I’ve not been happy with Jimsy Jampots for ages, and I decided to do something about it.

I switched to Blogger (I’m a WordPress cheat!) and opened up a new blog – A Clock That Does Not Work.

I blog there fairly regularly. Still trying to find my style and how I want to blog, but if you want to follow me I’m there.

Happy 2011 everyone, and goodbye Jimsy Jampots.

This year I have:

1. Finished my first year at Warwick and started my second. I managed to pass The Module From Hell, and got a few Firsts in my exams too. I managed to make a few really good friends, take a few modules that fascinate me, and not go to any horrible parties. This I feel is a big success.
2. Survived two hideous bouts of snow. Snow is my worst nightmare, as people who know me (and anyone who has read the past few months of my blog) will know. Snow for me means car crashes and being stuck at home. However we had bad snow in January and in December, and there was no huge drama in either. Joy!
3. I got into cooking. The start of the year had me trying out different recipes and finding I really enjoyed it. The summer, and The Great British Bake Off, sparked off an enthusiasm in baking too. I started a cooking blog, She Cooks, She Eats, and now am really enjoying cooking absolutely gorgeous things and making things I never thought I’d be able to (like my gingerbread house)
4. I went on a long holiday with Garry for the first time and didn’t want to kill him once. This is a wonderful, wonderful result.
5. I did a three-month stint interning at Ecobomb. A friend of mine mentioned it to me and put my name forward for it; I will be forever grateful for his doing it because they were some of the most interesting and challenging months of my life. Whilst getting up at 6am three days a week and making a two hour commute to London and another two hour commute back wasn’t fun, as soon as I was there I felt like I should have been doing this all my life. And I know it’s what I want to do with the rest of my life.
6. I appreciated my parents more. Nan fell and hurt her neck in August; she’s been living with us whilst it healed ever since. My Nan isn’t an easy person to live with, but she’s a foil to my frankly fantastic parents. The older I get the more I realised just what good people they are. They’re not just parents; they’re friends.
7. I didn’t kill Nan and bury her under the porch. I think I deserve a fricking medal for that.
8. I started and ended the year in a relationship with the same person. Garry and I are approaching our two year anniversary. For a previous commitment phobe who would split with perfectly nice people after several months because things were getting boring, this is terrifying yet exhilarating. Plato had a myth about humans, and how we are actually half of what we were originally created to be and we spend our lives searching for our other half. With Garry, I feel like I’ve found my other half. I fully expect to be ending 2011 in this relationship, so here’s to another year of giggling over stupid TV shows, making apple crumble and drinking Starbucks.

That’s the good things that have happened in 2010. There have been bad things too, quite a lot of them in fact, but this post isn’t about them. It’s easy to forget the good things and sometimes I need to be reminded of them.

Goodbye, 2010. Nice knowing ‘ya.

Happy New Year, everyone.

So I’ll go back to good old typing. Basically I’m telling you a story about what an idiot I am. And oh, I’ve been a big idiot this time.
At Warwick Uni we have three ten week terms. Essay deadlines are set at the start of term; I had one for Week 8 and four for Week 10. I got the one for Ethics done after reading week because that was due in Week 8, and thought I’d have a nice leisurely four weeks to get everything else done before the end of term.

But I got the weeks wrong. So whereas I thought I had three weeks left to get everything sorted, I actually have two. Four 2500 word essays due in two weeks.

I’ll get it done, I always do, but I wanted to spend ages on these essays so I could use them for revision for my exams. Instead I’m going to have to rush them out, probably using lecture time to do it.

It’s my own bloody fault, but I feel really dumb now. Which is not the mindset you want when you have an essay to write.

Anyway.

The night before my first seminar presentation of the year, I got really scared and decided to film myself talking as a way of making sure I didn’t sound like an idiot when I spoke. This is the result.

Verdict? I roll my eyes/play with my hair too much.

I want to stay in bed all day, read, bake, knit and watch TV.

I need to do the majority of the housework whilst I am home and can take the pressure of my Mum. I also need to do some Big Jobs that will take ages. And, of course, I need to take care of my grandmother.

I should be doing Uni work.

Whilst I’m used to having an angel and a devil on my shoulder, I now have three of the buggers flying round and vying for attention. It’s not an easy position to be in. Still, it could be worse.

I have a really quick temper. Most of the time I’m sunny natured and patient when irritating things happen — for example, I’m great in queues, even when they’re stupidly long and appear to be for no real reason. However, all it takes is for the right buttons to be pushed and I get very cross immediately. Many of my buttons appear to be the “right buttons”, and my Nan has an uncanny knack for pushing them.

I don’t like it when I’m angry. I have a flare of anger that leaves me usually shouting, swearing or resisting the urge to throw something and then the tears start to prick behind my eyes. Once THAT has happened, I’m a goner. As soon as I start to cry the anger breaks into misery. I sob furiously for a very long time and then spend the rest of the night with puffy eyes and/or feeling utterly miserable.

Yesterday was one of those days. I started the day with every intention of eating 100% heathily. By the time it’d finished I’d had the amount of crap I usually eat in a week because I needed comfort food. My grandmother is driving me to chocolate.

It’s held in a church hall. About 30 to 40 middle-aged women go every week, dressed in jogging bottoms and baggy t-shirts to dance along to songs like Pitbull’s “I know you want me” and 50s rock ‘n roll.

Last night, we had an new instructor.

She was wearing aquamarine pedal pushers and a black vest with “Zumba” written across it in rainbow letters. Her hair was jet black, she had an amazingly round bottom and the most teeth I’ve ever seen in one mouth. She liked to show us these teeth quite frequently by flashing us huge, excited, slightly manic smiles.

“Okay everybody hi! Hi! Yes, hi! Any newbies here? Great! That’s just great! I’m not your regular teacher but Shelley is absolutely great! We’re going to have a great time! Okay, this is a samba style song! Love this song! Ready? Okay let’s go!”

It made my eyes hurt to look at her she was so beamingly positive.

When we started dancing we found she was very, very, very fond of pulling faces when dancing. Sexy faces. Winks, kisses, suggestive eye flicks, that kind of thing. I think she was trying to get us to do the same, to feel sexy as we danced. I don’t know about the rest of the group, but I am several stone overweight and look like an over-stuffed, frostbitten sausage in my workout gear. I do not feel sexy. I just want to get it over with.

She later decided to make us have a dance off. The church hall has rather large windows; I was irresistably struck with an image of someone stumbling out from the pub opposite and catching a glance of a room full of sweaty women shimmying towards each other in a threatening manner before backing away waggling their bums.

Then she got us bellydancing to Shakira. Of course she did. I won’t go into this too much because the memories are still too fresh and painful. As, in fact, are my sides from a result of said bellydancing.

I’m not sure whether having a dance instructor who is clearly on a mix of amphetamines and hallucinogens  is a good thing or a bad thing. Every woman in that room was close to death last night and, I imagine, are now hurting when they breathe as I am today. However, the fear of “What the fuck is she going to do next?” certainly made it a more interesting workout.

What other people want comes first. Uni work comes first. Work work comes first. Looking after Nan comes first. Keeping the house tidy and running comes first. Gone are the days when I can sit and do bugger all, or lie on my bed listening to music in the dark, or read for hours. There’s just always Stuff To Do.

I don’t think I should complain too much; like I said, I think it’s just a symptom of getting older. It’s just not my most favouritist aspect of growing up. That would be being able to tell people who are talking rubbish to fuck off without my parents telling me off for being rude and being able to drive so that it doesn’t take three hours of waiting for buses to get anywhere.

There are, however, people my age who are able to do whatever the hell they want without concern for anyone else. These people, however, are mainly boys who don’t care about anyone else and have mothers to pick up the pieces for them. Either that or they are children, in mind if not in body. Having the choice between being an ignorant childish prick who thinks shrink-wrapping Shreddies is a productive use of time and a grown up with some grasp of living in a world and not a bubble…well, I know I made the right decision.

I started learning to knit when I was a little girl but never really got into it. My mum knits quite a lot — I have a family that is semi-Catholic and semi-in-rural-Wales-with-very-little-to-do, so there’s always someone having a baby — and upon finding me frustrated because it was impossible to find a pretty, affordable scarf and hat my mother bought four balls of wool and made me The Most Beautiful Scarf in the world, with a hat to match.

This I found to be really bloody impressive. I write, play music and philosophise, but there is nothing I could create that would be half as beautiful as this scarf. I wanted to be able to make the beauty.

Plus I’ve always worried that, should society collapse, I’d be one of the first people to be killed and eaten. I’m a Philosophy student and my desired career is a writer. How much use would I be to the human race when we’re trying to build ourselves back up from nothing? At least now that I can knit I’ll be able to make warm clothes and blankets for people.

So my Mum and I knitted a scarf for my Dad:

You know you want one. Second most beautiful scarf in the world, right?

I have had a weird stomach thing for six weeks, but I’ve gotten used to constant discomfort, pain after eating and various inelegant things that I won’t discuss on here. However on Wednesday a stabbing pain in my throat had been added to the mix. Yesterday it developed into a full-blown cold.

I’m sure many of you are thinking “Pffft, a cold? That’s nothing!” To you I say: Bugger off. Even my Dad, the the least sympathetic person in the world, gets sympathetic when I have a cold. It’s not just a cough, temperature, runny nose and sore throat. My entire body goes into meltdown.

My throat swells so that it’s impossible to eat anything that hasn’t been chewed to mush. My head pounds with the combination of a temperature and all the snot that has been packed in there that refuses to come out until the last day of the cold where it all descends in a huge disgusting rush or at night when I can’t get to sleep because I’m constantly drying my nostrils. My body aches, to the point where Garry was stroking my shoulder last night and I had to ask him to stop because it was hurting too much. My eyes refuse to work properly; they won’t focus, or won’t open completely. It’s just a big bloody snotty mess.

Thankfully, after a hellish night last night, this one appears to be on its way out. I’m still blocked up and my throat hurts and it aches when I move, but its definitely on its way out. Which is good, because I have to play catch-up on all the stuff I’ve missed over the past week or so.

Plus I have a new Professor Layton game to play, and it’s hard to solve brain teasers and puzzles with a head full o’gunk.