In any case, the debate about whether or not we like Anne Boleyn has been raging in my History class for weeks, so I thought I’d put in a word in the one place where no one can answer back. Anne Boleyn was a pushy so-and-so, wasn’t she? Shoved a great Queen off her throne, clawed her way up the political ladder, started a Reformation, wound a stubborn, mighty king around her little sixth finger, and all that. But the question is: was it all her, or was it all her family? No doubt the Boleyn faction — above all her father Sir Thomas and her uncle Norfolk — wanted to get in there, but from what we know about Anne, disregarding the various historical — yes, and theatrical — interpretations, I’d say she enjoyed it too. She was sharp and manipulative, and it’s no coincidence that she was the instrument of the downfall of Henry’s other sharp and manipulative pet, Cardinal Wolsey. She was charming, and she loved to play, and the excitement of her compelling personality was what drew Henry away for good from his wife, Catherine, devout Catholic, true princess, daughter of the monarchs who united Spain, beloved Queen and above all humble wife, who had put up with Henry’s crap for almost twenty years by the time Anne came snaking up.

I understand, of course, the difficult situation in which Anne found herself, with her patriarchs pushing her closer to the King’s bed and the King dragging her into it, she with very little say in the matter. All the same, you would think that the young woman who was resourceful enough to get Henry, who had had more than a string of mistresses, including her own sister, dumped unceremoniously, thereafter known as the Great Slut at court, to break with his Church, divorce his wife, dethrone his Queen, illegitimise his only legitimate heir, and settle down, unlike with Catherine of his own volition rather than his father’s…you would think that a young woman who achieved all of this would also be able to stand up to her father and uncle. Anne knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it, and though she has by history been reduced to just one of six, she was unique. She was the only wife besides Catherine to be crowned. She bore by far the most successful heir, though of course there was no way to know that. Her role in the English Reformation is often over exaggerated because it makes an already fascinating woman even more exciting, but the fact remains that there was, in all likelihood, not a single other person in the country who could make Henry sit down and read a fat book, let alone several. Henry was, and remained until his death, a Catholic, and no one but Anne could have made Henry shut up and listen for long enough to propose a radical reform to religion in his kingdom.

So she was important, and she was clever. But do we like her? I have to say, I harbour a vague dislike for Anne Boleyn, taking the wily minx view. Of course, Henry needed someone cleverer than him to shut him up once in a while — Catherine was plenty intelligent, but too intent on being a good wife and Queen to shut her King up — and I do take pleasure in the knowledge that she sexually frustrated him for years. noli me tangere, often incorrectly assigned to Anne as her motto, was in fact a poetry quote from Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of the many young men who was alleged to have had carnal knowledge of the Queen’s Majesty, but you can easily see why it has so often been — probably accurately — attributed to Anne Boleyn. She was tantalising to Henry, who naturally couldn’t be expected to stick by his solid, now middle-aged wife who had only gone through childbirth, say, six times for him. 

I hate to take Catherine’s side so vehemently, but everyone always forgets that Henry and Catherine were happily married for a decade. They were good friends, both fans of the New Learning, who had plenty to discuss and did often sit around and talk together of an evening. Anne was both less and more of Henry’s equal, and equivocally his companion, though in a different way. Everything was always fire and passion between them, whether that was the good, golden-fountain-giving, illegitimate-Elizabeth-producing kind, or Anne pushing her pushiness too far and letting something escape her lips which vexed the King beyond recall. Except, that is, by her. Anne could always talk Henry down. Catherine’s strategy had been to never wind him up in the first place. Go figure. Catherine also got by far the worst deal of the six, despite serving the longest term, being the only one whom Henry considered a friend as well as lover, wife, Queen or companion, getting their first and once inspiring the words, “if I were still free, I would still choose her above all others“. The beheaded cousins who went too far at least got it over with quickly. Sure, Jane Seymour died at length and painfully, but she won the child-bearing jackpot of the century and Henry still liked her by the time she died. Anne of Cleves, though called a horse, was also called the King’s sister and treated very well for the rest of her days, often coming to court and well provided for when away from it. Katherine Parr, though she had to deal with Henry at his most grumpy, smelly and ulcerating, was also the only one who managed to weasel out of an execution order. And they both outlived him. Catherine, stripped of her titles, land, daughter, husband and dignity, suffered. She had cancer. She was not allowed to see Mary. She died still shoved into a quiet corner, declaring till the last her love for Henry, the legality of their marriage and the legitimacy of the Princess.

The other debate, of course, is whether Henry was looking for an excuse to divorce Catherine and Anne came along, or whether Anne caused the whole thing. The latter is undoubtedly the case. Henry approached Anne to be his mistress, nothing more. It was only after a year of her whispering poisonously sweet nothings in his ear, among them noli me tangere, that Henry even thought of annulling his marriage to Catherine. Without Anne Boleyn, Catherine and Henry’s marriage would still have deteriorated and he would have got his son another way. But without Anne Boleyn, it is unlikely that Catherine would have ended up in such a miserable situation as she did.

That said, neither did Anne deserve her only nasty end. Mistress Boleyn was many things, but a slut was not one of them. No one quite knows whether her previous engagement to Henry Percy — broken off by the King and Wolsey and marking a fairly significant social leap for Anne – was made out of love, or political design. If it was the former, we should pity Anne all the more. If it was the latter, that still wasn’t in the least uncommon or even unexpected for that time, and Anne’s job, as a 16th century girl, was to bring honour to her family by marrying — preferably up. Perhaps she shouldn’t have aimed quite so high up, and it has to be said that if you play with fire it’s your own fault if you get burnt. But Anne’s sins don’t excuse Henry’s. Cromwell trumped up every single charge against her, the most ludicrous of which is that of sleeping with her own brother. The only reason for these charges being true which is supported by any evidence at all is that Anne was growing desperate for a son: who knew better than she what happened to Henry’s Queens when they were getting fat and not delivering the goods? I wouldn’t put it past her — Anne seems to me to have been the kind to do anything for her ambitions. But she also seems to me like the kind who had confidence in herself and believed in what she was doing. She believed she was serving God by spreading reformist ideas throughout her kingdom, and she believed she was supposed to be married to Henry, just as Catherine had before her. She believed that she deserved to be married to him, and therefore that she deserved to have his sons. And therefore would. Anne Boleyn was nothing if not stubborn and determined, rather like a certain King…

Really this post has answered nothing at all. Anne is to be pitied and scorned. She didn’t deserve the precise end she got, particularly the torturous delays, which must have had her, Henry, Cromwell and Jane Seymour in mutual mental agony, but she deserved something like it. Everyone always speaks of her influence on Henry and England at this time, and her greatest downfall, her failure to produce a male heir. But her greatest achievement is in fact the female heir she produced. Much of Anne can be seen in Elizabeth: her refusal to marry, keeping her very much in demand and in a very good diplomatic position to negotiate; her grit when facing the Spanish Armada; her insane book-learning; she even looks like her mother, if you compare their portraits. If it weren’t for Anne Boleyn and her finally giving in to Henry’s (rather heavy) pressure, the Tudors would not be remembered as anything worth rememebering. Without Anne Boleyn we would not have had one of the most successful monarchs to date.

And though this is the reason she is looked on with disdain by often female historians, Anne was interesting. Wedged between her precedessor and successor, Catherine of Aragon and Jane Seymour, she certainly spiced up this period of history. Who needs obedient quiescence when you can have flirtatious temper tantrums? And let’s face it, I could not have written an interesting post about Catherine or Jane.

When I came into Mixed Voice to hear Mr McC (husband, accompanist and calm-exuder rolled into one) banging out some discordant notes and the altos, with perfectly straight faces, singing “Twink. Twin. Kul. Twink. Twin. Kul.”, I thought I’d heard the weirdest part of the Troika song. (As some of us thought to ask after about three rehearsals of this strangeness, a Troika is a Russian sled.) However, when I got to the fifth line of the piece, I realised with surprise that my part was the only part singing. Not that the others weren’t contributing. Oh no. The boys and the sopranos were, in fact, busy clicking. That’s right, clicking. With their tongues. As we sang.

More jaw-dropping, however, was yet to come. By the time Iwas confronted with the hilarious torture of the new Sixth Form Choir project, I had grown rather fond of the Troika (at least there was a purpose in me being there — even sopranos can’t drown out everyone else with CLICKING). Never have I loved a sinister Russian carol so much as I longed for the Troika after my onomatopoeic introduction to Ray Charles’ arrangement of Jingle Bells. To give you a brief idea, it begins with the girls trilling “Pring Pring Pring Pring” in harmony, followed by the boys rumbling “Oom…Oom…” before launching into a so juxtapositional-you-hope-it’s-them-taking-the-piss lurch from a squeaky “Jingle Bells!” from the sopranos to a growled “JINGLE BELLS” from the boys, neither of which is identifiable as being actual musical notes, rather than just strange, animal-like notes. Other highlights include “Laughing all the way, hee hee hee hee”, shouting optimistically the word “Right!” before launching into the second half of the verse and the sudden transformation, from this melted jumble of interjections more farcical than musical, to the sudden information that “Everyone’s so gaaaayyyy”, that last word having to be held on for two and three quarter bars.

As someone who has been reading way too much of Jane Eyre for her own liking of late, I can confirm that these bizarre arrangements are the products of poor, hideously overworked, grossly unappreciated, Mrs McC’s soul, the only way it has found to cry out in complete unordered, nonsensical, erratic WTF. I will admit that when I was lower down in the school, I was as terrified of her as the next kid. When I got a bit older, I was just pissed off by the fact that you just can’t say no to her. Ever since Stage Management begun, I saw Mrs McC for what she truly was: a shockingly committed, very gifted woman who looks after her people. She has shown her gratitude on plenty of occasions and in plenty of ways — many of them involving rather tasty chocolates — and for me, she now represents the beautiful conventions which exist at our school, thankfully ignored by those who invest in the rather less humanist, rather more authoritarian traditions which are also in place. For instance, the Music Practice Rooms, which I often describe as a haven for those who inhabit it, is the universal dumping ground for things which music students don’t want to carry around. In exchange for the endless hours spent in rehearsal and practising, we are permitted taciturnly to leave our Geography textbooks, PE kits and other worldly possessions in the corridor. It is also frequented by music students at all hours of the day; the teachers pretend to believe they belong there, in return for their commitment to their lessons.

This was always more of a nice theory than a proved reality, until the first morning after the show last year. Those in the musical are allowed to lie in for an hour in the hope that this will allow them to actually function reasonably humanly for the rest of the day, but of course no one’s parents wanted them to be late, so we all arrived about ten or fifteen minutes early. Like any reasonable student at a very good comprehensive, we had no desire to go the end of our first lesson. Where was our automatic hide-out of choice? I didn’t really believe it myself, until I pushed open the door and saw that the corridor was already too packed to move, full of music students leaning against walls, sitting on the floor, sharing chairs, a whole wonderful community of Mrs McC’s bitches and slaves, housed safely from the horror of normal lessons by her generous corridor.

Still, being nice to her friends is the least of Mrs McC’s worries. How exactly does one run the only department in the school which the Head gives a crap about? How does one run the department in the school which only ever seems to have a maximum of two proper teachers at any one time? How does one handle the subject the least respected by kids who aren’t gifted in it? How does one organise the rehearsals for more groups than the rest of the school’s extracurricular put together? The answer is simply this: Mrs McC is superhuman. I would estimate that each of her 5 lobes (her super powers allow her 1 more than the rest of us) is dedicated to a specific area.

One is actual music. Two specific things stick out in my mind as proof that Mrs McC is, unbeknownst to pretty much everyone, is an awesome musician in her own right. One, when she told me about my first piano Distinction, she happened to mention that she once got 148 in an exam. Two, the fact that she could handle her rabble of a hired band (some of whom, HEM Eastern European Clarinet Player, couldn’t actually play their instruments), conduct and sing for us lot in the Head’s Choir AND play the ridiculously fast, 5-flat piano accompaniment for the Year 7 Chorus, all at the same time. In rehearsals I used to listen to her playing the piano part and think “Wow. I really wish I could do that.” Which is not something it had ever truly occurred to me to one day say about the Music Director who is so everywhere she seems to be nowhere.

Two whole lobes are dedicated to administration and logistics. Which of her fifty million musical groups should she attend today? On what colour card should she print her latest Scary Bold/Block Capitals Notice From The Music Department?  Which box of folders should she be dragging around today? How many more copies of the score does she need to photocopy since they mysteriously vanished in the last rehearsal? How on earth do you spell surnames such as Ghassemizadeh in the programme? What irritating Clipart should go on the concert tickets this time around? What the actual FUCK is she going to do with the immensely complex Stage Management plans for dragging stuff on and off the stage? What order should the items go in, in order to minimally piss off the Head with the inevitable interjection of things written after the Classical period? From which supermarket should she buy the overly-diluted orange juice for the interval? How many “guests of honour” is the Head dragging along to the front row this time? How many teenagers does it take to push a grand piano across a hall floor? …You get the picture.

One lobe is dedicated to patience. Most of this goes toward boys whom she has forced, through her various means, to attend her choirs and so on, who then divide their rehearsal time between laughing at the funny words, deliberately coming in at the wrong time, eating, throwing food, messing around on keyboards and taking hte piss out of her while she’s talking to them. However, it’s a whole lobe, so on most days there’s just about enough left over for her actual students, of whom Years 7 to 9 will largely scorn and think they hate her, the abuse she receives from the Head and his demands every time something doesn’t run absolutely perfectly, and the Music Department phenomenon of Vanishing Music.

The final lobe is reserved entirely for Remaining Human. Given all of the above, I’m sure you can see why it needs a lobe to itself. It is my personal belief that Mrs McC achieves this particularly important goal by immersing herself in the music she is forcing people to perform, the music she has found and organised and arranged and photocopied and given out and photocopied again and given out again and photocopied once more and given out some more and finally stuck in folders and confiscated from everyone’s sight until the night of the concert. The music is what she’s there for, even if no one else is, and though this may make her brain not overloaded but in fact TOTALLY WACKO, I’m pretty sure that as she hurried around in her scarily high heels, there’s always a little tinkly tune going in her mind. One just hopes it’s not “Jingle Bells! JINGLE BELLS. Jingle Bells! JINGLE BELLS.”…

Nevertheless, I have somehow mustered enough trickling energy to make a final stand before my brain shuts down, c’est-à-dire, to enthuse about the wonderfulness that is my friend Amany. I promised her a post because she complimented my writing, but in truth it was on the wind anyway. As she fondly reminded me today, during Years Ten and Eleven we bickered like a married couple, lasting approximately five minutes sharing a room on the History trip before starting the first inconsequential squabble, and I gave her the semi-affectionate nickname Dramany, for her tendency to get extremely upset over extraordinarily trivial things.

Now, however, I have wafted into the world of Arts and she has, in an explosion of truly interesting hair, flung her creative soul off the proverbial tower block into the bottomless abyss of Maths and Sciences. In other words, we no longer have enough time together to piss each other off. We have found a period in which we can cotch, as Sabrina might say, but true to form, this is not the average laze across a selfish number of armchairs in the common room. No, Amany’s and my time together is now concentrated into the forty minutes before first lesson, which we spend upstairs in the study area, doing too much work and stressing out over colour schemes.

This is interesting — not to you, of course, but to me — as Amany and I, as with many of my closest friends, blended into an Amara-coloured pattern without us trying or even noticing. It suddenly occurred to me one day toward the start of Year Ten that I was electing to spend almost all of my free time in school with Amany. From here — here being a curly, psychedelic, Dramanatic whirlwind of hugs, irritating keyrings and hysterical laughter — our relationship evolved to a higher level: sitting around watching films starring Catherine Zeta Jones and Hilary Swank.*

There is no one for whom I so frequently feel sudden rushes of squishy love, as I described it to her some hours ago, probably because there is something fundamentally cute about Amany — her little freaks, as Charlotte Brontë would say. Her perfectly compacted Muji pencil case full of absolutely tiny stationery she will never use, her obsession with doing things in her own, particular, Dramany way and her inability to handle anything else, her head movements as she mouths the words to  her iPod, her tendency to quote Forrest Gump at opportune gaps in the conversation…All right, so perhaps this is beginning to sound like a love letter, but it is impossible to explain how all of these minuscule details come together into such an awesome person as Amany. Well, let’s try anyway.

What is an enormous relief about our friendship is that, though it does not in general require much serious conversation or emotional strife, I always know that it always could. I like to think of Amany, or Manee as I have come to call her, for reasons best known to her family, as my companion on a tedious but necessary cliff-edge trek. Her purpose? To grab my ridiculously conspicuous shoes if I fall off, and drag me back up. But her practical role? To let me play with her hair, to laugh hysterically with me, to share Phish Food with me, to endlessly, atrociously, impersonate Catherine Zeta Jones’ real accent, to prop my eyelids open when we’ve already watched half a season of Grey’s Anatomy, to enter with me that state of Zingyness which can only be achieved by a grave sweet popcorn overdose. In short, to be everything that I need to get me through the dark and twisty path of existence.

To Manee: I love you. I love your family. I love your little freaks. I love your inner Dramany. I love our MSN conversations. Which is what I shall now return to — sorry in advance for having abandoned you in order to write the post in the first place.

*Films starring Cathy (as we call the woman we worship as a Welsh goddess) and films starring Swank (as we shout nasally during her screentime), not films starring  both of them. There has never been a film starring both of them. There SHOULD be. If I were slave to the giant, machinised, conformist Man, and if I had slept in the last day, I would start a Facebook group. Which brings me to the final shining basis of mine and Amany’s friendship: before Facebook realised what we were up to and made her change her password, she used to let me use her account to retrieve hideous pictures of me and beg for them to be removed, no doubt leading to a cursed string of Notifications for her whose existence, in my Facebook-related ignorance, I didn’t know of at the time. I hereby apologise profusely for this abuse.

“Ohmigod I’m actually in it now, instead of just being mentioned as the girl who left you!!!” says Dooey. She tells me that she brought her drugs. Oh no wait, she means her Lemsip tablets and so on. Well that’s less exciting. Dooey is now ranting about how crap LOTF is and how literature is stupid because it doesn’t need to be analysed THAT MUCH. I sometimes forget how similar Dooey and I are.

Dooey is hugging me. Dooey gives good hugs. And she wore an awesome t shirt to my party. Dooey and I used to HANG ALL THE TIME and then an unstoppable force known as the Coconut sort of tore us apart, which sucks rather a lot. I not only love Dooey but Dooey’s family too, which she probably doesn’t appreciate, but it makes things very fun when I very occasionally head over there. She’s looking in my Baby Names book; our favourites are Nest, Iowerth, Hymen and Humphrey. Ooh, Theophilus! And Tewdwr, the Welsh version of Theodore (apparently)

See what fun we have together?

Sorry I could probably make this a little more coherent but Dooey is rather distracting because she’s so amazing and I’d forgotten how funny this baby name book is…Okay let’s just say that I met Dooey in Year 7 when we had netball trials and my mum asked Dooey if she’d seen me,  saying “Have you seen Lara? She has a flower in her hair…” and for the rest of the year, Dooey and Debba referred to me as Lara With The Flower In Her Hair. And now we’re reminiscing about Vocalis in the good old days with Ms Byrne. Omg we just found Clodagh. I think it’s Irish. Dooey is upset that she has not found her name spelt the way she spells it. Cloe, not Dooey. OMG we just found Chrysogon. No it’s not the sequel to Eragon. And yes it is pronounced Krizzagon.

GOOD TIMES! I think I should go now. Yes, just be absolutely clear, Dooey is McAwesome too. x

Things have been really shit over the last two days, our entire year group is really tense and aggravated and easily pissed off by each other because of what happened on Parents Evening (I find it funny that Olivia missed this whole thing and has no idea what shit has been going down). But they can’t have been more crappy for anyone than Miss D.

Yeah, okay, Mr N’s clearly a really good English teacher and he’s got the entire class not only engaged in the book and the class discussion which we only have once every 5 chapters with Miss D, but making NOTES for God’s sake, but MISS D! It’s the god damn PRINCIPLE of the thing! That Miss D has been stuck with a random class of Year Eights she has never taught before and doesn’t know the capability of, or where they are in the course, because three people managed to reduce her to tears is probably the most incredibly wrong thing that’s happened in this school since I got here. And there have been a LOT of wrong things.

It’s not like it was Miss Mackie. It takes a lot to break Miss D, and it was unnecessary to do so. Yeah, I know I’ve complained about her in the past, and I still believe the things I said, she’s still a fairly useless teacher and has been nasty to me in the past, but no one deserves this and it totally sucks. Maybe it feels like I’m making this personal but if you make a woman cry in front of her colleagues and students in a room also full of strangers, during a SCHOOL EVENT, then it bloody well is personal. This isn’t just me being angry at the people who did this. This is me feeling genuinely sorry for a total victim whose dead cold wit and good taste in books I am already missing after 2 lessons without her.

Neither of these things are particularly cool things to have in common, but somehow this doesn’t stop Maimai from being very cool. Maimai always makes me feel like she’s happy to see me, and she put me in her personal message. It always makes me feel special when people do that, like I’ve actually had an impact upon the world… Maimai lets me play with her hair even though she doesn’t particularly like to be touched in that area of her person, she makes me work (…occasionally) in English and French when I suddenly think, “Shit, she’s better than me!” and start to pay attention…Maimai watches Strictly Come Dancing with me via MSN and teaches me all about Flavia’s stomach and Erin’s waist and other such things which have nothing whatsoever to do with the dancing…Maimai is so short and yet so damn intelligent and so damn pretty and is therefore one of those annoying people who puts me in my place when I don’t want to be put there…

I’ll admit, I didn’t know Maimai all that well before Year Ten when she crossed the vast abyss between 07 and Timetable One…Oh no wait…I crossed the abyss…Oh well. Whatever. But now that I have enough classes with her to get pissed at her singing (oh, that’s another part where she puts me in my place) and her giggling and her constant talking and everything, I have discovered that Maimai is lots of fun and a great friend who DOES make you feel important even if you’re not, and for someone so much smaller than me to make me feel important, she must be doing somethign right…Maimai, you are officially McAwesome. lari x

I do not remember when I first met Iain. It was in Year Seven, of course. I never confused him with Max (and I am telling the truth here), though I did wonder at how similar they looked. I have very few early memories of Iain, though we were friends from whenever we all started being friends…I can remember his stint as The Author during the dark and decadent days of Organised Chaos, oh, how he thought we didn’t know! I remember sitting on the elitist back row of Ms Ismail’s Maths class with him (as well as Sabrina, Runi, Ricky, Max and other such Mathletes beside whom I am totally inadequate). I remember Year Nine (just about). I remember how we were cruelly separated at the beginning of Year Ten, our only solace from the distress this caused us being Latin and History. Iain and I share the honour of being the only two people in our History class to have got 100% on an end of unit test…I think.

I’m not sure what else to say, because Iain is so utterly indescribable. He fits all sorts of stereotype, the most obvious being Evil-Genius-With-Exploding-Hair (for further detail, see Ricky Nathvani’s epic novel Nothing, written under the nom de plume ThickNavyRain). And yet he is so entirely unique that it is impossible to contain him within the words of a feeble explanation. Naturally, Iain irritates me from time to time, mostly when he upstages me as Most Negative, Most Patronising and/or Most Scornful. But he serves a purpose. Apart from anything else, he reminds me how nasty it can be to be on the receiving end of the full wrath of the Most Negative, Most Patronising and/or Most Scornful person.

Iain is wonderful. He may think that I make a mockery of him when I say this, but I mean it with all honesty. He is a lot of good fun and he is a rather extraordinary human. I wish him luck in all his endeavours.

Mummy has been my mummy since Fiona’s 13th birthday party (OMDIZZLE SO LONG AGO!!!), when Dooey, who used to be my mummy, decided she was going to disown me. Naturally, I was distraught at this loss, and so Mummy kindly agreed to be my mummy. Emma was not so pleased, as it messed up her weird incestuous inter-class 01 family tree thingy, but I don’t care because Mummy is such an amazing mummy.

Mummy’s hair. I can’t help but draw attention to it, just as I cannot resist pulling it every time I see her. Those curls! That boinging action! Oh, how many hours of my life have I spent playing with those curls? Mummy without a doubt has the best hair in our year. But Mummy’s appearance is not why I love her. I love her because she is always nice to me, because she stands there patiently while I play with her hair, because she offers me good advice and she gave me a moose-without-antlers (we’re not actually sure what it is, but we think it is a moose-without-antlers), because her handwriting is amazing and her glasses are cool, because she is such fun and can turn being locked in a damp, empty cell with no windows or furniture an exciting adventure (not that that has ever actually happened to us).

To conclude, Mummy is McAwesome, and I hope she already knows that I love her very much. As far as I know, I am her only daughter, and I vow here and now to do something for her for Mothers’ Day this year, as I have always failed to do so in the past. It will make up for us missing each other’s birthday parties. I LOVE YOU MUMMY!!!! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Also I love Amirah because she covers everyone in those annoyingly cutesy monster things, and she never gets in trouble for it, and she’s almost certainly right 90% of the time when she claims that people who mock/steal/vandalise the monsters are just jealous of them. I love Amirah because she fights tooth and nail every day in Chemistry to sit on the most uncomfortable stool ever. I love Amirah because she watches LOST and it’s nice to be able to say “yes” when she shouts “Who watches *insert show here*???” for a change. I love Amirah because she says “okay” and “freakazoid” and “I know, right?” and because she’s simply funny. I don’t think she does this on purpose, but it always brightens my day when I see Amirah squinting at me from down the corridor. (I eventually realise that she is trying to wink at me). It makes me feel like I’m not totally useless when I pop my lips or click my fingers and she can’t do it. It reminds me that I am not superior because I can do those things, when Amirah rolls her tongue in the way that Frank Jnr from Friends does.

In short, Amirah is hereby declared McAwesome, so even if I am quite mean to her sometimes, she should bear this post in mind.

Runi is very lazy. He can also be quite selfish. These are traits I also attribute to myself, which is why I was pleasantly astonished when Runi agreed to carry my ‘Cello all the way from Bottom Gate to the practice rooms this morning. I would not do such a thing for someone else, let alone expect Runi to. He is the laziest person I know (with the exception possibly of Luke). I was very appreciative of this effort, since over the summer I completely forgot how heavy the damn ‘Cello is, and I felt like dying when he took over. I awarded him Three Runis for this reason.

Apart from that, Ru Poo is awesome because he’s all of my most irritating qualities exacerbated, so I look good when I stand next to him, but somehow on me it’s exasperating and on him it’s absolutely adorable, so he still has many biatches who do his bidding, just as I have my minions who do mine. Runi kept me warm for three days straight on the History trip, Runi kept me entertained throughout every Latin, History, French, RS and Science lesson of Year Nine (how did we end up next to each other in all of those subjects???), Runi kept me quiet by either telling me to be quiet or saying it himself…Runi has done me a great many services and for this I am ever in his debt. One of the myriad reasons I miss History so much is because I miss sitting with my Ru Poo (admittedly, I also miss sitting with Ru Poo in a subject where I am possibly better at it than he is). Ru Poo has even occasionally helped me with Maths homework, and he is not the most patient of creatures, so I am extremely grateful that he did so.

I miss lessons with Ru Poo. All we have now is Latin (where if I don’t pay so much attention that my eyes are bulging, everything is utterly incomprehensible) and RS (where at least we still have our old class and Mr S and we sit vaguely near each other, but we never seem to talk). I’m now rambling and I don’t know how to wrap this up, so I shall just say

I LIKE IKE! …What did it mean when Runi kept saying that? Also, I only found out yesterday from Ricky that the reason I have Runi’s French holiday coursework in my Year 10 diary is because he made loads of copies and slipped them into people’s diaries at the end of term, which is so Runi that I replay him doing it in my mind… McRu Poo McRocks! love you x