Friday, 17 July 2009
Thursday, 16 July 2009
Any Old Pap
Will reclined dismissively in the computer chair, and groped his glass of cola. 16:46, and twenty-nine seconds.
Thirty.
Thirty-one.
Thirty-two.
Thirty-three.
The distant sound of the front door opening awakened Will from his comatose state, but returned to the stupor just as swiftly as he had left. His glasses slowly slid down, encountering no resistance, until they perched impatiently on the end of his nose.
Facing the ceiling, Will looked down, past his nose, through the dirty lenses of his glasses to the computer monitor, scanning the screen for any possible stimuli.
Behind, his sister glided noiselessly past the door. Will noticed.
There was nothing to do. Absolutely nothing on this godforsaken planet that he could do without exerting himself further than he was comfortable with.
Fuck all.
Zilch.
Oh, Christ. Is this what he had wanted from his Summer Holidays? Will had looked forward to this long period of rest for so long, but there's only so much rest one person can manage before he starts to experience brain death.
The sun shone, the curtains were drawn, and melancholy engulfed Will's sanctuary.
He reached forward, and rested his hand on the mouse. He was taking far more time than he needed to. He paused for a moment of quiet reflection.
Internet.
Bookmarks.
Will > Blogger. That might do. That might pass the time. That might provide a momentary source of creative expression and self-satisfaction in what has been, all in all, a completely wasted day. Maybe, just maybe, adding to the blog will provide an excuse, a reason for this day to have ever existed.
Okay. Here we go. New Post. Right... What to call it, what to call it...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Oh, I'll just put any old pap as the title. I can come back to that later.
William sat, in his melancholy sanctuary, brushed the lank locks of hair from his eyes,
and pondered.
THE END
Thirty.
Thirty-one.
Thirty-two.
Thirty-three.
The distant sound of the front door opening awakened Will from his comatose state, but returned to the stupor just as swiftly as he had left. His glasses slowly slid down, encountering no resistance, until they perched impatiently on the end of his nose.
Facing the ceiling, Will looked down, past his nose, through the dirty lenses of his glasses to the computer monitor, scanning the screen for any possible stimuli.
Behind, his sister glided noiselessly past the door. Will noticed.
There was nothing to do. Absolutely nothing on this godforsaken planet that he could do without exerting himself further than he was comfortable with.
Fuck all.
Zilch.
Oh, Christ. Is this what he had wanted from his Summer Holidays? Will had looked forward to this long period of rest for so long, but there's only so much rest one person can manage before he starts to experience brain death.
The sun shone, the curtains were drawn, and melancholy engulfed Will's sanctuary.
He reached forward, and rested his hand on the mouse. He was taking far more time than he needed to. He paused for a moment of quiet reflection.
Internet.
Bookmarks.
Will > Blogger. That might do. That might pass the time. That might provide a momentary source of creative expression and self-satisfaction in what has been, all in all, a completely wasted day. Maybe, just maybe, adding to the blog will provide an excuse, a reason for this day to have ever existed.
Okay. Here we go. New Post. Right... What to call it, what to call it...
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Oh, I'll just put any old pap as the title. I can come back to that later.
William sat, in his melancholy sanctuary, brushed the lank locks of hair from his eyes,
and pondered.
THE END
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
The 12th Street Rag
What a joyous little tune. I specifically picked this one because it had a nice, tinny, old-fashioned quality that I really like. Think of the end credits of 'Spongebob Squarepants' - it's that innocent, Hawaiian-sounding style that I find really addictive.
And lo, a new blog came into fruition
A chum o'mine, Josh Shaw, has followed my blogging example (did that sound rude to you?) and has created his own blog! It's still in the early stages, but I think it will be quite good.
And why does the spell-check function on Blogger try and correct words like Blogger and blog and blogging and blogger and frabjous and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Most peculiar.
Well, I know when a blog post is losing its way. I'll end this now.
Tally ho.
And why does the spell-check function on Blogger try and correct words like Blogger and blog and blogging and blogger and frabjous and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Most peculiar.
Well, I know when a blog post is losing its way. I'll end this now.
Tally ho.
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Bloody School! (Part Two)
Well, yes. Bloody school indeed. Today was the second of the two days I had to attend school during the holidays (there must be laws against that sort of thing - I may look it up), and as I had radically less things to do today, boredom reared its ugly head.
One thing that was bloody interesting was form time. No, wait, interesting is the wrong word altogether. No. Entertaining. Well, it was certainly a new experience. Different, if you catch my drift, as to say. For I have the Grand High Sultan of Bumbling, Mister Kevin Frimston, as my form tutor. Oh, what fun. And I say that with an unusual level of honesty. I like Mr Frimston, and expect him to be a lovable, terrible but generally entertaining tutor.
He arrived about fifteen minutes late, but we expected no less from a man such as he. He then proceeded to get nearly everyone's names wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't trip over the litter bin, something that I very much expected him to do. This lack of slapstick on Mr Frimston's part imbued me with a slight wistful melancholy that lasted all day. I wanted to see him fall.
The only real lesson I had today was English Language, taught by my English teacher from last year. Miss (or Ms) Adlam is one of the best teachers I know, and I was therefore thoroughly chuffed when I read my timetable yesterday and found that I would be having lessons with her in the future. Now, at the time, I didn't know that these induction days weren't an accurate depiction of who we would have for certain lessons and what not, but more of a way of getting to know the ropes and what have you. But my false sense of glee at the thought of Miss Adlam teaching me English Language was verified in the actual lesson, when she mentioned that it was most likely. So whoop-de-doo on that front. Fiddle-de-dee and so forth.
Besides from that jollity, I had a lovely free period between break-time and lunchtime, clocking my time spent slouching on a big leather sofa in the common room to a grand total of two wonderful hours. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, bliss.
Despite the large quantities of relaxation I got through today, I was still knackered; my body clock is still in Summer Holiday mode, and as a result I rarely got more than three and a half hours sleep prior to each of these two bizarre days. This didn't work for me today; most of the day (when I wasn't slouching, anticipating inevitable failure on the part of a notorious teacher or discussing alternative meanings to newspaper headlines) consisted of talks about 6th Form and what we are to expect and what there is to do. I am sorry to report that by period 4, I was involuntarily slipping into minor comas. Which is a terrible affliction when you are sat in the front row of the hall, with Mr Newbold (who looks a little bit like Jim Carrey half-way through his prosthetic transformation into Count Olaf) literally a couple of yards away. It was a small miracle that I wasn't caught.
What was really nice was that the debriefing, during the last period of the day, only lasted half an hour, and I was able to retire with my chums to the common room for twenty minutes or so before catching the bus home. Jolly pleasant. Puts a fellow in good spirits, you know.
Not much else happened. So I'm finished. You can leave now.
One thing that was bloody interesting was form time. No, wait, interesting is the wrong word altogether. No. Entertaining. Well, it was certainly a new experience. Different, if you catch my drift, as to say. For I have the Grand High Sultan of Bumbling, Mister Kevin Frimston, as my form tutor. Oh, what fun. And I say that with an unusual level of honesty. I like Mr Frimston, and expect him to be a lovable, terrible but generally entertaining tutor.
He arrived about fifteen minutes late, but we expected no less from a man such as he. He then proceeded to get nearly everyone's names wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't trip over the litter bin, something that I very much expected him to do. This lack of slapstick on Mr Frimston's part imbued me with a slight wistful melancholy that lasted all day. I wanted to see him fall.
The only real lesson I had today was English Language, taught by my English teacher from last year. Miss (or Ms) Adlam is one of the best teachers I know, and I was therefore thoroughly chuffed when I read my timetable yesterday and found that I would be having lessons with her in the future. Now, at the time, I didn't know that these induction days weren't an accurate depiction of who we would have for certain lessons and what not, but more of a way of getting to know the ropes and what have you. But my false sense of glee at the thought of Miss Adlam teaching me English Language was verified in the actual lesson, when she mentioned that it was most likely. So whoop-de-doo on that front. Fiddle-de-dee and so forth.
Besides from that jollity, I had a lovely free period between break-time and lunchtime, clocking my time spent slouching on a big leather sofa in the common room to a grand total of two wonderful hours. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, bliss.
Despite the large quantities of relaxation I got through today, I was still knackered; my body clock is still in Summer Holiday mode, and as a result I rarely got more than three and a half hours sleep prior to each of these two bizarre days. This didn't work for me today; most of the day (when I wasn't slouching, anticipating inevitable failure on the part of a notorious teacher or discussing alternative meanings to newspaper headlines) consisted of talks about 6th Form and what we are to expect and what there is to do. I am sorry to report that by period 4, I was involuntarily slipping into minor comas. Which is a terrible affliction when you are sat in the front row of the hall, with Mr Newbold (who looks a little bit like Jim Carrey half-way through his prosthetic transformation into Count Olaf) literally a couple of yards away. It was a small miracle that I wasn't caught.
What was really nice was that the debriefing, during the last period of the day, only lasted half an hour, and I was able to retire with my chums to the common room for twenty minutes or so before catching the bus home. Jolly pleasant. Puts a fellow in good spirits, you know.
Not much else happened. So I'm finished. You can leave now.
Monday, 13 July 2009
Bloody School!
I had to go back to school today. The title 'Bloody School!' was what was going through my mind this morning, but the day got increasingly better and then, at the end, slightly worse. I have to be in today and tomorrow, to get to know the ropes about next year (6th Form), and then it's back to the devastatingly long Summer Holidays. This little (ha!) blog entry will attempt to entertainingly relay the events in the life of me, William Wivell, on Monday the Thirteenth of July on this year Two Thousand and Nine.
The first thing that happened was the bus; a necessary stage in every school day of my life, the bus being the only possible mode of transport to school for me at such an early hour. The fact that it was the first thing that happened also proves to be constantly invaluable, as it handily provides me with a school backdrop later, within which the later stages of this tale will be recounted.
But I digress. Horrendously. Sorry. Right, cutting to the chase, I love my bus trip to (and, indeed, from) school. It is so relaxing, because I am the first person to get on the bus in the mornings and it is nice to be able to sit in an empty bus, trundling through the early morning countryside. These bus trips always instil a sense of peace within me - a lovely way to start any day, I think you'll agree.
Whenever I sit on this bus, pottering about the outlying villages on a rickety old bus, searching for passengers like a great metallic bee hopping from suburban flower to suburban flower, I start to meditate. And during these moments of meditation, I often come up with some pretty profound observations and conclusions that I never make otherwise. I had one of these epiphanes as I was soaring past Dunholme this morning...
I noticed that the reason I am so calm, sedate and good-humoured at school is due to my non-aggressive start to the day. Whereas many people are driven to school, thrown into the hustle and bustle of school life at the gates at 8:00 before they know what's hit them, I am eased into it gently. About a quarter of an hour passes before the next person gets on the bus after me. And then, shortly after that, a few other people join the bus. Gradually, the people who make school what it is, my fellow students, surround me, until I am fully immersed in academic life and in the correct mindset to tackle another school day. It's like being gently lowered into a bath, instead of being dropped into it from a great height every day, which would no doubt trigger hostility in some people.
I feel that I must speed up the pace of this blog, if only temporarily, and skip ahead to the arrival at school. We started by getting our timetables for the following two days at the 6th Form common room. I didn't have any free periods today, but I have shedloads tomorrow, so that's nice.
We then listened to a slightly haphazard introduction to 6th Form by our new Head of Year, Mr 'Built Like a Brick Shithouse' Clark. He seems competent enough, albeit with a constant air of vague confusion. I'm going to miss Mrs Grant, our HoY for Year 11. She was always in control.
The day got off to a flying start (yes, I know, I have only just started talking about the lessons) with a jolly old art lesson. Bloody good, it was, despite the teacher's uncomfortable attempts to be pally with us. I then had a psychology lesson, which could have started better - we spent about twenty minutes in the wrong classroom, due to a room change that never reached the ears of the class. Furthermore, the new classroom was at the other end of the school, so we missed a hefty chunk of that lesson. Despite this, our psychology teacher (whose name escapes me) was a darn nice fellow who managed to cram a ton of fascinating info into our noggins in a radically compressed lesson. Kudos to him, I say. Bloody kudos.
Not much happened after that for a while - period four was an unusual 'session' which was exactly like a free period in every way imaginable, right down to the fact that it was set in the fantastically comfy and jolly old common room and absolutely no work was done. I think it was an opportunity for people to change their A-Level options, but that didn;t apply to me, so I just kicked back for an hour.
And then along came period five and the exacerbating Mr Frimston. God help me, I love Frimston - he seems to know his stuff, but at the same time never quite seems to know what's going on around him. Things rarely, if ever, work in his presence. Evidence of this was to be witnessed in our Art and Design: Photography lesson, where most of the computers wouldn't log on.
The frustrating thing about this session - especially for me - was that the original plan was to practise a process called 'pixillation' where a series of rapidly-captured photos are played back as an animation, giving the captured subjects a jumpy, manic sense of movement. This sounded like tremendous fun, and I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, of the six or so cameras Mr Frimston issued out to us, only about two managed to get working with the remaining working computers, leaving most of the class, including me, impatiently twiddling their thumbs. In the end, the lesson plan was revised, and we looked at sketchbooks of former students. This saved the lesson, and Mr Frimston's bacon, but nonetheless, I really wanted to animate someone spinning in a computer chair as we had been promised...
Combined with the fact that rain had been incorrectly predicted today, meaning that I had to lug a massive raincoat about, and the fact that I am having KFC in a couple of hours (hip hip, hooray!), today has been quite a mixed bag.
Tuesday should be interesting...
This is the end of this blog post. Go away.
The first thing that happened was the bus; a necessary stage in every school day of my life, the bus being the only possible mode of transport to school for me at such an early hour. The fact that it was the first thing that happened also proves to be constantly invaluable, as it handily provides me with a school backdrop later, within which the later stages of this tale will be recounted.
But I digress. Horrendously. Sorry. Right, cutting to the chase, I love my bus trip to (and, indeed, from) school. It is so relaxing, because I am the first person to get on the bus in the mornings and it is nice to be able to sit in an empty bus, trundling through the early morning countryside. These bus trips always instil a sense of peace within me - a lovely way to start any day, I think you'll agree.
Whenever I sit on this bus, pottering about the outlying villages on a rickety old bus, searching for passengers like a great metallic bee hopping from suburban flower to suburban flower, I start to meditate. And during these moments of meditation, I often come up with some pretty profound observations and conclusions that I never make otherwise. I had one of these epiphanes as I was soaring past Dunholme this morning...
I noticed that the reason I am so calm, sedate and good-humoured at school is due to my non-aggressive start to the day. Whereas many people are driven to school, thrown into the hustle and bustle of school life at the gates at 8:00 before they know what's hit them, I am eased into it gently. About a quarter of an hour passes before the next person gets on the bus after me. And then, shortly after that, a few other people join the bus. Gradually, the people who make school what it is, my fellow students, surround me, until I am fully immersed in academic life and in the correct mindset to tackle another school day. It's like being gently lowered into a bath, instead of being dropped into it from a great height every day, which would no doubt trigger hostility in some people.
I feel that I must speed up the pace of this blog, if only temporarily, and skip ahead to the arrival at school. We started by getting our timetables for the following two days at the 6th Form common room. I didn't have any free periods today, but I have shedloads tomorrow, so that's nice.
We then listened to a slightly haphazard introduction to 6th Form by our new Head of Year, Mr 'Built Like a Brick Shithouse' Clark. He seems competent enough, albeit with a constant air of vague confusion. I'm going to miss Mrs Grant, our HoY for Year 11. She was always in control.
The day got off to a flying start (yes, I know, I have only just started talking about the lessons) with a jolly old art lesson. Bloody good, it was, despite the teacher's uncomfortable attempts to be pally with us. I then had a psychology lesson, which could have started better - we spent about twenty minutes in the wrong classroom, due to a room change that never reached the ears of the class. Furthermore, the new classroom was at the other end of the school, so we missed a hefty chunk of that lesson. Despite this, our psychology teacher (whose name escapes me) was a darn nice fellow who managed to cram a ton of fascinating info into our noggins in a radically compressed lesson. Kudos to him, I say. Bloody kudos.
Not much happened after that for a while - period four was an unusual 'session' which was exactly like a free period in every way imaginable, right down to the fact that it was set in the fantastically comfy and jolly old common room and absolutely no work was done. I think it was an opportunity for people to change their A-Level options, but that didn;t apply to me, so I just kicked back for an hour.
And then along came period five and the exacerbating Mr Frimston. God help me, I love Frimston - he seems to know his stuff, but at the same time never quite seems to know what's going on around him. Things rarely, if ever, work in his presence. Evidence of this was to be witnessed in our Art and Design: Photography lesson, where most of the computers wouldn't log on.
The frustrating thing about this session - especially for me - was that the original plan was to practise a process called 'pixillation' where a series of rapidly-captured photos are played back as an animation, giving the captured subjects a jumpy, manic sense of movement. This sounded like tremendous fun, and I was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, of the six or so cameras Mr Frimston issued out to us, only about two managed to get working with the remaining working computers, leaving most of the class, including me, impatiently twiddling their thumbs. In the end, the lesson plan was revised, and we looked at sketchbooks of former students. This saved the lesson, and Mr Frimston's bacon, but nonetheless, I really wanted to animate someone spinning in a computer chair as we had been promised...
Combined with the fact that rain had been incorrectly predicted today, meaning that I had to lug a massive raincoat about, and the fact that I am having KFC in a couple of hours (hip hip, hooray!), today has been quite a mixed bag.
Tuesday should be interesting...
This is the end of this blog post. Go away.
Sunday, 12 July 2009
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