Sweet Sixteen

That's how old I am, as of 10:06pm yesterday.
Wow. I'm O.L.D
But, I had a lovely day, especially after all the excitement of my results. I even got cake for breakfast, although it was my Dad's leftover birthday cake (as his is on the 26th - bit stressfull for my mom that we're so close together). I'm getting my amazing cake at my birthday meal. I will post pictures.
I woke up to balloons and banners and general excitement, and I got:
A beautifull silver locket which is very Victorian.
Various books and CD's
The DVD boxset of Party Animals (yay!)
Some Clothes
Pretty dreamcatcher earrings made by Native Americans
and...
Pride and Predjudice and Zombies from my best friend Alice, who knows how much I hate Jane Austen. Can't wait to get stuck in!

During the day I went shopping, and bought the dress I've been lusting after for months in Warehouse. It's gold and silk and has a taffetta underskirt and makes me feel like a 1950's debutante. Ohhhh, it's so beautiful, and now I own it!!! I'm wearing to my meal on Sunday!

Sayonara!

Results!

I've got my GCSE results!
Thought I was going to vomit this morning, but then I went up to school and discovered I had got:
A* English Lit (So, so happy)
A* English Lang (So, SO Happy)
A* History
A Science ( I didn't do a scrap of work in scienece all year, and crammed teh night before. You see hildren? This is where cramming gets you.)
A German (My teacher predicted me a B! No idea HOW I got an A, but thats not my problem!)
A Maths (hahaha, mean primary school teacher who told em I'd never get any kind of mark in maths!)
A Textiles
A Additonal Science (like a second, harder science qualification)
A RE
B Music (which I thought I was going to fail)

So, lovelies, I'm SO HAPPY!!! I cried a little bit. && I'm gonna be in the paper.

AND, it's my birthday tomorrow!!!

Is this as cool as it gets?

Yes. I think it could be.

Well, my kind of cool. Which means everyone else's nerdy.

I saw this on the cricket yesterday, and I thought it was perhaps the best thing ever, for a Harry Potter-atic like me.

Its Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, arm in arm at The Ashes. When I saw them, they were drinking beer. Wow. I love it.

You're all turquoise ink and Exclamation Marks.

I like nothing better than writing letters. And, wonder of wonders, I had to send out five of them because it is my birthday in a few weeks, and I needed to inform my lovelies of the date, time etc. So, after picking up some marvellously whimsical stationary at Selfridges with a pretty turquoise ink pen, I set about to write my letters.

I must admit, once I'd adressed all the envelopes, I didn't want to send them. They were far too perfect.

It's a terrible shame the art of letter writing is so out of fashion.

It's healthy, isn't it?

Well, we didn't make Battenberg, we made Peanut Butter Cookies instead. I say 'we', because my friend Lauren came round, who is a long-standing baking freind of mine. You should of tasted our Halloween Fairy Cakes. They really were quite stunning. I mean, they tasted stunning. They didn't look too good.

Anyway, we baked. And we baked GOOD cookies. I would love to give you the recipie, but it's only on paper, and I can't be bothered to type it out. Google it. It involves 6 tablespoons of peanut butter, no eggs, some flour, some butter, some castor sugar and vanilla essence. Although not neccissarily in that order.

First we stirred:

Then we added milk: (lots of it)

Then we panicked a bit, because it looked like this, and that didn't look too good. However, it did taste good, and was 100% safe to eat raw, because it had no eggs. I always worry that I might get salmonella when I lick out a cake bowl. Then Loz & I washed our hand very thoroughly (You can't be too sure with all this swine flu) and balled the dough into little patties. Into the ovens for 25mns and....
Well, I don't have a picture to show you of that, because we got quite caught up in the eating of them. I'll suffice to say they were good.
And - we comforted ourselves with this thought - Peanut Butter's good fat. So really, it was a healthy thing to make.

Battenburg on a Park Bench.

I'm pretty sure that I'm gonna make Battenburg Cake tomorrow - although without the marzipan, cuz I hate that. There's a joy in Battenburg cake - I used to eat it at my Nan's. I think it's the symmetry of the pink and yellow squares. They make me feel young.

Me & My best friend once sat on a park bench eating a cheapo Battenburg once, laughing at all the dull people walking past us. That makes me feel young, too.

Anyway, it doesn't look too tricky. Famous last words.

I'll let you know how it goes.

I Come Not To Praise Ceaser, But To Bury Him.

That makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, which is not true. I did, although it wasn't quite as OhMyGod-You-Must-Go-And-See-That good as I expected. It took me a while to get into it, but when I did I was impressed. It was a good staging of it, I, in my humble opinion, thought, although it was very dark and quite scary at times. & the stage was swimming with (very realistic) fake blood at the end.

I tell you what though, Sam Troughton was completely wasted on Robin Hood for 3 years! He was playing Brutus, and was hands down the best member of the cast. I just sat there thinking "Wow. This guy can act. What on earth was he doing playing second-fiddle to Jonas Armstrong on a Saturday Night TV Show?"

Not of course, that I have anything against Saturday Night TV, I'm one of it's biggest fans. Especially, especially Doctor Who. And I had a Robin Hood obsession during series 2 (Harry Lloyd, yum.) But anyway. Not the time.

So, to sum-up, it was good, but not amazing. I did love the way they staged the "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech, it was nothing like I imagined it.

Beware the Ides of March...

I'm going to see Julius Ceaser at the RSC Courtyard Theatre today. I love Shakespeare, and I love living in Stratford because it means I get to go and see it as often as I can afford (which will be more when I'm 16 and get £5 tickets.)

The last time I did Julius Ceaser was in my year 9 English class - and our group had to preform the "Brutus in an honourable man..." speech, where I was a pleb. I thought it was fab, and wonderfully political, so I'm quite excited about seeing the first half. We only studied he first act, though, so the second bit is a bit more of a mystery. I fear the worst - although I feared the worst with The Winters Tale and I loved that.

I've spent the morning reading the reviews, the folowing is from The Telegraph:

"Greg Hicks powerfully captures the mixture of grandiosity and fearful frailty that makes up Caesar's character, while Sam Troughton finds a similar ambivalence in Brutus, a genuinely good man fatally flawed by both self-righteousness and an inability to make the right decisions. John Mackay suggests both the chippiness and the emotional neediness of Cassius, and Darrell D'Silva is a superb Mark Antony, perpetually hung-over, bleary, overweight and a shameless rabble-rouser of an orator. The moment when he picks up a severed head, lying conveniently to hand on the battlefield, and casually throws it at Octavius Caesar as if it were a rugby ball, encapsulates the bitter, violent, blackly comic atmosphere of this production."

I can't wait.

And in other news...

I'm going to be published.
I think I'm probably still in shock, even though I've been typing it all day.
I wrote a poem miles ago, and then I got an email about this Poetry Rivals competition, and thought; 'what the hell, there's no harm in entering'. So I sent it off and promptly forgot about it.
This morning, however, I went down to microwave my tea and found quite a lot of post on the doormat, so I made sure there wasn't anything for me. Well, strictly speaking, there wasn't, but there was a letter adressed to "The Parents Of..." me. Now, naturelle mon, I freaked out a bit, thinking it might be something from my new school saying I couldn't go (which would, in part, be a blessed releif), but when my mum opened it, it was from Poetry Rivals saying there going to publish me.
I'm really excited. I mean, they haven't picked the top 50 to go to the Grand Final, and I'm almost certain that I won't get into that, because I'm only 15 and still a bit crap, but... I don't care.
I'm going to be published. I'm so happy for me.

This feels better than Christmas in New York. >>