(no subject)
Vic’s gone back to Northwich to get her hair cut, Matty’s in London with Jord & Olly having placement interviews & I can’t leave until after my portfolio review with Jim on Friday morning.
So, to help with my boredom, I stole this idea off Draper [offence];
I was born on the 23rd of June, 1986, which coincidently enough, was also the day of my dad’s twenty-fourth birthday. We even shared our fortieth & sixteenth in 2003… But anyway, I’m skipping ahead of myself already. My birth is declared as being as approximately quarter to four in the morning, at Leighton Hospital, in Crewe. I was just over two weeks late & weighed about eight pounds.
I'd fallen off my bike.
I spent the first two years of my life in a house I now can’t remember at all. I can’t even recall moving to Castle, Northwich, which is where I’ve been ever since. But my earliest memories involve;
- Being chased around the back garden by my granddad on my third birthday for so long the pretend fear actually turned into genuine panic & I just kept screaming & screaming when he caught me.
- Running out of front door & half the way down the road the first time I saw Diesel on Thomas the Tank Engine. After that, my mum always had to watch it with me & allow me to hide underneath the dining room table everytime he appeared.
- Deciding that, while my parents were upstairs, I could take out all of their CDs & grind them against the rough brick of our then-very-eighties fireplace. Needless to say, my dad went mental when he came down & saw what I’d been upto as I’d ruined a good 50% of his collection.
- Listening to & obsessing over my audiobook of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland so much I actually knew the whole first story off by heart. My mum used to put me in front of her friends, holding the actual book, & tell me to “read” (reciting from memory the words from the audiobook - she didn’t tell her friends this part). As I was barely three years old at the time, it looked quite impressive.
Vic & I also did ballet in our early years & we even have a medal or two somewhere!
Vic, Pearl & I aged roughly six or seven. We've really been best friends this long.
Charles Darwin Primary School was literally around the corner from me & it took me all of a minute to get from my front door to my classroom. As my best friends Pearl & Vic were (& still are, obviously) a year behind me, I was the most timid, lonely child you would ever have the misfortune to come across. For the first few weeks of starting school, I rarely said two words to anyone except the teacher, & never answered questions openly in class even if I knew I had the right answer. Of course, being a blatant easy target, I was an obvious choice for bullies. Katie Hulse & Anthony Telfer (who later became my first boyfriend & kiss) often stole my things & called me names etc. My two “friends”, Hayley & Sarah, often joined in & would regularly declare that I could only play with them at break time if I could catch them as they ran around the playground (they were both nymph-like little things & I have always been completely inept at any form of running...)
The bastards.
However dire as this seems, I can honestly say that once I got into year three & beyond, my skin had become thick enough to deal with whatever was thrown at me, & my I wore my teacher’s-pet-geekiness so proudly on my sleeve my peers actually started to credit me for it. I still had a huge obsession for Alice in Wonderland, which developed into any form of literature, & I remember the envious look on Gemma Else’s face when Mrs. Dean put me on the advanced reading & writing program. At this point, I also become rather besotted with reading Encyclopaedias, playing Road Rash on my Amiga 600, & drawing amusing cartoons of my classmates.
By the end of Primary School I was one of the most well known & popular girls of the year. I’d even dated Stephen Joynson [pure Primary School hot totty!], who I’d once drawn marrying me when I was about six years old. At this point I was also big on drama & aswell as finishing with the title role in the Christmas performance of Robin Hood, Sarah & I would perform a new fifteen-minute show every Friday afternoon in Miss. Atkins’s class.
I approached High School with eager high hopes, which were soon to be slowly diminished by growing teenage laziness & a need to rebel.
Hartford High School was, like Primary School, within walking distance of my home & I could regularly roll out of bed at quarter past eight & still manage to get in before nine ‘o’ clock. I started off in boy’s shoes, boy’s trousers & a bag full of brand spanking new stationary, determined to be sensible & hardworking rather than worry about having fun or getting social life.
This was soon to change.
My hormones were incredibly late (perhaps my boring-yet-immature nature kept them off for a bit?) & I didn’t start to become a proper teenager until well into my fourteenth year. At this point, everything changed. I was starting year nine, which meant willingness to be a part of a more grown-up establishment & eagerness to do everything required to please every single teacher was beginning to grow stale. I’d recently discovered music, alcohol, boys & most importantly, the ability to use my reputation (built up over years seven & eight) as one of the “good ones” to my advantage when I couldn’t be bothered to do homework. I danced on the fine line between being cheeky & being charming, & I totally believe that at some points, I had many of the teachers wrapped around my little finger.
This doesn’t, however, mean that I became another idiotic bimbo with her mobile glued to one hand & a stolen packet of fags in the other. On the contrary, I made a group of friends who were just as into good grades as I was, but we always made the time to have a laugh aswell. For my two free-choice electives, I took Art Graphics & Drama Studies, for both of which I received an A* in my GCSEs. I was a member of the Bookaholics Club, studied three languages (Spanish, German & was practically forced into the specialist Latin group) worked in the library on some of my breaks & occasionally stayed after school hours to help Mr. Mason with his Dramatics Club. I wouldn't even put a tenth of that amount of effort into anything these days. I genuinely don't know where I got my energy from. [...Eating meat? :S]
Once I was into the final year, I become cocky, somewhere near arrogant & rebellious. I’d already pierced my tongue, bellybutton & the tops of my ears without my parent’s permission & had purple dreadlocks - consequently looking like some daft, self-righteous kid from the inside cover of Kerrang! Hey! We all went through it at some point! I had my headphones in practically all the time, wore knee-high socks instead of tights, & often started arguments with teachers if I didn’t agree with what they were saying, which came up a couple of times in my Biology classes where dissection, vivisection or vegetarianism came into question. (I had a fling with vegetarianism when I was about fourteen, became enemic, & vowed to go back to it on my sixteenth birthday, which I did & have been doing ever since).
I left with all 11 GCSEs (barely scraping a pass in Maths - my worst subject), & couldn’t wait to start studying more specialist areas in College. Hah! Bye physics, chemistry & all other logic-based subjects!
Myself & one of my final pieces in John Deanes, which was based on Villains from Famous Literature. [I look back & cringe.]
After a ridiculous amount of deliberation, I started at Sir John Deanes Sixth Form studying Theatre, Art & Design, English Literature &… Erm... Well, the first three were a given, but I was always a bit perplexed with what I was going to take up as my fourth - there were so many things I was interested in! I briefly poured over English Language, Media, Sociology, Graphic Design & Politics before setting on Psychology. Somehow I was really good at it without having too much of an interest. I dropped it after the first year so I could concentrate on having three good A Levels later on, even though I got an A in my AS Levels for it.
Generally, my days at John Deanes were some of my happiest. My friendships were becoming tighter & my circle of friends was getting bigger. People seemed to genuinely like me because of who I was, not what or who I knew, which I greatly appreciated. I had my first serious boyfriend Josh [well, he took it seriously anyway... :S], & generally enjoyed all of my subjects (not least because my teachers were generally absolute legends - especially Josie & Tony Dunn, who I wanted to marry).
There was a blip of about four months in the second year where my parent’s arguing got so extreme I started to spend entire days in bed crying & refused to eat. This, on top of the stress of having my final deadlines for all three subjects (if you can imagine, huge amounts of essays for Lit, an entire devised performance from scratch as well as a 50-page assessment for Drama & a fifteen hour final piece for Art) nearly killed me. I often ran out of classes to cry in the toilets & wrote suicide notes to myself, meanwhile losing about a stone & a half from not eating. One day, after bursting into tears in the middle of my Drama class, Josie took me into her office & I told her everything. I was immediately put on to seeing the college counsellor & recovered pretty quickly.
Although I was eager to start University to study my passions (after an internal conflict between dramatics & art, I plumped for the latter), I was told I’d need a Foundation in Art & Design before most similar-based courses would accept me. Cue; the HORROR of Mid-Cheshire College.
I’ve always been a bit a traditionalists when it comes to Art & Design. Not in the frumpy sense of the word, ‘cause let’s face it, I consider comic books & animated cartoons to have a rightful place in the Art world. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s pretentious modern “art”. Which, unfortunately, is all that will get you good feedback in that depressing excuse for a educational establishment.
Frequently the lecturers that worked there told me that I didn’t have what it takes to become a Designer or, more importantly, a Concept Artist. When I mentioned comic book art or games design, I was simply scoffed at & told to go discover the “work” of some equally infuriating & talentless twat who either gets paid thousands to display his shite in the Tate Modern or is barely making ends meet because they honestly believe their conceptual, “experimental” ideas are too much for the current world.
Argh. I HATE the word experimental. I heard it enough to fill an entire lifetime at that Godawful place.
It’s only saving graces were the Friday afternoons of Life Drawing with Dave, who never stopped singing my praises & told me that I was one of the most talented students he’s ever met. &, Of course, Thursdays of Art History with Chris. Oh God, Chris… I had the biggest crush on that bloke. He was a scruffy, thirty-four year old Mancunian who smoked & drank too much. But hey, that’s love for you, innit?
After only six months of being told I was rubbish & consequently skipping lectures with Luci by driving to pubs for lunch, I just stopped going in.
Luci took this on one of our many skiving trips.
At the same time that I had started Mid-Cheshire, I had also started working at Moto, & I just couldn’t take the amount of complete knobheads I was having to put up with in day-to-day life.
Dave had been sacked & Darren’s constant wave of negative feedback & intolerance for anything that wasn’t a piece of modernist shite meant that I was ready to apply to University by myself. I sent Chris a letter, explaining why I’d left & thanking him for his brilliant lectures. Later on in the year, I saw him on a train & I was able to follow up on it. I hadn’t seen him in months but he still made me go slightly gooey, haha.
So, I applied to UCAS through John Deanes & told them that I’d just been working solidly for a year, earning money & developing my artistic skills. It was good enough for them & on the 19th of April, 2005, I had to drag my port folio (done from scratch by myself & without any input from anyone else whatsoever) to Preston for my interview with Jim.
As documented in my Livejournal already, we got on ridiculously well & I was given an unconditional offer there & then, which I’d been previously told is unheard of for someone applying through Route B [Go team me].
As Summer finished that year, I felt excited & nervous to be handing in my notice for Moto aswell as packing all my stuff to move to Preston.
I moved in on the 16th of September, 2005 & although the flat hasn’t always been the easiest & most comfortable thing to live in, I have to say that I’m going to be very sad to move out so quickly next week. This past year at University has easily been the most enjoyable of my life so far. Even though I’d had to go long periods of time without seeing many of my close friends, I couldn’t be more happy with the friendship I have with Vic, & I’ve been able to make some absolutely lovely bloke mates off my course (even if they are all weird & like downloading bizarre porn off the internet), & of course, I now have Mathew.
Our first drunken bender at a big party in Jord & Matty's house.
Me in Avenham Park.
The incredible fource, innit?
I can’t wait until summer really kicks in & I’m even looking forward moving back ready for next year, even if I won’t be a teenager anymore.
Cheers for reading, like!
Also, I have a new mobile number [finally!] - 07800743147. Keep my old one though, I may go back to it yet.
So, to help with my boredom, I stole this idea off Draper [offence];
I was born on the 23rd of June, 1986, which coincidently enough, was also the day of my dad’s twenty-fourth birthday. We even shared our fortieth & sixteenth in 2003… But anyway, I’m skipping ahead of myself already. My birth is declared as being as approximately quarter to four in the morning, at Leighton Hospital, in Crewe. I was just over two weeks late & weighed about eight pounds.
I'd fallen off my bike.
I spent the first two years of my life in a house I now can’t remember at all. I can’t even recall moving to Castle, Northwich, which is where I’ve been ever since. But my earliest memories involve;
- Being chased around the back garden by my granddad on my third birthday for so long the pretend fear actually turned into genuine panic & I just kept screaming & screaming when he caught me.
- Running out of front door & half the way down the road the first time I saw Diesel on Thomas the Tank Engine. After that, my mum always had to watch it with me & allow me to hide underneath the dining room table everytime he appeared.
- Deciding that, while my parents were upstairs, I could take out all of their CDs & grind them against the rough brick of our then-very-eighties fireplace. Needless to say, my dad went mental when he came down & saw what I’d been upto as I’d ruined a good 50% of his collection.
- Listening to & obsessing over my audiobook of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland so much I actually knew the whole first story off by heart. My mum used to put me in front of her friends, holding the actual book, & tell me to “read” (reciting from memory the words from the audiobook - she didn’t tell her friends this part). As I was barely three years old at the time, it looked quite impressive.
Vic & I also did ballet in our early years & we even have a medal or two somewhere!
Vic, Pearl & I aged roughly six or seven. We've really been best friends this long.
Charles Darwin Primary School was literally around the corner from me & it took me all of a minute to get from my front door to my classroom. As my best friends Pearl & Vic were (& still are, obviously) a year behind me, I was the most timid, lonely child you would ever have the misfortune to come across. For the first few weeks of starting school, I rarely said two words to anyone except the teacher, & never answered questions openly in class even if I knew I had the right answer. Of course, being a blatant easy target, I was an obvious choice for bullies. Katie Hulse & Anthony Telfer (who later became my first boyfriend & kiss) often stole my things & called me names etc. My two “friends”, Hayley & Sarah, often joined in & would regularly declare that I could only play with them at break time if I could catch them as they ran around the playground (they were both nymph-like little things & I have always been completely inept at any form of running...)
The bastards.
However dire as this seems, I can honestly say that once I got into year three & beyond, my skin had become thick enough to deal with whatever was thrown at me, & my I wore my teacher’s-pet-geekiness so proudly on my sleeve my peers actually started to credit me for it. I still had a huge obsession for Alice in Wonderland, which developed into any form of literature, & I remember the envious look on Gemma Else’s face when Mrs. Dean put me on the advanced reading & writing program. At this point, I also become rather besotted with reading Encyclopaedias, playing Road Rash on my Amiga 600, & drawing amusing cartoons of my classmates.
By the end of Primary School I was one of the most well known & popular girls of the year. I’d even dated Stephen Joynson [pure Primary School hot totty!], who I’d once drawn marrying me when I was about six years old. At this point I was also big on drama & aswell as finishing with the title role in the Christmas performance of Robin Hood, Sarah & I would perform a new fifteen-minute show every Friday afternoon in Miss. Atkins’s class.
I approached High School with eager high hopes, which were soon to be slowly diminished by growing teenage laziness & a need to rebel.
Hartford High School was, like Primary School, within walking distance of my home & I could regularly roll out of bed at quarter past eight & still manage to get in before nine ‘o’ clock. I started off in boy’s shoes, boy’s trousers & a bag full of brand spanking new stationary, determined to be sensible & hardworking rather than worry about having fun or getting social life.
This was soon to change.
My hormones were incredibly late (perhaps my boring-yet-immature nature kept them off for a bit?) & I didn’t start to become a proper teenager until well into my fourteenth year. At this point, everything changed. I was starting year nine, which meant willingness to be a part of a more grown-up establishment & eagerness to do everything required to please every single teacher was beginning to grow stale. I’d recently discovered music, alcohol, boys & most importantly, the ability to use my reputation (built up over years seven & eight) as one of the “good ones” to my advantage when I couldn’t be bothered to do homework. I danced on the fine line between being cheeky & being charming, & I totally believe that at some points, I had many of the teachers wrapped around my little finger.
This doesn’t, however, mean that I became another idiotic bimbo with her mobile glued to one hand & a stolen packet of fags in the other. On the contrary, I made a group of friends who were just as into good grades as I was, but we always made the time to have a laugh aswell. For my two free-choice electives, I took Art Graphics & Drama Studies, for both of which I received an A* in my GCSEs. I was a member of the Bookaholics Club, studied three languages (Spanish, German & was practically forced into the specialist Latin group) worked in the library on some of my breaks & occasionally stayed after school hours to help Mr. Mason with his Dramatics Club. I wouldn't even put a tenth of that amount of effort into anything these days. I genuinely don't know where I got my energy from. [...Eating meat? :S]
Once I was into the final year, I become cocky, somewhere near arrogant & rebellious. I’d already pierced my tongue, bellybutton & the tops of my ears without my parent’s permission & had purple dreadlocks - consequently looking like some daft, self-righteous kid from the inside cover of Kerrang! Hey! We all went through it at some point! I had my headphones in practically all the time, wore knee-high socks instead of tights, & often started arguments with teachers if I didn’t agree with what they were saying, which came up a couple of times in my Biology classes where dissection, vivisection or vegetarianism came into question. (I had a fling with vegetarianism when I was about fourteen, became enemic, & vowed to go back to it on my sixteenth birthday, which I did & have been doing ever since).
I left with all 11 GCSEs (barely scraping a pass in Maths - my worst subject), & couldn’t wait to start studying more specialist areas in College. Hah! Bye physics, chemistry & all other logic-based subjects!
Myself & one of my final pieces in John Deanes, which was based on Villains from Famous Literature. [I look back & cringe.]
After a ridiculous amount of deliberation, I started at Sir John Deanes Sixth Form studying Theatre, Art & Design, English Literature &… Erm... Well, the first three were a given, but I was always a bit perplexed with what I was going to take up as my fourth - there were so many things I was interested in! I briefly poured over English Language, Media, Sociology, Graphic Design & Politics before setting on Psychology. Somehow I was really good at it without having too much of an interest. I dropped it after the first year so I could concentrate on having three good A Levels later on, even though I got an A in my AS Levels for it.
Generally, my days at John Deanes were some of my happiest. My friendships were becoming tighter & my circle of friends was getting bigger. People seemed to genuinely like me because of who I was, not what or who I knew, which I greatly appreciated. I had my first serious boyfriend Josh [well, he took it seriously anyway... :S], & generally enjoyed all of my subjects (not least because my teachers were generally absolute legends - especially Josie & Tony Dunn, who I wanted to marry).
There was a blip of about four months in the second year where my parent’s arguing got so extreme I started to spend entire days in bed crying & refused to eat. This, on top of the stress of having my final deadlines for all three subjects (if you can imagine, huge amounts of essays for Lit, an entire devised performance from scratch as well as a 50-page assessment for Drama & a fifteen hour final piece for Art) nearly killed me. I often ran out of classes to cry in the toilets & wrote suicide notes to myself, meanwhile losing about a stone & a half from not eating. One day, after bursting into tears in the middle of my Drama class, Josie took me into her office & I told her everything. I was immediately put on to seeing the college counsellor & recovered pretty quickly.
Although I was eager to start University to study my passions (after an internal conflict between dramatics & art, I plumped for the latter), I was told I’d need a Foundation in Art & Design before most similar-based courses would accept me. Cue; the HORROR of Mid-Cheshire College.
I’ve always been a bit a traditionalists when it comes to Art & Design. Not in the frumpy sense of the word, ‘cause let’s face it, I consider comic books & animated cartoons to have a rightful place in the Art world. But if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s pretentious modern “art”. Which, unfortunately, is all that will get you good feedback in that depressing excuse for a educational establishment.
Frequently the lecturers that worked there told me that I didn’t have what it takes to become a Designer or, more importantly, a Concept Artist. When I mentioned comic book art or games design, I was simply scoffed at & told to go discover the “work” of some equally infuriating & talentless twat who either gets paid thousands to display his shite in the Tate Modern or is barely making ends meet because they honestly believe their conceptual, “experimental” ideas are too much for the current world.
Argh. I HATE the word experimental. I heard it enough to fill an entire lifetime at that Godawful place.
It’s only saving graces were the Friday afternoons of Life Drawing with Dave, who never stopped singing my praises & told me that I was one of the most talented students he’s ever met. &, Of course, Thursdays of Art History with Chris. Oh God, Chris… I had the biggest crush on that bloke. He was a scruffy, thirty-four year old Mancunian who smoked & drank too much. But hey, that’s love for you, innit?
After only six months of being told I was rubbish & consequently skipping lectures with Luci by driving to pubs for lunch, I just stopped going in.
Luci took this on one of our many skiving trips.
At the same time that I had started Mid-Cheshire, I had also started working at Moto, & I just couldn’t take the amount of complete knobheads I was having to put up with in day-to-day life.
Dave had been sacked & Darren’s constant wave of negative feedback & intolerance for anything that wasn’t a piece of modernist shite meant that I was ready to apply to University by myself. I sent Chris a letter, explaining why I’d left & thanking him for his brilliant lectures. Later on in the year, I saw him on a train & I was able to follow up on it. I hadn’t seen him in months but he still made me go slightly gooey, haha.
So, I applied to UCAS through John Deanes & told them that I’d just been working solidly for a year, earning money & developing my artistic skills. It was good enough for them & on the 19th of April, 2005, I had to drag my port folio (done from scratch by myself & without any input from anyone else whatsoever) to Preston for my interview with Jim.
As documented in my Livejournal already, we got on ridiculously well & I was given an unconditional offer there & then, which I’d been previously told is unheard of for someone applying through Route B [Go team me].
As Summer finished that year, I felt excited & nervous to be handing in my notice for Moto aswell as packing all my stuff to move to Preston.
I moved in on the 16th of September, 2005 & although the flat hasn’t always been the easiest & most comfortable thing to live in, I have to say that I’m going to be very sad to move out so quickly next week. This past year at University has easily been the most enjoyable of my life so far. Even though I’d had to go long periods of time without seeing many of my close friends, I couldn’t be more happy with the friendship I have with Vic, & I’ve been able to make some absolutely lovely bloke mates off my course (even if they are all weird & like downloading bizarre porn off the internet), & of course, I now have Mathew.
Our first drunken bender at a big party in Jord & Matty's house.
Me in Avenham Park.
The incredible fource, innit?
I can’t wait until summer really kicks in & I’m even looking forward moving back ready for next year, even if I won’t be a teenager anymore.
Cheers for reading, like!
Also, I have a new mobile number [finally!] - 07800743147. Keep my old one though, I may go back to it yet.