Blue Garden + Red Sunburn = Her Periwinkle Majesty

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Sorry about the delay, but you must understand how difficult it is to write when I can barely see through the sheer amount of freckles I've acquired in the past two days. While everyone else frantically revises for first year exams (which start tomorrow. In less than 24 hours my nails will be chewed down to the quick from analysing a poem for English for two hours, but I will also be on my way to Stratford so it balances out really) in stifling carrel units and musty quiet room, habia descubierto el Jardin Azul , that is to say I have discovered the Blue Garden, where I have been absorbing enough Vitamin D for all the inhabitants of Slovakia and setting all my Spanish verb tenses to songs for the past two days. I'm so surprised that it never actually occurs to anyone to study outside on a day like today, when it's so clear and bright that everything looks like it was outlined by a divine Sharpie;if I confined myself indoors, there's no way I could face polynomials. In order to reward myself, I just fall asleep for half an hour, or ride to Llantwit on my little periwinkle bicycle. Wait, go back to that personal pronoun for a second...'my' bicycle? 'My' endearing (because it's not necessarily 'nice' or 'fully functioning') little three-gear machine, which I espied glinting in the afternoon sun outside the missionary charity shop for 12 quid including the air pump? I rode into Llantwit on Lydia's bike, expecting to buy only milk and not the periwinkle fulfilment of all of my subconscious desires, so I had to search all the supermarkets for someone from AC to ride Lydia's fantastic grey ten-speed back to college. I arrived back puffing from the effort of going up the last hill with a completely flat front tire, but contented, until just as I was parking it in its new special place in the Morgannwg bike garage Haider came speeding down the hill toward me shouting "EMMA! YOU'RE LATE!" I had been so sure I would forget that 3:00 student newspaper interview with my English teacher Lydia that I had written it in black capitals on my arm, an even more obvious place than my reliable hand (where I usually have maths formulas almost tattooed into my skin). However, Her Periwinkle Majesty served me well as I arrived gasping at Lydia's house at 3:15 greeted by a picnic blanket, four cups of tea, a plate of fudge, and my barefoot English teacher. Little did I know that I had just arrived at what would be the four-hour Wimbledon of verbal tennis matches. Once we turned the camera off, it was easily the most intelligent conversation I have ever had/witnessed/attempted to participate in in my entire life; there were so many times I just wanted to scream "Wait a second... oh my GOD! You just, like, totally quoted Albert Camus!" and tried to keep the look of awe and total regeneration of faith in humanity off my face. We all missed dinner, understandably. Those four hours just felt so incredibly real, so true, so completely transcendent of everything outside the picnic blanket and the four cups of long-finished milky tea, even in this place which is already pretty much transcended anyway. I was curiously hungry afterwards, as if my cerebellum had just run 20 miles. Since I had a whole carton of eggs about to expire, Rosh and I made omelettes, which are worth mentioning on the world wide web if only because they were so fantastically good, with a pepper I acquired from the reduced produce at Filco and spinach from the school greenhouse. It was clear enough to see the houses in Bristol illuminated by the rosy glow of the sunset, I realised (with my own sunburned rosy glow, wearing beautiful tortoiseshell aviator sunglasses that I found in the Languages department when my Spanish class was moved upstairs) that I had actually just experienced a perfect day. Naturally, I decided not to ruin the encapsulated memory of it all by moving on to Unit 3 in my Chemistry IB study guide. I firmly believe that watching all three Back To The Future movies back-to-back was a far better use of my time. Now it's time to slather one quarter of my face with sunscreen, put on my sunglasses which are ludicrously huge enough to cover up the rest, and tackle differentiation in the Blue Garden. Which is the only garden that's completely removed from the wind, has a big stone shelter from the rain, and a socket for my laptop, i.e. I might actually live there for the next 12 hours. I am an absolute genius at finding locations to revise in, but not at actually revising. I could also procrastinate by packing my bag for Stratford, however. Oh dear, it's one of these arguments of conscience again. To be continued...

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