they don’t love you like i love you.

this weekend i spent friday evening in glasgow at a rocket summer gig with my sister and two friends. when we entered the garage, where it was held; every single person was vaguely wearing the exact same thing as me, had the exact same hair as my friend, and were also there to see a band we love – but they all looked so hostile towards us! i felt like i was amongst my own people and yet was still out of place, or something.

that night we drove cross-country and pitched up at a holiday park near edinburgh at midnight, to share a caravan with the rest of my family. the next day we woke up early and all had breakfast together, then walked around the site in the sunshine and heat to the seaside and the swimming pool and to have a nose into all the caravans for sale. my gran and i danced to the music they were playing over the loudspeakers and we ate ice lollies. then, we drove into edinburgh and walked around the royal mile for a while and up to the castle. it was so, so hot. i have never been so hot here in scotland in my whole life. unbelievable. when all i wanted to do was stay the whole weekend with my family i got on the train and travelled back up to aberdeen, where with every mile it got less sunny and more hazy and my train table was swimming in red vodka and party poppers. then i worked for the rest of the weekend and was extremely lonely in my empty house with noone to speak to, apart from on sunday night when i went to my best friend’s house and learned to play poker.

ever since the hostileness of my glaswegian peers and the good times i had with my family i’ve felt torn between wondering if moving to glasgow really is the right choice or if i was stupid and rash and should have decided to stay here. in the face of thinking that my family would become down-heartened and torn apart after the death of my grandad bob they have instead become close-knit and more appreciative of the time they have together, spending more time with each other. and soon i won’t be a part of that any more. anyways, i go through phases of this thinking. but in the end i suppose that the main thing really is that i would like to have a fresh start and glasgow is the way forward. i always get these bouts of glumness in the holidays, which go away when we return to school .. apart from i’m never going to return to school so when will the glumness end?!

i finally put down the money for website hosting on monday, and after some soul-destroying international phonecalls to houston longlostpenpal.com is kind-of basically up and running. i’m currently having a nervous breakdown with css and headers and plug-ins and all kind of things. right now it seems that i either have a professional looking theme which is then harder for me to edit or a rubbishy looking one which i can change how i like because the coding is simpler. so anyways, just a heads up: after i’ve worked through this theme mine-field i’m going to try and import all this old blog content into the new one and re-direct the old address, but i’m not sure how this is going to work or even if it’s going to work so i guess it could get a bit messy.

today i had my first ever driving lesson, and it was very exciting because i actually managed to not stall the car and drive around a bit. not stalling the car is a feat in itself because when i tried to drive my mum’s car around an empty car park last week as practice i stalled it almost every single time i tried to get it going, and then when i did get it going i accidently went so fast that the car lurched forward and i braked so ferociously that tyre marks are now permanently burned into the kingswells park and ride car-park as a souvenir of my first foray into driving. let’s hope my lessons continue to go better than that ..

this summer i have a whole list of things that i want to accomplish, which i’m hoping to start off my first new exciting post on longlostpenpal.com with [you know, if i ever work through the horror that is css ..] and i’m hoping to do a lot of cooking and stuff, so hopefully i’ll be able to share that all with you.

what should i do with my hair?

i first dyed my hair red when i was 14, and it was red [or ginger ..] for two years. then i got fed up of it fading all the time and dyed it brown instead. i kept considering dying it back to red, but i made a new friend who had dyed her hair red and two fake gingers in a crowd is two fake gingers too many .. BUT now she’s dyed her hair brown again, so should i go back to my old colour, strip my hair and be natural, go crazy and dye it blonde, or keep it a streaky kind of brown?

here’s some pictures to help you decide ..

what do you think? please answer in the comments

i hear the thunder out in the distance.

today i relished having a free sunday because i don’t usually have one and work all weekend instead. i went out to a car-boot sale because my gran was selling all my grandad’s things and i desperately wanted to rescue some of his books. i could never even imagine selling any of his things at all, but luckily his books survived her unsentimental sweep and are still safely at home. his old typewriter is in the back of the car right now and it’s destined for my desk. instead i salvaged the secret garden video that we used to watch – it skips because it’s been played so many times. i also found this amazing stall selling old badges and got three mugs for £1.75. i love car boot sales - although when i think about them i get that same kind of itch you get when you think about nits, thinking about all the germs that could be hanging around on people’s old stuff!

when we got home i decided i would make some mango chicken for my lunch. i got a cookbook a few months ago to start working on my recipe skills before i go to uni, and so far i am happy to say that my attempts have turned out really well. i’m an exceptionally bad baker though, but i think i’m working towards shaking off that bad-cook reputation. i hunted for mango pulp for ages in the supermarket and now i finally have some it’s more than i know what to do with .. two batches of mango chicken for four people and it still isn’t finished.

after that i went to pick up my train ticket from the station, because next friday i’m going to glasgow to see the rocket summer [if the ash cloud actually lets them fly to the uk ..] and then doing a cross-country hop to stay in the caravan my family have hired near edinburgh because my uncle is running the marathon on saturday. i have to be back for work on saturday night though, hence the train ticket.

then i went to pick up my gran and to return my university library books to the university in old aberdeen. it was so beautiful, the sun was shining [for once .. it actually snowed on monday!] and the streets were cobbled and the houses so old. however, we walked past the building where my parents used to live and the paint was peeling, the door had no letterbox and someone had written the building number on it in lipstick .. so we tried the door handle. it opened. we tiptoed inside into the cool dimness and the peeling paint and went like spies up the stairs to look at their old flat. then we heard someone coming down the stairs so we had to slip back out the back door and hide in the garden. we laughed and hid amongst the weeds and dandelions and a cat looked out the window at us accusingly. then we went to visit the cathedral and an extremely enthusiastic man met us at the door and gave us a leaflet .. in dutch.

i got my accomodation for uni recently, it’s in student houses two minutes from campus. i’m happy with that – no rowdy student village in the middle of a really bad area for me, thank you. we can google street-view spy on it here and here. i’m not sure which street it will be on yet, but i’m hoping it’s hillhead.

* as an after-thought: i went to see kiss last weekend with my best friend alex and i like this picture. it looks like the kind of picture you would get on a xanga photo site and is a bit girls gone child-esque.

you’ll never know if you don’t know now.

on 5-5-10 my grandad bob died peacefully, with his family by his side. on sunday i went to visit him .. i hesitate in saying went to the funeral home. i was asked by my gran if i wanted to put something with him; i wrote him a letter and, however silly the reasoning, i put in my picture. i didn’t want him to be alone. i hated it there, it smelled like a library and i felt guilty for being scared. i told him i liked his tie and that i’d see him later. then i’d pre-arranged to catch the bus to glasgow with my friend to see kiss. but i was entirely freaked out, i couldn’t think of anything else. i think the reason i hated it so much was because it makes me feel better to imagine him floating around out there, somewhere, watching over us lovely-bones style; and seeing him there, so small and gone, made that harder for me to believe. i can’t listen to m79 by vampire weekend anymore, it reminds me of  the way he fought and how much we’ve lost and i break down when i hear it.

the funeral was tuesday and my gran asked me to make a speech. i was proud to stand with his brother and children and be the grandchildren contingent, to take the lectern and tell everyone about my grandad bob: of how we loved to read real-life mystery books, of how when we had sleepovers we would watch movies and he’d always tell us he liked them although we secretly knew he slept from the middle to the credits, how he would give us lifts everywhere, how we would walk the dogs together on the field in the wind and rain, and how every morning he would ask if we would like a buttery or a scone from the newsagent [buttery, always.]

i had never been to a funeral before, i had never seen so many members of my family break down. but, our grandad bob would not want us to be sad. and so i was not sad. whenever it was sad -and this is completely ridiculous- i sang “na na na i’m as tough as nails” to the tune of can you dance like a hippogriff? from harry potter and the goblet of fire in my head. i loved to hear the songs he liked, i loved hearing everyone’s stories of him as we took the lectern one by one. i just wish that he was still here to tell me them himself. ever since the funeral i’ve been listening to his big band music on repeat.

and so, we live. and our grandad bob would not want us to be sad so i am not sad. it aches, but i march on, in the hope that if he is out there somewhere he will be happy that the grandchildren contingent are living and making him proud .. i feel alone. i feel guilty that i haven’t finished my gryffindor scarf in time for him to see. i feel glad he’s not in pain anymore. i feel dread for the day when i’ll have lived longer without him than i have with him.