It therefore boggles  my mind how often my nationality is mistaken. This usually happens with either Americans or people from the London area. Typically, I am mistaken for being Irish or Northern Irish. Not necessarily a bad thing, and probably fuelled by the fact that Boyfriend is from Belfast; people probably like to assume that since we are both Obviously Not English we must be from the same place.

This blog post is being written because for the first time in my life someone failed to recognise the Obviously Not English part and his wild guesses at my homeplace amused me terribly.

The offender was a young lad from Surrey, approximately 20 years old, has been living in the North East of England for several months now. He asked whereabouts I was from; I assumed he knew the country and prompted him to guess.

His first was Somerset. Second guess was Yorkshire.

Oh dear. How can people be so unaware of their country that they know so little about places outside a few miles radius of their home? Le sigh.

I think it’s fair to say I’m not a particularly loyal society member.

Original ideas don’t come easy to me. I struggled with the composition element of my music courses. I liked my photography course because all the subject matter I needed already existed; all I had to do was work out what aperture, composition etc was right for the shot, and press a button. Incidentally, I’ve always been good at editing – improving existing material. It’s just taking that first step that baffles me.

The Creative Writing society meets once a week; a standard session involves a prompt, an hour or so writing, and then feedback for those who want it. I definitely would never have written anything without those prompts, and even with them I felt like I was forcing the words out, and eventually I stopped going.

I was looking at an old notebook earlier, and I found a piece of writing. I don’t remember writing it, but it’s in my handwriting and it’s clearly a work in progress, so I must have. I’m not even sure it was written at Creative Writing; if it was I don’t think it had anything to do with the prompt. We had a lot of snow that winter, and I think I may actually have been inspired by my environment for once.

Anyway, I didn’t want to lose it forever, so here’s a poem I apparently wrote.

The news would be a pandemic
Sweeping across town in a matter of minutes
Yet there would always bee one poor soul who trudged across town
To be lost in a deserted playground

Our daddies would fight through a jungle of rusty bikes
To retrieve our sledges from the back of the shed
While our mummies would fuss over too-thin-jackets
And flimsy shoes

They would peer anxiously as we flew free downhill
Wincing as we skidded to a halt
Just a little to close to those ominous dark waters

We would fall backwards, sinkikng into soft clouds to make snow angels
Never wondering what lurked beneath
Catching snowflakes on our tongues
With no regard as to their chemical composition

Soon someone would throw the first snowball
And the town would ring with shrieks and battle cries
Some would sneak home; my daddy would take me
To the pristine sheet in our back garden
Each year our snowman more magnificent than the last

And as the snow turned grey and the sun fell
Our mummies would fuss over our soaked clothes
And melted snow dripping on the carpet
Would we ever learn?

We would make hot chocolate
And feel warm in every sense of the word
Dreaming not of the days to come
But of snowflakes and icicles

That snow has melted now
And now we fuss
Over frizzy hair and cold toes
And complain of our too-thin-jackets.

Needs some development and it’s too sunny these days to think of winter, but I quite like it regardless

From approx May 2007;

THINGS I HAVE LEARNT THIS YEAR IN CHEMISTRY

• It is fun to wear lab coats
• It is not fun to have hydrobromic acid explode in your face

THINGS I HAVE NOT LEARNT THIS YEAR IN CHEMISTRY

• The course

Bollocks.

I actually kinda love my 17 year old self just now.

As it happens, I’m still pretty sure he was lying and hasn’t been kicked out, but I was quite tickled pink by the misunderstanding regardless.

As a pianist, while classical music is my favourite to play, I also enjoy exploring other genres.

Bearing this is mind, here’s my cover of Less Than Jake’s The Science of Selling Yourself Short;

Enjoy!

THINGS THAT ARE GOOD ABOUT THE A1(M);

(capiche?)

“Oh, we walk together, and talk together, and just before we say goodbye, he takes me in his arms, and then… I wake up. Yes, it’s only in my dreams. But they say if you dream a thing more than once, it’s sure to come true, and I’ve seen him so many times.”

This particular part of the quote was brought to my particular attention yesterday.

“…they say if you dream a thing more than once, it’s sure to come true…”

I sure hope that’s not the case, or I will soon turn into a fish.

I will also;
- become pregnant
- be chased down a flight of stairs by a herd of angry witches
- become somehow trapped in a house with creatures who will eventually kill me

and I don’t much rate my fishy self’s chances with any of those.

Oh, say it ain’t so…

Post orchestra performance at a prominent venue. Back in the dressing rooms;

JM: Jenny, would you please unhook me at the back?
ME: Sure. *hesitates* Uh, your dress is already undone, is it your bra you want me to undo?
JM: Yeah, yeah.
ME: Oh, right, sure. I thought I’d better check, ’cause, y’know, it’d be pretty awkward if I undid your bra and you’d meant something else.
*unclips bra*
JM: Wha… what are you doing? Why did you unclip my bra?!

Bet you all saw that coming. Turned out when I’d said her dress was unclipped, she’d thought I was asking if that was what she wanted unclipped. Oh dear…

It’s evident, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, that I suffered from an overly active and occasionally somewhat macabre imagination as a pre-teen. As I crossed the road, I would visualize the parked cars suddenly revving up and charging at me. I would constantly worry about the end of the world arriving in the near future and what I could do to stop it.

I live fairly close to an international airport, and as such there are often airplanes flying over the house. Having lived in this house most of my life, I don’t usually register the sound of an airplane, except late at night when I’m trying to sleep. Everything is quiet, except from the occasional snore from certain family members, and in such circumstances the normally barely noticable airplane drone turns into a fiery roar tearing up the sky.

After that project on Space, I would lie awake every night convinced that this time, the noise I could hear really was that of a meteorite, only relaxing once the plane touched down and I could accept that I was safe. This fear was to be replaced a few years later by the assumption that the noise I heard was that of a doomed flight taken over by terrorists, headed towards a nearby petrochemical plant which would blow us up into oblivion.

Having been out of Scotland for essentially all of 2008, I had more or less forgotten everything that I had just written, until yesterday. I had just woken up, and was happily dozing in bed when I heard this noise. An airplane, I thought, casually shrugging off my old demons.

The noise grew louder. I turned over.

The noise grew louder still. I heard the old notes of panic start to sound in my mind.

Louder still. If I hadn’t already been awake, the noise (now more of a milk-curdling howl) would have woken me up. Convinced that this was now the end, I ripped open my curtains to catch a glimpse of whatever object was going to end me. A meteorite? A plane? A fiery ball from the depths of hell itself?

It turned out to be the council’s new ride-on lawn mower trundling past my window. Thanks guys!

That’s why I’m here.

I am nineteen years old and I come from a small Scottish town. I am a student in my first year at an English university, although I’m currently home for Christmas. I have a lot of hobbies and interests, but I’ll keep those for later. My page title is ‘Like so many girls’. This is a lyric from the song Jenny Wren by Paul McCartney.

Like so many girls
Jenny wren could sing
But a broken heart took her song away

I am like so many girls, my name is Jenny, but I can’t sing, and not because of a broken heart. I’m not the biggest fan of Paul McCartney, but I like songs that have my name in it, another example being Photo Jenny by Belle & Sebastian, but that one has tones of vanity in it. My old Journalspace account was jennywren, and that would have been my first choice username for this blog but it was gone already. Jenny Wren is also a character in a Charles Dickens novel that I have never read.

Maybe one day.