Napoleon, from what I gather. He's poor and wanders around in filthy rags and lives in a cupboard which he can't pay the rent for, and this woman is wealthy due to being a greedy old witch, and yet he doesn't kill her for the money. He hides everything he steals from her under a rock. Oh, and when people give him money, which they do quite often, he either gives it to someone else or throws it off a bridge. I wanted to yell at him to keep the money and go buy himself a nice meal, since he never seems to eat anything, leaving me to wonder how he survives to the end of the book. He gets very ill, raves deliriously in his bed, broods a lot, wanders around the slums falling asleep in bushes, abuses all his friends and family, and then finally turns himself in to the police. Then he goes to jail, decides he's in love with a prostitute, and that's the happy ending.

Who else is there? He has this friend, Razumikhin, who's also completely off his rocker. He's basically permanantly excited and follows Raskolnikov around like an overexcited spaniel, despite the fact Raskolnikov tells him to get lost on numerous occasions. Then there's Svidrigailov, this weird old lecher who has a creepy obsession with Raskolnikov's sister and flings money at everyone who comes within ten metres of him, before announcing he's going to America and then shooting himself in the head. Porfiry is the clever detective who knows that Raskolnikov murdered the old woman, but he never tells anyone because he has no concrete evidence. Instead he constantly torments Raskolnikov and makes long rambling speeches in which he says "tee-hee-hee!" a lot. There are lots of other characters, but it would take too long to go through them all, and I can't pronounce let alone remember any of their names.

I'll briefly mention the female characters though, because they don't fare much better. Sonya is the prostitute who 'offers Raskolnikov redemption'. I think this is because she is the only person he feels able to confess the murder to. And she loves him and he loves her and she gives him the New Testament and at the end he considers maybe thinking about reading it. Which is good, I guess. Anyway, Sonya spends most of the book trembling and crying and wailing, "Oh merciful Lord!" which was very sweet at first but just got a bit pathetic after a while. The other woman worth mentioning is Katerina Ivanova, Sonya's stepmother, who is consumptive and runs around going "cahuh-cahuh-cahuh!" a lot, and thinks she is a noblewoman despite living in absolute squalor, and goes raving mad when her permanently drunk husband dies, and then forces her children to wear ridiculous hats and dance in the streets. And then dies. Yeah. I do feel a bit sorry for her, but she is mental like the rest of them.

So you've got all these crazy characters wandering around St. Petersburg trying to have conversations with each other, but failing since none of them is on the same page as any of the others. Most of them spout two-page long monologues in which there is no logical line of thought, and which are usually misunderstood by the other characters. Everything is so...disconnected. I suppose it's the real world seen through a framework of poverty and exggerated ten times over. It's a grotesque, gloomy, clownish fantasy world, full of charicatured figures, where nothing feels real and nothing quite makes sense. It completely threw me out of my prim and proper middle-class English Home Counties comfort zone. No one did what I expected them to do, what I would have done, and it frustrated me a lot. By the end of it, I'd stopped expecting anything to make sense.

But then, there was a suggestion at the end that order might be restored - that Raskolnikov will repent of his crime and lead a happy life with Sonya when he is released from jail. Wikipedia tells me that Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian (though I suspect it's more complicated than Wikipedia suggests), which I suppose makes sense of that.

Anyway, I know I have spoken irreverently about Crime and Punishment and its general craziness. But you know what? I thought it was brilliant. Who says literature has to make sense?

I love Hamlet.

2009-08-14T08:49:00.000-07:00

If it were possible to marry an inanimate object, I would probably marry a copy of Hamlet. I love Hamlet to the point that it is almost disturbing.

I am obsessed with it: it is one of the very few things in this world that make me cry every time without fail (the other things being Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto and Norrington's death in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie - I have a devastatingly massive crush on Jack Davenport) and I consider it to be the best thing ever written EVER. I can't explain why I love it so much. There's a huge debate about whether Hamlet is feigning madness or whether he is actually mad, but I think that even in his madness he is the sanest character in any play. The way he responds to his tragic circumstances is so convincing - I think I'd go crazy if my uncle killed my father and then married my mother. All of the other characters (except Horatio) betray or totally misunderstand Hamlet, but as the audience you feel like the only people who see who he really is. Every time I watch it I feel like I go a bit mad with him.

I was obviously delighted when my friend offered me very cheap tickets to see Jude Law play Hamlet in London last night. I'm not such a big fan of Law, but I thought it would be interesting to see him attempt the ultimate role when I'm accustomed to seing him in awful romcoms. I mean, The Holiday is pretty much the Bad Movie I compare all other bad movies to. That one really set the bar. My friends and I watched it last Christmas and we rewinded back to the bit where the little girl looks at Cameron Diaz and goes YOU SMELL LOVELY...I LIKE YOUR LIPS! about five times because at the time it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen. Anyway, I'm off on another tangent. Sorry.

Last year I was also lucky enough to get tickets to see David Tennant in the Royal Shakespeare Company production. We drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon and combined it with a visit to Shakespeare's birthplace. Tennant was so good that I left fancying him a bit, despite his not being particularly attractive and my not being a fan of Doctor Who. I didn't expect Law to better his performance and I was right. So now, like everyone else who has had the good fortune to see both productions, I am going to compare them.

Tennant was far more witty and charismatic. He was excellent at being mad, which isn't surprising considering the quirky, barmy way he played Doctor Who. However, when it came to the soliloquys, the moments when Hamlet is consumed by grief and the desire for revenge, he was surprisingly touching. One minute I was laughing, the next I had to hide the fact my eyes were watering pathetically from the people sitting around me. Law on the other hand went down the angry, brooding, shouty route, which he did pull off well, but at times I felt it lacked any emotional content and he was just speaking lines. He substitued emotion for over-the-top hand gestures, such as pointing to the sky when he said the word 'sky'. Thanks, Jude, I had no idea in which direction the sky was located. At points he was very over the top...but I feel I'm being a bit mean to him. He spoke the lines very well whereas Tennant had a tendency to garble, and he grated on me a lot less in the second half. His portrayal was consistent, he drew laughter from the audience in all the right places, and by the end he had really pulled me into the story.

Hm, what else? My friend and I both agreed that Ophelia in last night's production was unbearable. I just read a review that described her as 'touching'. Ugh. The only thing she touched was my suppressed desire to scream and break things. She was stiff and dull and just reeled off the lines robotically. Her version of madness was wandering around the stage singing in a pretty voice. In the Tennant production Ophelia was running around the stage, shouting, flinging flowers at people, tearing off her clothes. The ghost wasn't, er, ghost-like enough for me last night, and Horatio didn't really do it for me. It's not Hamlet's actual death that always sends me into floods of tears, it's when Horatio says "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest" that I begin to bawl like a five-year-old, because Horatio loves Hamlet and stays loyal to him to the end. But this Horatio didn't particularly seem to care, and I only experienced a bit of mild eye-watering (and for some reason nose running, which was very attractive).

Both productions went for the whole gloomy set, everyone wears dark colours vibe, which is probably the best way to go with Hamlet. In the Tennant production it was chilling and atmospheric, but last night's set was a bit...blah. When Law spoke the "to be or not to be" line he was standing in the snow framed by a set of massive doors. I suppose it was a little hackneyed but I quite liked it. Oh, and the scene of Polonius' death was excellent. Hamlet and Gertrude were behind a sheer curtain and Polonius was on the side of the audience listening. Hamlet then stabbed him through the curtain and he tore it down as he died. He ruined this a bit by falling onto his front and then suddenly flopping over onto his back with a massive thud. It made me laugh but no one else found it funny. It was like one of those moments when someone sneezes in a silent exam hall and you are the only person trying to hold back hysterical laughter.

Oh, and apparently Kevin R. Mcnally played Claudius, and I had absolutely no idea until I got home and looked it up online! I didn't recognise him because the only thing I've seen him in is Pirates of the Caribbean as Gibbs, and so I always picture him covered in muck and swigging a bottle of rum (Pirates is another one of my obsessions if you hadn't guessed).

Overall it was a very good performance and I now have a lot more respect for Jude Law - he did very well, though not as well as David Tennant, who is awesome. Law proved that he can act more than one type of character. I read somewhere that Tennant and co. are going to create a film version of the RSC performance to release on DVD, which I am so buying and watching over and over again (and you should too). I suppose the point of this massive blog post is to say that if you've never seen or read Hamlet, please do so. It will make your life better. It might even make you sob like a baby. Then again, that might just be me.

BASIC GRAMMAR FOR IDIOTS

2009-08-01T15:25:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I don't expect much from Fictionpress. It is a site predominantly for angsty pre-teens, and at nineteen years old I am basically a veteran. But here's what baffles and angers me about it: it's supposed to be a site for people who love writing. How can you love writing and yet have no knowledge, let alone respect, for the very basics of the English language? I know grammar at nineteen years old, and I knew it when I was thirteen years old, too. Age is no excuse. I am appalled by the quite frankly embarrassing butchering of English I see on Fictionpress on a daily basis.

Here is a guide to grammar for idiots. I know that the people who read my blog are generally lovely, intelligent people who can spell, and so this is not directed at you. It is more of a generic angry rant.

Emma's guide to basic grammar for idiots

"It's" is a contraction. It means IT IS. If you write, "the cat licked it's paw", you are in fact saying, "the cat licked it is paw". THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
On a similar note, you can't just shove apostrophes into random plurals. Egg's. Dvd's. Pillow's. Sorry, the pillow's what? These are the only two functions of an apostrophe: to signify a contraction, or to denote possession. Stop using them for other things. Apostrophes are not like sugar, which you can sprinkle randomly all over something to make it nicer.
You're = YOU ARE. Your = POSSESSIVE PRONOUN. Learn the difference. It's really not hard. I'm not asking you to memorise the periodic table here.
Capitalising Every Word In a Sentence Does Not Constitute Formal Writing. It Is In Fact Incredibly Irritating And Makes You Sound Like You Are Talking Like a Robot. Please Stop it Now.
You must always capitalise 'I'. I learnt this in Year One. If you are still writing "and then i went to the shops", I think you have a lot of catching up to do and perhaps need to be demoted to aforementioned year. In fact, please remember to start your sentences with capital letters in general.
You can't just randomly change tenses halfway through a paragraph or sentence. If you don't understand why this is, I wash my hands of you, but let me get the ball rolling by telling you that we do not live in a completely incoherent time-warped world where the present can become the past in an instant. This is one of the basic facts of existence, let alone grammar.
Why do some people not realise that if you pose a question you must end it with a question mark or else it will sound like you are an unbearable person who talks in a monotone all the time.
I don't understand why people seem to hate question marks, and yet they love exclamation marks - so much that they deem it acceptable to either make every sentence an exclamatory one, or to use six all in one go. You cannot write, "And I couldn't believe how handsome he was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" without sounding like a squealing fangirl at her very first boyband concert.
Okay, I apologise for the caps lock, and I am aware that this in itself is bad grammar, but I need to use it to express my sheer outrage at this last point. Here goes: YOU CANNOT SPEAK IN INTERNET SLANG IN YOUR WRITING. THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE. YOU ARE CREATING A PIECE OF ART, NOT CHATTING TO YOUR BEST BUDDY ON MSN. IF YOU THINK CREATIVE WRITING IS SUCH A WASTE OF YOUR TIME THAT YOU FEEL THE NEED TO CONTRACT "YOU", A SIMPLE THREE LETTER WORD, TO "U", THEN YOU SHOULD NOT BE WRITING, AND SHOULD ACTUALLY BE BANNED FROM BEING NEAR A KEYBOARD OR ANY KIND OF WRITING IMPLEMENT EVER AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE. THIS IS THE ULTIMATE DISRESPECT TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND I DIE QUITE A LOT INSIDE EVERY TIME I SEE ANYONE DOING IT.

Breathe, Emma, breathe...

Yes Girl!

2009-07-30T12:40:00.001-07:00

You may have read the book Yes Man by Danny Wallace. If not, you may have seen the Jim Carrey film adaptation, which contains almost nothing that happens in the book and destroys all the humour by Americanising everything (no offence, guys), but nonetheless makes the same basic point. The point is this: Danny Wallace realises his life is going nowhere and so decides he is going to say Yes to every proposition made to him. He gets into lots of bizarre situations and, long story short, concludes that while it is good to open yourself up to more opportunities, there are times when you have to draw the line and say No.

I am a Yes Girl, but not in the good way; rather, in the pathetic way. I always say No to the things that might make a difference - for example, I will never go to a social event where I won't know many people, and so I never meet anyone new. But I say Yes to pretty much everything else, only because I am too timid and polite to say No. I will pay money to see a film I've already seen because my friend wants to see it; I will pretend to like food I hate because everyone else is eating it; I will buy a hideous jacket because the salesperson is so persistent.

I'll give you one recent example of this.

So I'm walking down Oxford Street in London. For any readers who aren't familiar with London, let me say that Oxford Street is busy, particularly on a Saturday in the summer. I'm walking along, when I see a man standing in the middle of the street. This man looks fairly ordinary, except he is scanning the crowds with a scary glint in his eye as if he is looking for someone. As soon as his eyes fall on me, it is apparent that I am THE CHOSEN ONE. I try the old 'head down, eyes on the ground, walk as fast as possible' manoeuvre, but he forms a human blockade in the street and I am forced to stop and listen to him. He shoves something into my hand, which I take, assuming it's a leaflet, and then try to continue my peaceful walk. But the man won't let this happen.

"You speak Russian?" he asks me.

I don't know why, out of everyone on Oxford Street, he decided I was the most Russian-looking person. I also don't know how exactly you can tell a Russian speaker from their general appearance, but apparently they all look like me.

"Er, no," I say.

"Have you heard of Hare Krishna?" he asks.

Oh dear. I look down at the leaflet in my hand and discover it is, in fact, a book. A book about meditation. I make an ineffectual attempt to shove it back into his hands and do a runner, but he looks so excited about the fact I have actually stopped to listen to him that I don't have the heart.

"Er, yes," I say.

He starts going on about meditation and yoga and how I should come down to this hall somewhere and take part in some class on something or other, and I smile and nod and try to conceal the sheer panic in my eyes. I keep repeating the word "cool" over and over again for lack of anything else to say. Passers-by eye me with sympathy, but their eyes seem to say "you got yourself into this one!" and none of them tries to rescue me by pretending to mug me or kidnap me or something.

Eventually he finishes his speech. "I give you this book," he says. "But it is not free. We ask for a small donation...eighty pence? One, two pounds?"

And I give him the money. That is how pathetic I am. I am so pathetic and incapable of saying No that I bought a book on spiritual meditation off a Hare Krishna in the middle of Oxford Street, despite a) having no money and b) being a Christian. That is probably the silliest thing about this whole affair. I bought a book about something that conflicts with my own beliefs, and then threw it away as soon as I got home.

I need to stop being a Yes Girl. Once, I went on a date with this guy I was not attracted to in any way whatsoever because I felt bad for him and couldn't say No. The date went okay, until he told me that he thought Eragon was an amazing book and Christopher Paolini was a really talented author. That was the death knell, really. The next time I saw him I pretended I didn't know who he was, and I never saw him again. I am not joking.

Anyone have any tips about how I can be less pathetic? Thanks.

Musings on a wedding.

2009-07-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the wedding of a girl who was in my year at school. The ceremony was beautiful, but I also found it very strange. I remember when she first met this boy, in our local nightclub, which is basically a glorified sweaty shoebox with a sticky floor and a terrible DJ. Now they're going to spend the rest of their lives together. It restores my faith in nightclubs a little. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times, the guy who catches your eye across the dancefloor probably just wants to shove his tongue down your throat - but he might just turn out to be the love of your life.

A lot of my friends were shocked when they heard she was engaged at nineteen. "Trust me," I told them, "if you saw them together you'd know it was right." Normally I would say that marrying at such a young age is a mistake, but they make a perfect couple and I know they are going to be happy together.

Personally, I can't even comprehend getting married now. I'm not sure I can comprehend getting married ever, though I hope it will happen one day. Maybe that's just because I haven't been in love. There's just something about the thought of getting into the dress, walking slowly down the aisle with everyone staring at me, speaking the vows into the silence, that absolutely terrifies me. "If it were me I'd do a runner!" I exclaimed (just as the church went silent, because that's the sort of thing that always happens to me). My friend couldn't imagine not spending the rest of her life with the boy she loved. That's the difference between me and her; that's why she is married and I can't even get into a relationship because I'm such a commitmentophobe.

As someone who cannot write a single story without romance in it, you'd think I was a hopeless romantic. And I am. But the romance I write about is all about the pursuit: that exciting period when you first meet someone, when you start to develop feelings for them but you have no idea how it's going to turn out, when one minute you hate them and the next you miss them, when everything goes by in a big confusing dramatic blur. Then you finally end up together - and then the story ends. I don't want to know what happens after that, because that's the part that scares me. What happens when the excitement dies down? What if everything just becomes...mundane?

The pastor at the wedding read a quote from Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Searching for it just now, the first page that came up on Google was a page that contained all of the exact readings he did. How funny. I can imagine him sitting down panic-stricken half an hour before the wedding and typing, "WEDDING READINGS PLZ!!!" into the search box. Anyway, I digress. This quote, which is apparently quite an overdone wedding quote, describes love as "what is left over when being in love has burned away". I know that this is the truth for many married couples who are still in love after many years, but it is a calm and steady love rather than an exciting and passionate one. I hope everyone manages to find this.

As for me? I'm just too much of a free spirit...

The adventures of Rolo, Jack and Max.

2009-07-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I decided to clear out my wardrobe so that I could accommodate the various junk I accumulated whilst at uni. At the back of the very top shelf I discovered a folder of short stories I wrote when I was little. It's nice to unearth a piece of nostalgia like that, but at the same time they make me cringe.

I used to have these three toy dogs called Rolo, Jack and Max. Every now and then I would brave the three hours it took to load up our fridge-sized grey beast of a computer so that I could happily type up stories about their various canine adventures on MS Word '97. Some of the stories are quite short, but I'm not going to recite any of them to you. Instead, here are some of my favourite literary gems, complete with butchered grammar:

"Yikes" shouted Max. " I hate spiders, unless they are grilled with cinnamon and garlic... Yum, yum ! ". (Presumably that was a combination of flavours I considered normal...)

"What's going on around here?" the puppies asked Calico, who was promptly sick all over them.

"Ho ! Ho! didn't you know? I do birthdays as well", chuckled Father Christmas.

Rolo suddenly rushed in,followed by a fat ghost smoking a pipe."Hi doods" said the ghost ."Would you like to hear a joke".He diddent wait for a repley."What do cats use to fight?" "catapolts!"."Shut up ghost your annoying me"said Jack.

I don't know where I got the subject matter for these stories. One is about a tortoise called Christopher Columbus that wears its shell upside down so that people mistake it for a bowl. Another is about a giant dog biscuit that chases the puppies around at night. In another they get detention with Mr. Dread, who proceeds to shout "LET'S PLAY BALL!" and lob a baseball at them. This last one is called "Detention is BRILLIANT!!!!!"

My mum has decided that these stories are proof that I am destined to be a writer. She thinks I should rewrite the stories and get them illustrated. "Seriously, I think you have a future in writing children's books," she says. "Children would love to read about Rolo, Jack and Max."

I know I'm lucky that I have a parent who supports my desire to follow a career that will probably see me living in a box on the street offering to write witty verbal vignettes of passers by for small change. At the same time, it can be a bit overbearing, because she expects me to write a bestseller and I don't know whether I can achieve that. Despite having praise lavished on me by my English teacher at school I have never actually won a competition, had anything published, or generally done anything to prove I have talent. I was rejected for the highly in-demand creative writing module at university and instead ended up with my last choice, feminist literature (joy). And yet she still thinks I'm a genius.

So it's dinner-time and my mum is telling my dad about our discovery. They start to discuss this new plan for my life as a children's writer in detail, while I sit and wonder why they don't plan my wedding and funeral too while they're at it.

"Of course, you're going to have to change the name Rolo," Mum says. "Copyright issues and all. Jack, Max, and...Rollo?"

"Why not introduce some diversity?" says Dad. "Jack, Max and Iqbal!"

"She can't do that! They're brothers. That would suggest they have a mother who is promiscuous."

"It would suggest they have a mother who enjoys celebrating diversity!"

I feel like burying my face in my chicken. The joys of witty dinner-time banter.

The end is nigh!

2009-06-26T01:12:00.001-07:00

Tomorrow I leave university and go home for the summer. Today people are starting to leave, and the atmopshere is melancholy. The last few weeks have seen everyone finishing their exams and campus has been buzzing: groups of people sprawled across the fields in clouds of barbecue smoke, music blaring from bedroom windows, queues outside the ice cream van parked in the piazza, the pub packed out with people who have been in there six hours straight and are starting to teeter on their stools.

For many people, post-exam life has been one big sleep-deprived party. Now, everything is starting to wind down. Rooms are bare, the walls stripped of posters and the hideous pastel-coloured and questionably stained university bedcovers returned to the beds. The abusive signs we pin up on each others' doors (I woke up one morning to find one that said I'M GONNA CREEP INSIDE YO LIKE A WARM KITTEN! with accompanying illustration, inspired by the Mighty Boosh) have been taken down. People stagger up and down the corridors with suitcases that look like they're about to explode. Even the sight of the empty fridge makes me a little sad, and I miss having to delve through piles of gone-off vegetables, pizza boxes and bottles of vodka in order to locate my milk for a cup of tea.

I can't believe my year as a fresher is over. It seems like only last week I first walked into my room, nervous, excited and friendless, ready to introduce myself to the strangers in the rooms around me. Those strangers are now my best friends. This year has been so surreal: existing in a little bubble world populated entirely by fellow students, and living side-by-side with them too, cooking and sharing a bathroom. Our first year results don't count towards our degree, so it has basically been like a year-long holiday to the Land of Irresponsibility, going out three or four times a week, sleeping until stupid o' clock in the afternoon. Next year won't be the same. We will actually have to do work, a thing most of us have forgotten how to do.

Since I'm in a nostalgic mood, I'd like to share a few things I have learnt in the first year of university, because I believe I've become a completely different person over the months I have spent here - hopefully in a good way.

Your mum (or dad, let's not stereotype) is pretty much the best person in the world. It's only when you're kicking the broken change machine in the laundrette, moving aside mountains of scabby plates and pans covered in month-old congealed food to find enough room to eat your dinner off the kitchen table, or filing outside at 4am in tiny pajama shorts in the rain because some drunken idiot has failed to accomplish the simple task of making toast without setting off the fire alarm, that you truly appreciate what an amazing job your mum does.

In the first year of university, your sense of humour recedes to what it was when you were about twelve. Since you're not required to be a responsible adult anymore the most juvenile things become funny again: unpicking the lock and bursting in to the bathroom cheering when someone else is having a shower, jumping on top of someone who has for no reason just jumped spreadeagle into a bush, waiting until your friend has left his door open with his laptop on and then changing his Facebook status to "just wet himself in Tesco, how embarrassing!" and his profile picture to a really, really fat person. The other day my dad asked me how we made each other laugh at uni in the absence of unfunny Dad Jokes. "By throwing each others' mattresses out of the top story window," I replied. He thought I was joking.

If you thought you were clever, university soon teaches you that are in fact irrevocably stupid. There are many, many, people who are cleverer than you. You will probably end up in a small room with five of these people listening to them hotly debate, in a deeply philosophical way, whether the bloke who decides what font to print a book in is in fact an artist. You will stare at your shoes and slowly lose consciousness.

On a more serious note, you must study a subject that you love. Never choose a subject for its academic prestige, because if you secretly hate it, it will show in your work. Even if you love a subject, when you study nothing else except it, it becomes a bit like a black hole that mercilessly feeds on your enthusiasm and turns you into a bored, cynical wreck. Honestly, I already feel like I've read enough Chaucer to last me a lifetime, and if I ever hear anyone open a friendly anecdote with the line "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" I think I will snap and transform into some kind of bizarre literary version of the Incredible Hulk, destroying all in my path. If this is what has happened to me, think what would happen to you if you hated your subject to start with.

You'd think that, with only a few hours of lectures and seminars a week, you would have plenty of time to pursue hobbies and spend your time productively. Not so. You will find that you never get anything done, ever. This is because you will spend most of your time doing things necessary to being a respectable human being such as washing, feeding and cleaning up after yourself; when you are not doing these things you will be too lazy to do anything else. Hence you will lie on your back on a field trying to find pretty shapes in the clouds, watch three series of one TV show in a week, take two naps every day, tape over your door with newspaper and then burst through in a dramatic fashion - anything except the work you are supposed to be doing.

Friendship is totally different at university. You probably know the feeling when you spend all day with a friend, and then sleep over at their house; by the next morning you are fed up with each other and can't wait to be alone. Well, at uni you spend every day and every night with your friends, but you don't get fed up with them. Instead they become like a second family. You miss them a ridiculous amount when you are split up from them, as I am now split up with my friends for three months, and you can't pop over to see them because they come from all over the country, and often from other countries too. I grew so used to being around them constantly that now I am home alone I am bored senseless. I don't know what to do with myself. Which is mostly why I'm writing this blog.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now. I learnt many more important things whilst at university but I don't remember most of them, meaning most of them probably weren't all that important anyway.

Traumatic bus experience

2009-06-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

I have to start blogging now because already strange things are happening to me.

I'm not sure what it is about me, public transport and crazy people, but they seem to come together far too often. I was once stuck on a train next to a man who gave me a very loud half hour lecture on particle physics and the nature of the electron before telling me that the tarot cards had predicted his life and did I know that CHILDREN HAVE AURAS! At least that man was harmless - just a little, er, off his rocker. Today, however, I had a truly traumatic experience on a bus to the effect that I am never going to sit on the top deck ever again, even though when I sit at the very front with the big window it feels a bit like I'm flying.

So there are five of us sitting on the top deck. We'd been out for my friend M's birthday and we were all pretty tired, just minding our own business. Then...she comes. I try not to judge by appearances but there are a few little things that suggest she might not be the most desirable bus buddy: the shabby clothes and hair, the stumbling and screeching, the faint stench of illegal substances, the obscenities. She is followed by her children and they sit right next to us.

She picks up a piece of rubbish someone has left on the bus and, casting us a dirty look, announces that "students are ****ing tramps". I'll add here that I hate swearing and am not going to repeat the words she used here, but suffice to say she would have made Gordon Ramsay look like he belonged on Ceebeebies. She produces a Tesco bag that has definitely seen better days and kindly offers it to us so that we can "shove all our rubbish in here because no one wants to see it."

None of us points out that the rubbish isn't ours. As someone towards whom crazies seem to gravitate, mainly because I am very shy and socially awkward and try my hardest to avoid crazies, I know the golden rule: never make eye contact. It provokes them. So I stare out of the window as if the view outside is the most interesting thing I've ever seen, and the rest of the group follow suit. Crazy lady calms a little, and soon she and her children are lighting up together in some kind of bizarre family bonding experience. On a bus. In a few minutes I am engulfed in a cloud of smoke and am feeling a bit sick.

Soon, the bus driver pulls over, comes up onto the top deck, and tells them to stop. The lady stands up, all in his face, shouting that "It weren't me, it weren't me, you won't find no cigarettes on me, why are you complaining anyway, all you have to do is drive a bus and get paid for it," and so on. She doesn't seem to realise that the driver could see her smoking thanks to this newfangled invention called mirrors, not to mention the fact she stinks of smoke and has yellow teeth and nails. To her, this is DISCRIMINATION! He's picking on her because she's not a student and she doesn't have a "rich daddy" to send her to university. Discrimination, I say! Speaking of discrimination, apparently it's still okay for her to racially abuse the driver. The poor guy obviously gets intimidated and goes back downstairs, leaving us to be on the receiving end of her torrent of drunken spite and malice.

Crazy lady now takes offence at my friend O because O has taken her shoes off on the bus; she jabs a finger at her and shouts, "Her feet are discriminating against me, no one wants to smell her feet, that's just dirty innit! I didn't ask to smell her feet, she didn't ask to smell my smoke! That little ***** thinks she can get anything she wants just because daddy pays for her bus pass, isn't that right, didn't daddy pay for yer bus pass?" I'm pretty terrified to be honest, but O isn't disturbed by this at all, and is in fact staring at the lady like she is some kind of fascinating animal in a zoo. She offers to put her shoes back on but the lady hasn't quite satisfied her daily quota of innocent stranger abuse yet so continues.

"You're really bugging me, you know what? You're really bugging me. Looking at me like a right snob coz of your rich mummy and daddy. You know what, I might live on a council estate, but I'm loving it! I work hard to get on the dole while your mum goes sleeping with the boss for £20. I raised my kids of the dole and it aint done them no harm!"

Oh no she didn't...she didn't just go there....she insulted my mum. NO ONE insults my mum. It was like a "your mum" joke except actually offensive. I know it wasn't personally directed towards my mum, but it still offended me because I have MASSIVE respect for my mum. How dare you, I wanted to say. My mum grew up on a council estate too (I've been there and it's awful, people had just randomly poured milk all over the pavement and it had gone sour and stunk) and she started out with all the same opportunities as you, but she didn't go on the dole and get drunk and abuse people instead of making an effort to find work. She worked in the same job for years and years, in the same office five days a week, completely monotonous, before coming home and then having to feed and look after her family, and she never complained, not once. And now she has made something of herself and has a nice house in a nice area and she and my dad can afford to send me to university so that I can make something of myself too. You clearly didn't care enough about your kids to do the same thing.

Of course, I say none of this. I cower in my seat and continue to stare out of the window as if none of this is actually happening.

I feel sorry for the daughter. She's actually trying to stick up for us, albeit in a scary shouty sort of way, and when the woman threatens to trip O up as she gets off the bus the daughter says don't worry, she won't let her lay a finger on O. I think it was only because of the daughter that crazy lady didn't physically start on us, so I'm very thankful for that. This girl clearly has the potential to be a really smart, but she's never going to be given the opportunity by her mother. What can you do? So we get off the bus, leaving crazy to her own devices. Hopefully she didn't begin abusing any of the other students on the bus, since she seems to have a vendetta against us.

Anyway, that was my traumatic bus experience. In a way I'm glad it happened because looking back it was kind of funny, and it has also made me very grateful that my parents have been so amazing, and that they are happy to spend ridiculous amounts of money on my education to give me good opportunities in life. They also taught me personal hygiene and didn't encourage me to smoke spliffs on public transport, which is also good times. Good times all around.

A fresh start

2009-06-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've deleted all my old blog posts because I've decided to start again. It's going to be a lot more interesting than before, but I probably won't start blogging again until after summer when I have moved into my house and crazy student antics recommence. So, yeah, see you then!