Reading a Book

Yesterday, I finished reading The Amber Spyglass (by Phillip Pullman), signalling the end of the His Dark Materials series. What's funny about finishing books, particularly series or one that took time to read, is that you're not really sure what to do with yourself afterwards. Once you read that last page (which will almost always be disappointing), there's not really much left in reality that interests you. If the book is particularly long, or you enjoyed it lots, the characters become people. I remember reading a book, and not being able to read anything else for two weeks, because I couldn't manage to start reading about other characters, with different names, histories and traits to the ones I'd been used to.
 
Maybe I'm just emotionally volatile. But I'm also as tired as hell, so this blog post is roughly 150 words. You get my disappointment at the end of a book.
 
Although I rarely wait two weeks for my books. Until the next time.

School Holidays

Today, I was freed from school for two weeks. Excellent! Two entire weeks! And then, I shall have six/seven weeks of school, followed by a week of holiday, and then another six/seven weeks of school, and then two weeks holiday. Six/seven weeks of school, followed by a week of holiday, followed by six/seven weeks of school, and then six weeks of holiday. Then I begin Yr 11, my final year of secondary school, and continue on with more of the same.
 
However recently, a little birdy (in the form of BBC Breakfast. The Beeb has taken my soul. No more.) told me that the government are thinking of changing the holidays. Instead of six weeks in the summer, we'd have four. And for two of the three one-week holidays, we'd have two weeks. The idea is that many people fall out of synch with school life over the six weeks, and forget much of what they learnt. By making the long holiday not as long, and spreading it out over the year, pupils engage in school when coming into the new year and much less time is given to revising of the past year.
 
I'm not happy about this. First, because my parents are divorced, I have to split my holiday time between the two families. When I'm at home, I can get stuff (i.e. extensive amounts of art homework) done, however when I'm away at my dad's, I can't do as much. I class my time spent up there as lost holiday. The six weeks holiday gives me three weeks of holiday, something I don't get any other time. If it was reduced to two weeks, it'd just be like any other holiday, when I occasionally spend the two weeks of Easter at home.
 
Secondly, living in South East England, it can get pretty hot in the summertime. Not insane levels of hot, but fairly toasty. Concentrating during July is near impossible, and that's only the first two weeks before they end the year. Having to attend through all of July would just destroy us, as we wouldn't be able to listen or try in the final critical weeks before the holiday.
 
Thirdly, it'll take away the sheer joy of six weeks of wearing whatever the hell you want, eating when you want, and swearing until you go blue in the face. Holidays are full of freedom (family commitments permitting), relaxtion and sleep. The six weeks (sometimes seven, sometimes five) are long awaited from the moment we begin the new year in September. Although the change to four weeks would mean no lost holiday, it'd feel like much less.

Going Abroad

I have never been outside Europe. Yes, I've still got quite a few more years left in me. But as yet, I've never been outside Europe.
This is not particuarly relevant. Slightly, but not totally. I'm talking about tea. Ah, yes. Beautiful tea. Not about the history of tea, but tea abroad.
 
Being from (East) Sussex and all, I'm not very picky about my tea. I'm not fussy about what different herbs have been infused with, or what it smells like, or what colour it is. Put the bag in the cup, add water, sugar and milk. Done.
However, go abroad and it's almost as if the concept of a decent cup of tea has never reached them. Go out and drink tea, and you get a pathetic little taster tea bag from PG Tips that'd only taste good if it had about three drops of water in it. So you go to a supermarket for some teabags, and you get more of the same. Pathetic little bags that have about six tea leaves in and you need two or three bags per cup. And even then they taste a bit crap.
So, you've found a problem, find a solution. Bring your teabags with you. So you exceed your Easyjet baggage allowance with an extra suitcase full of teabags (while attempting to not look like a smuggler), and bring it with you to have some excellent tea. Congratulations, you look like an idiot. Besides it still doesn't taste nice. Foriegn milk tastes funny. And sugar. Come to mention it, the cups give the tea a funny taste. And not forgetting the water.
 
I don't like going abroad because then I have to rely on coffee. My current limit is six cups of coffee a day (2nd July 2011, I traveled in a coach for three hours through the same amount of countries), and that was borderline jittery. But I like to drink tea at midnight, 2am, 3am even. I've had twelve, thirteen cups of tea in a day. And decaff coffee is more expensive and harder to find. Besides, it doesn't taste too great without excessive amounts of whipped cream in it.
 
I like going abroad, but I like my tea. Saying this, I feel a bit like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there you go. I really like my tea. Ah well, I guess I'm stuck to the UK. I hear Bath's lovely at this time of year.

The Euro

Today, I shall complain about the Eurozone. Curses! you cry. She's a bloody Euro sceptic!
Well yes, I am. This is probably because I know bugger all about politics. But I don't think the Euro was ever a good idea.
 
You cannot run Sweden the same way you run Spain. Greece has a different economy to Italy (although their tax collectors probably play online poker with each other) and Germany has a thriving economy, while Ireland's was recently flailing.
 
This is the problem.
 
They are different countries, that cannot have a similar currency. They do not have the same GDPs, and so what a Euro is worth in Finland might not be what it is worth in the Netherlands. While a strong GDP in the US will be reflected in their exchange rate, any change in Eurozone is softened by the other economies.
 
The single currency means that they're all tied, and so as we've been hearing, Greece is in turmoil, and the value of the Euro is going down, even if only slightly. And when Italy reveals to be well and truly gone, it'll go down a bit more. And then Spain, and then when France can't take the debt it's going to go under. Bamn, and even though Britain's got the pound, it'll probably not take all the Euro countries going and we'll go too.
 
Although this is probably an exaggeration.
 
But it could happen. Either way the point is the same. When Greece goes down, without the Euro the other countries would just get a little splash in their metaphorical boats, but with the Euro they're all sinking together.

Obsession with Perfection

Oh, I understand. You've read the title and thought "Bloody hell, not another fat bird making excuses". Honestly, it's nothing to do with weight, or the media, or society, or anything like that. This post is about artists.
Not just I-paint-and-stuff artists. ALL artists. Musicians, actors, writers, painty-artists and any other profession you would class as an art form. Being a musician/artist/writer myself, I'm exposed to the constant need to perfect a lot. Sportsmen and such practise, and train and train and train to improve, to be the best. Artists don't do that. Artists will spend hours correcting one point of their work, be it that one chord they can't get quite perfect, or that one line in their script they can't convey perfectly, or their word choices on a single paragraph because it's not perfect, and I could go on. Artists don't strive to improve, they attempt to be perfect. There is a difference.
Perfection is the want to have nothing wrong with the work. It doesn't matter if it's a cover of Wonderwall (Oasis), or a ground-breaking and incredibly controversial statue that is intricately detailed and is likely to sell for £82654783489 million, it has to be perfect. Being the best means being better, being recognisably better, which means fame. Not necessarily major fame - I'm not talking own-brand-of-perfume fame, but definitely regional-news-on-a-slow-news-day fame.
The problem with perfection is that it drives people insane. I vaguely remember sobbing for a fair amount of time because I couldn't get a chapter right. Last week, my Art teacher had to physically stop a friend of mine from throwing a piece of artwork that he'd spent the best part of an hour working on, because he'd become so convinced that his work was awful (I thought it was pretty good to be honest). I had another friend who smashed up their electric guitar because they believed they were bad at it.
You see, the problem is simple. Art forms are not something you can measure, and everything is a matter of opinion. If I were a swimmer, for example, I could aim to cut a second off a length. But there is very little I can do to monitor my progress. I could say my knack of drawing noses has become more life-like, but then again, it might have also meant my skills at drawing a range of different noses has decreased, meaning a step back. Also, this is again a matter of perspective.
This is why everything takes so long. It doesn't take long to create something, but months to correct.

I'm sorry

I did have a post on Friday, and I posted it via email.
I haven't bothered to check until now, but clearly the email didn't go through.

I am very sorry and I shall post it now.

Wales

As when I go to university most of the ones in the UK will be £9k a year, I was thinking of going abroad. More accurately, Holland. The Maastricht university is an international school, and so teaches in English. Bonus, it's only £1,500 a year right now, dependent on the euro/pound exchange rate. I mentioned this to my father, who despite being from Henley-on-Thames is one of those irritating militant Welsh, and he said to me "It's free in Wales. Remember you have a Welsh birth certificate"
Now, I'm sure Wales has been bashed with a stick until it is less than dust, but I'll give it another fair whack. What exactly is it that I would study? Agriculture? History of sheep? Here's a well-known fact for you - for every one person in Wales, there are three sheep. Wales is dull. Wales is hilly. Wales is empty. Wales is full of sheep. It also has a pretty much defunct language. And I'm not surprised. Would you particuarly want to learn a language in which vowels are f,y and g?
Welsh is an irritating thing we could live without, frankly. Welsh causes town names such as Rhosllannerchrugog. To be a teacher, politician or anything really, you have to know fluent Welsh. To know fluent Welsh, you should live among Welsh-only-speaking people and preferably your parents speak it too. This reaches out to a good, ooh, three people? If you want to live among Welsh-only-speaking people, you'd have to live in Mid Wales. Wales has two motorways, the M4 and M5. Both are in South Wales. Even Northern Ireland has more. Mid Wales is just a large expanse of... nothing. It's windy, rainy and everybody speaks Welsh, which of course nobody understands.
A friend of mine recently went to Aberystwyth, came back and told me that she went to a restuarant that had the menu available in Welsh. She asked the waitresses if any of them understood the menu. They all said no.
Don't get me wrong, I love Wales, rolling hills and... well, all the sheep. We can just do without Welsh.

Writer's Block

For those lesser-informed, I should make it known that I am a writer. And, as every writer will ever come across, I suffer from writer's block (Or writer's lazy, as some I know refer to it as). Writer's block should be a recognised condition and I should be receiving disability benefit for it. I'm joking, of course, but only about the disability benefit. It has to be a recognised condition. You see, if writer's block had a cure, I would literally sell my left arm for it (I am right-handed, after all).
It is the kind of thing that makes you want to smash your head into something very, very solid, like a wall, or your father's beer belly. It creeps up on you slowly, at first you're poodling along, typing away about last night's aWeSoMe SaUcE pArTy!!!1!!1!!1 (I promise never to write like that again), and then it just attacks, and suddenly you're screaming and gnawing away on the table, or your arm, trying to drag another sentence from your mind, although everything you write is shit and you just want to shoot the inventor of the written word and strangle his wife in the process.
"But please," you protest, "I promised myself I would write 2,000 words tonight."
"Alas NO!" screams writer's block, cackling away, "You will roll on the floor crying or go on the internet!"
"But I told myself I'd write 2,000 words before internet," you protest again, weakily
"The internet is WAITING," cackles writer's block again, so you cave and waste your life on the internet, or roll on the floor for an hour. A pain to all this is that your 2,000 words was probably a school essay, so you have to turn in a blank sheet with just your name (sometimes not even that), and explain that you were busy fighting writer's block. This, of course, will not fly with your teacher, who will then fail you in all your exams and then most likely your life. Yes, writer's block is that cruel.
The ultimate trouble to all this is that there is rarely a solution to this. All you can do is hit your head against your keyboard and hope it types better than your hands.
I'm stopping this post shorter than normal because Writer's Block is now standing in the doorway brandishing a sword and I'm not sure I can win. As it is in the world of a writer.

Root Beer and Apple Jacks

I thought I might kick off with a dull paragraph about Americanism and how it affects our proudly 'British' lives and so on and so on. Although I thought I might complain [this may become a recurring theme] about how it's a very selective Americanisation of our lives. Mostly because I, personally, adore Root Beer. I'm pretty sure when I die I will be greeted with rows and rows of the glorious liquid. In my small town, and the one nearest to me, I know of two places that sell Root Beer. So I drink Dandelion + Burdock instead. I don't mean to drink obscure and expensive drinks, honest. Apparently, McDonald's used to sell it, but, alas, there was no demand for it, and so it was taken off the menu [cue much sobbing from me and the other three or four root beer lovers in Britain]. It would've also meant I don't have to go an half hour car journey and pay £1.40 for a single can of Diet Root Beer.
In case you haven't noticed, I really, really like Root Beer.
My other point are Apple Jacks. For my lesser-enlightened British counterparts [or just Americans that have never eaten Apple Jacks], they are a heavily-artificially-flavoured and coloured cereal that are roughly Golden Nuggets, just appley-flavoured. I'm assuming that the idea is to trick people into believing that they contain some apples and therefore nutrition. However they may contain apples now, as I haven't had Apple Jacks for two years. Which is precisely my point.
Apple Jacks, to my knowledge, are sold in one place in the UK. This one place doesn't happen to be near my house. More accurately, it is in Greater Manchester. Me, being roughly an hour south of London, puts me at least a 5 hours drive away. And I've lost the link to the online shop that sells it. And finally, the even more important fact that my mother would most likely chew her own leg off before even thinking to allow me to eat something with as many additives as I think it has.
But why is it, that even in the time in which I swear I once saw cheese in a spray can [WHY? What could possibly go through someone's mind when they think that cheese in a spray can would be a good idea?!] that I cannot buy a can of root beer that hasn't had to be imported from the US? And why can I not buy Apple Jacks in my cereal aisle [along with other gloriously unhealthy and crappy cereals that I could only dream about, meaning Lucky Charms and the like]? Although coming to think, the second question can probably be answered with the EU.
I shouldn't complain too much, I only have to take a simple half-hour car journey to my closest can of root beer, or if I dare to need a choice, a Starbucks. And who could possibly want more?

An Introduction

I will try to post every Friday.
I will also try to make each post at least 500 words.
When I make my first post this Friday, I will confirm the *official* email for this blog, but hopefully it'll be noiwouldnotlikesometea@hotmail.com
This blog will mostly be stupid ramblings about random thoughts I have had.

So, I'll see you Friday.