The Firstest Worstest Week

The first week of school is always a fun experience, especially if you take 'fun' to mean 'excruciatingly long' and experience to mean 'time during which I would rather be sawing off my own foot with a steak knife'. Five long, long days to get used to the idea of being back at school again. They don't even ease us into it. If a Formula One racing driver had a horrible accident while on the track, and woke up the next day crippled for life because of it, you wouldn't buy him a car as a get-well-soon present. Partly because Formula One racing drivers make far more than the likes of you or I and they should learn to buy their own damn cars. But mostly because it would be inhumane and bring back all kinds of messy, repressed memories that should really stay bottled up.
Now I've created that metaphor I can't remember exactly what point I was trying to make with it, but I'm sure it was an important one. All I meant to say was that we should be given time to get used to school, an hour a day for a couple of weeks, building up to the full seven hours around week nine or ten. Not thrown, struggling, into the deep end of the pool.
I don't like to get bogged down in metaphors (not after that first one, anyway), but in this case I don't think that applies, because for this week at least, school has been extraordinarily similar to a swimming pool. That is to say wet, cold, and filled with soggy people.
It's spring, for goodness' sake. Yet it poured with rain for three of the five days of our school week. Monday and Thursday were fine. The rest, not so much.
One of the more interesting side effects of rain - aside from the cold, damp, and generally wet-making aspects, which aren't interesting so much as irritating - is that it encourages all the worms, slugs and snails to come out from wherever they're hiding and grace the humans with their presence. Yes, nothing says 'spring rain' so much as a dying worm which has attached itself to the bottom of your shoe in a last, great effort and doesn't seem keen to be unstuck. It also encourages all kinds of different behaviour in people. In me, for example, when walking on pavement, I have to stop every two or three metres to rescue a snail which has strayed on to the path. Not because I like snails, I just hate the noise they make when they're stepped on. In fact, the only reason I move them is so I don't have to step on them when coming down the same path later in the day. This is surprisingly ineffective as snails are not the brightest of creatures and the time it takes them to travel back on to the exact same position on the path is almost always roughly equal to the amount of time it takes me to do whatever I was going on a walk for and come back to the snail. So I move them again, they move back again, and the cycle goes on.

This is nothing, however, to what these creatures do to Ness. Ness has a thing about worms. By which I don't mean that she is fond of them and actively seeks them out: more a kind of mortal terror situation. Vyvyan discovered this early on the Tuesday, and took no little pleasure from exploiting it. At one point, Ness, Giuseppe and Marie-Clare were chatting somewhere near our locker area. I went up to engage them in conversation (I was Vyvyan's decoy). Vyvyan then approached, cheerfully wielding a worm. Ness wears glasses, has quite poor vision, and was therefore not aware of the worm until it was within five centimetres of her face. She noticed it, let out a blood-curdling scream, and pelted away until she judged she was a safe distance from the creature (about five metres - although what would a worm actually do to you if you were less than five metres at you? Jump at you, fall into a puddle and get stepped on?). Giuseppe, who I hadn't realised didn't like worms (that is to say, she'd told me and I'd forgotten), did the same thing, but in the other direction. Marie-Clare remained in the middle, slightly unsure as to what had happened. Vyvyan collapsed, laughing, and I nearly did the same, despite trying my hardest to look like an innocent, oblivious victim. Yes, if you read this post without knowing who we are we sound like six-year-olds. I don't care. Fun for all ages.

Another thing that worms (or slugs, in this case - lovely) have revealed about my friends is Chinny's true nature. Virtually every day before school, Chinny and I are there before most other people. She does homework. If she doesn't have homework she does revision. If she doesn't have revision she studies sheet music. I hang around her and do incredibly witty things like pretending to speak a different language or think that her copy of Bach's Thirty-Second Prelude (or whatever it was called) is a copy of an adventure novel. You know, exciting, hilarious things like that. Anyway, on this morning - it must have been Thursday, as the SCARF INCIDENT (see below) happened on the same day - Chinny arrived slightly before I did. It had been raining the day before and presumably all the table were too wet for her to work on, as she had her books on top of a wall and was working there. The wall was bordering a garden - 'garden' in the school sense, that is to say a large pile of dirt with various shrubs and leaf-litter. I intended to go up and lean on the wall next to her, but was annoyed to find a small slug exactly where I wanted to put my elbow. I carefully rolled it off into the garden with a bit of stick and reclined on the wall. I looked up to discover Chinny staring at me reproachfully. 'Leslie!'

'What?'

'That was animal cruelty. You can't do that to slugs.'

'It was in the way!'

'Well, you could have leant somewhere else,' she said firmly, and picked up her books. I couldn't help being transfixed by something that had managed to climb on to the top of her science textbook. Chinny followed my gaze to see a giant slug crawling (or sliming, or whatever it is slugs do when they walk) along happily. She let out on ear-piercing scream (what with Ness, Giuseppe, and Chinny, I don't think my ears will ever be quite as they used to be) and flung the slug hard onto the concrete we were standing on, before backing away and giving it a disgusted look. After we'd all calmed down again (except the slug, who didn't look like it would be doing anything anytime soon), I looked at her meaningfully. From now on, her name is 'Double-Standards Chinny', or 'Disc' (for those who find it easier. I had to add the 'i' because it's incredibly hard to pronounce the work 'Dsc'. Really. Give it a go. Now. I don't care if anyone's watching you).

One of the less pleasant side effects of the rain - and believe me, worms aren't that pleasant, so that should tell you how bad this was - is that the ovals are now completely waterlogged. Not nice for walking over in the mornings, worse in the afternoons after it's been raining all day and the puddles are up to your ankles. But when it gets really bad is when you have to play lacrosse on said ovals.

For some time now I've been under the opinion that nothing, whether natural, manmade or Act of God, could possibly make my lacrosse-playing-skill worse than it is. Nope. Water, freshly mown grass (so that all the pieces are still lying around, looking like they're still attached), and me with a lacrosse stick are a combination made in either hell or perverse comedy writer's heaven. Add Vyvyan running around with her crosse confidently held at shin-level and you've pretty much got the idea as to what PE lessons have been like for me this week.

In fact, that's not the worst of it. You know what's worse than playing a sport you can't play on ground you're incapable of standing on with a homicidal crosse-wielding lunatic?

It's playing a sport you can't play on ground you're incapable of standing on with a homicidal crosse-wielding lunatic when people are taking pictures of it for the school book.

Luckily, the camerapeople seemed to have picked up the impression from somewhere that the most exciting thing to take pictures of in a game of lacrosse is the person who has the ball, and as my position in lacrosse is 'stay away from the action and it can't hurt you', I managed to avoid the worst of my failures being preserved on film.

In fact, Vyvyan was probably worse off in this case. She's actually quite a good player - well, better than me. Then again, you could just jam one of the sticks upright in the mud and would play lacrosse better than me. Anyway, she did get the ball enough that the camerapeople followed her on occasion. While there were plenty of good shots, somewhere, there is a picture of Vyvyan trying to throw the ball to someone across the field, throwing it up in the air instead, and then being hit in the back of the head with it. That might have been the high point of my lacrosse-playing career. Sadly.

In my year at school we recently received an exchange student from South Africa. She's made an exceptionally good impression on a friend of ours called Skeith. He's appeared in the blog before as 'STUDENT 2' in my 'Not-So-Sweet-16' post, when I couldn't think of a name for him. Luckily we were discussing name changes the other day in Media, and I discovered that his middle name is Keith, while his first initial is an S: S. Keith. Thus, 'Skeith' was born.

Anyway, Skeith has a number of clever ruses going to attract the attention of this exchange student. His first idea was feigning ignorance to anything she talked about, so that she would  be coerced into long explanations, giving him excuses to talk to her. After spending some time learning about what water polo is from her (he pretended to have confused it with lacrosse), he decided that a second idea would be in order. In this one, he decided to learn a lot of things instead to impress her with his knowledge. After I prevented him from using our Media computer to google 'South Africa', he decided to quiz me about it instead. 'Is it true that black South Africans don't exist?'

'No, Skeith, I think they exist.'

'You're wrong. They're imaginary, only white people live in South Africa.'

'I don't think that's right. There aren't as many of them, but they're there.'

'You're wrong.'

'No I'm not.'

'Yes you are.'

We went to the Wikipedia page for South Africa and scrolled down in an effort to find out if black South Africans existed or not. I pointed to one of the first pictures. 'That is a black South African, Skeith.'

He shrugged. 'No, that's a migrant.'

'What about those ones?'

'More migrants.'

'Well, how about -'

'No, they're all migrants.'

'They can't all be migrants!' I countered. He looked amazed. 'Of course not! The white ones aren't.'

I suggested that he try something else.

In that same Media lesson, we had resumed work on our project when Skeith had sudden doubts (we decided not to use the Drama students for our project, by the way, which was tricky as we'd already filmed some bits with a Drama student as the main character, a clown. So the clown swaps from being a Drama student to being Skeith halfway through the film. Saying that it looks tacky doesn't cover it). Anyway, Skeith nudged me and said 'Can I borrow your scissors?'

'Why?' I asked suspiciously. I haven't forgotten the time Vyvyan took my gluestick and used it to glue her socks up.

'Look at my hair at the back!' He spun around on the chair and showed me.

'What about it?'

'It's too long.'

'Well, cut it when you get home.'

'I can't. We have French after lunch and the exchange student is in our French class.'

'And?'

'If I cut it now, she'll never notice!' he enthused.

I was suspicious. 'You mean, you want to cut your hair at the back - without a mirror - with my scissors, to impress the exchange student?'

'That's it.'

I lent him the scissors, partly because I was interested to see if he'd go through with it.

He went through with it. Not a bad job, either, so far as I could tell, considering he couldn't see what he was doing. I'm not sure if the exchange student noticed or not, but our Media teacher certainly did. I won't go into that.

On the Thursday, I finally brought in the scarf I'd knitted for Falcon. I was confident - nay, certain - of its phenomenal powers of hideousness, the sheer clashing tastelessness of it all.

Therefore, I was quite put out upon Chinny's reaction to it (this was just several minutes after the DSC incident).

'It's pretty!' she exclaimed. 'I want a scarf just like it!'

I was shocked. How could she like the scarf?

'Well, I like that colour of green,' she admitted. 'And those pompoms look really soft.'

I charged her with wearing it, to see how much she liked it after everyone else commented on it. It didn't work. 'It's really comfortable too.'

It was quite funny to see how tactful people can be. 'That's . . . an interesting scarf, Chinny.'

'Leslie knitted it.'

'Ah. Well done, Leslie. It looks really . . . well done.'

I had to explain that I'd knitted it for the purpose of being horrible, which I'm not sure relieved anyone of the impression that I'm mentally ill, but at least reassured them that my taste isn't quite that bad.

Giuseppe and Marie-Clare's reactions were far closer to what I wanted. 'Oh, God, that's disgusting!' said Giuseppe after glimpsing it for the first time. Marie-Clare made a similar comment, but I can't remember what it was as she was laughing too hard. Aviator was extremely pleased with it. 'Give it to Falcon now, I want to see his reaction. We should catch it on video.'

Marie-Clare and Giuseppe acted as scarf bearers. On the way to Falcon we passed a friend of Marie-Clare's, Dancer, who is (it's only fair to say) fairly stylish. I swear he actually took a step back when we passed him with it, and the look of horror on his face would have photographed just as well as any of Falcon's.

When we did get the scarf to Falcon, there wasn't horror on his face so much as shock. 'I did tell you what to expect,' I said firmly.

'Yes, but I didn't realise there would be quite so many pompoms . . .'

He wore the scarf to half of Media (Media people are clearly far less tactful than most, as most of the scarf-related comments showed), then removed it for the rest of the day. DESPITE having promised - on a signed contract, no less! - to wear it for a whole day of school. I confronted him about it in Chemistry. 'Well, I didn't want it to get damaged in Woodwork,' he said guiltily.

Sure, Falcon. Because last time I checked, Woodwork didn't go for the whole day. Blog-readers, I know that a good few of you - Aviator, Marie-Clare, and Giuseppe, anyway - were interested in the progress of the scarf, and we can't let him get away with it. We need the other six-and-a-half periods of scarf wearing he promised in the contract. People of school, I'm relying on you.

Anyway, nothing brightens up the second week of school like a lime green/hot pink/pompom covered scarf. True fact.

Photograph courtesy of Phoenix, who is a close personal friend of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Read her blog. All the cool wizards are doing it.