here's the bad news.

we have a gas leak. the gas has been cut off. we now have no central heating and no hot water. it is four degrees. i am shivering inside my seven layers of clothing.

i am going upstairs to cry.

just another friday

today i:
- went shopping. hope theo likes his present. hope my jeans fit.
- slept. for a very long, luscious time.
- read. about german unification. at my sister's house and in waterstones. i love reading in bookshops. you can just curl up blissfully and read all the beautiful hardbacks that you'll never afford. almost spent my book token on carol ann duffy's new anthology, but thought better of it. it was £12.99...
-thought alot. about last night. went to an awesome party full of blue lights and people from stratford. there's something reassuring about spending time with people you haven't seen in far too long, it brought back strange memories of eccentric teachers and purple blazers... what happened to him, is she really pregnant, what about her sister? we sat drinking sangria and talking of the golden fleece and wanstead and girlguides, and saint angela's and upton park and the 325 bus. shattering.

there were reports of burglaries and gas leaks while we were away. the firemen came after someone reported a gas leak, and found our back door open. creepy, but there was no gas leak, and no burglary, just glacial temperatures and a deserted, disordered house of abandoned chaos. but when we got back from joey's today we definitely smelt gas again. quite scary really, and my mind instinctively clung to horrific, hollywood-inspired images of an innocent family gassing themselves to death in their sleep, unknowing. the gas man has arrived, bearing strange gas-detecting gadgets. we will wait, and worry. and at some point sleep and wake again tomorrow. hopefully.

what's more worrying is that no one leaves comments any more and tim doesn't blog, or does half-heartedly and too infrequently.

everyone had better be there tomorrow, i'm dying of loneliness and delusion.
x

as an afterthought...

"Class is so deeply embedded in our national subconscious it is poisoning every aspect of our lives. Not just industrial relations and politics, but our choice of districts to live in, jobs, schools, friends - even which bar to drink in at our local. It's a kind of civil war we are perpetually fighting, wearing out our energy and emotions, wasting our time and money. It holds back progress, destroys prosperity, impedes social and working relations on every side"

- Lynne Reid Banks

cold and confused

finally i have emerged from the depths of bleak, cloudy ireland. christmas has once again been and gone, unoticed. i am weary of being with my family, my parents are viscious, my grandparents are uptight, my grandparents' dog hates me. my fingers are frozen, there has been no heating in this house since we left so it is the same temperature inside as out. minus three degrees.

christmas was nice. but as ever the "christmas spirit" i felt when i was ten is diminishing. we ate two ducks with orange and gravy, then watched 'singin' in the rain', then sat round the fire eating nuts and chocolate. my parents/grandparents got drunk on port and irish whisky. i lounged on the sofa feeling detached and doing sudokus. i have done thirty-seven sudokus while i have been away. now you sense my utter, unavoidable anguish.
the duck tasted good though. i finally have You Could Have It So Much Better, which is pretty damn awesome. and purple tights and red checked pyjamas.

we went to see a lighthouse at dusk, and climbed along the slippery, shadowy rocks. it was the most sombre, sinister thing. i sat down, staring across the sea listening to parachutes, completely thunderstruck. my feet were cold and clammy, my eyes were streaming.
i had to sit in the boot with the dog all the way home, drowsy, shivering.

my bed was so warm i slept for fourteen hours every night. even on christmas day i didn't wake up until eleven. it was sunny and sparkling on christmas day. before dinner we walked along the coast skimming stones and watching the squarking geese across the estuary. i wore my wellingtons.

i think i wrote this subconciously. i don't remember what i have written.
x

love steals us from loneliness...

i love this weekend, it's the best weekend of the year. full of anticipation, but without the stress and strain of christmas. the calm before the storm. where work and school and pain is finally receding. and to be honest i prefer preparing for christmas than actually celebrating it... although i love my family i never particularly look forward to being stuck inside the house for three days watching them get drunk.

i went christmas shopping with my brother yesterday. i am so broke that no one would actually have had any presents from me had my brother not lent me a generous sum of money from his student loan. nice. someday i shall have to pay him back out of my student loan.

sarah's party was pretty damn good. although it seems that either no one got drunk or everyone had long recovered by the time i arrived... i guess i was just too busy watching the x factor and strictly come dancing along with 20 million other people, poor sad little me. happy birthday sarah, glad you liked the card, i spent ages on it. i know now that if i don't make university i can drop out and make birthday cards for a living.

this site has beautiful photos.
i hope katrina is better.
and my love of garden state seems to have lead to emotional dependency.
i have to give it back tomorrow...
x

tascha

you owe me £1.
x

and it feels so much lighter... now i've met you.

it's amazing how many completely contrasting emotions can go through my fucked up mind in twenty-four hours. i have felt: exhausted, agressive, paranoid, elated, absent-minded, sick, hormonal and restful all within the space of today. i only got six hours of sleep, shouted at my mother for no apparent reason, freaked out on the train because i thought i had gone past ingatestone when i hadn't (senile dementia..?), handed in my extended essay for good, forgot to find mr wright when it was really important, felt rotten when i got in from school, ate half a tub of chocolate dairy ice cream and then slept for several luscious hours. (clever the way the emotions and actions are in corresponding order... go me!)

anyway, this wasn't meant to be another angsty entry, i was pondering about how crazy my emotions seem to be, this strange rollercoaster sugar rush. (i think i stole that off ben - copyright ben temblett 2005. someone reading this entry will probably be bothered to find out where the reference is).

it's also strange how the people living with us have grown on me, despite how determined i was to hate them. when they first arrived i saw a scrawny, 5-year-old, blonde pest and a gabbling welsh woman. harsh, i know. despite the horrible age barrier between us, i have now realised alex is actually scarily adorable, and very modest and intelligent, i'm convinced i was a lot more annoying than that when i was five. wendy is lovely and somehow holds all the maternal qualities my mother never had: she had got me into lemon tea and constantly offers soothing advice while my mother tells me to get a grip and pull myself together. good times....

my mother... i know exactly why i hate her and she knows exactly why i hate her, and we've reached this horrible limbo where she won't stop being a control-bitch and i won't stop hating her and resisting her for being a control-bitch. she looks and talks to me in such a vindictive way. i love london, i love this house, i love living here, but i hate my mother. i should probably be ashamed for hating her, or admit that i don't really hate her, but right now i feel like this is the truth: i really do. even though i wish i didn't. i'm priveledged really, i'm not some deprived, abused child, i'm just normal(ish) and i am lucky in lots of ways. this is one of the most fucked-up confusing entries i've ever written. it's also surprisingly honest, but unfortunately it's still boring, angsty crap. i'm so full of angst, so helpless, so fucking young.

honey you are a rock upon which i stand....
x

well, what's wrong with a little destruction?

my room:

the sun won't swallow the sky... (hopefully)

i seriously wish the links on this blog weren't so screwed up, but i can't face the hassle of messing around with html to put them right so they'll have to stay like that.

and on sunday i came disturbingly close to quitting the anglo, quitting the ib, starting afresh, stabbing myself in the back, shooting myself in the foot. i hurt from working and worrying, i have an interview on thursday for somewhere i'll never get into. and worst of all if i don't get in there i have to live with my parents for another three years. in all honesty i couldn't give a fuck about the *oxbridge experience*, i'm just trying to escape from my parents. also i'm trying to create some sort of a life plan based on the fact that i am about to fail the IB. i could do any one of the following:
-go abroad and study in france for a while.
-forget about the whole uni thing, just get a monotonous nine-to-five job (preferably in the co-op, in true ex-anglo style) and indulge in academic freedom.
-commit suicide.
-retake the whole of my secondary education. or possibly just the last bit. at some point in the past i was a fairly successful, intelligent person. i have come to the conclusion that GCSEs are actually pointless. getting 10 a*s has not given me any advantage whatsoever in life. in fact in retrospect i wish i'd done less work.

damn. yet another component of my life that i have misinterpreted and then fucked up.
and why did everyone go to see franz ferdinand except me? actually my bitterness evaporated quickly when tim presented me with a beautiful franz ferdinand badge which i shall treasure. and also berengere told me that despite franz being her favorite band, the gig actually wasn't everything. i love you berengere. (though for many other reasons beside the franz ferdinand thing. i love the way your hair is curly then straight but always looks stunning. i love getting wasted with you (jesus i miss that) and i love the way you hug me better than anyone else. i'll stop now before this starts to sound reminiscent of mj. disturbing thought.)

anyway. my life is like a rubber duck. one that drifts down, then floats, then sinks below the surface again. what a bizarre analogy.
strange how fresh blood runs so stale.
perhaps i'll leave you in peace now.
x

(feel my lips undress your eyes...)

in the good old days....

- the libertines existed.
- six people lived in this house, they were all related to me.
- i didn't know what the IB was.
- weekends were for relaxing.
- having broadband was some sort of strange american dream.
- going to university was distant, and unimportant.
- sue mcgregor was still on the today programme.
- my grandparents had three dachshunds, not one.
- my brother had a healthy head of hair.
- the sun shone occasionally.