First box: What do I need to improve? Fair enough. Not so much, you know, only speaking, writing, vocabulary and ideas. Piece of cake. Second box: When am I going to do it by? Ooh, self deadline setting, that’s good. Wait a second…FUCK.

Mock orals start next week. Thanks to whatever weird pen-jabbing system Mme J used this time, I have a week’s grace. Then there’s another week. Then it’s Easter. Then it’s the real oral. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DRAG MY SPEAKING UP TO AN A BY THEN? I ONLY SEE CORINNE ONCE EVERY TWO WEEKS. THERE ARE ONLY THREE SCHOOL WEEKS LEFT. Not only am I incapable of getting from one end of a coherent sentence to the other, I am incapable of using any good grammar, remembering any vocabulary, or coming up with any ideas. Really, at this stage, I’ll be deliriously happy if I manage to spit out a sentence that has an opinion about one of the topics in it. Fuck grammar. Fuck vocab. Fuck il faut qu’on soit conscient de ce dont nos jeunes ont besoin. If I can get through the je pense que c’est une bonne idée and make it out the other side of the parce que into something like ça aide beaucoup de gens, I will probably collapse with fucking relief on the fucking floor.

And if one more person tells me to stop freaking out because I’m the best at French, I will rip each hair from their head individually and then hang them upside down from a window by the upper lip until they eventually perish. Because even if that accusation (even when people are trying to compliment me, they can’t help it coming out as one of the many things in the latter column of my Pros/Cons list) is true, WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT IN BEING THE BEST AT FRENCH IF I DON’T DO ANY BETTER IN THE EXAMS. In fact worse. My essays, chronologically, are literally getting worse. And I have no idea to improve them. 

And at the end of this unbelievably shitty week, indeed this unbelievably shitty day, I get to the bus stop only to discover that my brand new Oyster card holder (lost it 2 weeks ago) has broken. And that my brand new Oyster card (arrived 1 week ago) has fallen out of the bottom. I know not where. After pleading with the bus driver, alternately waving my student ID and the useless empty holder at him, I was eventually allowed on. I think my facial expression probably frightened him. I’m meant to be babysitting at my sister’s tonight, which involves two or three buses. My father is furious — being Oyster manager has its perks, and he put a rush on my new one — and therefore a lift does not seem likely. This leaves walking all the way, or paying £16. I have also last minute realised that it’s Mothers’ Day this Sunday, so I don’t really have the £16 to spare. Nor, however, do I have the time to walk.

Going back to the French thing, it just makes me think, what is the point? Why am I putting myself through this? I’m dragging myself through this interminable thigh-high swamp of shit so that I can get an A, so that I can get into a good uni where I can drag myself through an  interminable waist-high swamp of shit, so that I can get a good job which will involve me dragging myself through an interminable ribcaage-high swamp of shit. For fifty years. And then I will retire, and suddenly it will all have come to nothing. Really, when I’m inevitably going to end my days sitting around doing nothing and waiting to die, WHAT THE FUCK IS IT ALL FOR?

I don’t really have anything to add. Except what you already know, that the world is a fucked up place.

I’m pretty much up to date on work, but I’m really behind on that list of stuff entitled God, I’ve Really Got To Get That Sorted. At the top of the list currently are: dentist, hairdresser, optician, cervical cancer jab (not that THAT one’s of any great urgency…), some proper piano practice, cutting my nails to enable this to happen, finding some work experience, downloading some uni prospectuses, deciding what I’m going to do with my life and putting away all the ironed clothes hanging off the front of my wardrobe. Right now, between careers (I’ve suddenly realised I need to sort it out) and actual homework, everything else seems kinda unimportant.

Except, of course, Cathy & Swank nights. Except, of course, that we were unable — once again — to get hold of a Swank film, as usual, so really it was just Cathy night. We also only got through two films, which I blame on the presence of so many eight and nine year old boys that they were literally everywhere — we dragged ourselves upstairs at 4am and went into our regular Cathy & Swank bedroom, and turned on the light only to discover about five children in our bed. I felt like one of the three bears coming back from the mornign walk. Except Goldilocks was quieter, and a lot less obnoxious. And probably, when invited to a sleepover, didn’t spend the entire time staring at her Nintendo DS. Oh, the modern age.

Now I have to go home and write an Eng Lit essay. The slight flaw in this plan is that I haven’t actually read any of the poems I’m supposed to be writing about. The slight flaw in the general plan of getting stuff done is that no one ever gets anything done the day after a sleepover, and I really can’t be bothered to do anything at all. “I’ll do it the night before” is such a beautiful phrase, like a fine wine trickling smoothly under my tongue. Then again, this IS the night before, though it still feels like a continuation of yesterday. Already on the cards for Monday’s night before is the usual Pile Of French Shit; the Always Tuesday thing is comforting, but unfortunate, as Monday is my six-period day in both weeks. Plus whatever other homework for History/Latin/Eng Lit I’ve forgotten about.

In short, it’s all a bit messy and icky. My life feels like the morning after a sleepover. I was about an hour late coming here yesterday, because I was sitting at my desk, on the verge of TEARS of SHEER FRUSTRATION, at the Oxford course outline for Classics w. French. I literally could not make sense of it. There are 2 courses, one for people who’ve done Latin and/or Greek A Level, and one for people who haven’t. So far so good. For my version of the course,there are 3 versions, people who’ve done Latin, people who’ve done Greek, people who’ve done both. Still following. For each version of the course, there are 3 options, entitled Option 1, Option 2 and, nonsensically, Option 1 & 2. Option 2 is a year longer than Option 1 but seems to have less stuff in it. And Option 1&2 has nothing to do with Option 1 or Option 2, so far as I can tell. In the end I threw it into my overnight bag and crawled weeping into the shower. I think this is the preliminary Oxbridge test: If you are smart enough to understand this course, you are smart enough to apply for it. I failed miserably.

So my brain is a bit of a mess, too. Unusually, the only thing which isn’t a mess is my desk, which I tidied while watching LOST  to make me feel like I was doing something productive. Amany’s hair looks pretty neat too. Despite its natural chaotic and twirliness. I want to go back to bed for about five years. And when I wake up, we will have emerged from the recession, so everyone will have stopped applying to uni, the Tories will have just been voted out, so tuition fees will have gone back down, and I will have subconsciously absorbed five years of knowledge and wisdom, and will be able to work out the table with 3 options for 3 versions for 2 courses for 2 degrees.

When I suggested, since I was supposed to help organise a failed November trip, that we all go off au cinema to see the new Jeunet film next week, I had kind of assumed that Mme T, a fellow childless mummy and one with much less free time than me, would let me do it. This was going all right until the ever pleasantly surprising democratic approach of Mme J kicked in, and suddenly, in addition to me, we had two teachers, eighteen students and one French assistant organising the trip. Of course, as often happens in such situations, it has ended with me sorting it out anyway, which suits me just fine (now I get to do my extremely unattractive “I told them so” smile to myself) . But it got me thinking about my role as Mummy, and what it means.

It is possible, of course, that this is a sign that I am destined to become a real mother. Indeed, the main reason I have always recoiled from the idea of having children is because I can’t stand the thought of any more responsibility. My own mother is of the view that if you want something done, you give a great sigh, are secretly grateful for the lack of response from your companions (be they friends, colleagues or family) and, martyr-like, sacrifice yourself for the completion of the task youw anted done in the first plcae.  Mine has less self-confidence in my own ability to do it, more along the lines of if you want something done and you can do it, why not just fucking get it done before anything goes wrong? Such impatience and inexorability probably do not make the list of Top 10 Motherly Qualities. Or even the top fifty. However, it might come in handy every now and then when you have one kid at band practice, one going prune-like in the bath and one in tears over their trigonometry homework, with another one tugging on your sleeve in the awful, rubbery, death-smelling waiting room at Barnet General and your husband on the phone saying he can’t find any food to shovel into the other one.

It’s for this reason that Ricky and I have arranged theoretically our five test-tube babies. It’s perfect. We will both love them. He will inspire them. I will manage them. Thus we will raise them. It’s unfortuante that Ricky and I would most likely murder each other within a week of starting such a project, that we’re not attracted to each other and that we have no money for IVF or a house big enough to fit five children into it. Because it would be a beautiful family. In any case, the point is that a nature such as mine is incompatible with anything other than a laid-back, lenient, fun parenting persona, unless you want your children to be total disasters. Since I couldn’t stand living or working on something (I would love them, I promise, but I’d always work on them) with  a laid-back, lenient, fun parenting persona, it looks like I am destined to remain eternally, if not bitter and alone, then at least childless.

The second, rahter more popular, theory among my associates is that I am destined to become a teacher. I have been fighting this suggestion for at least the five and a half years I have been at MHCHS, and seem to remember it coming up before that too. Well, at least, my Year Six teacher apparently told my mother on Parents’ Evening, “Lara sometimes is at risk of organising people.” My mother, being the source of the anal genes which expose me regularly to this risk, replied something along the lines of, “Well, somebody has to.” The jobs of teacher and mother are both excuses to organise a person. The difference is that in a mother, this quality may be at the detriment of the other aspects of being a mother, such as liking your child. In a teacher, organisation is both desirable and limited to one aspect of the child’s life, their education — as opposed to 18 entire years of their existence. Logic worked through: the problem now is that I don’t know if I want to be a teacher, or if I’ve spent half of my life being told I will be one, and therefore when the idea is put forward, I think, “Yes, that makes sense”. My psychological laziness — the dislike of change coupled with the unwillingness to try and come up with anything else — needs no encouragement. I suppose I’d better hope to God that I can actually teach.

The only other explanation I can think of for the Childess Mummy Syndrome (hereafter known as CMS) would involve some very long psychobabble. This might revolve around the successful precedent of my own mother (who, incidentally, also passed on the CMS gene to my sister, an equally skilled mother and manager, in equal and related parts). Or it might concern my own life, my feeling that I cannot control the things which happen to me, the traumas I experience and the travesties which I witness, and so transfer this frustration onto things which can be organised, such as a trip to the cinema or a school project. It’s a well-known fact that the vast majority of Type As in fact feel more than the general population that their lives are spiralling out of all recognisable control. I’m not disagreeing with that statement.

Oh, God. I hate it when I go profound.

Let’s move onto lighter topics. I watched Wanted at last, as I have been *wanting* to do since it first came out, because, simply, watching the trailer I thought (as did everyone, I think), “That looks fucking awesome.” I can now confirm for a fact that it was. It probably didn’t make any sense, but it just looked SO FUCKING COOL. I wish I had a more elegant way to say it, but there you are. However, though amazing action sequences often feature in my list of awsome films, this was not all that I liked about the picture. We all thought at the time of the release two years ago that it was just about bending bullets. It is about bending bullets. And it is cool. But, contrary to my expectations, there was also a plot, with, if you consider it, some fairly deep psychological questions. We have everything ranging from daddy abandonment to the destruction of perception, the extent to which you are slave to something you believe in and whether that’s a choice, a fair few mind games…Well, I’ll let you watch the film.

All this added to a window into the humour of the excruciatingly normal life of hypochondriac protagonist Wesley (played perfectly by James McAvoy), a little sex appeal (anyone alive in 2001 will understand if I simply state, Jolie & weapons), quite a few genuinely unexpected twists… And, of course, the amazing visual and sound effects which would have made this movie as ridiculous as it sounds on paper, were it not for the stunningly high quality of CGI that we have come to regard as normal from the industry today. 

This has absolutely nothing to do with what this post was originally about. Except, I suppose, that if I were a real mummy, watching such films might be a bit difficult. Which leads us on to an entirely different post, the one where it transpires that I only love movies so much because they constitute a complete distraction from the awful responsibilities and problems of every day life. I think I’d better save us from this by ending the post now.

The decision to drop Politics, which has been viewed (often verbally) by most as a disastrous, whimsical mistake that I would hasten up to the sixth form block to rectify on Monday morning, definitely makes the list of best choices I’ve ever made. This week has been every bit as relaxing and enjoyable as the summer holidays were — and 2009 was the best summer of my life — not just because, like then, I had minimal work to do. It’s not that simple. I was able to properly relax, because, unlike every holiday since then — culminating in the weekend in Paris — I could face the thought of its end. The summer, because it stretched on forever and because I was looking forward to Year 12, which represented the apparent discovery of some semblance of control over my own life. This week, because having had the sense to just bloody give up, I have regained that mental — and physical — control. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that apart from two essays I have essentially had no homework set. But that wouldn’t be enough for me to properly enjoy half term if I knew I was going back to five subjects.

Self-satisfied paragraph dealt with. The more recent complaceny stems from, as I said, the outing I just had with Amirah to go and see The Lovely Bones. I hadn’t been all that impressed by the book, though I thought it was an interesting idea — a murdered tween narrating from heaven the collapse of her family and the antics of her killer. However, as happens not all that often, the noise being made about the film has been exactly the right volume and in exactly the right places. Films which combine spot-on scripts, performances and direction are always unique, and The Lovely Bones is no exception. In terms of the writing, I felt the film had achieved what the book had so clearly attempted and not quite managed: to make something poignant and original out of something unnecessary, pointless, awful and unfortunately, dirtily, common. The script was helped in no small part by Peter Jackson’s visionary mind and the resulting perfection of the CGI afterlife. The line between pretentious and innovative is extremely, microscopically thin, above all in cinematography: things either just work, or they just don’t. The singular beauty of the otherworld Jackson and his team created captured perfectly the mood of this film: one of wonder. No one, though, is under any illusions about what we’re dealing with here: the rape and bloody murder of a fourteen year old girl. To take something so ugly and transform it with such grace that the audience walks out hopeful and uplifted, and have it not seem a gigantic cop-out designed to please the BBFC and reel in the half-term families — that’s what the fuss is about this picture.

It’s arguable that it still would have been a fairly good film on this basis alone, but great films need all three: script, direction, performance. The latter is, of course, 99% Saoirse Ronan (that’s sear-sha for most people, serr-sha for people from her town) and Stanley Tucci, whose combined sackful of nominations speak for themselves. Ronan proved herself beyond all doubt in Atonement at the tender age of thirteen, and once again takes centre stage, narrating the film, playing the character around whom the actions of all the others revolves and, most impressively of all, acting with pure truth something none of us, including her, can ever know: being dead. Susie Salmon is simultaneously normal and special, and Ronan plays her in both worlds — the everyday, earthly family crises she now watches and the extraordinary In-Between she now walks — with understanding and curiosity.

Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, sinister serial killer, is now very high up on my Top Five list of the creepiest people ever. As soon as you look at him you know he’s the one. With such a level of spine-shiver already going on before he’s even moved, it’s pretty impressive that he tops it with his acting. He, like Ronan, has the impossible job of trying to get inside the mind of the incomprehensible: a taker of life. An archetypal, Always The Quiet Ones disturbed murderer with beige jumpers, big glasses and a weird moustache. But Tucci is diverse enough to take on this role, a world away from his other famous,  turns in The Terminal and The Devil Wears Prada, and play this subtly, subtly. Well done Stanley. He normally looks so harmless…

Not much else has happened recently since I’ve been at home for the last two days, clearing out my French folder. And anyone who has taken French for at least GCSE will know that yes, this is a two-day task. I have managed to reduce the Random Crap section (it was literally called that) from approximately 30 sheets to 6, through heavily condensed notes. This may not sound like an achievement compared with the week’s earlier triumphs of writing the impossible brutality essay, finding something to say about downloading music and eating an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough with Cloe, but the fact that my French folder no longer weighs more than all of my others put together…To me, at least, that’s made this week worthwhile.

The fact that such a small task has left me feeling so contented sums up this post nicely. It was mostly because I wanted to ramble about The Lovely Bones, but it’s good to add in some personal details for those who have no interest in the film, just as it’s good to ramble about cinema for those who have no interest in me. Life is so nicely balanced these days…

This entire subject neatly corresponded with another interesting topic I covered recently, this time with Ricky. He sent me a website detailling the last meals of every single inmate (former) of Death Row in the USA: 

They all, to continue with generalising stereotypes, seemed to order an awful lot of meat. Except for the ones who asked for World Peace (bullshit, don’t kill ten people then), or for the meal to be given to a homeless person (do they tell the homeless person where it’s coming from?), or the one who wanted 6 chocolate chip cookies and a cup of tea. I warmed to this one — relatively speaking, of course — until it transpired he had raped a 19 year old girl and then beaten her to death on the head with a motorcycle chain.  Which sort of put the whole thing back in context. But the point is, both of these conversations got me thinking — if I were on the verge of death, what would I want?

Ricky, of course, would want to climb a building and sing from the top of it, then get laid, then run all the way to the South Bank and back, then tell his parents he eats meat, then get a hug from Rhetor McC, then meet Alan Moore, Heather Graham and the guys from Peep Show (again). And, I’m sure, twenty other amazing accomplishments. But me? I don’t know. With the nuclear thing, I would of course say goodbye to whoever I could that mattered. And then I’d have a last meal. The contents of this are the tricky part. One Lindt ball. Then my mother’s spaghetti bolognese. Then ice cream. But which FLAVOUR? Cookie Dough for all of the PMS memories? Clotted cream vanilla because it’s just the best one?  And oh, God, Oreos. And savoury! What am I talking about? I need Belgian waffles, and the biscuits with the cow on them, and Doritos, but not too many because then it’s like ew, and Kettle Chips, but WHICH FLAVOUR???? Sea Salt & Balsamic Vinegar? Lightly Salted? Aaaah! And I forgot about cake! I’ve never been one for cake so much as for all this other stuff, but Cake Day has fundamentally changed me. I think I can see why those crazy mass murderers/serial sexual offenders ordered so much stuff. But to eat all of it they’d have to have minuscule portions. Which would, really, leave them feeling empty and frustrated. Which is probably what led them to commit such heinous, Death-Row-worthy crimes in the first place.

Yes, I am aware that this train of thought is going absolutely nowhere. Yes, I am also aware that I have chosen to spend my Valentine’s Day listing the junk food I would want if I were a hard-up criminal waiting to be lethally injected. However, it is also Chinese New Year, so I have felt rather removed from this year’s much-hated celebrations. Not that I am ever particularly affected by them. Last year I was babysitting like the good single sister I am so that my sister and brother in law could go out for a nice romantic dinner. All the other years before that have just blurred into one. So back to Chinese New Year — we have just entered the Year of the Tiger. Tigers aren’t all that great in Chinese culture, in fact they’re borderline bad-omen (which makes me feel bad for children born in the Year of the Tiger), so there have been no giant red and gold posters or paper animals on sticks this year. At least my mother has finally given up her determined treks into London, to thread herself amongst thousands of other non-Chinese Londoners and smile hopefully at the Money King and trail after the procession and finally emerge from Chinatown with cabbage stuck to the bottom of her shoes. She used to do this every year, while my father and I, the Chinese ones, stayed at home. Most likely asleep.

This year marked another change, in that my father attempted to teach me to prepare rice properly. He stuck his hand in the rice cooker thing and indicated that when the starch gathers around the knuckles but the water does not cover them, this is the right amount for the portion of rice. This indicates that I am, Asianally, soon to become “the woman of the household” who is expected to do all the cooking. I can see myself now as a typical 27 year old Chinese spinster, shoving her cracked hand into the rice cooker thing while my mother realises she isn’t Chinese and can sit down and my father lounges around on sofas enjoying his position as Elder. Now, unlike many of my friends, I am fortunate enough not to suffer from typical Asian parents. However, I know my father’s upbringing, and I know his personality, so I’m pretty sure that the only reason that I have been saved from experiencing this kind of thing on a daily basis is that my mother would not stand for it.

I’m going to be out quite a lot next week, which probably will NOT please him, as I think he has the day off almost all of the time. However, I need to see my friends, and to go to the cinema and see a DECENT film (2009 produced an impressive number of bad ones), and to get outside of the house, and to celebrate my no longer having 5 crazy A Levels and no longer being behind in Latin (THAT’s RIGHT, I CAUGHT UP FOREVER). And since I only have one Asian parent, and my non-Asian parent will shush him over the Quality Family Time Round The Dinner Table With Chopsticks thing, I’m not going to worry about it.

I think I’ve exhausted myself on this topic. I’m going to find some fruit and watch the movie Iain got me for my birthday.

I have entered a vicious cycle of non-work, whereby I go to bed way too late, therefore fall asleep in lessons/when I should be in lessons/when I should be doing homework/am too tired to notice teachers telling me there is homework, therefore have to stay up late to get done whatever was due in 5 days ago, therefore fall asleep…Okay I’ve probably sent YOU to sleep now. Note to self: deliriously recital of vicious cycles not best way to advocate exciting aspects of blog.

The point is, why can’t I drop Politics THIS week? I mean, I first thought seriously of dropping it like 2 weeks into January. And resolved to have made a final decision by the time I came home from Paris. Voilà, I decided on the Tube home from Paris that there was no way I could continue with 5 subjects. You know why? Because the only thing stopping me from getting off the train, crossing to the other side of the station and catching another one to Heathrow (literally, I actually considered this), rather than face the work for me at home, was the thought that I would have one less subject soon. So decision made. Final answer.

Next step was telling McC. I gave myself a week for that. Voilà, I told him at 8am on Friday. But he said I had to go away and think about it over the weekend (surely going to another COUNTRY over the weekend and thinking about it should have been enough?), and also keep doing it until half term. I was expecting that one — it makes sense — but he seems to be operating under the delusion that I may change my mind once I have had five days off school to clear my backlog. Well, make that three days since, in his typical patronising-you’re-just-a-tired-hormonal-teenaged-girl-who-overworks-herself-into-freak-outs-over-her-subjects way, he has instructed me to take two days off. This isn’t about backlog. It’s about BALANCE. There is currently no balance. I said I would do five as long as it worked for me. It is no longer working. I could do it. But not while also doing dancing and piano and rehearsals and sleeping and eating and travelling. Well. I could do that to. But at the expense of my social life, such as it is, meagre thread of weak laughter, and therefore my sanity. NOT WORTH IT. And NOT GOING TO CHANGE OVER HALF TERM. If he’d let me drop it effective immediately I could have caught up on Latin Lit before half term. And maybe got some sleep somewhere that wasn’t in the Study Area or the toilets or the bus or English Lit. (Don’t worry, we were only reading a play.)

I may have already written that in a previous post. I don’t even know. I litearlly have no recollection of being set 99% of my work. Not that it matters, since my current project is work that was overdue from before Paris. The Politics essay I am going to hand in tomorrow is in all likelihood the worst thing I’ve ever written (one hour of rambling about the rise of the SNP and the fact that the new electoral systems since 1997 have, in actual fact, had no other impact whatsoever, thereby heavily implying in my conclusion that the question was a STUPID one), and by the time he marks it I will no longer be a student of his subject. The Cambridge Classics Project site has decided to freeze so I am blogging while I wait for it to load.

I had some funtimes at the weekend, though. Friday night was the baffling start of LOST VI, which involved the writers not bothering to decide after all whether the perfectly reasonable plot to reset time back three years in normal LOST time, five and a half years in real world time and push it forward 30 years into the future in current LOST time, by chucking a hydrogen bomb into a pit of magnetic energy did, in fact, work. They just filmed two parallel situations: one where it worked and everyone is leading perfectly mundane lives of breaking out of federal custody at LAX and choking to death on heroin balloons, and one where it shifted them through time (AGAIN) but not back home, and everyone is dying in holes filled with metal crap, ponds in temples and fires in four-toed statues. Somehow, none of this confused me. The only thing that confused me — beside the sudden appearance of creepy temple people who partially speak English — was the following: if things reset to the plane journey, why was Desmond on the plane? If he had never come to the island, he would have just been in army prison at home. Or married happily to Penny, also known as the hot DNA lab tech from CSI:NY, depending on HOW far back things reset. Well, he has a cool accent and is rather pleasing to the eye, so I’ll stop complaining.

Saturday night was Helena’s (pictures soon to follow), where shockingly, despite our unprecedented exhaustion, we made it through two films and did not start drifting away from the biPodding (thank you Mme J for that wonderful phrase) and half-conversation until 4.30am. I think this was due to the presence of Andrea. As word spreads around the year group that yes, the girl does indeed eat like a savage dog which has been locked in an empty room for 50 days with nothing but pictures of food on the walls, a different question springs to the my mind: how can so tiny, tiny, TINY a person carry around such a gigantic fluorescent, vibrating, tune-playing, flashing lava lamp of energy? Okay, so that was a shit metaphor, but remember how little sleep I’ve had and forgive me. The point is, I doubt we could have gone to sleep earlier if we’d tried. She wouldn’t have kept us awake — Andrea is the epitome of consideration and politeness, except when it comes to food — but we wouldn’t have been able to do anything else in such close proximity (isn’t that an unnecessary adjective?) to one such as she. In the end though, even she succumbed. Tasha and I, who had been sharing an armchair, slept sitting upright, side by side, in said armchair. She couldn’t even slide down the floor to her sleeping bag. I couldn’t even turn 90 degrees to lie down properly on the chair. It was actually probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had for a good while (5, maybe even 6 hours?), so again, no complaints here.

Sunday was rather less successful. I wrote the shitty Politics essay, and fell asleep in my clothes on my bed at 7pm. I did not wake up until 6.15 the next morning. This morning. If my 5th and 6th hadn’t been cancelled (JOY TO THE WORLD) I would probably be on my floor right now. I did fall asleep in the car on the way home. Maybe that saved me. I am facing some long times at school this week; tomorrow I have to stay for a piano lesson in, most irritatingly, the second half of period 5, and on Wednesday I am not going home at all after double French 5th and 6th, but staying and working until the 6th Form Concert, which has crept up on us out of nowhere. However, 6th Form Choir is hardly the one I’m worried about (we had a rather efficient, if a cappella, rehearsal last week when Mrs McC failed to show and we all stayed anyway like the losers we are to note bash).

We may have six months to rehearse it, but Über Choir is scaring me. Rumbling through the rehearsal came the voice dreaded by every choirmistress, that of, as he called himself “the composer”. He suggested we do it FASTER. Those of us who can read music were failing to sing it at the moderate tempo Mrs McC had selected due to time constraints. She, politely, restrainedly, pointing out, “Well, I think they’re learning the notes just at the minute.” There was a strained silence, and then The Great Composer returned, “There are only four notes.” So our poor Head of Music gritted her teeth, faked a work-laugh (Chandler & Monica fans, anyone?), nodded tersely to her husband at the piano and faster it was. I think the only reason we weren’t stopped in this abomination after three bars was that most of the teachers (the worst culprits for having no idea what the hell is going on) were absent from this particular rehearsal.

So far this evening I have made it through a box of grapes (mixed, green and black seedless), a box of blackberries, half a box of bluberries, half a box of strawberries and a clementine. The clementine was not nice. Blueberries are Bea’s thing, not mine. You have to eat about a thousand before gaining the impression of actually having anything in your mouth at all. Apart from that, it was all very nice. I appear to have reached the point in the report where I start listing everything I’ve eaten (a common feature of my childhood diaires). I think I should stop.