You know what? Wednesday, 4th November 2009

I should start writing blogs as soon as the things happen, it’s a pain doing them two weeks later. I’m not gonna bother with an NY one. If anyone’s desperate to know then ask me and I’ll do a special ramble just for you.

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…).

The October Gaitherin 2009 Sunday, 1st November 2009

First, if you don’t know what the Gaitherin is, here’s a description (if you do know you can skip this paragraph if you want). Basically, it’s a five day long music thing, you pick three instruments (or dance, voice or drama) and learn how to play them for a week and then at the end you do a concert. Mainly it’s based on Scottish music but dance is always hiphop, drums is usually African and electric guitar is always just rock music, with occasional random instruments added in. It sounds pretty shit but the focus really isn’t on the music at all, everyone that goes is a little bit insane and while there are a lot of really good musicians *cough*the Forsyths*cough* there are even more that are rubbish, like me. It is great fun, just impossible to describe.

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.

Tim Minchin: Ready For This? (12 October 2009 – Music Hall, Aberdeen) Thursday, 22nd October 2009

This was my first ever Tim show (and unfortunately the only one ‘til next tour) and I was not disappointed. Foolishly I’d listened to the album before I saw the show so I was quite worried that I wouldn’t find it as funny as I normally would but after about half a song I had face-ache from laughing so much, I clearly shouldn’t have doubted him. And almost all the talky bits were brand new to me, my favourites being the Greensleeves bit (especially when it reappeared in Dark Side) and the bit about Jesika. Sitting next to Katie made it all the more fun, that girl is insane . I am going to try my hardest to remain unspoilered next tour though.

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.

Busy busy busy… Thursday, 22nd October 2009

I keep having things to blog about and then not having the time to blog. I’m trying to catch up on the last 2 weeks. The Tim Minchin review/blog is written already and I still have the Gaitherin and New York to go. I’m not going any further back than that though. I can’t even remember most off the Gaitherin youth work training weekend thing in Aviemore except it was fucking freezing and sharing a whole house between me, Abi, Eilidh, Jean, Molly and Jackie (and Linda) was great fun.

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…

This week… Sunday, 30th August 2009

…has been quite eventful.

On Monday I was doing work experience at the hospital, which was actually quite fun and I’m certain now I want to do medicine. Although I don’t think I’ll specialise in radiology, I have no idea how they can diagnose anything from the scans. I was in the breast clinic in the morning and managed to get Confessions by Tim Minchin stuck in my head (if you haven’t heard it click here and listen to it, you’ll see how inappropriate it is once you get to the chorus). Then in the afternoon I was in the radiology department and I played hangman with one of the doctors (whose name I can’t remember which is pretty bad) and then outsmarted him when he told me that patients were the most important people who worked on a ward. Then I looked at some scans of brains and pretended I could tell the difference between tumours and the other black bits.

Tuesday was boring. I just got a lot of boob jokes, my friends are so mature . And Wednesday was boring until about 9pm when I suddenly got a boyfriend (well, it wasn’t that sudden, we’ve been flirting for months now, but it gave me a bit of a shock as anyone I was talking to at the time will know).  Thursday was taken up by people interrogating me about getting a boyfriend and Friday was taken up by us all being annoyed at Mr Travis yet again cause he made up a new prefect duty (reading the bulletin out at assemblies ) and instead of giving us all one commitee like we’d been told, we’ve all been given all three of our choices. So now I’m doing: book buddies, charities committee, helping out in younger ones classes (hopefully Miss Hay’s with Kimberley), organising evening events and gold Duke of Ed (from scratch cause I haven’t done bronze or silver). And then two advanced higher sciences with the joys of projects, higher physics, and trying to write a personal statement good enough to get me into medicine. Should be easy .

Today was fun too. Me, Mum and Abi went to the dog shelter in Aberdeen in the morning; then I went to the cinema with Finlay and saw Final Destination which is probably the single worst film I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s so bad it’s funny. And then I got home and my new netbook had arrived. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve nearly got used to the silly little keyboard too.