My last day at work was, in a word, bizarre. To use two words, totally bizarre.

It was the best day at work I’d ever had. I was still stuck in a UGC fleece because they didn’t have any UGC t-shirts to give me, and everyone was fussing over me because I was pretty much melting in the heat and trying to find me something else to wear. Everyone was kind to me, I didn’t do anything wrong the entire day, I got a free ice-cream from the ice-cream van…

Then, at the end of the day, the manager did a staff announcement for everyone to come to the reception desk. We all did…and I was presented with a card which everyone had signed saying good luck to me and wishing me well for the future. Then they all hugged me…and I left.

Why couldn’t they have shown that they appreciated me before? I may have stayed.

Well. Yesterday was my birthday. I still had to work, booooo, but there was the promise of a meal with my parents when I got back. I drove home, showered, got a fairly nice dress on (hey, I am 18!) grabbed my driver’s licence so I could buy my first legal drink, and jumped in the car with my parents.

I gabbled away on the way to the restaurant, excited because it was my birthday, excited because we were going for a meal at my favourite restaurant, just excited in general. I was so excited, in fact, that it wasn’t until Alice said “Hello, Ginny” that I snapped out of my dream and realised that she was coming out of a car towards me.

“Oh, wow!” I said, giggling. I really hadn’t expected Alice to be invited; the day before she’d said “See you Monday!” and I’d genuinely expected to have not seen her all weekend. It was lovely that she was there, and I was really surprised.

So imagine how surprised I was when I came in the restaurant and saw a table with my brother, his wife, and the family next door to us who we are ridiculously close to. Surprise party. Yay!

It was a great night. I had a big cake and bought my first legal drink and…just fantastic. Yay!

I stole this off Citronella. It’s a list of books that people put on their bookshelves more for show than because they’ve actually read them. I’m going to bold the ones I have read, italicise the ones I haven’t heard of, and I’ll make little notes under anything else. Onwards!

# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
# Anna Karenina
# Crime and Punishment
# Catch-22
# One Hundred Years of Solitude
# Wuthering Heights (Admittedly for college)
# The Silmarillion (I’m pretty sure this is one of the LOTR-ingy books. I couldn’t get through those, so I’m not going to try with this)
# Life of Pi : a novel
# The Name of the Rose
# Don Quixote
# Moby Dick
# Ulysses
# Madame Bovary
# The Odyssey
# Pride and Prejudice (Lovelovelovelovelove)
# Jane Eyre ‒ (Should have read it. Have it upstairs. May do after my exams)
# A Tale of Two Cities
# The Brothers Karamazov
# Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
# War and Peace
# Vanity Fair
# The Time Traveler’s Wife
# The Iliad
# Emma
# The Blind Assassin
# The Kite Runner
# Mrs. Dalloway
# Great Expectations (Studied the first few pages in depth for GCSE English…)
# American Gods
# A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
# Atlas Shrugged
# Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
# Memoirs of a Geisha
# Middlesex
# Quicksilver
# Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (It’s absolute shite)
# The Canterbury Tales
# The Historian : a novel
# A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
# Love in the Time of Cholera
# Brave New World
# The Fountainhead
# Foucault’s Pendulum
# Middlemarch (I really should read this one for reasons I can’t go into without compromising my anonymity_
# Frankenstein
# The Count of Monte Cristo
# Dracula
# A Clockwork Orange
# The Once and Future King
# The Grapes of Wrath
# The Poisonwood Bible
# 1984 (I LOVE that book so much)
# Angels & Demons
# The Inferno
# The Satanic Verses
# Sense and Sensibility
# The Picture of Dorian Gray
# Mansfield Park
# One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
# To the Lighthouse
# Tess of the D’Urbervilles
# Oliver Twist (Well…I started it…)
# Gulliver’s Travels
# Les Misérables
# The Corrections
# The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
# The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (His next novel, “A Spot of Bother”, is rather good too)
# Dune
# The Prince
# The Sound and the Fury
# Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
# The God of Small Things
# A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
# Cryptonomicon
# Neverwhere
# A Confederacy of Dunces
# A Short History of Nearly Everything
# Dubliners
# The Unbearable Lightness of Being
# Beloved
# Slaughterhouse-five
# The Scarlet Letter
# Eats, Shoots & Leaves
# The Mists of Avalon
# Oryx and Crake : a novel
# Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
# Cloud Atlas
# The Confusion
# Lolita
# Persuasion
# Northanger Abbey
# The Catcher in the Rye (I absoloutely HATE this book, and don’t understand the hype around it)
# On the Road
# The Hunchback of Notre Dame
# Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
# Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
# The Aeneid
# Watership Down (I must have been about five when I read this, and I cried my eyes out)
# Gravity’s Rainbow
# The Hobbit (Yes. Well. Started it…)
# In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
# White Teeth
# Treasure Island (I think so. I remember I had the book. If I did read it, it was a long time ago)
# David Copperfield
# The Three Musketeer

Wow. I need to read more

(Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…)

It’s my birthday tomorrow I’m not actually having a party for it - I’m going away with Alice and my parents and tomorrow I’m just having a meal with my parents - but I had a picnic today which was rather lovely

It was my favourite people from my French class who came. Oliver, the nice girl from my French class whose name by the way is Suzie, WGG and Alice. We sat in an abandoned classroom because it decided to rain when it had been sunny all week today and munched cake and sandwiches and other scrummy things lovingly prepared by Alice and I last night.

I do have some FANTASTIC friends. And hey, I’m going to be 18 tomorrow!

VERY excited!

As I said months ago, I’m doing a gap year after I finish my exams. Why am I doing this? Well…I don’t really know. Originally I loved the romanticism of finding a job in France, having my own tiny apartment, croissants on a balcony overlooking a town square and all the other silly things people think about when they dream about living in France. Eventually my dream-bubble popped, and I hit reality hard.

After that, it was because I wanted to spend a year with Alice. We were going to charge off into the unknown, become language assistants and have a great year together. But now she’s not going to France for her gap year, and I’ll be all alone.

For a while, it was going to be backpacking with Danny. I don’t think there’s anyone who’d say that that’s a good idea now.

Then I was going to work across different parts of France all year - grape picking in the summer, Chalet Maid over the Winter, Euro Disney for the rest of the year. But…well. I’d be doing that only because there was nothing else I could really think of to do. It was becoming ever more likely that I’d be spending my gap year hanging around until I could go to MyUni.

But not now.

Months ago, when I was pondering about doing a Gap Year, I went to a World Wide Volunteers meeting. Yesterday, the woman got back to me with pages and pages of places I could volunteer in France, Ireland and the UK. A few clicks later, and I found places that I could volunteer in all over the world.

So this is how I’m going to spend my gap year. Dotting around from once volunteering placement to the next. Working with pit ponies in Wales, dolphins in Scotland, disabled children in Ireland, homeless children in England, restoring old châteaus in France, working (maybe) with elephants and/or kids with HIV in Africa…

There are so many things I want to write about today, but I think my post would be over 10 thousand words long which no-one is going to sit through no matter how fantastically I write it.

And I’ve actually forgotten most of them anyway.

Do you ever get that? All day your mind is buzzing with something you really want to do but as soon as it comes to doing it…

Anyway. I’m in love with the summer sunshine at the moment. I’ve been sitting again outside on my Garden Swing, reading the notes for my French Oral test and enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin. I love the first few days of real sunshine in the year, when everyone sheds their clothes and revels in the warmth, the white skin being slowly turned to brown (or red in most cases of silly people at my college - my skin feels slightly tender, but I haven’t burnt)

What’s more, I came to a decision yesterday.

I’m leaving UGC.

Why? Because…well, I hate it. I’ve always hated it, actually, and I don’t want to do it any more. Why put myself through such hell every week for such measly pay? It’s honestly not worth it, and I don’t want to do it anymore. So I’m not going to.

I’m off to revise. Love you.

I’m having a Big Think at the moment, about many things but mainly about who I want to be.

You see, one of the big things Danny and I argued about during the worst bit of our break-up was me, and me changing. He accused me of going hack to a person I was a few months ago, before I started dealing with all the Robbie stuff. He accused me of being tougher than I usually was, and (paraphrasing here) of being less sensitive than before. Am I like this? I didn’t think so. Not in the way he was saying. I think that with him I was nasty and insensitive occasionally because I was so stressed with the whole break up, and I am very sorry for that. But in my day-to-day life? No, I didn’t think so.

But the conversation got me thinking about who I want to be, if I’m not like that. Not physically, but mentally…what do I want to be like?

I think I want to be sweet. I used to like being called sweet, although not cute. And I’d like to be clever and har working. I know I can be clever, because I used to be before my brain turned into mush as it has done these past few weeks, and I just need to put the effort into being hard working.

I don’t want to be a nasty person. I want to be nice to people. I think niceness is important. I also don’t want to be bitchy - it’s going to become one of my goals to stop saying nasty things about people. I already don’t spread rumours, but still, I can do more.

I want to be happy. One of the girls in my French class always has a big beaming smile on her face, and her most negative comment is “Ah, rubbish”. I kind of want to be like that. I want to be happy. Life isn’t all bad, and I think it’s time I started to appreciate the goodness.

But I don’t want to be all sweetness and light. I want to be able to stand up for myself too, and hold strong to my own beliefs and opinions. I don’t want to need protecting from everything and everyone, and I want respect. In fact, I demand it.

Sigh. I don’t know. I want to be happy, basically, but I’m finding that harder and harder with every passing day.

The exam went well, thanks for asking. Well. I say well, what I mean is that I didn’t curl up in a ball and start crying like I expected to so I’m pleased.

It’s been lovely and sunny all day today. I’m sure there are going to be posts like this on Blogs all across the world today, but I just wanted to tell you my personal experience of it.

I spent a good hour sitting on the grass outside my college with my friends, making daisy chains, doing a bit of revision, and feeling generally at peace with the world.

Now I’m sitting outside on our garden swing typing this, about to take the dogs for a walk, and when I come home I’m going to sit out in the sun and type up an essay.

This is what like should be like all the time.

Newton Faulker is great to listen to when you’re working.

…

I’m not putting off revision, honest.