choked up

Sometimes, I can't tell whether it's emotion or phlegm that makes her voice go like that. She sounds all strained when she talks about the pain in her throat, how it's like knives, so sore that she can't help but panic, and I can't help but wonder what's choking her up. Is it that she's sick? Or is she just sad?

*****

I'm not entirely sure how to feel right now. It's odd, not knowing what I feel or what I should be feeling. I'm trying not to think too much I guess. As you do.

*****
Right now, I'm sitting in my living room, sipping cranberry juice and listening to my parents talking about a stolen car. My brother's in the kitchen, preparing salmon for him, my mum and my gran. My dad's having pie, I'm having Chinese. We'll sit, eat, maybe watch a film, then I'll head off to midnight mass and give out the few cards I've gotten round to writing.

Christmas Eve 2005 has been much the same as in 2004 - I went to Basingstoke with my parents and used the Christmas money my nan gave me to buy all the presents I couldn't afford. DVD for Andrew, CD for mum, a book for my dad and a pashmina for my gran. Just like last year.

I'll show up to midnight mass on time for once. The first time I went I sat with Sian and wore my 99mt t-shirt and felt horribly out of place. Last time I sat on my own because I got there late and some guy winked at me and said "alright darling?" in that tone of voice while we were sharing the peace. This year I'll wear a hat like always and get excited about Christmas presents like always and try my hardest to find where God is in the service, just like always.

*****

Actually I won't wear a hat. I had my second haircut of the year on Thursday and the amount I paid for it, I'm not putting a hat on it.

*****

Txt from my mum's friend Joy, who works with her at Help the Aged.
"happy xmas to you all, how's it going?only took £80 in the shop today and i've spent the evening with my hand up a turkey's arse.does life get any better than this?"

*****

My Christmas presents thus far are as follows:
1 bottle of O'Sheas (Baileys rip-off, £3.99 a litre)
1 beer hat (you know, with the can holders and the straw?)
1 Body Shop gift set (I smell so good, you have no idea)
1 inflatable boyfriend, 18inches tall, who I like to call Steve.
1 bag of Penis Pasta, a humorously shaped source of carbohydrate (that should keep me well-fed throughout January...)

*****

Last night held two parties and a lot of catching up. I got to do whisky shots with my brother, eat trifle with some of my Dublin crew and had the strongest vodka and Pepsi of my life (cheers Phil).

Seeing mates who've been at uni is weird. I always chuckle when someone asks me about uni because, really, how do you sum it up? I tend to go for words such as 'bizarre' because words like 'horrible' or 'wonderful' would be misleading. You sit there with someone you haven't seen since August and you think, since I last saw you you've done so much stuff that I will never know about, you went and lived three months in a completely different world... I'm not sure what to say to you.

First everyone was driving, then they were clubbing, now they're working and moving out and moving in and getting engaged and climbing managerial ladders and growing up. I like it.

*****

Very early this morning I decided to run out of my house and go for a quiet drink of water in someone else's living room. Moments like that are what fairy lights are made for.

*****

Why is it that, no matter how many other books I have to read, I always end up reading the same few books over and over again, depending on what time of year it is? Winter means The Other Boleyn Girl and Cuckoo in the Nest, Christmas means Narnia and Northern Lights.

*****

My nan isn't the only one who keeps getting choked up. I keep wanting to cry for no reason, when I'm on my own or when someone's praying for me. When I'm writing, especially.

I think Becci might have a point about being addicted to blogging. Although with me it's not blogging that's the problem, it's getting my head stuck so far up my own arse that I lose touch with reality. I know the worst thing for me to do right now is to get too introspective; it would be very easy to just wallow in the ol' misery but what's the point? It'd make things worse than they already are and, let's face it, it doesn't make good reading.

I'll be back soon I reckon, in the meantime have a very merry Christmas or Hannukah or capitalist orgy, however it is you like to celebrate this time of year. Remember that Christmas carols mean something, remember that Christ was perfect and remember that the only reason we celebrate his birth is because he died in our place.

Catch you later.

5 reasons why things are better than this time last year

Maybe it's something to do with Christmas. Maybe it's just this time of year that hacks me off, SAD or whatever it is. I'll blame it on that, a combination of how the winter makes me feel and how ill the winter tends to make grandparents feel. That's my explanation for why this period, these two weeks leading up to Christmas have sucked so royally these last couple of years.

Dunno. Bit of a shit coincidence really. I'm getting the most horrendous sense of deja vu. So here's the differences, here's what's not the same:

1) This year's granny isn't dead yet. In fact, she's even showing signs of improvement. Hah. Take that grim reaper, we're fighting back in 2005.

2) I haven't been sick this December. Granted last week's caffeine induced nausea was almost exactly a year since the infamous 'Travel Lodge' incident that followed my nan's funeral (which is creepy, by the way), but I wasn't actually sick. There was the Pepto Bismol, the bargaining with God, the hugging of the toilet bowl but everything stayed where it should be. That's a big step-up from last year.

3) I'm in the start of a relationship this year, rather than the end of one. It's one thing less to get me down. This year, I have a new boyfriend and an old boyfriend who's now a best friend instead. How can I not be thankful for that?

4) This year, I'm leaning on God rather than bawling him out. As fun as it is giving the middle finger to the almighty in times of crisis, I think this is more what he had in mind.

5) I'm coping this time. Maybe not very well, maybe I could find better ways, but I'm getting on anyway. It's sort of encouraging to think that, if this whole 'everything going tits up just before Christmas' thing is gonna become a yearly occurence, at least it's getting easier each time round.

It's all gonna be fine.

they say that when you are weak he is strong in you

I should explain, I should update. I should tell you about the last few days in bullet-points: doing too much work, overdosing on caffeine, moving home, but I can't be arsed. I'll just say that my first term at RH finished much as it started - with stress, Pepto Bismol, heaving into my en-suite and ending up on the phone to Trev in tears.

Then I got home. And it got worse. I love being home, and coming home has made me appreciate it so much more, how lucky I am to have my tiny house and my crazy parents. My crazy family. I should be happy right now.

I haven't mentioned that my nan's getting ill. The one that's still alive, obviously, she's taking what can only be described as a Turn For the Worst. The doctor gave us this thing called a Nebuliserm which sounds a lot more fun than it is. You put asthma medicine into it and it vaporises, then nan puts a mask on and inhales the vapor. It makes this really loud whirring sound and she sits there with vapor coming out the side of her mouth for five minutes.

Five minutes, four times a day. It's really not that much. But she's practically helpless. So when I say 'you put asthma medicine into it' I mean that I do that, and I switch it on and help her on with the mask and if suddenly, when I'm out of the room she starts to choke I have to run in and twist open the Ventolin capsule and vaporise it and hook her up.

And it means that when we're sitting watching Countdown together and the slow wheezing of her breath stops I have no idea if it's because she's cleared her throat or because she's not breathing.

When her head slumps down on her chest, I don't know if it means she's sleeping or dying. I wish I was dramatising this. My parents are out at work all day and my brother doesn't live here anymore. It's just me and her in the house, my grandma myself and the Nebuliser.

I am so scared, I'm terrified. What if she dies? What if she just dies right there in the living room?

I'm eighteen years old and I can live by myself and cook for myself but I can't make sure I get enough sleep and I can't regulate my drinking and my incident with the pro-plus on Thursday night has more than shown that I'm incapable of medicating myself.

So how is that I'm here looking after someone older than myself? How come I'm trusted to give her her medicine, to hook her up to this breathing machine, to nag her about her inhaler and flinch every time she coughs up bits of blood?

Didn't we go over this last year? I'M NOT STRONG ENOUGH FOR THIS.

Of course I'm not. And I'm not good enough or strong enough or calm enough to do anything that I need to do. I've had words from a hymn stuck in my head for days: make me a channel of your peace. That's my prayer. It's my prayer in the doctor's surgery, or when I'm arguing with my parents or when my granny's even more scared of the Nebuliser than I am.

I'm going to cope with this because I have to. This has nothing to do with being good or brave but everything to do with necessity - circumstances dictate that I'm the only one in my family who can look after her during the day so that's what I'll do. It's only in the day and it's only until we can get her to stay at my aunty's, where she'll be much better because they have an annexe especially built for her so she won't get tired and she won't choke and the Dalek Nebuliser can go back to the hospital.

In the meantime, biblically speaking, I'm going to get the hell over it and get the hell on with it. It's ok that I feel small. In fact, the bible positively encourages it. I completely and utterly relinquish control on this situation, I cannot deal with it and I cannot change it so I'm putting it in God's hands. And that, at least, makes me a little less fucking scared.

i remember last night like this:

The overwhelming feeling of needing to find someone. I kept bumping into people I knew and staying with them for a while but then getting this massive urge to move and look for this particular person. I didn’t find them and I’m still not sure who they were. A vet with a sedative perhaps?

Taking twice as many caffeine pills as I should have done in that amount of time. I remember this vividly, not because it made me excessively hyper and paranoid (which it did) but because of how rotten I felt when I crashed at about half 2. Ugh.

Being amazed at how everyone knows everyone else. Walking past someone from one of my seminars and realising that they know my friend because they went to a party together and that guy they pulled once is the flatmate of someone that my flatmate went to school with. Or something to that effect.

Getting bear-hugs from Maffro. Maffro, Est and I are the Naughty Crew in our Writing and Performance seminar; we made badges and everything. We raved to Feeder to celebrate our love for each other. I got a bit emotional, but then I always do.

Realising that just because someone’s name has the word ‘gay’ in it and you just saw them pulling a bloke, this doesn’t mean they won’t grope you.

Solving the Great Royal Holloway Blog Mystery by introducing myself to Chris and then telling him more than he needed to know about my caffeine issues.

Panicking when Kate didn’t show up for her DJ set and asking Ed and Joel where she was. They said they didn’t know and suggested, half-joking, that I should go and find her. Not knowing any better, I went and tried, asking complete strangers and people dressed as Santa if they knew where she was.

Walking home and being spectacularly locked out of my flat. Stuck my head through various windows in Reid asking if they’d seen Kate. No one had.

Someone giving me a lollipop. I don’t know who.

Giving the brush off to a bloke who’s always looked down his nose at me. Hurrah!

Raving to Lady Madonna and Beating Heart Baby courtesy of Est and Jo, disk jockeys of my heart and soul.
Leaving Endrit on the dancefloor, walking up to the tech balcony and being absolutely terrified when I opened the door to find him there already. I’m left thinking, how long did it actually take me to wander up the stairs? I’m left thinking, what if Endrit has superpowers?

Getting home, no longer caffeinated but still very drunk, crashing completely. Lying awake reading Jane Eyre, knowing that if I lay down I’d puke but completely unable to keep my eyes open.

Feeling a rush of love for everyone, the union, my halls. Feeling sad that the term’s over but realising that some parental supervision might be a very wise thing for me to have right now.

this academic factory

Today, an exam, three trips to the library, the beginning of the world's worst essay plan, more of my Space, Body, Design logbook.

I suppose there must be a point to all this. Actually, I know there must be, because of the 5 books I withdrew today, only two of them are in any way related to my course. I don't have to do this. I want to do this. Quite what the point is I'm not sure.

I think about 3 hours of sleep last night. Possibly a correlation between pro-plus and seasonal insomnia, possibly not. I tried meditating, which was so utterly frustrating, I was sure I was doing something wrong. At about 6 I realised how incredibly dire it would be for me to show up to my exam with no sleep behind me and decided to force myself to sleep. I rolled over and listened to my breathing for a while, and I suddenly realised that my mind was as beautifully empty as I'd wanted it to be earlier. Nice. Somehow typical.

I shouldn't be going out tonight. It's that simple. I'm exhausted and I have obscene amounts of work to do for Friday, but I don't care. This is my last opportunity to get wasted with my cohorts this term, both Est and Kate are Djing and besides, Tom's already bought me a ticket. I'm going. Out with the pro-plus, on with the boots.

When I say stuff like that, you lose all sympathy for me, don't you?

Right now, I'm about to take a nap. My back pain from almost two weeks ago is back with a vengeance and my wisdom tooth is sore. On the plus, the pro-plus, I'm going to have a fantastic time tonight. My last night at the union '05 and I intend to rave until my eyeballs melt.

Yeah, I like tonight...

PS. My dad just txted me to tell me that they have Christmas work available in my local pub. Shit. I finally come round to the idea of not having a job and then I find one. Better take those books back...

in brief

Here is the news at 1:45am.

Sleep is still a luxury rather than a privilege. I feel so petty complaining about a flatmate but this is no mere spoon stealing. When you sleep this badly and someone rudely awakens you three mornings in a row, you start to twitch.

The first and only (if I play my cards right) exam of my university career is tomorrow. Today has been spent cramming. I wouldn't say I'm confident, I know my shit, but I don't know if I can put it on the page right. Then, I never do.

I took too much pro-plus today so I'm too awake to sleep. Tomorrow morning I won't be awake so I'll have some coffee to pep me up for the exam. This, if you hadn't realised, is bonkers.

I left my phone in Trev's car again on Sunday. Is someone keeping track of how many times I've done that? Because I think I've lost count.

No Christmas job means that I'll be spending the break wading further into my overdraft, getting some work done and reading all the books I've been meaning to read. If someone leaves a comment and recommends a book, I hereby promise that I'll read it. Within reason though, I still have Polo to finish...

I just realised that the sore bit in my gum is actually a new tooth. A wisdom tooth I suspect. I'm not quite sure what to think about this. Did I really go through the horror of having five teeth removed for my braces just so I could go and grow some sodding new ones in adulthood?

I went to the Journey church social last night, learnt the names of 32 people whilst waiting for my meal and then had a fab time pre-empting introductions in the bar afterwards. "Hi, I'm Fiona, you must be Dave/Ruth/Alex/Alistair/Natalie/Phil/Beth/Sarah/Andrea/Luke/Daniel..."

Secret Santa gave me some reindeer antlers and a flashing red nose. He also gave similar garb to my mate Ben, who bought me a Guiness, which I then got smeared on my nose. Fake nose, that is. My real nose isn't quite big enough to dip in my pint when I drink. Not without spilling it anyway.

Caffeine induced antics in the library with Kate today. Getting lost in the restricted loan section in Founders and then getting so utterly disorientated in Bedford that I gave up any hope of finding my way home. Kate found me sat on the floor reading a book on racial politics, which was quite funny, and then I jumped her in the revolving door, which was funnier.

I have an exam tomorrow. This is ridiculous. I am going to bed. Now.

*in which fi figures it out*

I've had this ongoing conversation with Tim about the difference between love and infatuation. How is that infatuation feels exactly like love but it's not? If, when you fall in love, you 'just know', and when you're infatuated you think you're falling in love, then what's the difference? How can you say what either of them is?

My conclusion on the topic was that love is when the infatuation ends and you still want to be around somebody. Tim's slightly more useful conclusion was this:
"the difference between infatuation and love is that infatuation is a loving of the feeling the person gives you. love is loving the person."

It rang a bell. Suddenly I had a thought in the back of my mind and I couldn't quite place what it was or where it had come from. Then I remembered Tim's previous email contribution, after telling me to have a good time at church:

"if you find yourself on your own walk up to the nearest person and start showing them how to really love thy neighbour."

Tim, Buddhist as you may be, I often think you've got the measure of this Christianity lark far better than I have.

It's always bothered me, that 'love thy neighbour' bit. Not in the sense that it's difficult to love people, but that it's damn difficult not to hate people. Try as you might, there are people in life that just piss you off and there's not much you can do about it. You can dig out their good points, try to ignore their bad points, smile and nod while they talk but you know that on the inside, below all of your good intentions, you're still thinking "SHUT UP, I HATE YOUR FACE."

Well, maybe that's just me. I know that you can work around it, it is possible to stop yourself from hating someone, to pray good things for them and actually mean it. But you can't make yourself like them. You can't change the fact that your personalities just don't match, that you just plain don't get along. And how can you love someone you don't like? If you act like they're your best mate when there's a part of you that really can't stand them, aren't you just being a raging hypocrite.

But then there's two ways of loving someone. Love can be a feeling they give you, that you have for them, or love can be something you do. Human beings aren't designed to get the warm fuzzies off of absolutely everyone, some people get on better than others. Loving your neighbour isn't loving the way they make you feel it's loving them, caring for them, looking out for them, respecting them, helping them and not saying stuff like 'I hate your face' when you're staring right at it. Or standing behind it for that matter.

After I email Tim back, the train of thought goes like this: Loving my neigbour means loving them, it means love being a verb, not a concept. So it means showing them love. Which is difficult when you can't stand someone, it's something I can be a bit rubbish at but I'm better at it than I was before. So maybe that's just the point: getting better at loving thy neighbour and getting better at loving God. Bonus! Epiphany! Back of the net! Get in! etc.

So inspired am I that I decide to whack open the ol' Bible and have a look see. Recently I've been hauling my ass through the gospels and as I'm looking for today's bit I find this bit in Mark.

You figure it out as you go along when you're a Christian. When it comes to finding out fundamental truths about life, I tend to take the long way round, but I get there. Eventually.

this time last year

It happened this time last year, the first day of my life that I bought and wore make-up, the day I'd decided not to let life get me down, to have a positive new start.

I remember thinking that her funeral was just another on a fucking conveyor belt. We walked into this side of the crematorium as the previous mourners walked out the other side. I remember being annoyed at how everyone got all religious now she was dead. I was pissed off at everything. I remember the vague sense of relief.

Mostly I remember hating hearing her life summed up. That she was born, that she worked at a grocers, and then at Woolworths, that she got married and had kids and was a member of this parish church and that her family grew and grew and that her husband died and she got sad, and then ill, and then died.

I remember thinking: fuck that. I remember her like this, in the letters sent back and forth between her and my grandad while he was in the army, the pictures of dad, Daisy, Ian that she sent out to him, how he used to finish his letters with 'I LOVE YOU' in capitals. I remember him standing in his uniform, the best looking guy in the regiment with this cheeky grin and his evil sense of humour. I remember her standing outside tenement halls with a baby on her hip, endlessly tolerant and frighteningly strong.

I remember the stick she carried, how my brother would be lippy and she'd hook it round his neck and scare the crap out of him. She had a sweetie cupboard in the hallway, always stocked, diet caffeine free coke and Penguin bars. We were never allowed fat coke at Granny's, but there was always a bowl of sweets by the TV. She had a crystal from the crystal maze in her cabinet, but I never found out why. She'd sit in her chair by the biggest window, nearest the TV like this: one elbow on the arm of the chair nearest the room, resting her head on it, watching the conversation. A lot of the time she'd just do that, the more of us there were the less she'd say, like she was just content to sit and listen to us, her tribe.

She laughed an awful lot, and she never gave in. She said she'd never leave that flat and she didn't. The last time I saw her I got bored of the conversation about people I'd never met and picked up one of her hundreds of books. The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn, a Morse mystery I think. When we left she told me to take it with me, she wasn't ever going to read it again. I don't think I did.

A few days before she'd been in hospital, mixing up people's names and not really knowing where she was. She thought my dad Charles was her husband Charles. She thought Charlotte was Gail and my brother was Ian. I walked in from getting a drink and she looked right at me and said my name. I felt guilty, why should she recognise me and not anyone else? I went and sat in the car, tried to think of a way to deal with this. I was annoyed at my family, at her for recognising me, at myself for not having the balls to stay and talk to her, I was furious with God. I sat and seethed for weeks until I was too tired to seethe anymore. Then I just gave up.

She didn't give up. They all commented in the hospital at what a feisty bird she was. I loved hearing them say that, proud to be her fiesty descendant.

The last time they took her into hospital the doctor came to lift her out of her chair by the window.

Gladys, can you tell us what your date of birth is? She doesn't know. And can you tell us what the date is? No, she can't. Can you tell us the names of your grandchildren? The name of your neighbour? Can you remember who the prime minister is?

The prime minister? Her eyes brighten, yes she can remember who the prime minister is. "Tony Blair," she spits at the doctor, "and he's no bloody good!"

This year, I'm doing things differently. I've had this time to feel bad, to feel angry, to take my mind off it. Time to put a stop to that. This year I'm gonna stop thinking about how bad last year was, stop whinging about how awful my nan's death made me feel and think about how incredibly proud I am that she was mine. That positive start I decided on this time last year, the one that I forgot about: I think I'll do it now instead, one year delayed, a key change, me being happy for once. Yeah... reckon she'd approve of that.

*in which fi realises how much she likes her father, then becomes her father, then hates on the upcoming generation a little bit*

Today I had a wonderful conversation with my father. I realised that I am very much his daughter. I can see it in the way he likes to watch people, how he observes them and their behaviour, how he sees everything that happens to him as an opportunity for a funny story, his irreverence and his love of well-timed swearwords. There goes my brother's theory about my mum and the milkman.

Having found reassurance in my lineage and spent a mildly productive afternoon with Kate in which we killed an earwig, talked Jilly Cooper and did about half an hour's work, I then decided to go to a gig. I heard tell that my lovely Emilie would be playing in a pub in Egham tonight, so off we went down the hill to give her some long overdue sugar. The gig was in a small venue called the Underground, at the back of the Railway pub, by the station, funnily enough.

We knew it was the right place because of the people. Oh my days the people. When I was fourteen it was all about baggy jeans and being slightly unkempt, very gothic, dog collars and fairy wings and spikes and studs and chains... now they're all wearing drainpipe jeans, bleached streaks in their hair, kohl-ringed eyes and stripy t-shirts. Yuck. I wonder if people hated greebos as much as I hate emo kids? I do hope so. Chances are we deserved it.

This is where I start to turn into my dad, and lose all respect for those in this world who are younger than me. Sorry.

Realising I'd missed Emilie's band, I managed to sweet-talk the bouncers into letting me in free to find her (to be honest, I just think they wanted some adult supervision in there), so I waded in. I use 'waded' in the most literal since, the greasy little buggers were chest deep and unwilling to move lest I get closer to the stage than they were. I tried playing nice, saying 'sorry' and 'excuse me' but after being told to piss off for the fifth or sixth time I resorted to the 'do your parents know you're smoking pot?' card and started kicking ass.

I found Emilie right near the front and was so relieved I could have popped. After a terribly touching reunion in the emo-pit, I couldn't seem to turn round so I just grabbed her ethnic ass and started reversing. I may not have sixteen piercings in my bottom lip but I'm hard enough to part a crowd. Make way for my backside bitches, I'm leaving. It was fun. I definitely didn't swear like that when I was fourteen.

It's not so much that I felt old, although I really did, it's that their whole rebellion thing isn't nearly as good as ours. It's just so disappointing. These guys are the upcoming generation and they're not a patch on us. Everyone hates the world at fourteen, at least we were vocal about it. We had t-shirts with rude words on, we had spikes and wore actual dog collars, we considered personal hygiene to be more of a quirk than a necessity and we moshed, dammit, we moshed! We'd push each other around and listen to music so angry you could shave your legs with it.

Compare us to the emo-punks, their stupid stupid haircuts that took so long to style, their perfect make-up and their stitched on drainpipes... What do they do, once they've got their strategic fringes gelled carefully over their eyeballs? They go and look sad about stuff, that's what. They don't mosh, they don't scream, they just sort of sit there and glower. They're more like pissed off looking wall ornaments than teenagers. So disappointing.

And that they had the cheek to look us up and down. Screw you bitches, I used to listen to Slipknot, I've moshed to Marilyn Manson and one time, my grandma met the Corries. I'M NOT SCARED OF ANYTHING, LEAST OF ALL YOU! Sod off and go home, whack on some My Chemical Romance and wait for puberty to hit. Maybe it'll knock some sense into you.

soundtrack to right now

U2, Elevation
Tom Lockley, See His Love
The Knife, You Make Me Like Charity
Supergrass, Moving
Kelly Clarkson, Addicted
Frou Frou, Ssh
Suzanne Vega, Woman on the Tier (I'll See You Through)
Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Minor Thing
Franz Ferdinand, Dark of the Matinee
Delirious?, Now is the Time
Robbie and Kylie, Kids
Zwan, Endless Summer
Our Lady Peace, One Man Army

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Jilly Cooper, Polo
The Gospel of Matthew
Teach Yourself French
Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great
Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew From Concrete

Documentaries about Take That

Betty Boop and friends: Be Human

Citizen Smith, Series 1

Postsecret:

Thinking about being a vegetarian

Thinking about activism

Thinking about stuff

then shall ye shout

My Thursday night ritual tends to be a good one. The past two weeks, since meeting new Christians at the pub, I've headed out at midnight to go prayer-walking around Founders and the rest of the campus. For those of you not familiar with church lingo, I'll summarise - prayer-walking is praying whilst walking. Or walking whilst praying, I guess.

You see, these Thursday night prayer walks have been going on for a couple of years, once every three weeks, same time, same place. Beginning of this term, this one guy gets a word that they should be every week, for seven weeks. It goes back to this bit in the bible, they march around Jericho once a day for seven days and on the seventh day they go round seven times, stop outside the gates and tear up the shit on their assorted instruments, drums, whistle-sticks and etc. Bosh, walls fall down, job done.

I joined the guys on their fifth week of walking round Founders. Last week was the sixth, tonight the seventh, meaning that instead of going once round Founders and then meandering off round campus, we trekked round that castle no less than seven times. Personally, I'm still convinced it was only six but by that time I was so massively disorientated I could have been walking along the turrets and not noticed. That's the thing with Founders, each wall looks much the same as the others in the fog.

Of course, it's not exactly like Jericho. In fact it's nothing like Jericho. For a start, we decided not to end our walk outside the gates, partly because we didn't want to disturb people too much, partly because security got wind of us and started grumbling. Also, as cool as it would have been, the complete destruction of a listed building wasn't what we had in mind. I think we were aiming for the metaphor; spiritual barriers rather than masonry being broken down. Mainly it was about obedience. This guy reckons this was what God wanted us to do tonight, so it's what we did.

This is where your opinions will start dividing, this is where we break into factions: those who think that this is admirable and those who think it's batshit insane. I think I fall neatly between the two. I think it's bonkers, completely and utterly bonkers to think that a God we can't even see would give such a specific instruction, and even more ridiculous that people would carry it out. Which is precisely why I think it's so admirable that they did.

The other difference between Founders and Jericho is that we didn't bring any instruments. Again, if I'd had my way, things would have been different, but this wasn't my party, so I didn't kick up a fuss. Instead, we moseyed on up to the top of the playing fields, right by the perimeter fence so that we had the whole of the building in our view. Alan counted down from seven and we all hollered 'JESUS' into the foggy night sky like banshees.

And someone shouted back. "Hello?!"

So we shouted back. "HI!"

And they said: "What?!"

And we just grinned a bit, and went our separate ways.

I love this. I love that I've found a group of Christians who are up for this kind of thing, for trying to follow God no matter how ridiculous they feel, up for wandering around in the freezing cold after midnight, praying for the crazy people at this crazy uni. I love that I can remember how to pray now, that I got to spend an hour and a half pouring my heart out as I wandered round Founders eating mince pies.

I worry that it's taken me a whole term to figure this out. I worry that I haven't been to bed before 12 since I got here, that I've barely had a decent night's sleep in almost three months. I worry that even now I can't find the motivation to do work, or to go to cell group, or even to pray sometimes. I worry that I've been to church four times in ten weeks. I worry when people look at me and think I'm joking when I say I'm a Christian, that it's so hard to put it into words. I worry that I've never told anyone the gospel. Sometimes I think maybe it's impossible to do this, to live in the world and keep everything clean, to actually be any kind of a witness at all.

But then I realise that I'm not worried at all, because there's nothing to be worried about. I'm so stupid sometimes, but I'm finally figuring it out. I'm not entirely sure who I am, I definitely don't know what I'm doing but I know where I am, and it's exactly where I'm supposed to be. I don't know how I got here, how I came to be in this room, writing about praying in the fog and shouting Christ's name at a sleeping building, but this is where I am, and it feels right. Finally, I feel right here.

So there's nothing to worry about.

stutter-shook and uptight

Colourblind by Counting Crows.

The first time I heard it was when I watched Cruel Intentions at a sleepover and I didn't pay much attention to it because, let's face it, Ryan Philippe was getting naked at the time.

In GCSE music when they abandoned us to do work in the practice rooms, Sue White would sit and play this song over and over on the baby grand piano. I watched over her shoulder until I memorised it and played it at home, but I didn't know the words. I don't do that anymore.

Then, years later, someone kissed me to this song. In between those instances, between seeing the film and listening to Sue and being kissed, I've listened to it an awful lot. And it's never a good thing. It's the one I play when I'm not sure how I feel, or when I know exactly how I feel but I'm not sure how to deal with it.

Like when my nan died this time last year, or the last time I went to the doctor's, or at the end of summer, or at college when I used to fall asleep in lessons because I'd lain awake with this song in my headphones until the small hours. It's never a good thing.

There's better memories attached to it. I could think of Sue singing it, and how incredible her voice was, and how we'd sit and arse around for hours playing on the grand. I could think of learning to play it on the piano my parents got the year I was born, in my conservatory at home. I could think of hearing it in the car on roadtrips to Dorset, and remember how sunny it was and how we all shut up to listen to it. I could think of that first kiss and the exact point in the song at which it happened. There's really no reason for this song to be my sad song anymore.

But it still is.

other notes

I have to write things down. I really have to. In my eyes, no thought is worth having unless I've put in type or on paper. I guess the fear is that, if I don't, I'll lose it. It'll go and no one will ever get to see that thought and it will be forgotten. It's a kind of narcissism I suppose, to assume that my thoughts are so important, but it's just what I do.

We all have our notebooks, our blogs, diaries, whatever. The compulsion to scribble is in no way related to me. It only gets weird in classes, lectures and stuff. I can't stop taking notes. I just can't. Every good student knows to show up with a pen and paper, lest they forget what's being said to them, but when you find yourself trying to transcribe whole chunks of speech into your Pukka Pad it's time to take a step back.

The real issue here is not the volume of notes, but the different kinds of notes. I didn't realise it until today, but my margins are strange places to be today. In one of the Terry Pratchett books, he talks about the most interesting thing about people being what they write in their margins. It's so true. Going through all my Space Body Design notes, I find these bits, these odd little nuggets. When I'm typing up the draft of my logbook, I file these things under 'other notes', which means that I'm sure I wrote them for a reason but I'm not entirely sure how relevant they are.

On the page right next to my computer, the notes in the margins and at the top go like this:
Professional and personal are different things.
Strength without sensitivity is useless.
I can understand these. As self-contained thoughts they make sense but they bear absolutely no relation to the notes on the page and I really can't remember why I thought it so important that I write them down. Then there's other ones, ones that make no sense at all.
You have to understand.
A cup of tea that he will never drink.
It works better in blue.

Other ones, personal ones, are invariably the ones that people end up seeing:
I'm sitting on my own because everyone hates me in here.
I don't like how vulnerable I looked last night.
The laziness is winning today.
Why are there so many stupid people on this degree?
I hate her face...
Sometimes, just scribbles. I'll write each word on top of the one before so it's an indecipherable mass of ink. So good to do, but so impossible to figure out later. I do this when I know someone's reading over my shoulder.

The other kind of notes I've been making are here, on my blog. It didn't really occur to me that this here site is already a logbook of what I've been doing. I couldn't remember what I'd done in this particular class so I looked back through and found the date, read the posts from that week and figured it out. That was the weekend that Steph and I went to London, prayed in Trafalgar Square, went to see Chris in Chalk Farm. And I remember I spent the day complaining that my legs hurt. Which means it was the Friday that I did my legs in, which was the Friday that we first did the standing sequence, and me and my partner kept balancing our weight wrongly so I hurt myself.

And then I remember that week two was the week that we first went to the Buttoned Down Disco, which I must have blogged about, so I go into the ol' archive and find that week, and find this post, and find my logbook entry as good as written for me.

It's moments like this that I'm so very glad I do this. By this I mean not just blogging, but this whole thing, this compulsion to scribble down absolutely every thought I have. Every quote, every soundbite and question, every event and date and line of poetry that drifts in my ears and through my head, I have to get it down or there's no point in me thinking it. It's why I blog so much, why my notepads look like bombsites, why it takes me hours and hours to read a simple play because of all the scribbling.

It's frustrating, annoying, a bit embarassing. But I can do that, y'know, I can go back to October the 17th or May the 25th or whenever and know exactly what I was thinking then. It's worth the weird looks I get when people read over my shoulder, just for that.

student tableau strike 2

Yesterday, Kate came and knocked on my door in the early afternoon. I'd been home for the weekend and hadn't seen her since Friday. We decided to catch up over a coffee and then get back to work. Work. Yeah. We spent something stupid like an hour and a half deliberating whether it's immoral to eat your flatmate's grapes if you know they're gonna get mouldy before he eats them and I trashed my way through half a Sudoku (if you're interested, my Sudoku Success Total is currently 3) before we went back to our rooms. Kate and I, we're good at procrastinating.

I managed to get a relatively early night, in that I was in bed and asleep by one. Unless you're one of the fortunate few who gets to live with me (alright marras?) you won't understand what a big deal this is. I'll explain: I'VE HAD ABOUT TWO GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP SINCE I MOVED HERE. This is why I'm always tired and keep sleeping through lectures. This is partially why I sleep in til afternoon on my days off (also because I'm just lazy). Unfortunately last night's blissful earliness was fluffed by my waking up at about 3 and spending several hours worrying about global warming. You think I'm joking?

So this morning (afternoon) I decided to get up and get some solid work done. I actually managed, with the aid of my spangly new printer and the helpful absence of the internet across campus, to get some stuff done yesterday. Hurrah!

Since I sat at my computer to start work a few hours ago, I've eaten a bowl of porridge, some cheesy pasta and a mince pie courtesy of Kate, my partner in procrastination, tidied my wardrobe, messed up my wardrobe, checked every single blog that I could possibly think of, spent 2o minutes re-reading my notes on Tracey Emin (why?), brushed my hair 6 times, redone my make-up twice, moisturised my hands, painted my toenails, printed out and cut out photos from my Dublin trip, surfed the internet for yet more photos of the singer from Goldfrapp and drafted an angry letter to our Halls warden about Athlone laundry. And I've done fuck all work.

And now I'm blogging. In my defence, I've been away from the internet since Friday morning, due to going home and then the entire campus connection being down for two days. I think I'm well overdue for a blog. But here's the thing. I had plans to write about my weekend, what I got up to, to express my sudden sadness at the thought of leaving my lovely halls with their lovely power-shower, to finally get round to posting pictures from Dublin and summer... Instead, I'm wasting time by writing about wasting time.

My Space, Body, Design logbook has to be handed in next Friday. I have a Writing and Performance exam next Wednesday and I'm only halfway through Tamburlaine. I have got so much to do. So much. Loads. Oodles. Billions. Bare. Phat. Massive. Stupid amounts of work to do.

And how am I dealing with it? By adding Kate to my msn account so that now we can procrastinate when we're not even in the same room.

kitchen politics

And there was me thinking I didn't get pissed off anymore...

There's a dispute going on in my kitchen at the moment, stolen spoons, unwashed dishes and vicious blows delivered by firmly worded post-it notes. It's ridiculous... I mean, you get pissed off, say, when someone uses your saucepan and doesn't wash it, but it's fine, you just wash it and get on with your life because shit happens. People come back from the union with late night munchies, make a snack with the wrong pan and forget to wash up because, lets face it, when you've got more alcohol then blood in your veins and you can't feel your legs, you just don't care about washing up.

It's inconsiderate, but it happens. People get drunk. Put your goddamn pan back in the cupboard and vow to piss in someone else's next time you're wrecked and out for revenge. Or, failing that, you could make a big deal of it.

You know, because it really matters, doesn't it, your crockery. That's really the most important thing at stake here, not harmony, or peace, or us getting along as a flat. Never mind cutting each other some slack and trying to be friends, ignore the fact that we're going to be living with each other for another eight months, no, fuck that, you've got a point to make. Out with the post-it notes guys...

I love university completely, but sometimes I swear this place is just a microcosm of everything that's rubbish about the wider world. Not just because we're petty and materialistic and because it genuinely bothers us when people mess with our kitchen utensils, but because of everything.

Because of the way that the Student Union uses tits and arse to advertise everything, and because we let them, no one seems to care that you can't walk around campus without seeing sex everywhere.

Because of the segregation, the way that societies and cliques mean that all the whites, the blacks, the Koreans, the Christians, the Hindus, the Asians all hang out together. No one's doing that to us, we're doing that to ourselves. I thought it was so funny at first, how everyone's so irreverent about race and class here, but it's not so funny now, when you notice that we travel in clans. Even tonight, black Christians and white Christians. What the hell is that about?

Because of how ignorant we are, how long it takes us to even hear about earthquakes when we all knew about George Best before he was even cold. How ignorant we let ourselves become, we undergraduates.

Every day, in every way, this place gets more and more like Lord of the Flies, not just because of the fat kid jokes and feral tendencies. It's like we're acting out everything we're gonna do in the real world, we're getting ready to make the same mistakes we've always made and what's more, we're making it happen ourselves.