Attn. school inspectors: before you start asking questions about what we’re doing and what we do in class, it’s generally a good idea to observe a few social niceties first. Explaining who the hell you are is a good place to start.

Attn. English teachers: anyone who has not learned to use a comma by the age of 14 is a dead loss. Please, teach us something else!

Attn. librarians: when I say ‘do you have a copy of such-and-such a book’, it should be clear that what I really want is to know whether or not you have a copy of that book in your library. I don’t know how you hear ‘please direct me to the children’s section’ in that sentence, but hey, I guess you could mishear me. Still, I don’t think that makes up for the way you give me a dirty look every time I walk in and return a book, or the way you give me a lecture every time I take one out about making sure it’s back on time, or the way you frown at me if I’m standing in the adult section.

Attn. whoever organises those school enterprise event things: I do not care about trying to move an egg with three bits of string, a paperclip and a tin of pineapple rings, or about any of the other insane activities you have concocted. I don’t give a damn about building teamwork. Just pick up the damn egg already.

Attn. whoever organises school sports days: the world would be a better place if you just let us all take the day off.  Seriously.  Sports days probably have the highest truancy rate of all days in the school year anyway, and that’s probably because many people’s parents will let them stay home just because sports days are a waste of time.

Attn. teachers who set essays due in the following day: has it ever occured to you that we may have other things to do? Has it ever occured to you that other teachers may have set us essays for the following day? Has it ever occured to you that giving us a few extra days when you won’t mark it anyway might actually mean we’d do it?

Attn. people who enforce uniform regulations: if my tracksuit bottoms with pale pink stripes on the sides are unacceptable, then so must be my makeup, my decorative earrings and my nail polish. Given that you have yet to ask me to remove any of these things, I don’t see that my trousers really matter that much.

Attn. health and safety people: Health and safety is the reason people don’t jump off cliffs. Health and safety is not an excuse for controlling people to the extent that they are not allowed to do even the most menial tasks, such as walking down the corridor to the bathroom, by themselves. And if wearing a blunt plastic hairstick is dangerous, a pen is a terrorist weapon and a drawing of a gun needs to be removed by airport security, then God help us.

And finally, attn. anyone who thinks a French twist is an ‘extreme hairstyle’: what the hell are you on?

Oh, the romanticised cup of coffee.

Coffee smells like freshly ground heaven. ~Jessi Lane Adams

Every account of coffee shops you read is the same. They are places of intellectual discussion and discourse, filled with intellectual sorts, romantic couples, friends having heart-to-hearts. Jazz music is playing quietly in the background while writers scribble on their napkins, musicians pore over the scores of Mozart’s concertos, life’s quiet observers watch the people on the street outside and the literary sorts bury themselves in Dostoevsky.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. ~T.S. Eliot

My favourite coffee shop is in Blackwell’s in Oxford. The tables are populated by intellectual-looking students reading and typing away on laptops or scribbling notes in their notebooks (this is Oxford, after all). The tables are made of dark wood. Blackwell’s being a bookshop, a shelf of books is in one corner and customers are invited to help themselves to the contents to read while they sip their coffee. A water dispenser is on the wall with glass jugs in front of it and every minute or two, someone gets up to pour themselves a glass.

Given enough coffee, I could rule the world. ~Author Unknown

However, the harsh reality of the coffee shop is that more often than not, it is an ugly Starbucks or something of the sort, populated by individuals ordering triple mocha banana-caramel American-style lattes in espresso cups with Italian raspberries and Venezuelan caramel topping, where the staff don’t give a damn about intellectual discussion (and probably couldn’t spell ‘intellectual’ either) and where customers are hustled out the door so that the table can be free for the next banana-sipping commuter.

Coffee is the best thing to douse the sunrise with. ~Drew Sirtors

Occasionally, though, one comes across a true ‘coffee shop moment’. Perhaps the coffee shop actually plays jazz music, or there’s a group of men playing cards, or someone gets indignant when they’re asked if they want there coffee black (there are other colours?!), or someone scribbles on a napkin, or there’s someone reading Nietzsche in the corner (sometimes without being glared at by the staff). Maybe, just maybe, the coffee shop doesn’t serve quintuple strawberry frappanissimo espresso lattes with caramel topping.

No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness. ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

I went to the private view of a textile exhibition yesterday. During the requisite ‘I’m so pleased to be here today’ speeches, I was acutely aware that somewhere, there was jazz. Turning around, I saw a coffee shop moment lying on the table. A girl sat at a table, wearing one of the visitor stickers but not listening to the speech, with headphones in her ears, through which jazz was playing. She was wearing a flaming red headscarf and was wearing a fabulously embroidered red jacket which somehow looked even better for the grungy trainers she wore on her feet. She was reading a book, though I couldn’t see what it was. When I walked out of the room after the last round of applause, I could see that she had some kind of curly writing tattooed on the back of her neck and the four suit symbols tattooed behind one ear.

If only she’d been drinking coffee.

This is, apparently, a picture of a ’spork’. A spork is, according to good ol’ wikipedia:

a hybrid form of cutlery taking the form of a spoon-like shallow scoop with the addition of the tines of a fork

(Seriously, did you know they were called ‘tines’? Did anyone know they were called tines? Pardon me for being common and lower-class, but until I was enlightened, I’d have called them prongs. Oh, silly, silly me.)

Wikipedia’s article continues with some interesting spork-related facts, such as the fact that they are occasionally known as ‘foons’ and that they have been made since at least the 1800s.

The point of this entry, however, is to celebrate the fact that I am one of probably only 4 people in the world (the other 3 being related to myself) to refer to this culinary implement as a ’spoon-fork’.

Don’t you just love being alternative?

I guess it’s time for our second week of summer here. Yes, you guessed it: I’m going to be a stereotypical Brit and talk about the weather for an entire entry.

About a month ago, we had one week where it was glorious and sunny. I went out and bought skirts, having thrown all mine away during the winter. I’d only just got home from the shops when it started to rain, and until yesterday, it kept on going and going and going. Guess that was our one and only week of summer for this year…too bad I’m not so keen on drizzle.

Then on Sunday, it suddenly became ludicrously hot and it’s stayed that way ever since. It seems like everyone but me is absolutely delighted about it…seriously, though, I don’t like hot weather. I don’t like it when it’s horrible and drizzly either, but there is such a thing as too hot and it kicks in at about 25 degrees Celsius. You know how it is in the summer evenings when it’s cool and shady but warm enough to go outside in short sleeves? That’s my kind of weather. I think I’d like it to be like that all the time.

I am sick of people recommending this book to me. It seems to be universally acknowledged as a great read that’s really deep and meaningful and thought-provoking etc. etc. Unfortunately, I am probably the only person on the planet who didn’t enjoy it.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven on Amazon.

I reserved this book from the library after hearing rave reviews and I was rather excited when it came through. Everything I’d heard about it was good, and the overwhelming opinion I got was that it was a book that offered new perspectives and ideas. Boy, was I disappointed.

The writing style got me from the first page. It was blank. I was expecting something deep and thoughtful and inspirational: instead, it was bland, boring sentences with no drive to them at all. It didn’t feel like there was any deeper meaning than what was written right on the page in front of me, and in my opinion, that’s because there wasn’t.

Nevertheless, I persevered, convinced that these great reviews must have some basis in fact. However, as I continued, I found that another thing that really annoyed me was that that there was no scope of change. The idea of the book is that when you die, you meet five people in heaven who explain your life to you. Because of this, I was expecting some gradual revelation, some thought, some sense of r as the things they were explaining became clear. However, nice as the stories were, they didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Far from explaining Eddie’s life, they were filling in the blanks. Did you know that the guy in the corner shop used to know your aunt? Did you know that your mum once went out on a date with the guy who went on to become your lecturer at uni? That kind of thing. That’s all very well, and quite nice in a way, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere.

I’ll admit that that could very well have been deliberate or purposeful - after all, he’s dead and so maybe it’s supposed to illustrate that nothing can change and that things would have been very different if Eddie had known these things during his life - but I doubt it was. To me, the book rang hollow: it was a collection of stories, vaguely tied together by one man, that had no greater bearing on anything at all. What a disappointment.

kay, so the chocolate flapjack recipe I posted has turned out to be one of my most popular posts. So, in a similar vein, I’ve decided to post another of my favourite recipes. If I remember correctly, this originates from Blue Peter, a show I’ve never really watched, but obviously I was watching when they made this cake, and I’m really rather glad that I did. The whole ‘lucky bean’ thing is one of those daft things about ‘the person who gets the bean gets to be lucky for a whole year!’, which is obviously complete bullshit and really it’s best to make this cake without the bean in because if you end up eating the bean then it’s disgusting because all the foil sticks to your mouth and you have to take it out and it’s really not a very pleasant experience.

And now, without further ado, how to make a not-so-lucky hopefully-sans-bean cake:

Ingredients:

• 250g margarine
• A tiny bit of baking powder
• 150g caster sugar
• 2 eggs
• 200ml milk
• 300g self-raising flour
• 1 butter bean, if you’re going for the whole bean thing

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. Melt the butter.
3. Beat the butter and the sugar together.
4. Mix in eggs, flour and baking powder.
5. Whisk.
6. Wrap the butter bean in foil. Don’t use much foil: as I said earlier, it’s rather foul when you end up eating it.
7. Drop it in the mixture.
8. Mix.
9. Bake for 50 minutes (normally slightly less) in a ring-shaped tin. Sprinkle the baking powder in the tin before you put the mixture in the tin: seriously, this cake can be quite hard to get out, and the baking powder helps one hell of a lot.
10. Leave to cool.

This makes a very heavy, thick and delicious cake that goes marvellously with cream and strawberries. It’s best to eat it in nice big pieces, because it goes stale very quickly. If it’s been a few days, sticky it in the microwave and then smear jam all over it and it tastes a lot better.

The amount of time I spend online depresses me.

It seems like my life alternates between ‘internet’ and ‘not internet’. Get up, go online. Do something else. Back online. Do something else. Back on line. Do something else. Back online…

I started using a firefox addon called MeeTimer a while ago, which monitors the time you spend online. It also has a function to deter you, by blocking tabs, blocking links…in fact, it works pretty well. According to MeeTimer, though, it’s only saved me 27 minutes so far.

MeeTimer has logged 75  hours of my internet activity. On average, I spend 1h 45min online every day. That’s 25min on ungrouped sites (i.e. sites I don’t normally visited and so haven’t allocated a specific group), 7min on communication (which comprises of gmail, which I use for email, and meebo, which I use for instant messaging), 20min on longhaircommunity, which is fast becoming an addiction of mine, 47min on livewire (eek!), which is clearly already an addiction of mine, 5min on miscellaneous sites (wordpress, postsecret, the library, bookmooch) and 4min on music sites (deezer and chilirec).

I keep trying to cut down, but seriously, I don’t know how much is normal (or reasonable) to spend online. Almost two hours a day is too much, but how much should I be aiming for? I know that most of the time clocked up is from livewire, so perhaps I should cut down on that. Thing is, though, that because I’m a moderator, I really should sign in every day, and it normally takes me about 20min just to clear my mail and topics and quotes and the mod forum and the modmenu. Perhaps I should try and cut down on that, or maybe do only that for a few days and not make any extra posts or whatever to try and bring the amount of time down. Whatever I decide to do, it’s pretty clear to me that something needs to change.

2nd prosecution lawyer very clear and feisty. She will make a good lawyer.

^^^ That’s me!

I’m taking part in the National Magistrates Mock Trial Competition, in which we have to pretend to be a magistrates’ court and act out a trial. As I said, I’m 2nd prosecution lawyer. Our school qualified for the regional final, but someone quit and so I stepped in to take their place. That meant that everyone else had done the competition before, but I hadn’t.

The regional final was on Saturday, in Southampton. It went pretty well: fortunately, both teams we were against made pretty huge mistakes (obviously biasing their examination-in-chief by saying things like ‘how responsible of you’ and trying to re-examine, which isn’t allowed in the competition), so that made us look pretty good.

Anyway…we won!

That means we get to go to the national final (!) on the 21st of next month in Leeds. We get the Friday off school to travel up by train and then stay the night. Then we’ll do the competition on the Saturday and come back down after.

I can’t wait!

I’ve got the blues.

Everything seems so pointless right now. I’ve been to school every day this week and have yet to succeed in learning anything. I’ve stayed late every night and I haven’t really enjoyed any of the things I’ve been to. To which I’ve been.

We’ve had tests that count for jack shit and we don’t even get the results. When we don’t have tests, other people do, so we haven’t even had any lessons.

Insert your own profanity here because I can’t be bothered to make up the remainder of the post. Here’s a pretty picture instead:

Summer has come. It’s hot. I wake up early in the mornings because the sun is streaming through the window, which is now left open at night because it’s so hot. I’m wearing a skirt. I don’t bother taking my jumper to school.

SATs week last week. Boring as hell. I think I did well on them. The only papers where I feel I didn’t do so well are the science ones, and I still think I did okay. I don’t particularly care.

We have CATs this week. Had one this morning (missed IT and PE! hooray!) and I have the other half on Wednesday. There’s absolutely no point to them. Seriously, how can they possibly need any more tests to predict our grades? They already have 3 years’ of work, plus all the tests we’ve done in those years, and our year 7 CATs, and our SATs. If they haven’t got a decent idea how we’re going to do by now, then they must be effing stupid.

I went to photography today and messed around a bit with a photo of the piano I use in my lessons. I think it came out pretty well: I took the photo by putting the camera at the side of the keyboard on a timer and then putting my hands on the keys, then made it greyscale and fiddled with the sharpness and blurring. I’m pretty pleased with it.