In which there are several oblique changes of vector
Yesterday I returned home laden with books. Today I returned home with one further book. On returning home today, I made a phone call to a publisher; yesterday I read two books before going to sleep. Books make me happy.
(For those of you who are interested, some of them were in fact related to my essay: I found Hawksmoor and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller in my school library, bought Looking for Jake from Waterstones and returned from the main library with a bag bulging with tomes by a vast number of authors, including Ian MacLeod and Mervyn Peake. Those of you in the know: am I allowed to read Gormenghast before Titus Groan?)
Apart from my English, school has been producing very little that is actually worthwhile recently in the academic arena. As a case in point, I almost fell asleep during my history lesson today: I somehow managed to both be dreaming and entirely aware of what was going on in the classroom simultaneously (which was very strange indeed; I'm not entirely sure how to describe it other than that)after finishing reading and purposefully highlighting the sheets that were being read out loud and discussed by the class, and was very disappointed when I was directly addressed and had to re-emerge into the real world again. What we're covering is actually very interesting -- because my school is moderately insane, we'll be studying two modules rather than one and will therefore be looking at Britain from the Treaty of Versailles until the end of the Second World War, which really is a satisfying time-period to get to grips with, dealing as it does with the collapse of the imperialist system and the emergence of modern international relations (I amused myself very much when, whilst making a summary of British foreign policy aims, I was able to just stick the word 'reactionary' at the top and then logically work it all out from there; obviously Italy and Prussia are good for something other than stomping) although sadly the same isn't entirely true of the other side of the course ,which isn't actually entirely true in itself. The idea of covering the development of civil rights in the US from the end of the civil war until post-Martin Luther King (whom I almost typed as Stephen King) as a single unit is a wonderful one; unfortunately the way it is being handled is making the course as dry as the Antarctic (which is actually very dry indeed, because although there's lots of water around there is so little precipitation that it is one of the least wet deserts on the planet) and as boring as eating Quorn mince and plain rice for every meal for a month, which, for anybody who isn't desperately familiar with Quorn, is very boring indeed. Maths is currently coursework, which I really should do some more of at some point; in RS we're making a start on environmental ethics and not really doing very much else.
Some redeeming things have happened at school, though. I had a full day off for prefect training, which involved a sort of self-assessed Myers-Briggs test which labelled me fairly accurately as an Activist Reflector and gave Robbie a profile very similar but suitably different to mine and then lots of team-building activities when people demonstrated just how accurate the tests were in their behaviour as part of a team. (I did this by ending up organically and unofficially in charge by dint of the fact that I took initiative and gave instructions and people followed them and they worked; this theme will appear again.) We also did some situational training and some SWOT analyses, and were plied with not only vast quantities of coffee and tea just when they were needed most but also fed a really rather delicious cold buffet lunch that surprised me in its edibility. (As if to make it up to those who had not been anointed, my English teacher took the remnants of my class to the bookshop for their lesson: cue anguished jealousy.)
Last week only actually involved two days of lessons; on Wednesday I attended a rather fantastic fair at the University of Hertfordshire which involved talking to a variety of people, being given a forest of prospectuses (rather than proboscises, which would be rather less easy to read if somewhat more novel) and attending two lectures. I bumped into Tiggy in the English lecture, who was rather unmissable due to the fact that she now has shockingly purple hair, and also met some other people in the other lecture I attended, first thing in the morning. Paul, Tom and I all decided to sit in on the student finances lecture, and arrived ten minutes or so early. Thirty seconds later, a rather worried-looking Paul tapped me on the shoulder, looking slightly pale.
"Anto," he said. "Someone's waving at me."
Paul, I should point out, is the reason why I now no longer have a surprise reflex and why people leaping out at me from hidden spaces, jumping unexpectedly onto my back or wrapping their hands around my neck almost always fails to get much of a reaction. This may have played a part in my decision to refrain from taking his fear particularly seriously.
He tugged at my arm again. "A girl is waving at me, and I don't know who she is!" he said.
I rolled my eyes. "Well, wave back then," I suggested somewhat uncharitably, and glanced over my shoulder to see what -- or rather who -- he was making all the fuss about. Once I had, I could understand slightly where he was coming from: there was indeed a girl waving at him -- or rather, by that point, at me -- and the expression on her face can only be described as two parts beaming, two parts amusedly self-aware and one part manic. I shrugged, caught her eye, and followed my own advice.
I can't remember who spoke first; it's unimportant, really. Her name was Jess, the girl with the mouth with too-red lips and the wonderful smile, and she wanted to read philosophy at university. Her friend was called Kat, or possibly Cat. (I didn't ask which.)
"I like you," she said at one point, across the tiers of purple seats. "You're interesting. You talk back."
Then it became obvious that the lecture was about to begin, and she made a quip about talking through it, and we stopped our conversation and listened, and afterwards we filed out of the auditorium and went our separate ways. (Oddly, Paul and Tom and I bumped into them again, when we were waiting for our coach to arrive, and said hello again, and then it did, so we said goodbye, and that was that.)
There is something about having conversations with complete strangers that somehow you get on with rather well that is truly life affirming.
Anyway, that was Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, we had the Lower Sixth Business Conference, which theoretically involved us as a year becoming execuives for two days and running pseudo-businesses. In reality, it involved a lot of cheating, or rather industrial espionage, sabotage and bribery; a man from Faber-Castell with a five-day beard, a motorbike, the name Jimi, and a wonderful combination of a competitive streak and a relaxed attitude to the rules who happened to be our team leader; me getting up obscenely early on both days to do parking duty, which, on Friday, meant that I stood there in the rain under my umbrella reading a book and rather enjoying myself on for aesthetic reasons; ingenuity; Ashley (Sharkboy) asserting authority over our group, me accepting his authority as it made good sense and acting as his lieutenant and ideas-man and spokesperson because he had the economics knowledge and I had the mouth and we both had the will to actually make good use of ourselves and organise something; my arranging for a pizza to be bought and presented to our judges and kept warm for the next round as an example of our 'wares', which worked (along with the rest of the presentation, and Ashley's luck in managing to salvage the situation when a judge spotted the error in our figure-logic by giving them spurious and official sounding percentages with complete confidence) because we won; and also it involved me telling off a certain Ben [surname] in front of the entire year for being a prick without making myself look like one too.
It was good fun, overall.
Edit: I have been asked, by my stalker, to mention that I gave him the pizza afterwards, and have now done so.
(For those of you who are interested, some of them were in fact related to my essay: I found Hawksmoor and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller in my school library, bought Looking for Jake from Waterstones and returned from the main library with a bag bulging with tomes by a vast number of authors, including Ian MacLeod and Mervyn Peake. Those of you in the know: am I allowed to read Gormenghast before Titus Groan?)
Apart from my English, school has been producing very little that is actually worthwhile recently in the academic arena. As a case in point, I almost fell asleep during my history lesson today: I somehow managed to both be dreaming and entirely aware of what was going on in the classroom simultaneously (which was very strange indeed; I'm not entirely sure how to describe it other than that)after finishing reading and purposefully highlighting the sheets that were being read out loud and discussed by the class, and was very disappointed when I was directly addressed and had to re-emerge into the real world again. What we're covering is actually very interesting -- because my school is moderately insane, we'll be studying two modules rather than one and will therefore be looking at Britain from the Treaty of Versailles until the end of the Second World War, which really is a satisfying time-period to get to grips with, dealing as it does with the collapse of the imperialist system and the emergence of modern international relations (I amused myself very much when, whilst making a summary of British foreign policy aims, I was able to just stick the word 'reactionary' at the top and then logically work it all out from there; obviously Italy and Prussia are good for something other than stomping) although sadly the same isn't entirely true of the other side of the course ,which isn't actually entirely true in itself. The idea of covering the development of civil rights in the US from the end of the civil war until post-Martin Luther King (whom I almost typed as Stephen King) as a single unit is a wonderful one; unfortunately the way it is being handled is making the course as dry as the Antarctic (which is actually very dry indeed, because although there's lots of water around there is so little precipitation that it is one of the least wet deserts on the planet) and as boring as eating Quorn mince and plain rice for every meal for a month, which, for anybody who isn't desperately familiar with Quorn, is very boring indeed. Maths is currently coursework, which I really should do some more of at some point; in RS we're making a start on environmental ethics and not really doing very much else.
Some redeeming things have happened at school, though. I had a full day off for prefect training, which involved a sort of self-assessed Myers-Briggs test which labelled me fairly accurately as an Activist Reflector and gave Robbie a profile very similar but suitably different to mine and then lots of team-building activities when people demonstrated just how accurate the tests were in their behaviour as part of a team. (I did this by ending up organically and unofficially in charge by dint of the fact that I took initiative and gave instructions and people followed them and they worked; this theme will appear again.) We also did some situational training and some SWOT analyses, and were plied with not only vast quantities of coffee and tea just when they were needed most but also fed a really rather delicious cold buffet lunch that surprised me in its edibility. (As if to make it up to those who had not been anointed, my English teacher took the remnants of my class to the bookshop for their lesson: cue anguished jealousy.)
Last week only actually involved two days of lessons; on Wednesday I attended a rather fantastic fair at the University of Hertfordshire which involved talking to a variety of people, being given a forest of prospectuses (rather than proboscises, which would be rather less easy to read if somewhat more novel) and attending two lectures. I bumped into Tiggy in the English lecture, who was rather unmissable due to the fact that she now has shockingly purple hair, and also met some other people in the other lecture I attended, first thing in the morning. Paul, Tom and I all decided to sit in on the student finances lecture, and arrived ten minutes or so early. Thirty seconds later, a rather worried-looking Paul tapped me on the shoulder, looking slightly pale.
"Anto," he said. "Someone's waving at me."
Paul, I should point out, is the reason why I now no longer have a surprise reflex and why people leaping out at me from hidden spaces, jumping unexpectedly onto my back or wrapping their hands around my neck almost always fails to get much of a reaction. This may have played a part in my decision to refrain from taking his fear particularly seriously.
He tugged at my arm again. "A girl is waving at me, and I don't know who she is!" he said.
I rolled my eyes. "Well, wave back then," I suggested somewhat uncharitably, and glanced over my shoulder to see what -- or rather who -- he was making all the fuss about. Once I had, I could understand slightly where he was coming from: there was indeed a girl waving at him -- or rather, by that point, at me -- and the expression on her face can only be described as two parts beaming, two parts amusedly self-aware and one part manic. I shrugged, caught her eye, and followed my own advice.
I can't remember who spoke first; it's unimportant, really. Her name was Jess, the girl with the mouth with too-red lips and the wonderful smile, and she wanted to read philosophy at university. Her friend was called Kat, or possibly Cat. (I didn't ask which.)
"I like you," she said at one point, across the tiers of purple seats. "You're interesting. You talk back."
Then it became obvious that the lecture was about to begin, and she made a quip about talking through it, and we stopped our conversation and listened, and afterwards we filed out of the auditorium and went our separate ways. (Oddly, Paul and Tom and I bumped into them again, when we were waiting for our coach to arrive, and said hello again, and then it did, so we said goodbye, and that was that.)
There is something about having conversations with complete strangers that somehow you get on with rather well that is truly life affirming.
Anyway, that was Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, we had the Lower Sixth Business Conference, which theoretically involved us as a year becoming execuives for two days and running pseudo-businesses. In reality, it involved a lot of cheating, or rather industrial espionage, sabotage and bribery; a man from Faber-Castell with a five-day beard, a motorbike, the name Jimi, and a wonderful combination of a competitive streak and a relaxed attitude to the rules who happened to be our team leader; me getting up obscenely early on both days to do parking duty, which, on Friday, meant that I stood there in the rain under my umbrella reading a book and rather enjoying myself on for aesthetic reasons; ingenuity; Ashley (Sharkboy) asserting authority over our group, me accepting his authority as it made good sense and acting as his lieutenant and ideas-man and spokesperson because he had the economics knowledge and I had the mouth and we both had the will to actually make good use of ourselves and organise something; my arranging for a pizza to be bought and presented to our judges and kept warm for the next round as an example of our 'wares', which worked (along with the rest of the presentation, and Ashley's luck in managing to salvage the situation when a judge spotted the error in our figure-logic by giving them spurious and official sounding percentages with complete confidence) because we won; and also it involved me telling off a certain Ben [surname] in front of the entire year for being a prick without making myself look like one too.
It was good fun, overall.
Edit: I have been asked, by my stalker, to mention that I gave him the pizza afterwards, and have now done so.