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February 28 Music Coursework RantYou know when you're trying to compose, but you're just not in the mood for it? Everything that sounded decent the night before now sounds rubbish, and you end up putting in 'filler' bars which sound even more rubbish, so you have to delete them again and you've just wasted a lot of time and effort on nothing. Then everything you write in their place either sounds like the other (wrong) extreme, or just like some other famous composition?
This is the stage I have got to this morning. I've written a bit of organ accompaniment (why, why did I not learn how to write for the organ properly when I was doing GCSE?) and a not terribly interesting trombone part, to give a firmer bass to the stuff I already had. And then I did a nice bar with trumpets and horns with the lil motif thingy, but it seemed to lead naturally into some big thumping chords, which nice and dramatic as they were, didn't fit at all. 4 bars, may I introduce you to the delete key? My sister having told me last night that one of my progressions sounded like the titles to BBC's Coast programmes, my new trumpet quavers that have replaced the big thumping chords sound like the Snowman gone wrong.
It's quarter to twelve, I've ground to a halt, and I've got about 7 seconds more music than I had yesterday. I forget how long the board specifies these things to be, but its in the region of 8 or 10 minutes, and I've got 1:10 that I'm happy with. You seriously don't realise how long 8 minutes is until you actually have to compose for that length of time.
Phh. Even AS was easier than this... I should really badly have done Mozart for my investigation, it would have made my life soo much easier right at this moment. February 27 So...I've got this thing at the minute where I seem to be oscillating really frequently between being on a massive up then on a massive down, then on massive up again.. Like I was really pleased at the end of Classics 'cos both McDonald and Middleton were being really nice about my coursework, and Maths was ok (so that's what linear algebra looks like...), but I couldn't do choir due to the fact that I was couging up blood over the weekend and my throat still feels like it. I listened, and got some Maths done, but listening to Miss just reminded me of the fact that my coursework is shit, and also practically non-existant, and it got me really depressed again for the afternoon. Bugsy rehearsal was fantastic - good fun, even though I need to practise my bitch of a solo over the upper break! But it also brought up that again. I know why and everything, and I know that I should just pull myself together and like someone who isn't... but I'm now really depressed, which ain't fun. Hormones...
On a relatively unrelated track, I need to go jacket-hunting. Ideally I'd have a fitted black jacket which I could wear with trousers or a dress for Bugsy, then keep for afterwards as a nice fitted black jacket for general use. I do have a black blazer which I wear to school, but it's M&S and is neither fitted nor short nor remotely attractive, being endowed with large shoulder pads, and it's practically longer than the dress. Well, I exaggerate, but it's not 1920s jazz band style, nor what you would wear to try and pull someone.
I'd meant to look in town on Saturday, but needless to say I wasn't up to it, and now I'm in a panic. I did go to Kings Heath for an hour as Mum was going to get a hockey stick for my sister. The only shop which had anything remotely suitable was New Look; I tried the jacket on and it came to an inch or so above my belly button. From this we can confirm that New Look is rubbish for people with long backs.
Working backwards, the dress rehearsal's Tuesday. Monday I'll be zonked out. Saturday and Sunday I'm in Schweisse, or however you spell it. I'd rather use the time to see Dad than go shopping, and apparently everything's really expensive over there anyway. Friday, in school, then the flight takes off at 6.30, so that's a non-starter. Thursday after school? Maybe..though I don't want to push it with my clarinet lesson. Wednesday? Any other week I'd just skive voluntary work, but I've already missed the last two and I've got to tell them that I'm leaving anyway. So that leaves tomorrow. The morning has to be used for Music coursework, I've got a driving lesson at 12.30, takes me to school for 2.30, do Classics... it looks like it's going to be after school tomorrow!
Anyone recommend a place for fitted black jackets? I'm thinking H&M or Topshop... February 25 Je ne me sens pas bien :(I should have noticed the warning signs when I couldn't sing properly yesterday, having been in good practice from the rest of the week. Damn primary school kids and their infectious germs.
I'm meant to be doing Music coursework, but I can't 'cos the little I've done is crap, and I've got a huge mental blockage about it, and the deadline is effectively this Friday. It's not a good state of affairs to be in, 10 minutes composition down, and I just feel really sick and shivery and my head's throbbing.
Great. February 23 I Should Feel More GuiltyUntil the sixth form I'd never even skived an assembly. On the (relatively) rare occasion that I was late, I'd just go and stand at the back where the rest of my class was anyway, never being enough seats, and I'd listen extra hard to the notices at the end in case I'd missed something. That's the sort of pupil I was two years ago, forget the me of Y7.
Now it's practically an occasion when I'm on time. I probably make it to the form room before Mr Bennett about once a week, possibly twice, and he's often late himself. Then once I'm late I can't be bothered to go listen to Wheeldon droning on about something neither he nor I care about, and no-one checks the OS Block so I pretty much get away with it.
Travel West Midlands are partially to blame, for being shit, and the random Polish drivers who decide only to take their buses to Northfield instead of Bartley Green (why? why? at peak time!), and I now have to take 10 minutes each morning to do my back exercises which I didn't used to. But let's face it, if I got up 10 minutes earlier, or even 15, and spent less time faffing about over which top to wear, I'd be in with more of a chance of catching the pairs of 18s which traverse the route at any random time between quarter to eight and half past. I might even get to the occasional assembly.
Then today I just couldn't face General Studies. I was tired, frustrated, depressed, I wanted some warmer and dryer clothes, and I had a free last. So I skipped. I went home, and I didn't even bother to sign out 'cos there isn't any room on our sheet (no-one's bothered to look at it since the 16th January). I met Bennett on the way out, told him I was skiving, and that was it. Freedom!
Even six weeks ago I'd've had an attack of conscience, that it was only an hour and I should really go and sit it out. But today I simply didn't care. I don't have a negative attitude towards school generally atm, the opposite, but there are lines to be drawn, and frankly, General Studies comes the other side. February 22 Maths TripYes, you read right! Today I went on a Maths trip! I have been on many trips before - Latin trip to Italy, English trip to Stratford, Science trip to CAT, not quite a French trip to France because there weren't enough places for me to go, but you get the idea. I even went on a Geography trip a year after I dropped Geography (OK, technically it was cross-curricular Geography and Music but all we did Music-wise was listen to five minutes worth of Vaughan Williams). Never, though, have I been on a Maths trip. The opportunities are, one has to admit, fairly limited.
On this occasion, we went to the university to have some sample lectures. We didn't get, as promised, anything on geometrical proof, but what we did get was an afternoon session on Cryptography! Now talking about Cryptography and codes and ciphers and stuff is the guaranteed way to bring out my inner geek, so it was a little embarassing when five minutes in and I'd been answering questions, the guy asked me if I knew a lot about it.. er, no... Tell me I'm not the only one, did anyone else spend hours as a kid playing with code sets and writing secret messages with them? Maybe not then...
We learned some fairly basic stuff about shift ciphers and subsitution ciphers, but a lot of the Maths came in when he introduced us to modulus algebra and RSA methods. It is so interesting, but he said that all the proofs and stuff are second-year degree level, so I guess I'm just gonna have to wait for that! Actually, they'll probably make more sense then, 'cos I'm the type of person who finds it difficult to learn things if I don't know why they work, as anyone in my class will probably testify.
At the end, we had a little relay competition. Charlene, Chris and I won by, like, miles...!
While we were waiting for the others to finish at the end, the lecturer (who was a fairly young guy, probably mid 20s) was asking me where I was going next year. I said I was going to do Maths at either Cambridge or Durham, but I wasn't sure which to hold yet. Initially his response was 'Why not Cambridge?' but when I said that I wasn't sure whether all the pressure was worth it, he said that he'd been to Cambridge himself, and he had found the competitiveness really difficult, to the extent where he'd got quite depressed in his first year. So there we go. One up to Cambridge in that he clearly came through it successfully enough to do postgrad and beyond, or one up to Durham becomes depression sucks? Hmmm.
It has reared it's ugly head again. I'm so fed up of this, I thought I'd got it sorted. Whether he was or he wasn't, he did or he didn't, why should I care? I thought I'd successfully cut, in other words, but then again 'the heart has its reasons' and all that. Argh. February 21 THEY FIT!!!My shoes came today, my beautiful, comfortable, red suede, size 9, narrow-fitting ballet pumps, and they fit!!!!!! OK, I have to use some half-insoles and some heel grips to secure them properly, but you know what? I don't care! This is fulfilling a teenage-long ambition to have some nice shoes that fit! You actually can't understand what this means to me, it's a huge moment...
THEY FIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I HAVE SOME NICE SHOES WHICH FIT!!!!!!!!!!!! February 20 Bugsy Malone!The band parts came, apparently, just before half-term, so I went into Music today to find Chris waving his in my face, asking me if I'd got mine yet, and was I coming to the rehearsal this evening?
There's a rehearsal this evening?
Yes, we were given the schedules before half-term!
I wasn't...
The last day before half-term?
Ah, London trip...
You've got your clarinet though?
No...
Luckily, being a Monday, Mum was able to bring my instrument in (no need to nick Chris'!) and we had the first band rehearsal. It is soooooooo cool! Really nice group of people playing, and it didn't seem to matter too much that I didn't know any of the songs, though Miss says she's gonna bring the CD in tomorrow. And the parts have worked out really well, by chance. Chris has got Flute/Clarinet 1, so I'm on Clarinet 2, but I get the more interesting (and slightly harder) clarinet material, that doubles for half the time with Sam Watts on sax... We're gonna be playing on stage I think, and we've all got to dress up in black costumes. I'm trying to persuade them to let me wear my dress, though I'd need a jacket with it and the school one doesn't exactly go... Wow! It's so cool!
 February 19 Je l'ai fini!Finalement! (My Classics coursework, that is, for those of you that were wondering...)
It's only a bit over the word limit, as well. The board says 3000 words with 10% tolerance either way (or maybe it's just 10% above, I can't remember), excluding quotes, so when I clicked Word Count and it came up with 4702 I was kinda worried. But then I took all the quotes and titles and stuff into a separate file, and the actual essay ends up at 3640, so I still need to get rid of some stuff, but it's not as much as I'd thought. More to the point, I can hand it in tomorrow without Mr Middleton 'stamping on my soft bits'!
There's been two, no three, new developments in the shoe saga. Just before we went to Southwold, I was in town doing a couple of jobs, and it occured to me that I hadn't tried any of the cheap shoe shops. So I visited Shoe Zone on my way to the library, et voila, I found a pair of shoes! They're black and flimsy, and not especially attractive, but they're shoes! It's a shame, 'cos there were actually some quite nice ones in size 9, but they were too wide, and they fell off my feet when I tried to walk in them.
Development no. 2 is that I have ordered some rather nicer, and hopefully a bit stronger, shoes off the 'net (see picture, the red ones...). They were in a sale, and still quite expensive at £25, and they probably will be too wide and I'll have wasted £10 on postage costs, but nothing venture, nothing gain! Brownie points for www.tallgirls.co.uk ! Except I haven't told Mum, because she is under the strange impression that I have a lot of shoes already. I don't know which girl she thinks she's been living with..
Development no. 3 is less positive. I brought my proper black shoes downstairs today while Mum was feeling kindly disposed enough to suggest that she cleaned them. Three minutes later she called me through to ask me why I hadn't told her that both heels were completely worn through. Because I don't spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of my shoes, that's why... I knew that the leather on the buckle had gone... So either way I'm banned from wearing them tomorrow, which presents an interesting choice. I can either wear the completely unsupportive black pair with my trousers and my aching feet by the end of the day (and even worse posture), or I can wear my comfortable brown ones. But if I take the latter course of action, I have to wear my skanky M&S old ladies' skirt since Miss Cornell banned my cord one and I don't have anything else appropriate to wear. Sheesh.
Actually that would be a good excuse! Sorry Miss, I can't wear a matching suit because I'm too tall to buy shoes. One day, one day... February 17 Bits n BobsFirstly, congratulations to people who have defied the national statistics and actually received offers for Medicine courses! The two that I know about are Reuben and Chris, but I'm sure there's more. I take my (metaphorical) hat off to you for even wanting to be doctors, I really do.
Secondly, lil observation, it took the same amount of time to shut down our main computer, set up the laptop, and get onto the internet as it did to check my emails this morning on the desktop. And I only had one.
I had a driving lesson this afternoon, and it wasn't til I was on my first ever country road (out near Wythall somewhere) that I realised that my safe little 30mph zones were gone, as were all the road markings and any sort of sign. As if this wasn't enough, then came the dual carrigeway. Being in charge of a vehicle travelling at 65mph is scary! And ironically, once I got back onto safe territory, not once did I break the 30mph limit, which I had been doing all lesson!
My typing is notoriously bad in a hurry. If you look at the position of letters on the keyboard, it's easy to understand why www.bbc.co.uk sometimes becomes www.bbc.co.il. Try it... I reckon it leads onto the British media control in Israel or something like that!
I've just looked up my summer exam timetable. It's a bitch.
Final point in this rather disparate entry - I need advice! I'm thinking of buying a digital camera with money that I got from my birthday, but I don't know where to start, 'cos there are so many on the market. I don't want a proper artist's camera or anything like that - I don't want anything that bulky/heavy or indeed anything too complicated to use - but I do want one that takes good quality photos, preferably with a decent zoom lens. And something that takes landscapes as well as people, with a capacity to work in lower light levels if needs be. My budget is £200. I can go a sniff over if necessary, but that's also got to cover a memory card. So any recommendations? Any cameras to avoid? Any help would be much appreciated! February 16 SouthwoldWhy, you might ask, spend two-thirds of a February half-term going over to Suffolk, when the journey one way is 5 hours, with only short stops? Because.. I can't remember who I've explained this to, but if I haven't, here's why.
Let's go back to 1918. My grandmother is a few months old and the youngest of three children, though her siblings are quite a bit older than her. My great-grandfather, Alfred Stansfield, is a doctor. War is ending, but a new killer is sweeping the country - the French flu - and being in contact with the sick all the time, it is perhaps unsuprising that he is a victim. So Helen - his widow - is left with three children to provide for, one a tiny baby. Aunts and uncles gather round to offer help, and what with Helen being one of eighteen, there is plenty of practical support, but money is still desperately short. Helen must train as a teacher.
It started with jobs around Hertfordshire, I assume, where I think Mum says that they had been living. That's certainly where my Granny was sent to school after the rest of the family moved away. Helen had found a post as the headmistress of St Felix school in Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, and that's where the family moved to. Mary always returned in school holidays, to be near her mother and siblings, and the quiet little seaside market town suited everyone wonderfully. By September 1939, Granny herself had just graduated with an English degree from St Andrews, and I think was going to train as teacher when the war started (much against her will, she got posted to Bletchley Park, but that's another story).
Back in Southwold, St Felix's was swiftly evacuated, because everyone was terrified of a German invasion over the North Sea. Property was also being sold off dirt cheap - people just wanted to get out of there. Except Helen. She didn't want to leave Southwold. It had become her home over the past few years. The school was in somebody else's hands for the moment, and quite honestly, she'd had enough of moving about over the years. So she took a risk and bought Spinners Cottage, five minutes walk from the beach and on the edge of the large common. The rest, as they say, is history. The Germans didn't invade, Spinners was safe, and the cottage has been in the Family ever since. Anyone who has been there will tell you that it's one-of-a-kind. We really are incredibly lucky when I think about it like that.
It's now owned officially by some of Mum's cousins, but on the understanding that the whole of the extended family can go whenever we like. And so we do. Southwold has changed hugely, especially within the last ten or twenty years, which is awful. Holiday homes stand empty for most of the year round, eating up the local housing stock and making everything unaffordable for those who still live there from the 'old times'. Snobby Londoners dominate the scene - in the shop which until a couple of years ago sold tapestry wools and fabrics for dressmaking and that sort of thing, you now look in at shirts which are priced at £90 if you're lucky. They even sell ballet pumps up to size 9, but I never got round to trying on any, because we noticed that they cost £55. I know we're technically not locals, but Mum and Lis know (or knew) huge numbers of the residents, and the cottage is occupied most of the year round, so it is a bit different from just going there once, buying a souvenir and never returning-type-of-vistor.
But even nature is doing its bit to destroy all our childhood memories. We couldn't access the beach or even the Prom this time, 'cos they're putting in massive sea defences, shipping in rock from Norway on gigantic barges and replacing the wooden groynes in attempt to delay the massive erosion that's going on along the coast. One man has gone to extreme measures in an attempt to protect his house, ordering in massive quantities of earth - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2821683.stm, http://www.bbc.co.uk/coast/programmes/12-wash-dover.shtml . It's the first time I've ever seen a mole on the beach!
So large parts of Southwold are going to be under water come 20 years, unless predictions are way off mark. It sounds silly, but Southwold's the one real link I've got with my past, with my family heritage. It will be a very sad day when we can't go there any more. February 10 PhotosEllen's just given me the CDs with the photos from my birthday party! I've uploaded most of them, except two - there's one of me and Dad where Dad looks strange and I just look plain awful, and there's one where Ellen was trying to get a picture of Mum, and Mike got in the way at the crucial minute. And I don't think there are any of Mary or Simon, but I've got photos aplenty of them anyway, and the rest are there! LondonAs everyone else left behind in Maths had no doubt become sick of hearing, the Classics groups (U6 and L6) went to London yesterday, to be cultured.
The journey down was relatively uneventful, bar Kat turning up about two minutes before the train left - good job it was late... To be fair, it wasn't her fault, but that's why I don't trust the buses when I need to get somewhere on time!
First on the iternary was a *brisk* walk across from Marylebone to UCL. My claim to fame is that I nearly got ran over by a white van opposite Madame Tussauds, though the two facts are unconnected! On reaching the theatre a few minutes late, we saw most of an extract from 'the Frogs' which might have made more sense had we arrived at the start of it, as we got a bit of the play, then this uni Classics student furiously ad-libbing for five minutes when no-one had any questions. We then got released to find food, or in mine and Sabah's cases, somewhere to eat our food, so we went to a lovely little garden square just up from the theatre, and sat on a wall in the sun. Food always tastes better outside - I don't understand these people who think it's indecent to eat out-of-doors!
Next up, Euripides' 'Medea'. For those of you who don't know it, this is a thoroughly unpleasant play. Before it starts, Jason (as in Jason of the Arognauts) has brought a foreign princess, Medea, to be his wife in Corinth. In leaving her home, Medea has upset her father to the point where he disowns her, and on the way to Corinth, she makes enemies of every other kingdom that they pass through, mostly on Jason's behalf. So naturally she's a little upset when he annouces that he is leaving her and their two sons for a Corinthian princess. The play is basically about how she takes revenge, and believe me, it ain't pleasant. Without writing a full essay about it, it's Jason who really comes off the worst - choice quote: "it's quite natural in the female sex I should damn well think so!!!
Good play, shame about the seats. I got backache about 10 mins in 'cos they were so awful. Fortunately we were in the back row, so I folded up my seat, sat on top, and used my coat as a support. And I don't care that people were giving me funny looks, it hurt.
Then we walked to the British Museum for the final visit of the day. Sabah, Kat and I decided to go and see some stuff that we hadn't last year, so we looked at some Roman tombstones and busts and stuff before moving on to the Africa exhibition. Et puis, dans les femmes, il y avait beaucoup de jeunes françaises! Tous le monde parlaient en français, bien sûr, et j'ai essayé de comprendre ce qu'elles ont dit, mais il y en avait trop, et je l'ai trouvé difficile à entendre une seule. C'est quelque chose que je sais que je devrais améliorer. Mais j'ai commencé à penser en français, donc quand je suis retournée aux autres, Kat n'était pas imprimée. "Anglais, Lucy!" "Mais il y avait ces personnes français..." "What have I told you about speaking in French?!" "Oui, d'accord, d'accord..."
Our main itinary finished, we were let loose into London to go find somewhere to get supper, and get back to the train station. Me, Sabah, Kat, Rachel and Rosie went to a little café (very nice jacket potato :) ) before walking down the road, trying to find Tottenham Court Tube station, and passing last year's burger restaurant on the way. Rachel got chatted up by this tiny Chinese man who kept saying "Brazillian, no?!". Having found the Tube, we bought tickets and made our way down to the platform, trying not to think about last July. After a slight hitch - Kat and Rosie got left on the platform, much to the amusement of both Rachel and a weird guy with a laptop - we managed to change lines and get back to Marylebone. I saw the queue for the escalator, reminiscent of the Bull Ring at peak times, and decided to make a go for the stairs. It was only when we were about three flights up and realised that there were another three to go, all steep steps, that we realised why people were taking the escaltors! Still, we provided all those commuters with some amusement, and despite the fact that we were clutching the rail in case we fell down and our knees had turned to jelly, it was so hilarious we still reached the top, probably minus the calories from some of the chocolate that had been consumed earlier in the day!
And yeah, then we got the train back to Brum... Sabah said she'll never see me in the same light again (just 'cos I don't say it, doesn't mean I ain't thinking it!)... Gurmeet wa...think I'm gonna leave that one out... Middleton and I sprinted for a local train, and missed it...
Got home, fell asleep! So I don't know about the Classics, but I think everyone had a really good time! :) February 08 OK, That's Weird!Getting emails from teachers, even ex-teachers is really really weird, especially when you go to your junk inbox and you can't think for the life of you who 'Christopher Brown' is!
I'd sent him an email congratulating him on his new baby (Lucy!) cos he'd given his address out when he left, and the whole French group had been for a meal in Harborne, but it's still weird to have got a reply!
"Hi Lucy
Thanks for writing. How are your courses and applications going ? I like your email address, glad you like our baby's name. It's even the English spelling we've chosen, just to confound the Frenchies! All the best Chris Brown" !!! February 07 In AweThe new music computer, which incidently is shiny and new and sparkly and has xp and is obscenely fast, especially compared to the last one where it literally took 5 seconds minimum to respond to a mouse click... OK, that's gonna be a long sentence.. The new music computer has Sibelius 4!!!!!! Which means I copied my coursework quotes straight from Sibelius to Word, without going via Paint and bitmap, and my goodness, you can tell the difference. Instead of blurry fuzzy examples, you get a crisp clean print-out which is really easy to work with on-screen, and the reduction in file size is amazing - the whole of my coursework folder has been reduced from 4.9 MB to 890 KB.
*wants Sibelius 4, which costs, like, £600...* That Time Of Year AgainAs all the shops keep reminding us, Valentine's Day approacheth, and yet again I am going to spend it alternating between feeling sorry for myself and fiercely reminding myself that I don't need a boyfriend to make me happy.
Actually, the latter is true. The last time I had a boyfriend, it didn't make me happy, rather the opposite - I dreaded the phone ringing, dreaded seeing him, and got myself into such a state that I made a pig's ear of dumping him. In a way, not having a boyfriend has allowed me to develop better as me, and I look at some of the pricks people I know have gone out with, and i really think I'm better out of it. I mean, imagine being Dan Knowles' girlfriend come Valentine's Day! Or rather don't. Actually don't imagine being his girlfriend full stop, it doesn't bear thinking about..
Look at Vicky-with-the-long-surname-beginning-with-S. Every other lesson (it seemed like) in Maths last year, she came in really upset, often to do with her boyfriend Luke. Sometimes it was something he'd said or done, sometimes it was something he hadn't said or done - but I just question whether that relationship was really making her happy, when all we saw was it causing her problems
So I don't need a boyfriend, and I'm not gonna compromise my happiness in order to get one. There are more important things in life.
It would be nice though, to occasionally feel like someone really appreciated you. Not in a worship-your-feet-and-buy-you-flowers-and-chocolates kinda way, just someone who would give you a hug at the end of an awful day, and just hold you til everything was all right. There are things that I look for in a guy, from the essential (able to hold a decent conversation) to the preferable (musical, not a Tory) to the downright idealistic (taller than me). And let's face it, I'd like someone that I find attractive. I use that word carefully - attractive is not the same as good-looking, to which my list of crushes over the years will testify! Looks aren't everything etc etc, but if you don't fancy the guy, it doesn't matter how much *personality* he has, he might as well be your best mate.
He'll turn up one day. And I'll buy some industrial earplugs so I don't have to listen to everyone else's Valentine's Day romantic episodes in the mean time. February 05 Monetary IssuesThere aren't many times that I wish that I was rich. OK, sometimes I see a plush hotel as we come from our dank youth hostel beds and think, I wish we could afford to stay there, but youth hostels really aren't that bad after all, and there's no point wasting money for the sake of it. This isn't meant to be a commentary on youth hostels, by the way, they just happen to be a nice example of the point I'm trying to make. Youth hostels may not be plush, with complementary shower gel or whatever it is you get in hotels (I wouldn't know!), but they put a roof over your head, they're generally warm, and have kitchen and shower facilities. Which is all you need for a comfortable stay somewhere. In the same way, it would be lovely to have some ghd straighteners, but the remington ones don't do a bad job, and they don't damage your hair half as much.
I've also seen what an excess of money can do to people. One of the things going on at the minute is that one of Dad's (many) brothers is in the process of getting a very messy and very nasty divorce - I won't go into the details, but Dad is fairly disgusted by the whole proceedings, and I agree with him that the root cause of most of the problems is 'too much bl**dy money floating around'. Think of the old woman and the vinegar bottle.
So I always feel really guilty when I start wishing for ridiculous amounts of money to spend on equally ridiculous causes. Anyone who has discussed the topic of shopping with me will know about the problems I have finding shoes (and no Kat, I'm not going to argue it out again!). I do live in hope, however, that one year I might be able to get a nice pair of shoes, hopefully before the buckles on my current pair completely wear through, so I'm always keeping half an eye out for possible solutions. Sandra Davies found a bit in a newspaper with a couple of websites on, so I had a look - and came across this place which might do something to fit. And I don't mean old ladies shoes either - we are talking about tens of styles of ballet flat-style-shoes and pretty pumps and stuff, exactly the sort of thing that I have been looknig for for ages, claiming that they go up to size 9, in half-sizes no less, which would be great as I'm really 8 1/2. I'd even risk mail order, cos if they were too wide, which shoes have a want to be, I could just send them back. I was getting really excited - and then I saw that they were £65 a pair. £65. For a single pair of pumps.
If I was a spoiled rich kid, one of those Daddy's-credit-card girls, I might be able to have some shoes. But I'm not, so I can't.
Something's gone really wrong, you can't help feeling. February 03 *Proud*I was reminded of my New Years Resolutions (here) today when I went into Northfield after school with Kat - she needed to go to the bank and I urgently needed paper, as I'd used my penultimate sheet in Mechanics. But anyhow, we went into Home Bargains to get some stuff, and Kat was buying chocolate, and there were 300g bars of Fruit and Nut for 69p, and I had money, and I didn't buy anything! Not even a pack of Poppets (17p)!
Nor, now I think about it, have I been to the vending machine in the past couple of weeks. I'm going good! The only thing is, I've probably consumed a similar amount of chocolate cos I got given loads for my birthday. But that doesn't count...!
We think it's cold here - apparently it's -7 degrees in Switzerland! February 01 Shiny Maths!We started P5 today with Miss *big scary Maths is P5*, and we were doing hyperbolic functions. They're basically similar to normal trig functions, but not - but what they do mathematically is unimportant for the minute. Much more to the point, to get their names, you add an 'h' to the trig names. So 'sin x' becomes 'sinh x' (pronounced 'shine x', or if you're me, 'shiny x'!), 'cos x' becomes 'cosh x' and so on. This gets very funny when you start talking about identities, and it sounds like you are trying to do Maths while drunk (no pointed comments about Miss, at all...)!
So phonetically, coth x - 1 = coshec x ! Just try saying that after a drink or two!
I'm sure the novelty will wear off in due course... hehe! |
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%3a+February%2c+2006&referrer=){kind=small}
