This actually happened today

Today my mum answered a call from my dad on our HOUSE PHONE.  I didn’t see what happened, I could only hear what was said, but I imagine it to be something like this:

Knock Knock

How America was really founded

I am now home with my parents for the next few days and I suddenly got a nostalgia attack and went madly searching through all my old boxes and drawers for anything remotely interesting.  I was hoping to find the tale of Hassie Dombed (the girl who died because her insides were scrambled) or, perhaps, even, “Mouse Out”, which was a book I had written about a person-sized mouse that was scared of an ironing board, but what I actually found was something I have absolutely no memory writing at all. 

Perhaps we had just studied the founding of America in school, perhaps I was just writing it for fun, perhaps I somehow have inside knowledge of an early voyage to America and all historians should use this piece as a Primary source, but here is an (untitled) masterpiece which I will attempt to illustrate with pictures, although I fear that the 25-year-old me will barely be able to do the 8-year-old me justice. 

It was 1692 when they set off on a voyage to America.  On the ship was Captain Bob and the crew members, among them were Jim, Tom, Andy and James.  There was Captain Bob’s wife called Elizabeth and she was very beautiful, and of course there was a cook called Charlotte so they set off across the wide ocean towards America.  When they sighted land they got excited and they jumped up and down! Tom got so jumpy that he crashed through the boat! Everyone on the boat saw his head coming out of the water with a thumbs up, just his way of showing he was okay.  Just as he was about to climb onto land he saw a large bow and arrow pointing at him.  He was taken prisoner by the Indians and he turned and shrugged his sholders at them and Captain Bob got his gun and shot, but he missed and shot Tom’s leg! He was howling with pain and fell over and died.

         

          Captain Bob shot again, this time he hit the right spot right in the heart, blood was everywhere and guts and intestines were all over the ground because everyone was fighting. 

One arrow hit Andy in the sholder but he carried on fighting and became ill and died.  Now only James, Jim, and Captain Bob were still alive so Elizabeth and Charlotte started fighting aswell.  For women, they were very good fighters and they soon caught up and started winning, finaly the Indians surrendered and said they could have their land and went off in a sulk untill Jim got hold of them and said

“Why don’t we make peace or something?”

“Ok” said the Indians and they got their land back.

Captain Bob, Jim, etc. had to go back to England, they brought with them a great number of treasures and spices.  They were just about to go when the Indians stoped them-

“You have stolen some priceless articles!” The Indians said.  Then Captain Bob said

“Alright I will have your land back!”

Again they started to fight, blood was everywhere again.  Suddenly Captain Bob shot the leader of the Indian tribe, he fell to the ground with a cut on his cheek, the ground where he fell was stained with the colour red.

Captain Bob said “Why don’t we discuss this.” So they all sat in a circle and after a long silence Jim said “what was the priceless article then?”

“The diamond” said an Indian.  “It is very old and has been passed down the family since the time of William the first of England, it has been through many battles and bad weather, so it is very special to us.

“Very amusing story” said Captain Bob “But we need to get back to England.”

“You may take all the treasures you want” said the Indian, “but not the diamond.”

So the Indians bidded them goodbye, and they sailed across the wide ocean again towards England where they would take lots of treasure back to the Queen, then she would be very pleased with them and England would be a rich country.

THE END

These are my early thoughts:

1. “And of course there was a cook called Charlotte.”- well, blatantly! I can’t think other names a cook could have.

2. “But he carried on fighting and became ill and died.”- I’m not sure what I mean by this- perhaps his hay-fever was playing up.

3. "For women, they were very good fighters..."- I'm glad to see that I was always a feminist.  

3. It confuses me that they didn’t ask what the priceless article was BEFORE another fight with blood everywhere.

4. It’s even more baffling to me that the Native Americans would have had a diamond which they had treasured since the reign of William I of ENGLAND…what?!?

5. I was impressed that I knew there was a queen on the throne in 1692 (Mary II), but there was also a King (William III) who I neglected to mention…

On the whole I am actually quite pleased with it; especially the vividness of the fight scenes. What do you think? Should I abandon all other life plans and publish?

Art Galleries

Yesterday, Foofy and I went to the Louvre.  I have quite a sour relationship with art galleries; not because I hate art or anything, but because whenever I’m in one, the people with me like to stop and look at EVERY painting and take hours over each tiny thing they observe. 

I spoke too soon before actually, because, in some ways, I don’t like art at all.  It’s a bit unfair really, as some of the pictures and sculptures I saw yesterday were very pretty, but as a result of countless boring museum visits (where people also walk VERY SLOWLY), not doing well in my Art and Design GCSE, and getting my wallet stolen at the National Portrait Gallery, whenever someone tells me- “I really like art.” I kind of inwardly roll my eyes and sigh.  I know it’s not fair, but I do it all the same.

I enjoyed the Louvre because Foofy let me set the pace (he’s going to go back there by himself another day when he can get in for free) and I also had a good time in the Pompidou centre for a similar reason.  Before we went, Foofy and I had a 2-hour long fight about how rubbish some modern art is, I mean, pictures like this:

According to Foofy, they are actually a lot more complicated than I think, and it’s just that I don’t appreciate it, but, for me, that’s exactly where this kind of art fails.  I have great respect for people who study art as it’s something that I don’t understand and people who do understand must be somehow working on a different level to me, but even though it may have meaning to those who study it, I find that most modern art just makes me feel alienated.  When I see someone looking at a painting of a black square and nodding at it slowly while narrowing their eyes I don’t think they are cleverer than me for understanding something about the painting that I didn’t.  I just think they’re an arse.

Anyway, I was all ready to feel alienated and annoyed by the pictures at the Pompidou but my favourite picture in the whole place was one that was really simple; I stupidly didn’t take a photo of it but it looked like this:

There was something about the exact shade of blue and the fact that it was on a completely white wall that made it look like it was glowing.  It struck me as amazing that something so simple can appear to be magical when looked at in a certain way. 

The pictures in the Louvre were pretty much as I expected; my favourite exhibition was the Egyptian one, because they had little models of cats that had kittens:

I also made a discovery in the gift shop:

Some more tampons! Foofy and I have looked at the evidence and deduced that ‘tampon’ must mean ‘stamp’ in French, but it was surprisingly difficult to figure this out!

Painting is HARD

I don’t remember anything constructive from my childhood; they say that they are the happiest years of your life but all I can remember is PAIN.  I mean, it’s nothing compared to what happened to the boy in “A Child Called It” but I’m talking relatively here; all my childhood memories are of me getting into trouble, not understanding exactly why but feeling absolutely terrible about it all the same.  I’ll be sharing quite a lot of these stories with you, but the first I want to talk about was when I was six.  I know I was six because I remember my year 2 classroom quite well, and I was six for the entire time I was in year 2.

A group of about six of us had been instructed to paint a banner.  Despite remembering pretty much every detail about this story, I have no idea what the banner said on it, but, for the sake of argument, let’s say it said ‘PANDA’.  I’m sure it didn’t, but that was the first thing to pop into my head for some reason.  (It also just struck me that it might have been colouring pencils rather than paint but let’s not split hairs.)  Somebody in charge, our teacher probably, had lightly traced the lines of the block letters, and we had to fill it in with red paint.  Naturally, because we were six, we didn’t do the best job, and we ended up going over the lines a few times:

When the teacher saw what we had done, she was LIVID.  Does anyone else remember just how cruel and mean teachers used to be when we were tiny and couldn’t possibly have developed any kind of accurate moral belief system? We were just like the abused animals in one of my previous posts- when the teachers shouted at us for doing something morally neutral but otherwise sloppy, we would mis-understand their reaction and think we had actually done something wrong wrong.  Some children receive so much of this by being repeatedly lazy that they just learn to ignore it, but for me, who only got into this kind of trouble very, very rarely, all it did was confuse me and make me think I was a bad person.  I grew up a nervous wreck, and still feel incredibly guilty about a lot of stuff that I did when I was very small.

Anyway, the teacher was furious with us for being so sloppy with our work.  I remember suggesting that we start over, but she said something like-

“No, no, NO! You’re not starting again.  You’re all just going to have to find some way to fix this, or you’re all going to be in more trouble!!!!”

We stood there, looking at the apparently ruined banner, unable to think of any solution.  Then suddenly, much like it often happened to Leonardo de Vinci I imagine, I was hit with a genius idea that would solve the problem, and make the teacher like me again! We would draw NEW lines for the letters, making them thicker, meaning that we’d have another go at staying within the lines.  Everyone thought my idea was great, and we all got to work.  Carefully, we traced in new lines next to the old ones and filled them in, and the result was great:

I was very proud of myself, and though I didn’t know this at the time, I was on track to learn a perfect lesson, that we shouldn't dwell on the mistakes we make, but try to figure out how best we can fix them.  I didn’t, however, learn this lesson that day.  When the teacher came over, I was all ready to receive praise for my idea.  She took one look at the banner and what we’d done, and she said-

Nobody said anything, then this happened.

I was told that I should be ashamed of myself for single-handedly messing up the beautiful banner that everyone else had worked hard to create, and that I wasn’t ever to do anything so ridiculously stupid ever again.  To this day I still don’t understand what she was so cross about.

I feel sad now so I need to cheer myself up.  Here's a happy corkscrew:  

That's better.