I really am going to miss school. My year are amazing. The year below think we’re boring cause they have better parties than us but seriously, which other year could you walk into the social area and find someone walking about wearing a bin? I think that’s what I’ll miss most though. There are certain individuals I’ll miss, but it’s our year together that’s really special. We have bitchy ones and not every gets on, but in general we have a lot less drama than other years; and we are all a little bit insane which helps.

I’m worrying about leaving properly though. It just feels wrong that after being in school for basically my entire life so far, I’m suddenly not. I keep looking at everyone I know who’s older than me and reminding myself that they’ve all done it already, and there’s no reason why I can’t too. But I’m still a bit scared. I mean, I’m only 17. I’m not even old enough to vote yet but in a few months I’m going to be going on a gap year and travelling around the world by myself. And most of my friends are going to be moving out. We’re so not old enough for this! I knew these kids since they were 4!

It still hasn’t really hit me yet though, I’m finding this blog harder to write than normal just because it seems stupid writing about it now when I still have exams and prom and parties and duke of ed. Expect a longer, more nostalgic blog when it does hit me.

My long-term goals are quite predictable really:

• Be a (fucking awesome) doctor. I want to be able to know exactly what I’m talking about, and be able to just do it.
• Linked to that, I want to be more outgoing. I always try to put off phone calls, or get someone else to do it. By the 4th March 2020, I won’t have to do that. And I’m going to be less scared about going up to new people, especially boys.
• I want to actually cope with being independent too, although I’m managing to ease myself into that quite well with my gap year so I don’t think I’ll struggle as much as some people might.
• Finally, I want to think of other people a bit more and get better at taking their beliefs (and advice!) into consideration. I’m not exactly ego-centric, but I do have a habit of thinking I’m right when I’m often not.

More short-term things include:

• Find some more money for my gap year (and petrol, and the fringe, and everything else I have to pay for).
• Get my gap year website up and running and learn how to add in blogs and photo albums for me and Gemma.
• Get into uni (I realise the first goal is completely screwed if this doesn’t happen).
• Learn to drive, including steering properly.

I’ve already had quite a bit of progress on these. The website’s starting to come together, and I did a big sort out on Saturday of the little bits that had gone a bit wrong while making it, and I have pretty good ideas of how to do the blogs and photo albums. I got a car on Saturday too (it’s a silver Toyota Aygo ) so that’s coming along too, although steering might take a bit longer. Although, I think I am getting better. I just want my car to come so I can practice more!

Money-wise, I have a job now at the local science centre, so I get to be a geek, make volcanoes and stuff and make money. Brilliant.

The uni stuff isn’t going as well though. On Thursday (the day TYSIC officially started incidentally)  I got rejected from Edinburgh uni for medicine. I’ve moaned about it enough online already though so I won’t go into it. I was sad though, we’ll leave it at that.

As you might have guessed, I did not like this show. It was apparently popular around the ‘70s when it was written, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. The storyline is sketchy at best, the characters are all just clichés and the playwright doesn’t know the difference between vampires and zombies. I played one of the “Idiots”. We could have been called the villagers, but no. This is what I had to wear on stage, in front of people I know (I’m far left):

Enough said (and you can’t see the wellies…).

I stuck with the show though, mainly because it was my last one ever and show week is always a good laugh. Which it was, but I’ll get to that in a minute. If anyone’s ever been in a show though, they’ll know that the best feeling in the world is right at the end of a show, when you’ve just bowed and you’re smiling so much you’re actually laughing; not because anything’s particularly funny, but just because you’re so happy that smiling isn’t enough. On the Friday night show (we did Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. There was meant to be a Saturday matinee too but it got cancelled because we didn’t sell any tickets. ) I nearly got that feeling, but never properly. Not including Passion (one of the church ones – written by a local playwright, generally a bit rubbish), that’s the first show I’ve been in that I’ve never got that feeling. Bad times.

Backstage was brilliant fun though, as it always is. As you can see these fun times included phone faces, making Helen into Zombie Britney (the uneven bunches are because she’s ridiculously tall and we couldn’t reach properly) and eating deformed Dolly Mixtures amongst many, many other sweets. And giving the girl I still know as Short Hair Nose (there’s a reason, but I’ll leave you to come up with a more interesting one yourself) a zig-zag parting.

We actually had a bit of a ‘90s revival this show, as well as the Zombie Britney and zig-zag partings, the dance to 5, 6, 7, 8 by Steps played a very big part in backstage fun. A very big part. I really wish I had a picture of the entire cast doing it at the after show party, I nearly killed the guy who switched it off half way through.

Speaking of the after show party, I wasn’t really there. Our little group (except Murray ) all went for a Chinese and some wine for the older ones and then went back for the last half hour. I wish we’d started to do that years ago, the after show parties are normally dire (all the little ones just get hyper on fruit shoots and left over ice cream, it’s not fun).

We went out again, with Murray this time, the Tuesday after and it really made me realise how much I actually will miss GYMS, and especially our ridiculously stupid break time chats. And all the stupid backstage banter, and competitive “Where’s Wally?” with Katie, and the million games of “Bang!” we play a year, and my head being permanently stuck with random songs from musicals… Maybe not the last two so much. Saying that, I won’t miss being treated like a primary school kid all the time, or the fact that they haven’t chosen a well known show for years, and there are definitely certain members (and ex-members)  that I’m quite happy about being out of my life now.

I will miss it though. I’ve known some of the GYMS people longer than I’ve known most of my best friends, and it will be really weird not seeing them every week anymore.

Anyway, here’s a list of thank yous for making this year great.

• My lovely group of insane friends for entertaining me and generally being proper idiots all the time in the loveliest possible way.
• The other group of nutters for making school even more fun (and giving me somewhere to run away to in times of need).
• And the rest of sixth year, I’m really going to miss you all when we leave.
• The Gaitherin folk, I genuinely miss the Gaitherin already. I can’t believe 8 years as a participant is over.
• And the GYMS lot. I don’t think it’s much of a secret now that I’m only at GYMS for the people, God knows the shows aren’t up to much any more (Dracula Spectacular? Honestly, I don’t think they even read the scripts before they chose it). But I already know I’m gonna be gutted next summer when I leave.
• The Boosh forum pals (including the lot I still speak to on msn but don’t go on the forum any more). I don’t know what I’d do without you guys. Getting all your cards was the highlight of December for me, you’re all wonderful people and I really hope I get to meet more of you this year. Especially Gem, we have absolutely no excuse!
• I have to give a special mention to Em, the big stinker. None of my real life friends would get half the stuff that pops into my head so it’s very nice having someone I can text all that rubbish too who understands it and won’t try and argue about alternative medicine with me.
• The Angry (Feet)ers too. I might not be as close to you as the other forum lot, but you’ve introduced me to so many things I wouldn’t have found on my own (countless comedians, twitter (well, that was nearly all you), skepticism, figuring out that I really hate when people misuse evidence…). Extra mentions for #TeamTiernan, for being lovely when in Edinburgh, and the Precious Little Podophiles (who are basically the same people), for giving me lots of laughs, hopefully next year I’ll be able to start joining in the listening parties…
• And the rest of the twitter people who I haven’t already mentioned, I don’t think there’s many though. I really don’t know what I’d do without twitter now, I think I get more news from there than the paper!

I’m very sorry if there’s anyone that didn’t fit into that somewhere you’re obviously not very important I love you anyway though!

I hope you all have great 2010s and don’t feel too guilty when you give up your resolutions in a week (which is why I only make stupid ones now that I don’t really care about).

Unusually, this was the only Scottish show of the tour so there were a lot of non-locals there, mainly Glaswegians. Although, before the show had started I did see at least 10 people I knew from my seat and I’m guessing there were a fair few more. It was nice being able to catch up with people though (there were quite a few I haven’t seen for a while) since the doors opened at 6.30, we arrived at 6.45 and the support act didn’t come on ‘til nearly 8.00! They had music videos and a couple of short films on the screens at the sides though so it wasn’t too boring.

The support act was Steve Hall who was pretty good. I think any comedian who starts a set by asking everyone to shout out their favourite swear word (cunt had an overwhelmingly majority) will always be popular in Aberdeen. To be honest, so many weird things happened at the end of Russell’s set (I’ll get to them later) that I can’t actually remember much of Steve’s set. I did enjoy it though. I was a bit worried about if stand-up would really work in the AECC since it is a massive venue and the only comedy show I’ve ever seen there was the Boosh, and that was more theatre than anything to be honest. And a little bit embarrassing in hindsight…

Russell was brilliant. I’ve only ever seen clips of his stand up and then Mock the Week and Good News but he really is so much better live. He managed a pretty awesome impression of an Aberdonian cab driver (I’ve lived here for 12 and a half years and I can’t do an accent that good) to start with and the set was brilliant. At one point he started telling us a story then realised what the end was and told us that he couldn’t finish it. Thankfully we got it out of him before I went insane (he threw up the first time he went down on a girl if you’re interested). The crowd was pretty good though so apart from a few screams there weren’t many heckles and nothing really went wrong.

The fun really started when he came back on after his set to do a Q&A session though.

There was one guy a couple of rows behind me who was intent on asking Russell for a snowball fight, but he was too far back for Russell to hear. Then someone else near him asked Russell to sign his programme but before he could answer a girl just behind him yelled “Do you want to suck my bum?”. Funnily enough that shocked Russell a bit so she got some attention instead of programme man. Programme man did not like this. The next thing we knew programme man had walked up to the stage and suddenly Russell looked down and said “hello there” and then invited him up.

Off-mic he said to Russell “there’s a lot of ugly cunts down there” which made Russell laugh a lot and then repeated it to us. Then Cuntman (as he became known) asked Russell again if he could sign the programme. Russell said yes, then asked if he had a pen but Cuntman didn’t so they both just stood there and laughed while Steve ran on with a pen, waved, and ran off again. They stood and chatted for a bit and Russ made a comment about Cuntman having tourettes, at which point he unzipped his shell suit (not kidding) and showed us all a t-shirt saying “I don’t have tourettes, I’m just a cunt” (hence the name).

Unfortunately after Cuntman left the stage half the audience decided they wanted to go up too but none of them were very interesting. One girl did go up just to flatten down a bit of hair that was sticking up and annoying her. I liked that, it was annoying me too.

Until about two weeks ago all my money was in my current account but since I do have the ability to spend money without realising I phoned up the bank and got them to set up an ISA for me to save up in. It all went fine and I moved most of my money into my ISA and left about £130 in my current account for Christmas shopping and anything else I needed to buy.

All going fine until today. I was ordering a bit of Christmas shopping off the Tesco Direct site (which is a rant in itself, why can’t they put that stuff in the store too?) and you have to do a verification thing if you’re using a Visa card, but over the last few days my mum and Granddad had both had to ring up the bank to get through it, so I wasn’t overly surprised when it wouldn’t accept me either, although slightly annoyed. So I rang up the bank again and told them I was having problems with it and the lady on the phone took my details and then told me I had 69p in my bank account. Now, I’ve spent around £30 since I made my ISA, and for once, I’m certain I haven’t spent any more without realising, so naturally I was a bit confused and she went through my last months transactions and there was nothing weird, but I just told her I’d go and check myself online and try and figure it out and then call back.

I tootled off to the internet banking page and logged in, only to get stumped by the “Memorable Information” section. Apparently I hadn’t made it memorable enough. So then I went through and made up a new one which I should remember. And then it told me to ring them up to verify it. So I rang them up again and finally got through.

Sure enough, my current account had 69p in it, and my ISA had all the money I’d transferred in. I went to check my statement for my current account to find that when I’d set up my ISA two weeks ago, the man setting it up had told me I had £100 more than I really did in my account, so instead of leaving myself £130 for Christmas shopping, I only had £30 left. Now, I know I only had 6 presents to buy this year, but £30 really isn’t enough, especially since I’ve already spent it all.

So now I have to buy my two last presents on the £40 Mum owes me, and hope all my extended family just give me money for Christmas. I do realise I could take money out of my ISA, but at the minute I can just about afford either the Fringe or T in the Park (thank god camping won’t cost much) so I don’t want to be making the fund smaller already.

I have quite a lot to blog about at the minute, but no time to do it. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up at the weekend. I always get stupidly busy right before the holidays.

I have decided pirouettes are evil (especially since I can’t spell it). I’d just about  figured out how to do singles and now I have to learn to do doubles. And then make my legs go wobbly. And then the next thing we do is mental. So basically I keep feeling like my legs can’t quite hold me up.

Ooh, buzzcocks time. I can’t wait for next week. Tim Minchin & Mark Watson in the same episode (and I guess I should be happy about Noel Fielding too…).

Despite the fact the Gaitherin is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world I didn’t really want to go this year since it was my last ever one as a participant, and while I love youth working there too it’s just not the same, and I couldn’t bear the thought of never having another one. I was a bit worried it wouldn’t be as good as normal cause until 2 weeks before only 30-odd people had registered which is about half what we normally have. Like normal though, I was worrying about nothing. The Gaitherin was brilliant as normal and we 50-something people in the end. The only bad thing was how many regulars weren’t there. A lot of the 6th years from Huntly weren’t there and a few of the youth workers that have been there since I started couldn’t make it either. And Declan wasn’t there and he’s gorgeous and we missed him. The replacement clarsach tutors were great fun though, but just not the same (although I don’t know how well we would have coped with Declan there ). (For those who don’t know, a clarsach is a Scottish harp). And for some reason we didn’t seem to do a lot of the things we normally do. I only played one card game and it wasn’t even spoons, and we had a very half-hearted game of hide & seek/sardines but it was rubbish compared to normal.

Monday morning is always nice since I only see most people at Gaitherin things (although we’ve had more than usual this year and I had actually seen 6 of them the week before at the Aviemore thing). I had the added fun of trying to introduce Kimberley to everyone as well which was a bit mental, she was only there for the Monday though since she got ill ( ) and couldn’t come for the rest of the week. Monday’s never the best day since the Gaitherin only really starts once you’ve got to SAGs (Sir Arthur Grant’s Centre, the place we stay over night) but it was made a lot better by the fact every so often me, Abi and Ally would catch each other’s eyes and get excited about going to see a certain Australian piano-playing musical comedian that night. That did mean that I wasn’t staying residential until Tuesday night though so I spent the first two days being a bit sad that my last Gaitherin wasn’t as good as normal. Tuesday night was brilliant though, the girls spent roughly 3 hours getting ready and I don’t think anyone wore what they originally planned, or if they did they’d got changed once and changed back. 12 girls getting ready together is always fun. Then we all got onto the minibus and drove to Kemnay (and did some singing as is customary) for the Tutors’ Concert/Ceilidh; the highlight definitely being all the tutors swapping instruments and playing Valerie, including a rap section by MC, I wish I had a video of it. Then we got back to SAGs and everyone got into their pyjamas before having hot chocolate and toast and singing Michael Jackson songs. That was when it really started feeling like the Gaitherin.

I’m trying to remember all the other amazing bits, a lot of them seem to be from dance. The dinosaur impressions were great fun (especially when MC did it!), Bridget’s ballet was…interesting and Rosie is magic and can fly but wouldn’t teach me how (I know, so rude). And we had a little family. Me and Rosie did make pretty awesome keyrings for each other though. She has also be informed that at some point in her life she has to at least go out with someone called Jim, and ideally marry them. Oh, and we won the dance off!

We broke SAGs this year though. On Wednesday night Molly kicked a hole in the wall and between then and Thursday morning Max managed to break the sink off the wall in the boys shower room. Hopefully we’ll be allowed back next time.

However, the complete highlight of the entire week was all the fun the last-year people got up to. There were 8 of us staying residential and on Thursday evening we were all told by Liam that we were having a meeting in his new office which was the drying room, also known as the sauna (his old one was the shower room but after Max that was out of the question, and me and Jean didn’t want to go in the stinky boy room again anyway), after lights out. Then we remembered that we got to stay up later on our last night so after sitting round talking rubbish with the youth workers for a bit and laughing at Chemo trying to moon us through the window when he and Liam were out having their bedtime bine (again, bine = cigarette), even though his ass didn’t reach the window even when he jumped up, we made our way to the sauna with Gregor (the only youth worker who was in on the plan) to arrange what we were doing the next day. Then we went back to our dorms and me and Jean denied the existence of any pranks and we all got into Bridget’s bed for a girly chat about Gaitherin crushes and then we made shadow puppets. And Jean did a remix of Callum Forsyth. Funniest. Thing. Ever.

The next morning Jean set an alarm for 6.30 with her phone on vibrate, then woke me up so we could both sneak out. When we got to the living room the boys had nearly finished though (we were told to meet there at 6.30 but they started at like 6 ) so we stayed to chat for a bit then went back to bed. But they’d hung duct tape from the door frames, turned all the chairs into a maze, written “Last year 10000 ninja points ” on the tables in duct tape and, for the piece de résistance, got James on the breakfast bar, duct-taped him to it and then put his duvet and pillow on it and he pretended he didn’t know how he got there.

Friday was fun, but really sad. First near-cry of the day was sitting in the living room before we got on the bus thinking it could be the last time I was ever there (not by choice, but I don’t think they’ll appreciate the hole in the wall). Then on the bus someone said the boys thought we’d rated them all the night before so we made a list and rated them all on punchability, smelliness and marriage material (Mikey won mainly since if you married him you’d be a Massie and have Jackie and Tiggy for your sisters). Then the day basically went between me nearly crying about it being my last year and us all being stupid (I especially enjoyed getting Caitlin to wheel me through second choice dance on the trolley after I’d had to carry the clarsach the entire length of the school). I did manage to not cry at all until after the concert though, and then me and Jean both just broke down while all the boys acted as if we were idiots and said things like “But we can still help out”. Boys, honestly.

Oops, this is quite long. I’ll bullet point the bits I’ve left out…

-We spent pretty much all week singing the songs from third choice voice. To the point where every girl staying residential knew them, whether they did voice or not.
-No one who did 3rd choice voice can sing Help by the Beatles any more, we just sing the backing part.
-Jean can be a little bit scary when she sings vocal warm-ups seductively, although it is very funny.
-Elio shouldn’t be allowed to sing songs about growing up on the last day of my last Gaitherin, I only just didn’t cry at it.
-If Pablo wasn’t 13 I think every girl at the Gaitherin would have been in love with him. And I know someone called Pablo now!
-On the subject of Pablo, one of my favourite bits of the Gaitherin was waiting to go into the hall for the concert Pablo folded up his chewing gum wrapper really neatly and gave it to Jean, who unfolded it really carefully and said “Aww, there’s no declaration of undying love or anything on here”. So we gave it back to Pablo with a pen and he drew a heart on it and folded it back up.
-See, don’t you love him? Although apparently he “brings out the awkward” in Jean. She told him she was “master of sandwiches” . I do love Jean.
-We all have a new motto too, No Folky Boys.

I won’t go through every single song since they were all great and it was very nice to hear them with just Tim rather than the whole band versions on the CD (although I do think I prefer the band version of Phil Daoust and I can’t decide which version of Storm I prefer). There were some great ad-libs in the show too, like in Dark Side when Tim pretended to cry and someone yelled “I love you Tim!” and he sniffed “Thanks, I feel better now” and continued the song. There were some nice jokes about Aberdeen too, like when he introduced Storm as “a nice light-hearted number for the teenagers. This is a 9-minute beat poem about rational thinking” when the entire audience cheered and he replied with “Wow, who’d have thought it? Aberdeen’s full of nerds. It’s like coming home.” *more cheers* “And finding your house full of nerds”. Tim also adopted a teenage girl in the front row called Rebecca (she said she was 16 but Tim didn’t believe her) and kept giving her advice cause he would think of it as “a personal failure if you turn out to be a screw-up”.  Craig-Bear was great too, mainly because he had absolutely no idea what was going on; his face when he realised he had to dance in a bear costume was priceless. And the “big paws” joke took way too long to get to do Tim actually had to tell us we were working up to a joke so we didn’t think he was just taking too long speaking to Craig (he finally got stumped on “What is the fourth digit of pi?”).

A personal highlight was at the beginning of I Love Jesus. Tim had played the guitar part a couple of times and then paused so Katie jokingly cheered as if he’d finished and he started to walk off, then turned round and shouted “Shut up!” as her. I don’t think anyone’s ever been so excited about being told to shut up before.

After the show we waited outside (in the rain) to meet Tim. Being the lovely man he is we weren’t waiting for long and they opened up a little lobby-type room so we could get pictures in the light/dry. Me, Katie and Abi made friends with the two girls standing behind us and I have to admit the Angry (Feet)er in me cringed a bit when all four of them screamed when he came out. Or when Katie leapt on him. He was very lovely though and put up with Katie’s craziness. He seemed to really like our bags too (we got them off the internet). And when Katie congratulated him on Caspar he went into Dad-mode and it was so cute. Although I’m a bit worried that he made it sound like Caspar is a massive version of Tim.

We all got pictures too. Look…

That was the second attempt. He ruined the first one by speaking. He is a truly lovely man though, and it was a great night.

I’ve applied for uni now too (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Leeds and Dundee for medicine and Medicinal and Biological Chemistry at Edinburgh for my back-up). And I didn’t totally fail my UKCAT test, I actually did quite well in the end. I know I’m a skeptic but I really do think the only plausible explanation is magic, I was rubbish at the questions every time I tried them until I actually did it.

Ok, interesting blogs coming up…