not.in.paris

It’s taken me more than a week, but hey, I’m actually updating!

Exeter was pretty dull. We stayed in Topsham. Walked round Topsham, moseyed down the coast a bit (Dawlish was nice) and looked round Glastonbury. We went up the Tor. There were loads of people on the way up who kept talking to us, especially this one woman with this little kid called Emily. The kid was really friendly. Aw, sweet!

Here’s some pictures:

That’s a photo of Dawlish.

That’s me playing at being all artistic and taking pretty shadow shots.

That’s from most of the way up Glastonbury Tor.

Isn’t it just cruel how you always seem to get ill in the holidays? I’ve been suffering somewhat this week. Not fair. Not fair. Not FAIR! I couldn’t play flute or recorder for two days because my throat was too sore and I’m still sniffing like crazy.

I haven’t done a great deal in terms of going out. A couple of friends and I were going to go and see Juno but then one of them said she didn’t think she’d be ‘comfortable’ seeing it (ain’t it quaint?) so in the end we just went shopping, then back to my other friend’s house for a while. It was good.

Today we went to the Sunday market and bought clothes. Hooray hooray hooray! I took some pictures on my phone so you’ll get a proper entry about my fabulous purchases when I’ve got them off. For now, it will suffice to say that they are unmistakeably awesome.

I’ve done a bit of homework. I made a stromboli this afternoon (pictures of that still to come too). My room needs a tidy. I washed my hair. Yeah, my life is rock ‘n’ roll as always!

Seems like it’s ages since I’ve updated this.

Half term has officially started (hooray! hooray! hooray!) and believe me I’m glad. I could really do with SLEEP. Getting out of the bed early in the morning is never fun but it’s even less fun in the middle of winter when it’s cold and dark and it seems like a year since the last time we had a holiday.

We’re going up to Exeter tomorrow, staying two nights. We don’t have family up there or anything: just staying there for the sake of it. A little bit of a break. I love doing that: it gives you a chance just to get away from everything and organise things. If you’re in Exeter then you don’t need to worry about going out or doing things or meeting friends because you’re in the wrong place. It’s great not to have to bother with those stresses sometimes.

I made the F1 challenge team! That’s good news. The F1 challenge is an engineering challenge where around 500 schools from the entire country compete to make the fastest little car and race them. It looks awesome. My school is currently champions in loads of different categories, so I guess we have quite a bit to live up to! In order to get on we had to do this selection thing where we had to complete a task. We had to build something in about half an hour that would pick up the lid off a pan, put an egg in it and then put the lid back on. Ours didn’t work but then neither did anyone else’s. Then again, ours failed quite spectacularly. Our stick was too short (it was supposed to be 2m long) and so we had to get creative and do a weird swinging thing. We did manage to knock the pan lid off in the end, but we quite honestly didn’t stand a chance of getting anything else done!

Aside from that, not much has really been happening. Apart from something that I’m not really going to post about, because I want to find out if it’s actually going to happen before I say anything.

I reckon I’m going to go and either have a very long shower or a very short bath. Either option would be very, very nice indeed.

Adios!

Everyone knows about the pecking order.

The pecking order is the reason you’re allowed to stand in front of someone and say ‘I want to be with someone else’. The pecking order is the reason it’s okay to laugh in someone’s face. The pecking order determines who’s picked for the football team, who you play at badminton, who you stand with at break…the pecking order determines everything.

The pecking order is not a straight hierachy. There’s groups. You’re on one side or the other and then you have to move up that side’s hierachy. One side is always higher than the other but it depends where you are. If you’re alone, then it’s simply the person who’s more popular within their own pecking order. In fact, it almost always works like that. It’s just that one pecking order is inferior.

The pecking order is determined by many things. Who your friends are. Who they aren’t. Who you know: who you don’t. Who knows you - and why. What you do, when you do it and with whom you do it. Every little action shifts your place in the pecking order. Everyone knows their place and nobody dares to move from it because that would mean being put down by the people above them and sent back to the bottom. The bottom of the pecking order is the wrong place to be.

Funny how it’s always the same people at the bottom. And how nobody can remember why they’re there.

We got our options booklets today, so I’ve been pretty much finalising my choices. I’ve known what I’m going to take for a while now, but all the same, it’s good to have the booklet so I can check that I really can do what I want to and also just to flick through the extra options.

I’m going to be taking, in addition to the compulsory courses: French, German, triple science (already started that this year) and geography.

I’m also hoping to get on the GCSE Russian course at my brother’s college, which is a two-year course open to those who are gifted in languages. I know I’m on the gifted list for languages because only one class on each side of the year gets to do both French and German, and I am taking both of them, so there shouldn’t be any problem doing that.

I don’t know what I want for a final career, though. I want something to do with languages, but most of the options that are based mainly around languages don’t particularly appeal to me. If not that, then it’ll have to either be something in writing or something in law. Writing’s a hard one: I know it’s very hard to get into the journalism industry and there’s no real set way of qualifying. Law really interests me, but it worries me that it takes so long to qualify and that you can’t really have a go beforehand. What if you qualify and then find that you don’t actually like it? What do you do then? We have to do a career study and I’m doing becoming a barrister, so hopefully I’ll find out some more about it.

I’ve been looking at AS- and A-level options a little, just to make sure I’m not cutting off anything I want to do by picking the wrong subjects for GCSE. I reckon the IB looks good…don’t need to worry about that for another two years, though. Hooray!

Ugh, hate this. So darn complicated and yet it’s so simple as well. Can’t be bothered to explain.

In other news…

Non uniform day today. My apparel of choice: brown shoes with rainbow laces, jeans, bright orange shirt that ties at the back, rainbow hoodie zippy thing, amazing purple jacket, the purple scarf that Cathy gave me, lots of jewellery including the awesome thread earrings  I bought in London.

Got my wooden treble today. I’m borrowing it from a friend of my music teacher so that it’ll stay played in and I’ll get some experience on a wooden one. It sounds gorgeous; can’t wait to play it properly! Oh, and I got some new piano pieces too.

I like playing piano, but I’m in a group with a friend who is super-competitive. She’s always wanting to be the best. And then she always insists on playing first, so she does, and I just sit there silently. And then I play, and she’s always singing along, grabbing the music, pressing the keys down the bottom…give it a fucking rest, will you? There’s no need to be so effing competitive.

Ah well. At least she gave me music for Pachabel’s Canon. I love that piece. And my flute/recorder teacher said my pieces were good…count your blessings, Fern. 1, 2, 3, 4…

This weekend I’m sleeping over at a friend’s (the competitive one). It’s a birthday thing, even though her birthday was a few days before Christmas. We’re going out for a meal, then bowling. Yay. Should be fun!