I love Hamlet.

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

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

1. "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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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.
8. 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.
   
9. 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!

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.

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.

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!

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

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.