If I Stopped Writing The Gossip Column AND The Travel Blog Then I Would Have Two EEs Finished By Now

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Only when the latest issue of INK came out on Monday did I realise how much power I - as the illustrious and salacious gossip columnist - wield at this school. I planned to reveal nothing, but I would make a terrible secret agent because all it really took was Ollie and Simon pinning me down on the Morgannwg dayroom couch and mercilessly tickling my feet. It is my well-known sole weakness (literally), that and a totally irrational and constantly mocked fear of spiders. One would think that the arachnid breeding initiative that is the CAVRA hut would be the best sort of shock therapy for the latter, but whenever we have to clean up the hut I always end up sprinting away screaming up the hill about fifteen minutes later with Arash or Ramzi dangling a daddy longlegs from a broom laughing maniacally behind me. Then I delegate myself to sweep up a bit outside, away from the stuff of my (musical) nightmares. Everyone still marvels a bit at the fact that I'm in CAVRA in the first place, with my penchant for neon bright skirts and, you know, being clean. I have to admit that when we're not actually ambling along the cliffs above the smooth grey stone beaches on the first legitimately balmy day we've had all month, my service is as soporific as watching the PGA Masters Tour on a Sunday afternoon. For two days this past week we've been helping school groups on the climbing wall, which perhaps would've been fun if I hadn't had to stay for four hours instead of just one two-hour shift (I'm a girl. Only big girls can put harnesses on little girls. Adrienne's excuse for getting out of the second shift was a lot better than mine, and I believe she OWES me), coaxing terrified eight-year-olds down from the science block roof. Granted, if I was nine years younger and some teenager I barely knew instructed me to "Just lean backwards off the ledge and let go of the climbing wall. It's perfectly safe. I'm holding you up by this one little rope, see?" I would refuse too. Besides, they did get some nice footage of us for the year video, footage which makes CAVRA look like it actually does do some community work. I never said I had a problem with sessions like today's, where we packed the bags quickly, ate out salt and vinegar crisps and chocolate bourbon biscuits, and left within half an hour. It allowed me more time to write the song I'm singing when Geoffrey Neuss' W-Code chemistry class arrives unexpectedly at 8:30 tonight in the Tythe Barn at his going-away party in green rubber aprons and safety goggles stolen from the lab. In the dramatic final repetition of the chorus I have rhymed 'one more evaluation' with 'data extrapolation'. Now if only I could submit THIS one to the IB. I'd get full marks for my bridge 'When I walked into class I said 'Hey everybody, let's look'/ I'm learning about acids from the guy who wrote the textbook/ It was like a foreign language that we couldn't translate/ But now we know the formula for calcium carbonate'. Although I don't actually know the formula for calcium carbonate...but it is NOT the time to question my priorities thanks very much. As a result of double codes of politics and maths, I've been on a bit of a creative song/college musical-writing spree. Perhaps it was seeing the Globe Theater traveling production of A Winter's Tale on top lawn at (what would have been, if it hadn't been drizzling) sunset which prompted the squeezing of my creative juices; I have decided that I want to be Perdita, who has the most heartbreakingly romantic speeches delivered to her in the second act by the shepherd (who in true Shakespearean style is actually Prince Florizel, disguised!) desperately in love with her. I believe I actually may have audibly said "ahhh" at some point, when Rosh nudged me and told me to stop looking all moony-eyed. As if I need anything to raise my romantic standards even more, you know. Although there are many perks to being the only writer of the gossip column, the best - aside from the fact that the gossip column is often the first and sometimes the only thing anybody ever reads - is that I never have to put myself in...

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