Ghosts and Fairies

I was in the park in town the other day when it started raining, and while everyone ran for cover under the trees I saw a woman riding her bike around the flower beds with her arms out like she was flying and her face scrunched up and smiling.

Then on the way home while it was still raining I saw a group of teenage girls huddled under a huge tree, blowing bubbles.

Who says life isn't as romantic as in the movies?

Number three in the BBC's Ten Things:

3. Gordon Brown once locked himself into a toilet and had to be freed by Tony Blair.

Made me smile.

The other day I told my parents I haven't been able to hear properly out of one ear since I had that cold back in Falmouth. We were at a restaurant and they were sitting opposite me and they both leaned forward and put on identical expressions of horror. It was quite funny really.

Then I told them I was going to see Pirates with Mark's family the next day and they fired various questions at me: When am going, will I be there for tea, is someone picking me up, are they dropping me off, which cinema am I going to?

It's funny, you can live away from home, go out when you want, get around on your own, pay your bills, cook your own meals, but apparently as soon as you enter your parents house you are eleven again. I don't know, I'm not moaning really, it's nice to be cared for.

In result of the lack of hearing horror my mum dragged (or tricked) me into a Llyods to get advice from the pharmacist, who said I should use a nasal spray because 'It's all connected'. Don't judge me if I'm a little skeptical. Two days latter and the effective spray has cleared my non existent blocked nose, as the box promised, but I still can't hear. hmmm.

It's the longest day of the year? When did that happen? I think this automatically takes me by surprise because I presume it should be smack bang in the middle of summer. But actually I'm usually quite pleased to hear the days are getting shorter. It's not so much to do with liking winter more, though I do like winter, but just that it seems sad for twilight to be too late to appreciate. Even the shorter evening in the summer are lovely, when you can sit outside with candles and watch the sky get darker and the flames get brighter.

But short evenings give me lovely cosy memories, of coming out of school with the sun setting, of riding home from foundation in the dark and seeing light in the steamed up kitchen window. Of eating tea and watching neighbours with the curtains drawn.

It's a shame I don't have cosy memories of winter in Falmouth. It seems winter here was both too cold and too warm. With no central heating inside was freezing and damp, but outside there was none of the beautiful frost that you get in Southampton. Maybe next year will be better winter-wise.



I've packed pretty much everything except my laptop, sketchbook and quilt covers.

I felt very smug this morning, getting washing done well in time to be dry and packed by Sunday. However, after realising just quite how much stuff me and Mark have, I've decided to get the train home on Friday (along with a suitcase) to free up space in his parents car. This means I had to put all the washing on the line and spend the whole day anxiously peering out the window for signs of rain. Miraculously it managed to catch a few hours of sun and is pretty dry now, but really, you should never rely on Cornish weather! Next year's dryer will be excellent.

Of course there's absolutely no reason why I can't just get the train back on Sunday, but life here has taken on such a stagnant waiting feel that I'm taking any excuse to get away. I remember feeling the same at the end of summer before I came here and thinking is was because I was bored of a city I'd lived in all my life. And it probably was, a bit. But really, as soon as you start packing for something, and everyone around you starts leaving themselves, you just spend all your time thinking about what you'll do once you've left. Maybe a full life is as much to do with being able to plan things as actually doing them. There's no time to plan anything for the next few days. Except washing.

What's funnier though, is when I was leaving on Sunday, life in Southampton still looked sort of rose coloured in my head, and I'd been forgetting all the boring things I'm not looking forward to about summer, and now that I'm leaving just a few days earlier they've all come back with clarity. So I'm not at all sure if I'm looking forward to going back or not. When I thought I was coming back on Sunday afternoon it all looked sort of squashed and cosy and busy, and now it looks barer and drier and grey. Really, two days difference. I must be one of the most changeable people I know. Anyway I've emailed Jane to tell her, and maybe when she's back from work she'll email with lots of exciting things we can do and I'll feel better again.

Strangely I'm quite looking forward to clearing out my room at home and putting all my stuff back. I do like arranging books on a shelf. Though now I think about it I won't be able to do that until I get all my stuff back on Sunday. hmm.

I'm going to have a jacket potato for tea...

This castle cost £4.50 to get in to. £4.50! And that was just the student price. What kind of a student has £4.50 to spend on English Heritage? But really there's only so long you can go living within walking distance of a castle and not going in. And it really was quite lovely. Falmouth is quite a cramped town, all tumbled up on the edge of the sea, but once you get inside these grounds there are sweeping expanses of grass with benches perched on the crest of hills. So maybe the money was worth it for a bit of space. And we got some drawing done. Two more photos ( under the cut )

Back to Southampton on sunday. I really don't see how I'm going to use up 2kg of muesli in 6 days.

I love this quote:

“Draw anyway (when you think you can’t and even if you could you haven’t got any time and everyone said your last picture was fab, until you told them what it was meant to be, and, look, you never said you could draw, anyway, right?)”

I seem to have contracted freshers flu at the wrong end of the year. Almost immediately after assessment I got a horrible cold, which seems a bit more than odd, given that it has suddenly got scorchingly hot.

Yesterday I finished reading Lord of the Flies and then shut the curtains on the evening sun and tried to sleep. Which only lead to a night of half rest where all the time I was trying to escape from a desert island, with the chant Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! running through my head. Isn't it funny, how fiction can so easily mix with reality at night. It wasn't so much that I though I was on a desert island, as that my bed represented an island, and in my half consciousness I would think that lying only on a certain part or in a certain position would help me escape. Occasionally I would wake up enough to reason that I was at home and all I had to do was sleep, but still in the back of my mind there was something else.

I also thought, lying there, that sick rooms always have a certain feel, and the best I can describe it as is dark and hot and heavy and full of silent restlessness.

---

But today, though I sound worse- coughing and sneezing and using a million tissues- I am actually feeling better. I hope this will go away soon enough to appreciate these last two weeks by the beach.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6715313.stm

Hope you're all well xx

Two weeks until I go back to Southampton now. It's funny, at the start of the term I was dying to go back, then I went through a stage of not really wanting to at all, and now I'm sort of indifferent. Though I suspect that excitement is still lurking around somewhere.

I wonder though if I build up the holidays just because I want to hang onto the idea of 'going back' to something, because otherwise it's like accepting 'this is my life and anything else just a trip away'. And I don't know why I shouldn't accept this as my life, it's not like I'm having bad time. Maybe it's something more than that, to do with childhood and adulthood. But that's a bit too deep to take seriously, somehow. And 20 is such a grown up age, from the outside.

Love Jon Ronson. Love him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1993203,00.html

Phone: *rings*
Jane: Hello? Hello?... *puts down phone*
Dad: Who is it?
Jane: It's 'BEEEEEEEEEEP'
Dad: ...who is it?
Mum: Just a continuous tone.
Dad: oh

I have a real vendetta against people who take good sinister children's stories and give then happy or politically correct endings.

I was reading 'chicken licken's Christmas' at the dentist this morning. Firstly there is no romantic reason for them all trooping through the book, except that the chicken (who I very much doubt was even a descendent of the real chicken licken) has received a letter from santa asking for help. Then when they find out (as is all very well and good) that it is a cruel trick by foxy loxy, they avoid imminent death by throwing snow in his face and locking him out of the house. It ends on them all sitting happily around the dinner table with no one whatsoever getting eaten.

Except perhaps turkey lurkey, given the time of year.

Mum: I need to think of a nice pudding to make for when Jane comes back.
Me: mmm
Mum: Do you think she'd like some of that carrot cake?
Me: mhm. Are you going to make lasagna any time?
Mum: I could make lasagna when Jane comes back. Oh no, I'm making roast meal.
Me: Why roast meal?
Mum: I think she'd like it. Why, don't you think she'd like it? Do you think she'd prefer lasagna?
Me: I don't know, I'd prefer lasagna.
Mum: hmm
Me: Why don't you just ask her?
Mum: I don't want to make it into a big deal.
Me: *headdesk*
[pause]
Mum: ooo, I could make a nice fruit salad!