Wishful thinking...

As if I don't routinely have enough of them.  But I have a bedroom to prepare for leaving to go home, and for decorating.  Therefore I am so going to procrastinate, by writing a list of things I want to do in my life.  I'm not a decimal person.  It's going to be twelve things.

1. Publish a collection of short stories.
2. Earn £60,000 in a year (or equivalent of £60k at today's rates)
3. Have children.
4. Own a vegetable patch or allotment.
5. Spin and dye my own wool.
6. Have a tall, thin house with three floors and a library, and people round for mealtimes several times a week.
7. Spend a month straight in France or northern Spain, visiting churches, drinking the local beverages and writing poetry.
8. Distribute aid for a charity at least once.
9. Set up and successfully run my own business.  I don't care if it's just a small one, as a sole trader, selling the things I knit in my spare time.  Obviously I'd like to make some money out of it; I'd like it to be bigger scale than that.  But more than I ever thought I would, I think I'd like to be self-employed at some point in my career.
10. Win an argument with a qualified barrister.  (Ohplease... the ego boost...)
11. Learn to sail.
12. Go back and do another degree later in life, in something I consider a hobby.  Maths.  Literature.  Textiles.  Physics.

I used to think I never really wanted to leave the British Isles.  There's too much to do here as it is.  I'd also like to do the Great North Run (to prove my old gym teacher wrong), and go to the Scilly Isles without a phone for a week, but travelling isn't really my bag.  I also want to design a hemp tote bag with 'Astonishingly, logic-defyingly good for the environment' printed on one side, and 'Yay me' on the other.  Hmm.

Probably ought to get on with this packing business, I suppose.

Sorry for not being in touch for ages.  I'd written a really good explanation of the last entry, with everything I wanted to say in it, but Spaces deleted it.  It wasn't me, honest.  But the point is it was about one in the morning, had taken me a good half hour, and I really could not be bothered to do it again.  At some point I will.

I then wrote a good half of an entry (which I'm currently adapting because again, it's a bit too late at night for me to start from scratch) and then... I don't remember.  Maybe I was packing.  A good lot has happened in the last few weeks.  By tomorrow morning, in the last week I will have slept in four different beds.

The last few weeks have been so busy.  I should not have stayed up til survivors' photo at five after the Phoenix ball (Grey's annual big summer do) - and then, starting from the next afternoon, go to a week's worth of 9 til 6 rehearsals, then have the D'Oscars (student theatre's awards ceremony - gloriously pretentious and sparkly, and consequently unmissable, then three thirteen plus hour days in the theatre setting up for Mack and Mabel, and five shows and two dress rehearsals in five days, and then straight into props for another show... which would have been all well and good.  I could have got by on coffee and stress for a week, and then crashed.  I could have done it.  (It seems so odd rereading this bit, this was two or three weeks ago.  Happy birthday Fiona.  After eighteen, they all pass without comment.)

About an hour after curtain went down on the opening night of Mack and Mabel, I got a phone call from my mum.  My gran has died.  The funeral was last week.  It has not been a good week - and more about keeping myself together than anything else.  Term finished a few days ago and I went to stay at K's house for a few days.  They gave me the spare room and the first day I was there I didn't emerge until two in the afternoon.  I wasn't asleep.  I hadn't been asleep for a good three hours.  I just haven't had a moment to myself in nearly a month, and there's been so much that I just haven't had time to think about.  I was sat in the second pew at the funeral, which was very small, sadly I think Gran must have outlived most of her friends.  I knew at the time I wasn't doing it justice.  A funeral is about saying goodbye, about having something final that you can use to draw a line at the end of a chapter.  I hadn't had time to even think about it beforehand.  As far as I'm still concerned, my paternal grandmother is as irrelevant and removed from me as she ever was and that's not going to change.

As I write, I'm sat surrounded by boxes in a new bedroom in a new house in Durham.  This is a new chapter, but it doesn't relate to any of my relatives.  There was a thunderstorm earlier and we arrived drenched to the skin.  There are midget gems on my desk, I don't have a bedside lamp and I feel sticky with the humidity, but that's just England at the moment.  I don't know how people manage to connect so many different places or parts of themselves together and make it make sense.  I was in Lincolnshire this morning.  Last week I was in Birmingham.  Next week I'm going to Hampshire, the week after I'll be in Devon.  K's talking about Paris, Poitiers.  Egypt.  My head is spinning, and that's only the Geography.  I'm stuck here in this tiny, hot room with all my things in no semblance of order and I can't connect the last three weeks in my own head, never mind the next three.

And now I've run out of steam and I don't think there's much else I can say.  Apologies that this is a bit of a whine and/or history lesson but I really have nowhere else to put it.

I went to see the Vagina Monologues tonight.  They were very good.  Afterwards we sat on the stage and chatted about the next shows we're all doing and locked up.  I love that theatre and all the people in it, including the ones that occasionally make me very, very upset.

I would like to make a serious point, however, and one that rarely gets aired, because it is not really a very chic thing to say.

What I would like to do is to reclaim the taboo of the c-word.  You know the one I mean.  The one Germaine Greer did the programme on saying it shouldn't be a taboo.  Well I think it should.

Can we get it straight, before I go any further, that I am not a prude.  If you know me you will know that I am liberal and open about these things, occasionally too much for my own good, but that's how I am.  I swear - not too often because the less said the greater the punch, to an extent, so my objection to the c-word is not that I don't like talking about these things; nor is it that I think it will offend people.  Clearly it does offend people.  Before you quote Stephen Fry at me saying that people usually get offended on behalf of other people as opposed to themselves, I know people who are offended by the c-word.  Personally.  For their own sake.  Because they don't like it.  They, also, are reasonable, forward-thinking people.

The reason I want to reclaim the taboo of the c-word is that it is an expression that is not clinical or amusing, and if it enters common, acceptable usage then I don't think it'll retain that.  The c-word, say what you will about it, is taken seriously.  When you say it, you don't usually say it lightly.  When you hear it, you know that it is not meant to be clinical, and it is not the sort of thing you ordinarily snigger at.

It's not a terribly good analogy, but take the colloquial use of 'harsh'.  If you tell someone they are being harsh, that's something that you have to consider, something that's maybe breaking the rules, something that's important.  It's not formal, but it is serious.  It's not a joke.  It's an almost universal signal among a generation that what is being said should be considered seriously but not threateningly.  The way it has retained this is by not being over-used.

The same I think is true of the c-word, at the moment.  It's a serious word, used sparingly but forcefully, and I think in the way that there is a certain nuance to the meaning of 'harsh' that seems to be recognised, there's a nuance to the c-word that it can be used in that sense.  Yes, it's an insult.  Anything that's sparsely used can be an insult.  I honestly don't see a problem with that.  Horrendously fearful expletives come in and out of fashion.  It's how it is.  (Edit: upon rereading, not a clue what I was trying to say first time round.  Think this should make sense now.)

The reason that I like that the c-word is like this is because it makes me feel like I have a choice.  (Here's where the Vagina Monologues come in...)  With the gentleman's anatomy, you have penis, which is frankly clinical (I'm sorry.  It has a Latin ending.  In no possible way is that arousing.), or you have the variations summarised in verse format by Monty Python.  There is no serious word.  Surely everyone wants to be taken seriously, at least to some degree?  That's not a feminist thing.  I thought it was universal.  I thought nobody wanted to be laughed at or reduced to a clipboard observation.  I thought if you wanted to be taken seriously, language would be a good way to do it.

I'm aware that this misses out a lot of the subtleties but it's been a long day.  I just like that something is still private, still up to me to talk about if I want to, or not as the case may be and there's an excuse for that, and if I do want to, it's still capable of being taken seriously because there is a term that is little-used enough and taken seriously enough to have the right effect.

I've deliberately avoided writing the word in this blog because I don't know who reads it and if I were to offend you I'd rather it was intentional.  (This also makes sense if you think about it.)  If I read this when I next have a moment it might get revised fairly drastically.  I can hardly type at the moment, let alone form a coherent and exhaustive argument.

This would be a serious, election-related post, but I've discovered (to my utter surprise, of course) that when I get started on politics I tend to get a bit carried away.  (Sorry, J.)  So I will assume you've thought about it, applaud you for doing so, and direct you to Washminster in my blogroll if you're at all interested in anything political but don't think you know that much about it.  I found it a month or so ago.  It's a gem.

So, aside with the world-changing events; bring on the frivolity.  Hurrah.

Yesterday evening, a friend of mine told me I was diplomatic.  This made me very happy for a number of reasons: firstly, it's a very lovely thing for anyone to be told, secondly, it's something I would like to be seen as, and thirdly, it means that at least for some time, in some people's eyes, I've beaten my own nature.  This cheers me up.

But the swag!  Yesterday, I went back to York to meet up with M for coffee and bounty-hunting.  We were successful on both counts.  I know I've mentioned before my quest for the button shop of glory and finally, third time lucky, the shop and I reached an understanding.  To the tune of this:



A veritable mountain of buttons!  Yes!  So everything I make for months on end (probably years, she says with undisguised glee) will have at least one of these sewn onto it.  For posterity like.  Top marks to you if you can see the one with the car on it.  That one makes me happiest.

Oh.  And of course.  I was in York.  It is practically sacrilege to return without spending a fortune in my favourite shop in the whole city...



The colours are in no way done justice.  I have already decided on patterns for them.  They're going to be beautiful. (And thank you, they are gorgeous fingerless mitts I'm wearing, now you mention it.  Wonder where I've seen those before...)

In the meantime, the theatrical whatnot is building up in my room, as is the panic, so I shall leave you to whatever you were doing (distractions, tsk!) and go and play with the shinies.  Yes.  It's one of those days.

Sat in my room this morning for a good half-hour with the cleaners, talking about knitting and Dan Brown, and Northern Ireland and 'The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas'.  My knowledge of pop-literature is at least as good as that of literature with any weight to it.  I love talking to the cleaners.  They're lovely, and they know more about you than you do about them because after all they're cleaning your room, and they chat like nobody's business and they take you at face value.

Just to let you know that I'm going to be off the radar from today, for a week.  I'm going home, to see my parents and my sister, and then I'm going to see M.  Thus I shall be near a computer but resisting the urge to look at it - I've decided I've spent far too long in the last few weeks staring at a computer screen so besides the old e-mails via college account (can't be missing out on our theatrical orders can we?) I'll be entirely out of touch til at least Thursday afternoon.  If I can keep my self-control up, that is.

So have an absolutely excellent one.  See you in a week darlings.  (By which time there shall be photos of beautiful finished things.  This is what I've been looking forward to.  Chiz.)

Piss it.  I'm really not that bothered any more.

I know about a third of the cases, of those I probably can spell a quarter.  I've had three very late, very stressed nights and three very early, equally stressed mornings.  (I know, I have no stamina any more.  It's the cold.  I've never had to do it dosed up before...)  I can't really take any more.  So piss it.  It'll go how it goes.

Obviously I don't mean that and I really really want to do well... but honestly.  There are only so many times you can be in abject terror before you stop caring.  As much.

This time tomorrow, I hereby decree, does not exist.

...when things get on top of you and you snap.  (What you really need to do is delete the blog entry and start again when you're coherent.)

Yesterday was Just One Of Those Days, I think, where nothing went to plan and I wasn't equipped to deal with it.  All credit is due to H for antihistamine, tea and chocolate, and A, for sitting at his computer all evening with the patience of a saint, letting me get over myself, not asking any awkward questions, sending me all his notes and then waiting til after this morning's exam before acknowledging that anything had been wrong.  I must be among the luckiest people in the world to have so many friends I feel so completely inferior to but who still seem to like me.

Effectively what has happened over the last few days, for anyone who ought to know (and there are several of you) is a combination of things.

• This morning I had what every first year lawyer at Durham anticipated to be the worst exam of their life.  I finished teaching myself the course at ten to seven this morning, having been up for nearly an hour.  It went alright, I think.  As well as I could have hoped for.  But I have been wetting myself for the last three days.
• I've also got hayfever for the first time in my life, and until H worked her magic yesterday evening (well, gave me a pill) had no form of relief for it.  So I felt like I had the flu for all of yesterday, couldn't concentrate at all, had a terrible headache and just wanted to crawl into bed.  Were it not for the exam to end all exams.
• A friend of mine drunkenly confirmed various things I already knew about what he thinks about me.  At the time I feigned ignorance and have made no mention of it since, but I notice he keeps trying to touch me, or brush against me, and generally otherwise to demand my attention - more so than before.  This quite understandably makes me nervous; I do not like being the object of anything I can't and won't reciprocate.  It's the most worrying thing - unrequited what have you is so very well documented, but only ever from one side.  (Reading this probably didn't help matters.  Personally I think it's very clever.  How do you respond to it, though?  Honestly?)
• I've just agreed to stage manage a show I was doing the props for anyway, at the end of term.  I worry for doing something like this where I haven't got anyone to hold my hand and show me where I'm going wrong.  They're using projections.  It's going to be hard work.  Props is like my comfort zone now.
• You know when you say something that makes you out to be  horrible person?  I did, a few nights ago.  And someone picked up on it.  I value the opinion of this person.  They didn't say anything.  I really wish they hadn't noticed, or at least challenged me over it so I could explain to them that it's not what I meant at all.  I don't take advantage of people.  I don't like people being taken advantage of.  So therefore I'm obsessing over it.
• Someone keeps ringing me, every few nights, which upsets me because I'm ignoring the phone and I know I can't forever.  But I really haven't got an hour to waste at the moment being a blank canvas for someone else's ego.
• To cap the lot I've run out of teabags.
  

For this reason, I think a day's silence is in order, just to reassess myself.  Which is why I have Riverdance on and I am going to go now and work.  Concentrate on things that don't involve value judgements for once.  If any of the above can be construed to make me selfish, construe it.  I feel it at the moment.  Construe all you like.

Two exams left, Tuesday and Wednesday, without dispute the most difficult and horrible of the lot of them.  However this morning I woke up feeling like my entire head's being smothered by a very large pillow.  Clearly this is what happens when you have one gin and tonic at about half past six and then talk about maths and Arabic til you're half-dead.  I feel like... well, like I did at the end of last term.  Only with no reason whatsoever.

Given that this is entirely pathetic, I thought I'd show you something that cheers me up a bit.  I said about two weeks ago that I'd finished the first of a pair of fingerless gloves, and that I'd have the second one done in a few weeks.  This has yet to happen - I'm about a quarter of the way through, partly because I've not had time, partly because I've got distracted by a beautiful blanket (in the black - it's already looking fantastic, I'm about a tenth of the way through, I reckon.  It's going to take ages...).

So here, in its absence, is evidence of beautiful right-hand glove, in all its speckled-green, beaded, cabley glory.



Isn't it lovely?  This is what I knit for.  Here's the detailing a bit closer:



I can't wait to wear them.  On a related note, things in the pipeline include socks for roommate who used not to understand what the big deal was, and a really gorgeous soft handspun something for a friend with a nearby birthday who cares about how she looks...  Pictures/expostulations about gorgeous things to follow!

On an entirely other note, I discovered a poem earlier which isn't mine, but I read it when I was about fourteen and still found it funny.  Can't remember who it was by, but as soon as I can find out I will do.

DISTANT SHORES

Don't pretend you understand,
Nod, or try to take my hand.
Don't patronise me with that look,
Say, "I can read you like a book!"
You can't.  Not now, not then, not ever.
Believe me, you are not that clever.
"Teenage angst" is not my label,
I won't fit that tidy fable.
I'm in here and you're outside
You're the cliffs and I'm the tide.
You don't know me anymore,
To you I'm just a distant shore.
I stand alone on shifting sand
And you will never understand.

It has occurred to me that recently there has been a sharp rise in circulating Crap Poetry on Facebook.  (Please don't take this the wrong way, any poets who read this!)  There has been a rise in circulating poetry in general, but particularly shifting sands alone-in-a-crowd attack-of-the-elements-as-metaphor-for-internal-turmoil.  Which is all well and good once, and I've seen done very well... but every few days?  Expecting critique?

The noise I'm currently making is approximately that of a strangled cat.  Surely this isn't that cruel?

The handwarmers.  They make everything better.

If you are currently hard at work studying for any reason, you may find that this is an ailment you are suffering from.  On the arm that you don't write with, have a look at the elbow.  If it's sore, that's reviser's elbow.  Five in seven people mid exams that I asked had it, the other two being someone who reads handouts in bed and someone who procrastinates chronically.  Have a look.  Are you suffering from reviser's elbow?  And more to the point, is it a mitigating circumstance?

I feel like my ribcage is being slowly crushed.  The comfort music has come out of the darker recesses of Windows Media Player and I'm surviving on Christy Moore, Carole King and Pink Floyd pretty much on repeat, vast amounts of brain-slamming strength coffee and simple, repetitive knitting.

I was talking to a Philosophy student this lunchtime.  I think Law and Philosophy are more related than I like to admit, and the hardcore reading is a good part of that.  It was nice to talk to someone who also reads their set texts and the words start spinning in your head after the second sentence, and you can't take any of it in.  Every subject has its frightening bits.  Mine goes a bit like this:

European Communities Act 1972 Section 2(4)
The provision that may be made under subsection (2) above includes, subject to Schedule 2 to this Act, any such provision (of any such extent) as might be made by Act of Parliament, and any enactment passed or to be passed, other than one contained in this Part of this Act, shall be construed and have effect subject to the foregoing provisions of this section; but, except as may be provided by any Act passed after this Act, Schedule 2 shall have effect in connection with the powers conferred by this and the following secions of this Act to make Orders in Council [or orders, rules, regulations or schemes].

So that's my mind-screw, syntax, what's yours?  (If anyone can translate the above into standard English I'd be much obliged; two of us this afternoon didn't have a clue.)

One week left.  There is a red patch on the knuckle of my right-hand ring finger where I've had a pen in it so much.  For the record, my left elbow is red raw.

Seeing as I have basically been unable to talk about anything but law and knitting recently - sorry about that - I thought now would be a good time for a list of other things that have featured heavily in my life in the last week or so.  L-- and k------g are therefore outlawed in this list.  Even though my first exam for the former is TOMORROW MORNING OHGOD and the latter comprises most of what is getting me through revising the former.  Here goes anyway.

• Coffee.  Has featured heavily, I must admit.
• Unusual and exciting dancing.  Partly Eurovision-based, partly because there is no ballroom dancing OR salsa til after... til June, and therefore I'm having to improvise.
• Theatre.  Shouldn't be.  Missing it like nobody's business.  Therefore I am devouring props lists, and making plans to see Little Shop of Horrors next week.  It's going to be great.  Also took a break on Friday night to see the improv comedy troupe.  Most exciting.
  
• Rain.  Sadly.  However-
• Long 2 hour walk in same yesterday afternoon, culminating in cake at Aidan's [College].  Oh yes indeed.

That's really about it.  Clearly my life has taken a turn for the more boring since I failed to think about anything except the various meanings of A Good Yarn.

ENGLAND EXPECTS
                  - Ogden Nash

Let us pause to consider the English,
Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish,
Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz:
That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is:
A club to which benighted bounders of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians et cetera cannot even aspire to belong,
Because they don't even speak English, and the Americans are worst of all because they speak it wrong.
Englishmen are distinguished by their traditions and ceremonials,
And also by their affection for their colonies and their contempt for the colonials.
When foreigners ponder world affairs, why sometimes by doubts they are smitten,
But Englishmen know instinctively that what the world needs most is whatever is best for Great Britain.
They have a splendid navy and they conscientiously admire it,
And every English schoolboy knows that John Paul Jones was only an unfair American Pirate.
English people declaim sparkle and verve,
But speak without reservations of their Anglo-Saxon reserve.
After listening to little groups of English ladies and gentlemen at cocktail parties and in hotels and Pullmans, of defining Anglo-Saxon reserve I despair,
But I think it consists of assuming that nobody else is there,
And I shudder to think where Anglo-Saxon reserve ends when I consider where it begins,
Which in a few high-pitched statements of what one's income is and just what foods give one a rash and whether one and one's husband sleep in a double bed or twins.
All good Englishmen go to Oxford or Cambridge and they all write and publish books before their graduation,
And I often wondered how they did it until I realised that they have to do it because their genteel accents are so developed that they can no longer understand each other's spoken words so the written word is their only means of communication.
England is the last home of the aristocracy, and the art of protecting the aristocracy from the encroachments of commerce has been raised to quite an art.
Because in America a rich butter-and-egg man is only a rich butter-and-egg man or at most an honorary LLD of some hungry university, but in England he is Sir Benjamin Buttery, Bart.
Anyhow, I think the English people are sweet,
And we might as well get used to them because when they slip and fall they always land on their own or somebody else's feet.