Pretty Piece of Prose

Ok so after spending all day with my head in other peoples books, I thought it was about time I shared some of my own.

So here's the prologue of a book me and the lovely Kirsty King started working on during secondary school. Here's the prologue of Wayward High a book set in a 1960's boarding school thats just a little bit chaotic...

Prologue

The Appointment of Mr T

Mr Stubbs was sitting at the Headmasters desk of the prestigious Devon School Wayton Meer. He was having trouble with deciding which biscuit he preferred. The summer holidays where his favourite time of the school year as he got some peace and quiet; a rare luxury when the students where back. He decided on the digestive and proceeded to open the packet. He was just about to dip one into his very English cup of tea when he was interrupted by his secretary ringing through to him.

Grumbling, while attempting to rescue his biscuit from the bottom of his tea, he answered the phone.

“Sir, sorry to disturb you but there are 15 candidates for the open teaching position clogging up my office. I’ve got your daughters school on the phone telling me that Delilah will not be allowed to return next year due to an incident concerning Delilah, several first years and a lot of L.S.D. also sir, the coffee machine is still broken and Ruby is coming into talk to you about the epidemic from last year.”

Groaning and giving up any hope of the survival of the biscuit, Mr Stubbs shoved his tea to one side which promptly fell off the edge of his desk, staining his favourite rug and revealing the soggy lump that had until very recently been a digestive biscuit.

The door opened and without looking up Mr Stubbs said “look you’ve got the job now go away and tell the others to leave me alone,” casting a woeful look at his now hopelessly stained and completely ruined rug. Mrs Smiles was going to kill him.

“Sorry to interrupt but I do believe I’m already in your employ,”

Mr Stubbs looked up slowly to see the face of Ruby the school’s matron staring at him with a bemused look on her face.

“Oh, err… Ruby, how nice to see you, could we re-arrange this meeting for another time, I have very pressing issues to attend to.”

“Fine but don’t blame me when we have another outbreak of vomiting all over your carpets” sniffed Ruby who turned and walked out the room with a swish of her matron’s apron.

Rolling his eyes Mr Stubbs returned to his packet of biscuits when there was another knock on the door stopping him with his hand suspended over an invisible cup of tea. Groaning and giving up the fight for a biscuit he sat up straight in his chair and answered.

“Enter”

The door opened with a creak and a young man in his late 20’s stood tall in the door way wearing a dark suite with a pale green shirt which accentuated his piercing green eyes.

“Mr Stubbs? I’m Matthew Tilstone; I’m here about the open teaching position. I think I’d make the best teacher as teenagers are my speciality, there is nothing these kids can throw at me that I can’t handle.”

This caused Mr Stubbs to be rather taken aback, thinking something along the lines of “oh yeah, wait till you meet 3B!”

END PROLOGUE

The C word...Chocolate

Milk, white or dark, it's all fabulous.

All over the world Chocolate is celebrated for A)being severely yummy and B) by most men for keeping their girlfriends and wives sane through raging hormones.

Part of general girl code states that the minute a former relationship turns into your best friend screaming 'God he was such a waaaaanker!!! *cue crying*' then you are to descend with tissues and innumerable tubes of ice cream and a veritable hoard of chocolate.

It has always been said that Chocolate makes you feel better (at least that's my excuse I'm pretty sure I'm just a pig) but I always just thought it was some vaguely sciencey excuse used by woman to satisfy their cravings but apparently not.

There are in fact Endorphins in chocolate, 'happy hormones' as it were that do actually make us feel good (which is so going to be depleted once you step on the scales and realise just how much of that chocolate has landed on your ass).

In fact it would seem that there is something hard wired in our brain craving this wonder food. The royal college of psychiatry actually did a study on Chocolate cravings in the manically depressed. It would seem that out of the participants who listed cravings as one of their depressive symptoms the vast majority chose Chocolate with only 10% choosing another food (must admit I'm normally an Icecream girl myself)

Interestingly it was also a female majority that favoured the chocolate. Alex says its probably because we are all overtly hormonal (now who's generalising :P), who know's maybe we are more susceptible as women to 'happy hormones' probably just as well with all we have to put up with (men!)

Maybe I'm not a pig after all yaaaaaay!!

(The study for anyone interested was 'Chocolate craving when depressed: a personaliy marker by GORDON PARKER, MD, PhD, DSc and JOANNA CRAWFORD, BPsych. The link http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/191/4/351)

The grass is always greener....when its not in london

It was gloriously sunny again today, I didn't even need my jacket! It would seem that summer is finally on its way. I just wish the grass was.

The university of east London is still a fairly new campus (opened in 2000) and it seems to me they over did it with the concrete. For a uni in quite a pretty setting next to the river (if you ignore the huge airport) it seems ludicrous that they don't have more greenery.

What little green there is, is so little and puny it's hardly worth bothering about. You just know your a country gal when your on the phone to your best friend complaining about how the grass is crap.

The only bit of decent sized not crap grass has been cordoned off with a silly wooden + wire fence!!! Are they trying to drive me round the bend? When it's sunny I love to lie outside with a book on grass, can't lie on the concrete people give you weird looks and then you start to cook.

I eventually found out what it had been cordoned off. Last summer apparently the students killed it by being on it constantly.

Can't help but think at least it was getting used! Where are wire cutters??...

Blood, gut's and pants

As I'm lent over the bathroom sink, I really try not to think about the red liquid streaming from my nose. Even just the smell is making my stomach heave.

Ok so you got me, I can't stand blood. Well more specifically my own blood. There's just something about it that makes my skin crawl. I can only just about donate blood. Watching it shoot down the tube (because sorry you just can't look away) into the baggies beneath the bed makes me so light headed I've nearly fainted a couple of times. The nurses thought I was ill, no just a big pansy.

Other peoples blood is not an issue, Kat and Alex have bled on me often enough to know that. and with a mother who is a nurse you just kind of get used to it I suppose.

But still nosebleeds are like my own personal hell. I'm bleeding, I can smell it and worse yet I can taste it as it trys to trickle down the back of throat.

Even once you spit it out it doesn't get better because then you have to look at it, bright red against the white of the sink. And trust me you don't get any flatmate brownie points for besplattering the bathroom in red.

Kishan seemed to find it quite funny though when I finally made my way to the kithchen to get a drink with a huge wad of paper up my nose.

'Tip your head back!' he said. Thankfully Ella chose that moment to appear coming to check up on me.

'Er no just no'

Thank goodness some one has got some sense around here I can tell you. Seeing Ella also made me realise something else. Once again we were all in our pants. Well except Ella who had joggers on.

Seems me and Kishan have become victims to 'flat chic' in the evenings. Trousers are obviously just over done.

Urgh I need more tissue....

Resetting the clock

Once again I find myself trying to re-set my body clock. I think my body clock is about as busted as the horrid tacky Olympic clock they have put up in Trafalgar square to count down to the Olympics.

It stopped after barely a day and had to be fixed almost immediately. Wish someone could dismantle and reset my clock would make things so much easier. Or heck I could turn back the clock to before I screwed it up in the first place and actually get some sleep!

Isn't there something we'd all love to turn back the clocks for and do again. Repeat a good experience, correct a bad mistake. I think maybe it's a good thing that we can't really though, through everything we learn and it makes us who we are.

So for now I'm just going to keep powering through until my clock gets back in its normal rhythm, hopefully before Easter so I don't have mum shrieking at me to go to bloody sleep already! but then saying that by that point the clocks will have changed again

Will I ever win??

The toaster hates me

I love toast. Thick cut and smothered in butter all washed down with a cup of tea.

At home me and the toaster have an understanding, I won't overload it with hand sliced (I.e wonky chopped) bread if it doesn't burn my bread or complain when I press it into service all hours of the day and night.

Now here at Uni, the toasters all seem to have issues. We've already had to replace one that took umbridge to cooking crumpets at 4 in the morning. Me and Sam were not amused especially as after that half the grill went on strike, maybe it was a conspiracy against midnight munch?

The new one just seems to have an attitude problem. With Kishan and Sam it has no issue, 'Toast? here you go perfectly brown. Potato waffles? Not a problem, even when you leave them in me to defrost for half an hour before pushing the button'

Maybe I some how unwittingly bought a sexist toaster? I swear when it see's me coming towards it bread in hand, it just puts it's hands on its hips and says 'You want me to what? Cook your poncey granary bread? it's already brown! what do you expect me to do with that?'.

Don't even get me started on it's treatment of my fruit bread, it was black as charcoal. Any day now I expect the toaster to start asking for a pension and an extended warranty before it even thinks about even looking at my bread.

Now a days I've come up with a new tact. Surprise toast! you sneak up behind the toaster and slam dunk your bread and slam the button before the toaster even knows what's hit it.

So far so good, I just hope my manic cackling at getting one over on the toaster doesn't wake up the flat mates.

OK writers block is kicking me in the ass, Poetry time!!!

Ok so it would appear the plot bunnies have decided to build a brick wall in my brain, making it neigh on impossible to write a decent blog post today even after one of Sam's amazing cups of tea.

So instead I'm going to share with you guys some of my poetry :) Most of its terrible but here's a couple of pieces I thought you guys might like.

Food in bed

My love of food

It knows no bounds

Except when I'm in bed

For the crumbs upon my pillow

Won't let me rest my head

My teddy bears

All stand and glare

As my sandwich falls to bits

For lettuce on the bottom sheet

Gets really on my tits

Mayonnaise and ketchup

Dripped upon the duvet

Means stomping to the kitchen

For the wash cloth I may get

So now I sit at the table

And tidily eat my food

For once it's all cleaned up

I can finally snooze

Photography

Click click

The shutter goes snap

The same infernal rhythm

Of light becoming captive

Squashed into form

Forced into a smile

The portraits

Hold prisoners

Dreaming

My heart dreams

Beneath the covers I

Toss and turn

And try to forget

But I fail

I Tell myself to smile

To take each step

And move forward

But in the end

I suffocate beneath the smile

and then once again

I'm dreaming

Ok well hoped you liked them, might post some more in the future, but really I don't write much poetry (probably for the best looking at some of this) but thought it would make a nice change from me embarrassing the flatmates and whining :D