After two weeks of waking up before the sun to carry sloshing 18-litre buckets of water on our heads to fill the big blue water bucket, after calluses and blood blisters and even a scorpion bite incurred as what was an empty field in the Shamba countryside became a building, Zanzibar was what most would dfine as paradise - pristine white beaches and clear turquoise ocean, groves of palm trees waving in the spice-scented breeze, coffee, and flush toilets. I spent every day wondering how the next thing on the schedule could possibly be more luxurious or fascinating or delicious than [View Full Entry]

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"A face without freckles is like a sky without stars", or so Dietrich insisted was an ancient Tanzanian proverb. However, it took me about ten minutes to understand what he was saying because in Swahili-accented English 'freckles' sounds like 'flackoes'; this is the reason why we are asked if we would be interested in joining in with the players at church, or whether we would like more beans with our sticky lice. There was no shortage of flackoes, with my days spent honing a previously dormant talent for mixing cement and -during the afternoon break - committing unspeakable acoustic crimes on [View Full Entry]

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Outside in the courtyard of the orphanage, Vikta is wearing my sunglasses, and Sandi keeps wandering into the room forlornly because he wants his "sister" - after two days and a very long evening walk to the fruit market, this is his preferred name for me - to come out and play again. This might just be impossible as I am actually melting into the leather chair I'm typing from. Nothing could have prepared me for the brightness of the sun, the astounding vividness of everything, from the colour-coded city buses decorated with sparkling decals of the driver's favourite football team [View Full Entry]

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Unfortunately the only reason I have time to write this now is because I can't physically sleep, not through an entire night anyway. Every time my head hits the pillow my eye falls on the Spanish subjunctive review and the Ted Hughes quotes I have stuck to my ceiling (which, I guess, was the entire point of sticking them to the ceiling), and out of that follows an frantic mental review of operatic terms. Suddenly, my mind is whirring so incessantly that sometimes I even have to start reading my Chemistry textbook in order to get myself to fall asleep. I [View Full Entry]

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I guess I just have to keep digging; once I've shoveled myself in deep enough that I'm not able to see the sky anymore, I will become productively unaware that the balmy spring air even exists outside of my underground burrow of irregular Spanish verb tenses and bond combustion enthalpies. Unfortunately, at the moment I'm at the point where I can still kick the dirty revision from around my ankles and escape - to a jazz band concert, to a feast of a weekend in Porthcawl, to the Brecon Beacons - with puny soil clumps of the little knowledge I haveabsorbed [View Full Entry]

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I feel like I should write quickly, before something goes wrong. Among the hailstones pelting campus yesterday, the only one which could be large enough to pop my constantly-inflating helium balloon of blissful perfection is the IB itself, which I consider more of an inevitable fiery meteor now than a hailstone anyway. After the week and a half that I spent actually living (as in, eating in the practice rooms and sleeping on the white leather couch) in the upstairs of the music department, the frantic hair-tearing night I typed the final full stop at the end of my conclusion in [View Full Entry]

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I cannot be effusive enough about Madrid. If you asked someone for directions in London, they'd most likely look down their nose flipping their artistically choppy fringe and whine "you just don't know the city, do you?" In New York, they would debilitate you with their hand-held Taser before you reached the end of the question. In Madrid, the person you asked for directions will then ask you where you're from and what football team you like, leaving with just a chuckled "de nada" after walking half a mile through the city with you and your friends to the exact address [View Full Entry]

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I wonder, what is the exchange rate is between pounds and absolute shameless face-burning self-embarrassment these days? Because sometimes I feel like I'm losing a lot more than the £2.50 I gain for the Tanzania Summer Project whenever I burst into the dining hall with my red accordion to deliver someone a serenade. The ones I write myself are getting a lot more popular now, after the illustrious world premiere of 'The Communist Lullaby' in Kate Vincze's D-code European History class yesterday at 8:15 in the morning: Mao puts me to sleep at night Come on, Trotsky, hold me tight Stroking [View Full Entry]

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The past three weeks of my life experience can be summed up best in a series of meals and clothes, by which I mean that the main incentive for most of it has been either a meal or clothing. Yesterday, the unidentified pale yellow plane-food goo of dinner was the most beautiful thing in the world. I wasn't actually looking at it, I was savouring the buzz of anticipation as I watched people at every table fight for a copy of the 15-page newspaper I singlehandedly published yesterday covering the Model UN Conference. It was me versus Microsoft Publisher, grating the [View Full Entry]

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Because I just figured that "Yes, fully" was not necessarily the right box to tick, when asked on the casting form "Would you be willing to appear nude in this film?" I've got to admit I'm really looking forward to sending all my teachers the e-mail 'I'm sorry, but I won't be able to attend classes this Thursday because I will be appearing in Mr. Nice'; they're recreating Oxford here for the next week or so, and there might be more than the usual five people showing up to breakfast on Monday morning because Rhys Ifans is staying in the castle. [View Full Entry]

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