Spent most of yesterday clearing out my room, and after far too much sodding about and doing very little over the past week or so, I think it's nearly there.  I've filled the recycling bin brim-full, and most of the non-recycling one too, which is going to be exciting because that's not getting collected for another week.  But you know what?  Part of me is laughing.  Because I'm not going to be there.   I listened to about nine discs of Harry Potter (this is how I measure time spent) and burned candles on the windowsill.  All my clothes are now packed, too, and when I mentioned this, Mum thought I was panicking.  I wasn't.  She may well have been.

Letters are flying from one part of the country to another, which is quite an exciting thought, and I love getting them, I really do.  I've never been one particularly much to cling on to things but I seem to be clinging on to last year more than I thought.  Not consciously, I don't know, but I can't seem to let the people go.  I don't want to.  I think it was (and here I start to turn the tiniest bit back into psycho-geek) that there were other people who read Keats and Tennyson recreationally and therefore I was accepted.  Accepted as all kinds of things, i.e. someone who will talk about maths at the first opportunity, knows Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales backwards, has read relatively extensively (it's so refreshing to have someone to talk about books with!), knits, you know, that sort of thing.  But more just accepted.  So there we go.  I am somewhat loath to leave that, I suppose.

And who knows what people are going to be like this year!  I'm sure there will be readers and poets and mathematicians and physicists and *shiver* polymaths around the place, I'm just not sure how speedily they'll show themselves, or how speedily I will for that matter.  After all, it took us a year last time around.  I'm not sure I can wait another year.  So the nails are bitten right the way down, and when I get up there it'll turn out there was nothing to be worried about in the first place.

Seeing people today who I haven't seen in a while, and I quite look forward to it.  Sorry JE that I have no signal at home and therefore if you have tried to contact me I have been strangely silent.  I'm sure I told you this before.  But oh well, it's a day for playing these things by ear.

J, L and S from Guides came round last night to wish me luck at university, bearing gifts.  This was wonderful.  So now I have an excellent technicolour froggy camp blanket, and a photo frame of pictures of me plus Guides over the last few years: at Group Camp, on the canal boat in 2005, wearing a corset at the costume museum in Bath, and one rather excellent one with a moustache drawn on, of which I have no recollection, but which may well be one of the best photos I've ever taken.  This is wonderful.

I love that people only tell me after the event when I've been acting weird.  "Oh, about a month or so ago, you spent three weeks being really spaced out, like you were on another planet."  And I didn't write any diary or blog then so I can't even check.  How is one supposed to start being self-aware without any form of help in the slightest?  And when I try and ask how so, or why, or what they thought about it, suddenly they recoil as if it's an interrogation which maybe it is, but I only want to know where I'm going wrong when it happens.  Surely this is not the most horrendous of requests?

Oh, SOD.

Here is the most complete description of me you are going to find in quite a while.

The Chambers Pocket Dictionary
The Good News Bible
Smoke and Mirrors - Neil Gaiman
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
An Adventurer's Guide to Number Theory - Richard Friedberg
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
The English - Jeremy Paxman
Shakespeare - Bill Bryson
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors - Roddy Doyle
Selected Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Story of O - Pauline Réage
The Oxford Dictionary of Law
The Trial - Sadakat Khadri
Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! - Richard P. Feynman
The Resurrectionist - James Bradley
Hegemony or Survival - Noam Chomsky
How Language Works - David Crystal
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
A Memory of Solferino - H. Dunant
Understanding Law (4th Edn.) - Adams and Brownswood
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Winter Frost - R. D. Wingfield
Disordered Minds - Minette Walters

If you hadn't guessed, they're the books I've packed to take up to Durham.  Some are unread and unopened.  I'm still waiting on a few textbooks.  It pains me to leave the complete short stories of Poirot behind, although I might have to go and steal my copy of Murder on the Orient Express off L.  But that, as we speak, is it.

Apparently you can tell a lot about someone by their bookshelves.

Be my guest.

First of all, a toast: to old friends, relatively new friends, and extremely new friends who I didn't even realise I had until they went blog-hawking (oh well done! I'm so glad there are more people out there who use these things, I've spent years not knowing anyone else who did and convinced I was the only one... not fun).  So cheers, cheers, cheers to you all.

Thank you all you wonderful poetical people I saw yesterday, all of whom I am going to miss horrendously.  There is very little as glorious as keeping in contact with people.

As far as other people are concerned: I'm trying, okay?

I didn't realise I was as tense as I am, right now; T pointed it out yesterday and this morning, having fallen asleep about half past one, I was awake at six-thirty, drifting in and out of thinking about different things I have to do and have so far failed to, and therefore at a bit gone nine when my mum stuck her head round the door I was not in the best of moods.

It's been teetering on the edge for most of the day; several members of this household have been in a mood and one has had a friend round; therefore there has been a lot of dangerously sweet "Can I have a word with you for a minute?"-ing, and a lot of people shouting "Fi!" every five minutes, followed by some request, command, or comment on why I've failed to fulfil said request or command already.  I spent an hour cleaning scum out of the bathroom, which was thrilling, but at least put me in some people's good books.  Sort of.

It scares me that it's no longer "next Friday," or "the end of next week," any more, it's just "Friday", that I'm leaving.  I've started biting my nails again, right the way down.  I thought after A-levels it'd get easier, or at least calmer, but it hasn't, the only thing that's changed is that now people believe (and I suppose it's true) that I have nothing better to do with my time.

Found some of the lovely notepaper I used to use; bought two pads of it because I know I'm unlikely to ever see it again.  Expect long letters.  (That is, if you're the sort of person who replies to them.)  I like long letters, a lot.

Oh, J.  I know it'll have no effect but please don't worry.  As far as I can tell you've got both self-awareness and control.  (Also it is the job of every woman to feel inferior to all those around her.)

And one more thing: it's been a year, yes, but still I could quite happily shoot the Oxbridge application squad for the effect they have on people I know.  Do these people not recognise a good thing when they see it??  Let's hope they do, or else, there may well be blood.  Hmmh.

It's the waiting that I can't stand.

The fact that everyone else seems to be out there already getting on with it, that I can cope with.  Also that there is nothing to do at the moment, I can cope with boredom if pressed and even the insignificance that comes with it.  Nothing I'm doing at the moment is worth much, it's unlimited Me Time, which is supposed to be great, fantastic, well done, enjoy it, but I can't seem to.  The little things are amplified.  All the stupid bits I don't even bother thinking about normally.  And as ever when it gets to this stage - you know how it is - I feel horribly horribly guilty.  I must have some kind of internal Catholic who crawls out of the woodwork when I've nothing better to think about because the guilt's always there.

It's not even lonely - well, it is, a bit, but only at half-eleven at night when I'm feeling a bit sad anyway and with all this progestrogen running loose in my system, well, anything could happen.  (Just to let you know if it weren't for you saying you preferred it I'd be off these things like a shot.  Not to make you feel guilty, really not, but still.  That's how it is.)

The main thing is that I don't know what I'm going to be doing in two weeks' time.  I wish they'd only tell me if I'm sharing a room or not: then I can picture it a bit more easily, or at least try and psyche myself up more accurately.  That's just cruel: whatever Myers-Briggs has to say about it, I am not an extrovert, nor do I tend to complete work six weeks in advance.  I need room to myself to readjust to situations, and it is impossible for me to answer the question "What time do you usually go to bed?" accurately.  Sometimes it's 9 o'clock.  Sometimes it's two.  It swings between them and I can't predict it a month in advance, or time it to coincide with someone else.  Also - and here is the question - what happens when I feel like this again and there's someone else to explain the sudden appearance of loud music and tears to?  How uncomfortable for them.  I wouldn't force that on anybody.

I feel like I've spent the last goddamned year waiting, for the next thing to come along, for the summer, for results, for university.  And if this is a let-down, if it isn't as exciting as everyone makes it out to be or interesting or liberating, I will be SEVERELY pissed.  Somehow, at the moment, I can only think that this is the most likely situation.  When the summer came, it made me sad, because the days were getting longer and therefore I had nothing to be optimistic about in the future in terms of Never Mind The Days'll Get Longer Soon And It'll Be Lovely.  This is the only metaphor I can think of.

Dad left for Geneva this morning.  L is at school.  Mum is out... Bristol, I think?  Or maybe it's London and that's tomorrow.  But anyway the point is that there is nobody else here, the house is cold, I have been awake three hours and I'm still in pyjamas because I can't get the energy together to do anything.  This is not a good thing; I don't like not doing anything, and I'm supposed to be clearing my room out.  Unfortunately, while I have been doing this I have been listening to Stephen Fry read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (comfort listening to the extreme) and if I don't have the CD, I shall be bored out of my mind, but if I do, Dumbledore is going to die in the next half-hour and I shall be in mourning for most of the afternoon.  Dilemma in the extreme.

Last night, L was in a terrible mood, having a go at us for finding it amusing that she pronounces "flan" with a long /a:/ as in "glass" - flaaarn.  Which apparently she learnt out of Friends, and "everyone at school knows".  I went to this school.  It is evidently going downhill somewhat.  So anyway, she was biting the heads off anyone without a suitably sombre expression.  This had two effects on me: firstly I nearly burst into tears (last night was in no way a good evening for me mood-wise), and secondly I didn't look for an argument.  This is slightly revelatory, this time last year I would have probably said something along the lines of "For fuck's sake L, nobody cares, stop being so bloody touchy," but nothing.  I hope you are impressed.  At last I have grown slightly more mature than a fourteen year old.

I think it's that I'm not working, or at college or school or whatever it is people do these days, not concentrating on anything of that nature for another two weeks or so, that I'm starting to hanker after essays again, I want to concentrate on something until really late at night, sit hunched over a computer and just let the words out... the story I'm writing reached 45 pages yesterday of A5ish handwriting.  I'm refusing to type it up until it's finished, and I prefer handwriting to typing because it works at the speed I think but naturally, as I go along, I edit what I'm writing, and I'm starting to have had enough of Exercising Restraint on this point.

On a different but related note, if anyone happens to have or have access to some sort of guide to writing folk songs, or songs of a narrative and rambling acoustic nature, please get in touch.  It's not for the singing, I just have a really good idea I want to stick in this story.

Last but not least, a piece of advice, for the taking if you think it might apply: plough your own furrow.  It's much more interesting, I promise.

You're back.  Fancy that.

First thing's first:  Durham.  Grey College.  Law.  Next Friday.  Cheers.

Second thing's second, I am going to be perfectly frank, seeing as I can't seem to keep a diary going at the moment.

Went to the doctor today; I've been on the patch for a month or so and it's making me feel a lot worse than I'm inclined to give away, a lot more often than I expected.  There is one thing that (almost) invariably cheers me up, but he's leaving on Friday so God knows what's going to happen now.  Anyway the point is that I'm on a tiny dose of progestrogen, to be honest, but it's still screwing up my brain every few days and making me feel properly black.  I haven't felt like this in a while, and it's been sunny as well, so I've no idea what's going to happen when it starts getting dark early.  So I went to the doctor, to see if they could reduce the dose or something, or just help me feel better.

If I want to stay on the patch (which I do), they can't.  So the fact of the matter is this: I'm going to university at the end of next week and I feel like I'm about to burst into tears every other evening, and I'm having the most painful monthlies I've ever had.  I've said I'll keep going, just to see if it evens out in a few months, because it might.  And I really - really - hope it does.

In the meantime I'm back to writing poetry: http://commondenominator.deviantart.com/art/Metaphor-for-a-Wasted-Lifetime-98682144 (which is better than the title suggests, I promise) and staying up til half-one in the morning just staring at the space in front of me... I'm knitting a lot so as to have something to do with my hands but it can't go on forever.  We shall see.

Any comfort welcome, but let's not get sympathy and empathy mixed up, and I'm not sure it's the sort of thing I'm going to want to talk about on a regular basis.

There you go.  If that's not frank I'm not sure what is.