It has been so long since I last blogged that I forgot my own URL. Shameful. More shameful still is that I only recently decided to make the effort to blog again is to make myself look fancy on my UCAS form. We are forever being encouraged at 6th form to partake in any activity we can which makes us look like good studious and 'involved' people who care amount the community and all that. However, for a whole school year, only 30 hours of service is required, and we are encouraged to, instead of doing it in weekly installments, spend a week of our holidays slaving to get all that pesky good person work out of the way. Being a spectacularly good person myself (ahem) I have already signed up for medical volunteering at the local Orthopedic centre, not least because it's a hefty requirement for all aspiring medical students and am therefore feeling smug as others scrabble around trying to avoid teaching the bratty young ones maths.
The first week of sixth form was spent telling us that our A*s at GCSE meant nothing, you have to be incredibly stupid to fail them, and that AS levels are serious business and any work we did last year could have been done by blindfolded monkeys. Heartening. Then we were told not to come to lessons without homework done, not to be late and how trusted we are to make our own decisions. In my biology class two boys have been put under scrutiny for writing on a desk, the third girl of our year group is pregnant, and there are rumours that the boys toilets have already been vandalised. The ten thousand pound fingerprint-recognition attendance recording system lies in ruins (not least with so many of our students refusing to submit their fingerprints for fear of the information being handed over to the police) and our lessons are plagued with naughty boys sent out from other lessons to learn something from older students - recently we had a lesson without a teacher and when the naughty boy (there seem to be a popular three) was sent in, we decided to ask him to write out 40 rules of how to behave into a science lab. Surprisingly, he got to twelve before running out, which was rule 13).
Having done all that moaning, I like sixth form. Despite being heartily encouraged not to take on 5 subjects, I ignored all advice (I have decided to do this since all English teachers assured us heartily that we would not be examined on Denise Levertov's 'What Were They Like?' poem before it came up in our exam, much to the anger of most students apart from me, who so smugly had decided to study it on hearing we shouldn't.) from staff and went ahead with English, history, chemisty, biology and maths. Biology being the soft option here, we were immediately told in our first lesson that it's not a doss subject and then spent the rest of the hour making a poster.
The benefits of 6th form include being free to wear our own clothes instead of the poxy burgundy jumper, having a whole room full of comfy chairs instead of a corridor with benches, and a superior choice of snacks at our very own Pam's - the 6th form hole in the wall for food. Pam's also leaves us free from the new and bizarre government-enforced rule that anyone in compulsary education is no longer allowed to buy one of the packeted muffins or sweets without purchasing a sandwich along with it, presumably along the Jamie Oliver lines of children being healthy. However, when the sandwiches served are a white-as-paper freshly defrosted roll filled with grated cheese or tuna, this is hardly doing the kids any favours. I have noticed that the bins around campus seem to have a large amount of uneaten rolls sitting on the top, or for the busier students who don't have the time to get over to a bin between kicking things at people or lurking in hallways being naughty, littered artfully around the bins.
Something wonderful about being in 6th form and wearing our own clothes to school means that the lowly compulsary-education types below us have a habit of parting when we stride through importantly with our own pens and paper (Britain is the only country in Europe to provide its students with paper, and also the worst for teen pregnancies and alcohol abuse. There might be no connection between the two, but all I'm saying is that in Holland there's a 2% under-18 pregnancy rate and the kids bring their own damn paper.) to let us past. A friend and I were striding around importantly on our first day back when some 12 year olds jumped out from behind a corner to boo us into shock. When we remained unscathed and continued up the stairs, they commented to each other that we couldn't possibly be scared as we were grown-ups. How right they were!
In the spirit of being a good person and filling the large void in my life that was last year my precious yearbook, I have joined the Debate society. I have little experience in debate but I do have a very poor performance record for impromptu speaking - in Athens I went to the Panhellenic Forensics Tournament (not, as it sounds, a race to chop up bodies, but a debate, drama and public speaking event between the international schools of Greece - an event which those who stammer and go blank should be fiercely warned against and if you are foolish persue to make a mockery of yourself in front of 40-odd other judgemental students when you are unable to make a 3 minute speech about a given subject. Mine was cats and I froze after the 6th second, the only thought coming to my head was to do a vigorous and enthusiastic cat impression but instead opting for the turning red and apologising before dashing to my seat approach. However, I enjoy debate; it makes me strangely excited and passionate about British type subjects which usually I would be fairly unopinionated about - e.g. the morals of sending antisocial children away to boarding schools or abolishing the monarchy.
I enjoy this 6th form business. We all feel very privileged and motivated to do lots of learning. Mainly because there is lots to do, but mostly because it is no longer obligatory; none of us have to be here, but we are, in our comfy jeans and jumpers at that, armed with big empty folders and blank notebooks, ready to soak in knowledge and agonise over it come exam season. How willing and naive we all are.
Debate
You may have noticed that the profile picture on this blog has changed from Susanna and Branwen at night doing Greek theatre comedy/tradgedy to Susanna and Branwen in Lithuania! That's right, the Ironic Observations team took an executive journalistic trip to Lithuania, generously funded by an energy consultant and physics lecturer, who funnily enough, are directly relations.
The trip was kindly hosted (in part) by the Vilnius in Your Pocket Team, an old favourite magazine close to the Spector/Ryding family hearts. Both of us gained some invaluable writing experience (cham is apparently not a real English word but according to the editor, 'nibblies' is) which was published in our name. Well, for us to know anyway, as we have no representation on the masthead.
Anyway, the first publishings of the blog in an international company! We awarded ourselves 10 points each and returned from a week in Vilnius much wiser, accidentally cameoing in a wedding film being filmed on a Trakai bridge, full of Lithuanian-interpreted Chinese food and packet noodles and talking like Eddie Izzard. The latter a common side effect of the two of us being alone for more than a few days at a time.
Previously a haven to teenagers and youngsters all over Vilnius, Akropolis shopping centre was the first proper, Western style mall those of us who had been there long enough had ever seen.
It held an ice rink, a food court, probably over 30 shoe shops, often lined up in groups as if afraid of separation. It had a Danish Jysk, an 'Indian' cafe serving Earl Grey, a huge and bewildering Maxima supermarket, and, well, not much else. You could never have a successful shopping trip there as there was really nothing of interest to buy - unless you needed to supply footwear to a small transvestite army.
Returning to Akropolis made it seem even more depressing than it really was. Apart from a sign that Lithuanians were continuously getting richer (judging by the amount of cars and people there on a Tuesday afternoon), the walk up the motorway and the surrounding wasteland were a sad sight, as was the fact that the shops and merchandise still hadn't changed. After wandering through the Maxima to show Susanna that buckets of mayonaise really do exist and counting the shoe shops, dining on some impressively poor Chinese food cooked by impressively Chinese looking chefs, we took a 40lt (£8 - pittance in England but shockingly high in Lithuania) taxi home by an impressively rude taxi driver who sped and honked and swore. Clearly some things are meant to stay the same.
Lithuanian markets haven't changed. Vilnius in Your Pocket sent us on a market reviewing adventure to document the rubbish that they sell. We wrote a self-acclaimed fairly rubbish article here. We apologise for the quality but we were under pressure to be funny and it backfired.
Normally the image of a street market in Europe might conjure up images of fresh fruit and vegetables, bright colours and lively shouting. Not in Vilnius. The Kalvariju market we used to frequent as a mother-daughter vegetable and plant buying team remains exactly the same - drab, grey, selling reasonable fruit and veg but, to the trained eye, also plastic bread from sheds, sponges, mobile phone chargers and massive piles of women's pants. The central market was no better, selling competitively larger piles of pants and sausage. Susanna and I were impressed only by the few stalls devoted only to denim - the sort that only the Village People might sport and were consequently empty, even at peak shopping hours. Shame.
This hut for the security of some embassy or other on Ausros Vartu street in the old town of Vilnius provided Susanna and I with much entertainment. It was there when I was a resident but I never remembered having this much fun with it. We invite you to play guess the author's legs in the reflection!
Luckily the first statue we visited made it easy. Impossible to find and posted on a windy corner, Romain Gary was quickly christened a craptue. We were thoroughly disappointed and both of the opinion that no one should be taller than a statue.
Next on the list was Doctor Tsemakh Shabad, conveniently sculpted for a cuddle or handshake and in a more central and convenient location. He also had some Hebrew on him, which won brownie points.
I was pleased to see Susanna being excited about the same things I can get excited about in Eastern Europe, or indeed Europe. Here are some things we both enjoyed:
While it was wonderful to go back to my old home and potter about as a grown up, I found it slightly depressing. Now that Lithuania has joined the EU, I found a large proportion of the friendly and welcoming people who would immediately address you in English and talk about wanting to go to England or America and be optimistic have now left and it seems only the sulky leftovers remain, who are rude and don't want to speak English or be friendly, which is a great shame. My fondest memories of growing up in Vilnius include strangers making conversation straight away to practise their English. However, Susanna and I did make the acquaintance of one 13 year old boy who, having overheard us in the supermarket, followed us to the nearby park and declared to us that he was half-English and went on to prove it by showing his Union Jack wristband. He certainly showed us up when we claimed we were also Britons yet unable to produce a similar token of nationality.
Lithuania is great - I urge everyone to go there for one of those trendy weekend breaks. Stroll through the old town, buy Vilnius in Your Pocket, visit the lakes, drink the beer and try some Bum Gum. It's lovely.
At the moment we residents of Oxford, especially those of us who frequent facilities on the Cowley Road, seem to be caught up in some great moral debate. It’s all to do with the recent opening of a branch of Costa Coffee, something which the hippies of East Oxford cannot bear. For those who do not know, Cowley Road is more of a lifestyle than a street. It’s praised for its ‘diversity’ and ‘unique culture’, both of which it has, but scratch the surface and you’ll find a few problems.
Firstly, many reasons for objecting to the café being there are flawed. The building had been out of use for a long time and didn’t look as if it would ever become more than a derelict eyesore. On top of this, there were hardly ever any good places to go for coffee before on Cowley Road. Now, I’m not saying that a Costa Coffee was especially needed to serve this purpose, but no-one else bought the building (admittedly because prices are soaring in the area) so why shouldn’t they set up?
Many people who criticise the move also have not got their facts straight. On the facebook group that spearheads this campaign, entitled ‘Get f****** Costa Coffee off the Cowley Road’, many people refer to Costa as a ‘multinational’. This is most incorrect as Costa is a British-by-way-of-being-Italian company that prides itself on being at least slightly more ethical than some of the other large coffee brands. Up in Headington we have our own issues; Starbucks are planning on establishing a branch on the main shopping street. Luckily we are almost right wing enough to handle this. God forbid Starbucks would ever try and set up in East Oxford, they would have the Woodcraft Folk onto them in no time flat!
My biggest problem with the whole campaign against Costa is that it seems like the biggest case of NIMBYism that I have ever come across. My bet is that many people who object to Costa’s existence on the Cowley Road would perfectly happily go to the branch in Oxford’s city centre (most likely for a Soya latte) and probably never went to ‘The Excelsior’ for coffee anyway. It also bothers me that people are saying that it’s ‘gentrifying the area’. Gentrifying? East Oxford has been ridiculously middle-class for as long as I have been associated with it. In the GCSE results from Cheney School this year there was only one person on the list of people with special mentions for the number of A*s they got who wasn’t from East Oxford. There’s already a massive Tescos on the Cowley Road and I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that many people who are against Costa regularly shop there.
What I am trying to say is that I feel it’s almost as if someone finally realised the wealth locked up in the Cowley Road area, decided to make use of it and the local residents now feel as if they have been found out as being, shock horror, middle class. Of course you may think that I am being grossly unfair and that all this is is intelligent people fighting for a more ethical and diverse distribution of services. You are probably partly right, but if that really was the case then the campaign logo wouldn’t make amusing use of coffee beans and phallus.
All I am saying is that the ‘Costa is bad’ campaign is not as black-and-white as it may seem. I am a full supporter of the other issue at hand which involves local prices and rents, but refuse to boycott Costa just as many people do not wish to stop shopping at Tescos. It’s there, we live pretty consumerist lives and people like to make use of this. As long as it’s not causing major harm to others I see no reason why they shouldn’t
It began in April. Channel 4 brought out 4OD, the free download service of various programs and documentaries made for Channel Four and available for free viewing up to a week after their broadcast. I was, at first, a skeptic. You'll probably have to pay, I chuffed, and went about my life as normal. Then, then one fateful day I downloaded it. I was bored, there was nothing on TV and there's only so long you can enjoy watching Scrubs free, online, but in French for.
It was downhill from there.
Hey! I thought to myself. I can watch all my favourite shows for free, from my bed and on a bigger screen than the one in my living room (my family own Britain's smallest TV. I don't mind - we rarely watch the thing anyway. And we can safely leave the curtains in the front room open and be sure that no one will rob us). Eagerly, I began to download all the sorts of programs I love about Channel 4 - the gory yet upmarket reality series like How Clean is Your House (makes me feel better about the squalor in my room), the glorious F Word - I don't care if he's old enough to be my dad, I fancy the pants off of Gordon Ramsey - and Embarrassing Illnesses (curiously satisfying). Then came the panel shows; the Friday Night Project (awful) and 8 out of 10 Cats (less awful, but typical in the way of panel shows of having 2 comedians, a topical semi-famous face, a droll and unfunny presenter, and a beautiful woman who will say nothing and only smile widely when the camera is on her). Then there were the series (and it was at this point that I realised I had a problem) - Black Books, Father Ted, and Peep Show. It took me a few weeks to discover them, but it was a slippery slope. Then, having exhausted some 35 hours of series, I soon found myself clicking on the hardcore stuff: the documentaries.
Channel 4 is in many ways far better at documentaries than the BBC ever will be. First of all, Channel 4 docs are always sexy. They're always about naughty politicians, extreme racists or American sex addicts. They're never about nature. Since I do not share this seemingly nationwide love of David Attenborough and his endless programs about drowning penguins and the like, I cannot turn over to BBC2 without falling asleep.
It was once I started downloading documentaries that some of the symptoms of a typical addict began to show. If someone mentioned anything at all controversial or news-related, I immediately began to spout, 'Yeah, I watched a documentary about that last week and...' following in some death-inducingly boring story about a documentary that only I had seen therefore was of no interest to anyone in the room. Suddenly I would find myself sitting alone, alienated for my new hobby.
I began to have a thirst for knowledge of obscure and weird things - the Cutting Edge series about a 6th form for the blind, a boarding school for English kids in France where they practised Morris dancing and Gregorian chanting, and the story of an illegal sex change surgeon and his victims. I may have even developed a nervous tick when I felt I wasn't taking in enough useless knowledge.
Just this week I have enjoyed watching the Downfall of Tony Blair (could have been better, but the actor playing Tony bore such a wonderful resemblance to him that I forgave the poor quality plotline), The War on Britain's Jews (a scare-tactics exposé on how the Palestine-Israel conflict leads, apparently, to the view that all Jews are bad and the bomb-proofing of a Jewish school in Manchester - worrying but slightly overdramatised), Bernard Manning - Beyond the Grave (proves he was racist - didn't we already know that? - and allows him to argue that he wasn't because he was rude about everyone equally), The Castration Cure (a weird and unpleasant look at how American paedophiles can be chemically castrated, but then bizarrely switches to following the love story of two imprisoned paedophiles and seems to forget the original subject) and The Iraq Commission (deadly boring and depressing.) Considering I am on my summer holiday I feel that this is now dangerous.
Each day I wake up with a hankering for narration, low-budget re-enactments, sombre voice tones and explanatory yet infuriatingly simple shots that play along with the voice-over (e.g. 'I felt as though I was soaring like an eagle' cuts to a shot of an eagle). I am educated on a wide number of useless and boring subjects that no one apart from fellow addicts whish to be informed about. It is a lonely life. I can only hope that one fine day I can be united with my people and we can have heated discussions about Rabbis and paedophiles, Saddam Hussein's favourite breakfast meal or Tony's lucky tie, 12 year od Morris dancers or transvestites. Until then, did you know that 77% of Britons would rather play bingo than watch the news, Saddam prefers a yoghurt or fruit meal in the morning, and Tony goes for red? Trust me, I've seen the documentaries.
As I sit here in my £15 dress and magazine flipflops(the cheap attire will soon become relevant), I am glum. This is because at this happy time in my life, post-GCSE stress and a week into my 3 month summer holiday, I feel unrested. I am now a working woman. Sigh.
Endless days of sleeping till 12, watching daytime tv in my jammies and eventually crawling out of the house come nightfall to do things that teenagers do (watch other people's tv, cruise the Cowley Road (all teenagers must do this at one point in their lives) visit friends, and drink, smoke and commit other unsavoury acts that will come back to haunt us in our old age) are not on my agenda this summer. Because I, somewhat confusingly, agreed and partially organised no fewer than five summer holidays for the next three months, courtesy of budget airlines and the (British - I blame my grandmothers for they are the only confirmed Britons in my family) need to toast my skin to an unhealthy shade of red on a foreign beach. My travel itinerary goes as follows: Paris with friends, Berlin with friends, Lithuania with my co-blogger for some travel writing style fun, Rimini with friends, and then the mighty Reading Festival. Yes, I know, the latter isn't really an exotic foreign holiday but I am assured it will be a lot muddier than my current home, and I haven't camped for at least 14 years, so it counts.
Rich girl, I hear you cry? Or just perhaps it's the haunting echoes of my more skeptical friends and my boss (probably upset because he is responsible for the funding of such frivolities) - either way, my mother has not contributed one cent to any of my more leisurely travel, paying only for many many cents it takes to get to Lithuania on the deceptive Ryanair these days - ironically the cheapest of the nations I intend to travel to is the most costly to get to. Indeed, dear reader, all this travel is commencing through Easyjet, Luton airport (which, incidentally, costs more to get to by bus or train than it does to fly almost anywhere from), and my humble wages. In fact, the total of this years travel, mother's wallet's contributions excluded comes to a lovely £583, which if I recall correctly is over £200 less than what dear mother and I paid to go to the exotic and rather over-hyped Tunisia last year for ten days. The irony.
Since the realisation has only recently come to me that now I have paid for travel and accomodation to this lovely Euro-tour 07 as I am fondly calling it, I will need vast amounts of funding for travel, food, shopping and fun times. This rather puts a whole downer on the situation and as a result I spent two weeks trawling the web for a part time job to cover these costs. I am now a dog food packer. Laugh if you will.
It is brilliant though. I am ridiculously overpaid to go to a smart house in the city centre and package and keep track of organic cat and dog food for a new company run from a living room. Yes, I may have a peculiar smell about me that causes the cat to have been infinitely friendlier and, erm, lickier, since the job started and I was able to splash out and purchase both the magazine with the free shoes and the smart blue dress. I live the wild life.
However, is is it worth putting 'experience in handling and packaging organic animal food' on my CV? While I hardly feel the job is of great skill it does take great concentration and great resillience to the smell.
Such is the irony that now I am qualified with no fewer than 12 GCSEs (hopefully at least), I have now entered the food packaging industry, something which I usually assume is perhaps populated by those not wishing to go on to study Japanese and biochemistry.
Oh it's here again, the already slim brunette staring at the skimpy red swimsuit and wondering 'how can I fit into a bikini like that?'. Now, I am sure any intelligent person would say 'buy it in the next size up dear', but apparently this is not the answer. Apparently it is easier for an overpriced cereal to form two thirds of your diet for two weeks. Well, although I think this is incredibly flawed and stupid, I cannot help but be intruiged as to whether it works. I am feeling a little self concious about my wobbly bits at the moment and feel the urge to do a big journalistic piece so I'm going to give it a go.
Before I go ahead with this, I want to explain that i am not in to faddy diets, nor do i see any benefit in crash dieting and I know that really the only way to stay slim is to be constantly healthy, but that doesn't halt my curiosity about the whole affair. Besides, one of the joys of study leave is that I can now eat breakfast and lunch at home, so cereal is something I can actually eat at other times than at breakfast. Goodie.
In researching this plan, I have come accross some amusing discoveries. Firstly, there are 112 calories in a bowl of special K, 6% of an adult woman's daily allowance I am told. Therefore, if two of your daily meals only come to 224 calories, I can hardly say i'm surprised that you would start to lose weight. However, the box says you can 'even have your normal snacks and drinks' so perhaps they rely on you snacking to prevent complete starvation.
To make the whole plan seem more credible they have backed it up with research from Loughbrough University. My second cousin went there, she got anorexia. They don't have my full trust as an institution for promoting safe weightloss (and yes it was as a result she became anorexic, I shan't explain how as that is her business). Still, my sister's old housemate Emma swears by it, saying that as long as you switch between the different flavours it's not too boring, and she is very slim, so perhaps it has worked for her.
I am taking my precautions with this, especially given that it is exam time. I aim to do the full two weeks, but if it affects me too much I am giving up straight away. The box also says you should be over 18 to do the plan, but I choose to ignore that piece of advice. I have stocked up on tea, diet coke, multivitamins, cod liver oil and fresh fruit to try and keep general nutrition levels up.
Will report back in a week or so
Oh, Religious Studies. How I dislike you. How English you are. How terribly you are taught. How much of a waste of time are you really, and how better could the two hours a week of teaching be spent?
Now, I may be biased (and wouldn't that be a surprise) but I have a grudge against Religious Studies. Does it not, dear reader, conjure up images of fierce and exotic debate between Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, learning about exotic places and strange but wonderful customs? Probably not, if you're English, but it did to me when I moved to England and was told it was mandatory (unless you didn't want to take it, of course. Because that's how it works.) I was naive enough to look forward to a two year course of studying world religions with someone educated (this is when I was still under the impression that Oxford was home to only the pinnacle of academics and there were posh people all over the shop. Laugh not, my dear reader, as most visitors to Oxford are amazed to discover that there is a council estate and whole sections of the city (anywhere out of bounds of Oxford University) that is not posh. Cowley Road, posh, ha.) and well-travelled. Well, that was my first let down. My school has only two teachers, to my knowledge, with doctorates, and neither of them have dedicated themselves to teaching unwilling and surly students about Islam and Christianity. Because those are the only religions you will learn about if you are on the short course (where the other option is taking the full course which is an extra three lessons a week to cover the extra one religion) and you are actively encouraged not to 'bother' to learn about any other religions because 'they're not important.' Well, dear teachers of religion, if religions aren't important, then why, prey, are we here?
The next let down about Religious Studies is that we didn't even read the Qu'ran or the Bible. In fact, I can only produce about 3 or four quotes from each, at a stretch, and only because I crammed them into my head the night before my exam. One of the reasons I was so very excited about Religious Studies was because I am entirely ignorant about all matters of religion. I can count on one hand the number of times I have (resentfully) been present at some form of Church service and do not wish to repeat the experience. Yes, I know absolutely nothing about any religion ever. So I was very much looking forward to reading religious texts and learning why it is that people are religious, even what it means to seemingly depend on someone else to make decisions for you (good old God, eh) and pat you on the head and forgive you if you've buggered something up.
Yet I still remain agnostic. I wasn't exactly looking to learn about religion to become a convert, but it would have been super to have been able to make an educated decision about which religion I would choose to take up should I wish to devote my life to following a mysterious invisible person who seems to live mostly in the sky.
My biggest qualm with Religious Studies, however, is that under the four subject areas we study (general vocabulary (What is Hajj/Who was Jesus etc) belief and suffering (Descibe the importance of akirah/Why might God cause suffering?) life issues (Racism is bad. Explore/I'm Roman Catholic, can I have an abortion?) and planet earth (What does a Muslim person do to make the world better/Why do Christians save dogs) - all of these questions I am always tempted to answer 'Why do they indeed?') we are told, regardless of actual opinion or religious tendencies, what to say.
Religious Studies exams come in the form of a question on each subject area containing two questions and a quote. Upon reaching the quote you must state whether you agree or disagree with it and explain why, citing religious arguments in your answer. For example, this year's question on abortion read 'Women should have the right to choose whether or not they can have an abortion.' Do you agree or disagree? This is where my qualm is: we are all taught to answer this question by saying 'I both agree and disagree with this question for many reasons,' then go on to state these many reasons, quoting the Qu'ran ('Slay not your children') and the Bible ('Thou shalt not kill') to get your damned A. Now admittedly, I wrote this in my exam paper too, because I want my damn A, but my hand pressed so hard into my answer paper as I wrote it that it made a small hole. Personally, I think abortions are super, bring on the abortions, all over the shop etc. but I am told not to write this because 'I won't do well.' As a student who wants to achieve this 'doing well' thing we all seem to want, I am actively encouraged to put aside my own morals and beliefs (for someone who has remarkably few, I find this particularly insulting) in an exam about morals and beliefs and answer the regulation GCSE answer to prove I am an intelligent person. It's a qualm alright.
Religious Studies is one of those subjects they teach you when you're at teenager - apart from at some hippy schools where you learn 'citizenship' instead. I do
not know what 'citizenship' is and neither do I wish to learn, it sounds ridiculous and like some sort of police exam but boring - so they can slip in things like prejudice and abortion without being overly patronising (so they say) and giving us information about such things. This is handy because, at a multi-ethnic school you sadly get quite a bit of racism (most of it from the students but a surprising amount comes from teachers too) and equally sadly, quite a few abortions. But telling us what to think,
telling us how to answer a question masquerading interest in your own opinion so we can get full marks on a half-GCSE (no, I don't know what a half GCSE means either) course that no one particularly cares about as they know what a sham it is.
Finally, since I have sat my exam and will never need to discuss it go to a lesson in it again, my last problem was that I didn’t get along with the teacher. Now, I am not a person to be rude to teachers, ever. Even when I have a problem with something (and I usually do) I address it in a polite way or get my mum to ring up and shout. I managed to get off on the wrong foot with her when I first arrived at the school because in practise exam papers, I ignored the regulation form of answering and the fact that we were to only write about Islam and Christianity, writing instead long winded and inventive answers concerning mostly Buddhism. Teacher did not like this and failed my paper. Bran did not like this and asked teacher why. A heated and infuriating argument later, I was told I would have gotten maximum C for this paper because it did not contain any religious quotes to back up my arguments. She didn't give me a C to begin with because, I discovered later, she did not know anything about Buddhism and therefore could not be sure any of my information was correct. Considering that my entire knowledge of the religion comes from reading Alec Le Seuer’s 'Running a Hotel on The Roof of the World - 5 years in Tibet' I was not impressed. Most of it was made up anyway – in fact, if I remember correctly, I recall the bulk of my essay was comparing the Buddhism belief in committing good deeds to the Tesco points card system. Utter bullshit but it entertained me as I wrote it. Teacher goes on to publicly humiliate me by discussing my exam flaws throughout the next year of lessons, something which I found quite unfair and demeaning.
She teamed this with my frequent disregard for wearing the hideous school jumper and instead one of my own and accused me of
being pretentious and thinking I was too good for the school. She suggested I would be better off at a private school and threatened to send many a letter home. As far as I know, they never arrived, and what they would have said I would have read with glee:
'Bran has been causing trouble in lessons and we would like to exclude her from this school. We suggest a private establishment with fees for at least £20,000 a year to solve her incessant jumper wearing and small knowledge of religions outside the syllabus.'
The Religious Studies GCSE seems to be seriously flawed, yet they've been teaching it for decades. Is it only recently they've decided to tell us what to think and say about religion, or is it just standard to be unsure on all issues concerning it? Can we 'both agree and disagree' with anything these days, provided we quote the Qu'ran and Bible? Being a keen debater, I find this sort of wishy washy nonsense intolerable and boring. If I were one of the poor souls marking exams this summer, I'd much rather read a paper saying why you were/weren't strongly apposed to abortion/prejudice/being nice to dogs than the same unsure-but-I've-quoted-two-different-sources-so-give-me-my-A-please paper three hundred times.
Well I have the solution. Let me write the examination paper. Hell, let me write the syllabus. You can't need any real authority to do this, surely, and the pay is
very good. If, at university, we are required to think for ourselves and not copy down what our teachers tell us is the right answer, as we are told so frequently, wouldn't it be a good idea to start preparing people now? I liked my Buddhism is a Tesco points card system - it probably could have been vastly improved (or perhaps disproved) with a bit of research but I'd accept myself into university with it. (Cue the righteous sounding superman-theme-tune type music please) So perhaps this is my new ambition: to change the standards of GCSEs so students can write what they think, not what they're told, to allow teenagers across the country to talk about what they believe, not what they're told to believe, to allow everyone to learn to speak freely in our modern democracy, and most importantly, to abolish GCSE Religious Studies
(short course) and replace it with something more useful like science. I'm going to be a doctor you know.
Like I said none of this food is retro in the sense that I used to eat it - in fact, now I think about it, I remember demanding fish fingers from the supermarket in Lithuania (why on earth were they selling them?) and my mother refusing to have anything to do with them. Potato smiles had never before passed my lips. Peas I find to be a particularly pointless vegetable, probably because I have always been restricted to the Birdseye frozen variety - stripped of flavour and texture and merely present to add a green section to an otherwise unbalanced plate. Small, round, annoyingly elusive when presented to a fork and bound to be found on or around the table for at least three days after you eat them, peas are the useless flop of the vegetable world. However, whenever I open my freezer it is packed to the brim with bags of the frozen devils.
My dinner was very easy to prepare, which is probably why it is a kids' meal. All it required of me, when normally I find boiling the kettle for pasta an exhausting chore, was popping it all on a tray and shoving it in the oven at 220 degrees. Simple. I even remembered to set the timer for 14 minutes.
Hopes brimming, I prepared my peas (place frozen lump in bowl of hot tap water, leave, drain, repeat until mildly thawed and rest of food sitting on plate getting cold) and sliced my tomato and cucumber. I chucked it all on a plate, pub artistic style and waited for the oven to beep.
Once I had finished arranging it all in an attractive way on the plate, I took a photo. Usually I don't bother with making my dinners look nice. Usually this is because I'm not the world's best cook and the food itself tends to look a little unappetising but also because when you're cooking for one and you have ten other things to do, you don't really care if you've burnt the pasta (yes, it happens) or mangled your stir fry. It's all food in the end. Anyway, here is my delicious retro dinner.
I did, however, notice that all kids food is processed and storable. No wonder we have the highest child obesity rate in Europe when the kids are eating stuff packed with sugar and E numbers instead of delicious vegetables like peas. Everything is freezable - the small convenience Tesco I go to has no fewer than four freezer isles, dedicated to ready meals, potato and vegetable products, puddings and ice creams. Kids food these days seems to come from the cupboard. My food snobbishness (says the girl eating frozen peas and potato smiles) causes me to bulk buy bunches of floppy herbs ensconced in huge amounts of plastic packaging (don't even get me started) and chuck them in whatever pasta/chicken/pasta and chicken dish I prepare for my dinner, to get some flavour into the otherwise mass produced and cardboardish produce that the Tescos of the world supply us with. Sigh.
I have to say the pudding was an improvement, although I have recently developed a grudge against frozen strudels when I caught my grandparents defrosting one to feed me. Grandparents, especially mine, are supposed to spend all day cooking delicious home cooked delicacies from better times, not defrost convenience food in their new tiny apartments with their stupid tiny kitchens. I was more than a little shocked at the time, not to mention put out that they hadn't spent the morning preparing for my arrival by cooking a home made strudel. However, the frozen one was delicious and I made a mental note to buy myself one.
Birds instant custard is always a hit, although to my surprise, when my friend Rosie with whom I was dining confessed to never having before sampled the deliciousness that is instant custard from a packet, I nearly had a stirring accident. Apparently some people only have it from a tin. But when you live abroad and consolidating your delicious western imported food into one suitcase, it's packet over tin for ease of maneuvering heavy bags through Heathrow. The strudel and custard combined only gave us mild inner-mouth burns and we both agreed it was delicious, although not that retro. Tune in next time for another retro snack and almost definate negative analysis.
Today I made jelly. It was made in a self-caring, sympathetic attempt to celebrate the finishing of the Yearbook, of which I am in charge. The bane of my life, this book has been making recent weeks hell. But now it is done, and I thought I would celebrate, nostalgia style, with some jelly and ice cream. Without the ice cream - I couldn’t be bothered.
The night before, mid yearbook-finishing madness, I dubiously mixed and stirred 12 unhealthy looking cubes of…goo into some sort of concoction that had the appearance of diluted fruit juice. Into the fridge it went, and on every tea break while I waited for the kettle to boil I would stick my finger in it to see if it was “done” yet. It never was. Even the next morning when I prodded it while reaching for the pesto and parmesan (how middle class I am) it gave a disappointingly water-like shimmy and then returned to normal. I was very upset. The whole bloody point of jelly is that it’s wobbly. They never give it to you at kids’ parties because it’s delicious - it’s entertainment! Having said this, why is it jelly and ice cream? Jelly is bland, and so is mass produced ice cream, and they certainly don’t mesh well together. Having said that, nothing really meshes with jelly, it’s generally a mystery substance.
Anyway, I came home today, exhausted and glaring from a full day of gawking at screens and flinching at my name being called by my lovely yearbook-making assistants, anticipating my jelly. I got it out of the fridge, and armed with a big spoon, sat down to enjoy some strawberry flavoured wobblyness.
I almost didn’t want to eat it, it looked so exciting, just a big bowl of semi-transparent wobble. I regretted having not put something exciting like an eyeball in the middle, as a hilarious joke, although if you know it’s coming I suspect the comedy is somewhat ruined. Anyway, it had been about 10 years since I’d last had jelly so I got stuck in, shovelled my spoon in, levered out a huge wobbly lump of the stuff, and dropped it on the table.
A hasty finger-scraping moment or two later, I was back on track, jelly aimed at mouth and ambitious thoughts of jelly for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Alas, it was disgusting. It tasted like when you’re little and have Ribena at your friend’s house and their mother waters it down far too much because ‘too much is bad for you.’ Yeah, whatever, Ribena is delicious and I’ll have as much as I like thanks, my mum lets me. Or probably just doesn’t notice that I no longer dilute it at all and drink it straight from the bottle, following each sip with a grimace and then a refreshed lip smack, cheap booze style.
My sad, watery jelly also collapsed into itself as soon as my spoon left it, indicating just how pathetic it was. It didn’t even taste of strawberries. However, it really did give a satisfying wobble. So much so, in fact, that I decided it was worthy of filming and putting on here. Even as it wobbled it gave a very satisfying slap against the bowl, before continuing to fall down and give up at being any kind of delicious dessert. All I can say is if you want a treat, get the ice cream in too. You can always rely on ice cream.
Maybe this should be some kind of series in which I test out nostalgic treats. In that case, earlier today at a tea sesh at Susanna’s, we enjoyed some fig rolls – these seem to be normal in her house, as she always has some with her tea. We never have fig rolls, although when we lived in Somerset I could hardly move for them. In fact, I recall having some kind of brownish seating unit that may have even been made from old ones. I bought some healthy living type fig rolls recently but they were horrible – it was as if I was eating corrugated cardboard wrapped around some old jam. I probably was. Anyway, more nostalgic snack updates coming your way!
Well, Jack. Haven't we been elusive. It started when he moved his original March 4th gig to April 22nd, ruining my highlight of the month and leaving me hopping up and down in anticipation for 6 weeks. Then the diary containing two tickets for the gig was lost, the gig was sold out and I had a very large and scary panic. Luckily no one was home, and then I managed to get a friend from work to sign over her tickets to me which caused a whole other story of trouble and woe for another time, but I would like to thank the phone book, her dad and the few other people of the same last name that I bothered that evening. The next fly in the ointment/needle in the haystack/etc was, on the advice of a friend who had been to the same gig in London a few days before, to avoid some unpleasant yobs wearing stupid baseball hats who were very rude and pushy. Sounded easy enough. Or so you'd think...
The lineup for Penate (pronounced, despite the lack of an accent over the n on most promotional posters, pen-iaaaaatey) included one Adele and one Late of the Pier supporting Penate himself.
Adele was...like an unrehearsed and one woman impression of Peggy Sue and the Pirates. Lots of nice, fun, jazz inspired lyrics intertwined with scatting and 'shoo be doo wop' (there's something to write to instantly make you feel stupid) interludes, but she just didn't have the mojo or the beauty of the combined voices of Peggy Sue, neither did she have the fun songs or the inspiring lyrics that, for the 20 minute set they played, made me want to throw away my doctorish ambitions and start smoking 20 a day to become a throaty-voiced (albeit dying) jazz singer.
My impression of her was thwarted about halfway through her set when she kept missing chords on her guitar and eventually had to stop playing one song because she couldn't do it, blaming it being the last night of her tour. Well, Adele, everyone else can play their guitars on the last night of their tour, why can't you?
Next up were the wonderful and facinating Late of the Pier. Having not known their name all through the set, we asked the bassist as they were packing up and he explained it as 'not making any sense; we couldn't think of anything.' Those wacky music kids, eh. But they were brilliant! I really, really, hope they catch on. So much so I'm going to write nice things about them. First of all, check out synth keyboardist:
The next excitement on the Late of the Pier front was the mysterious row of broken bed slats propped in the centre of the stage. Observe:
Penate!!! The highlight of April, gig-wise. He was suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper. Except the beginning of the gig was ruined by a very, very rude man who kept pushing me. He was wearing a stupid baseball hat. That's right, it was the stupid mean guys that my friend had warned me about. I am proud to say I fought back when he swore at me (not that proud, but I never knew my vocabulary of expletives was so very extensive) but then he elbowed me very hard and I scuttled off to complain to security, who did nothing. Thanks. I returned to the crowd, raving to Penate hits such as Spit at Stars, Learning Lines, Got My Favourite, Second Minute or Hour, Made of Codes and ending with a hefty stage invasion on Torn on the Platform. Brilliant. Penate's happy bouncy indie-pop that is Radio 1's new favourite had eeeeveryone jumping up and down, even the guitarist and bassist from Late of the Pier who, surely, must be a tiny bit bored of the same set every night. I was dancing right in front of them at one point before, upon realising it was fittie guitarist, commenced with much hair smoothing and sophisticated bobbing up and down. This pulled me back into the energetic but rather dangerous crowd full of Elbowey and his stupid mates, who proceeded to push my face away from him. This hurt and I got upset. However, when the show was over and the lights came back on, I saw him and elbowed him very hard in the chest before skipping off