29 Nov 2009

Look who's writing again!

I'm busy.  I've started my job, and I have homework and coursework and revision and a crush and many other things that are making my life rush past far to fast.
But, in the little bit of spare time I have got, I've managed to write this.  And... (this needs to be in small letters, just in case someone out there wants to jinx me for thinking it) And I'm quite proud of it.  It might not be the best thing I've ever written, but it's got a little something I like.  It's not autobiographical, except for the Dylan Thomas being amazing bit.  It's not current - it harks back to the 50's or 60's in my imagination.  
Would you like to read it? 
It's here, if you do.
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The Winter of My Content.

I remember when I was sixteen and we used to skive off physics and go down to the park to smoke roll-ups and flirt and drink flasks of tea.
Our physics teacher was new that September, and he had a phd – he made us call him Doctor. He had a little black beard and hairy hands, and was probably very clever. He was a terrible teacher though, and he never told the headmistress that two thirds of his class went missing every lesson. Looking back, I think he was just too scared of losing his job.
It was an especially cold Winter that year; it seemed to always be frosty or snowing. That’s why we brought the tea in flasks – to stop ourselves catching hypothermia. I wore two pairs of thick woollen tights for months, and my mum was always saying that if I was cold I should just wear a longer skirt. I think she’d forgotten what it was like to be a teenager.
It was during those stolen hours that I first heard Dylan Thomas, read to me by a tall, earnest boy called Mathew. I would lie on the read tartan rug he’s bring and eat apples while he’d sit above me and the recite the most beautiful poetry I’d ever heard. In between poems he’d smoke half a cigarette and give the rest to me, and I’d let him kiss me. I quite enjoyed the kissing, but that’s not what I had come for – much in the same way as Matthew enjoyed the poetry, but it wasn’t why he was sharing his smokes and apples with me.
Sometimes he’d ask me to meet him outside the fishbowl of our physics lessons, but I always refused. If I had discovered, for example, that at home he wore a cardigan I would never have been able to let him kiss me again. And I expect that he had found out that I had a stuffed teddy bear on my bed called Gregory, he wouldn’t have seen as the mysterious and alluring girl that he said he did.
So we muddled along in the cold Winter of my content, and when I dropped physics at A-Level, I rarely saw Matthew anymore except to smile at in the school corridors. My brief encounter with Matthew may not have been the great passion of my life, but Dylan Thomas certainly was.
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Now I'm not someone who begs for comments, but I wouldn't mind a comment for this, if you liked it.  Or if you didn't.  I'm always dying for constructive critiscism.

2 comments:

  1. I wrote out a whole load of comments about this and then the internet decided to be stupid and deleted it. I'll try again..

    I'm not normally a big fan of reading the writing of my friends, because it always kills me to have to tell them when I don't like it - but I actually really liked this so we're both spared from the pain of that!

    The writing style seemed quite poetic, which worked quite well because this is probably a memory which the narrator has thought about a lot over the years.

    I'm not familiar enough with your writing to know if this is your usual style, but I'd say that it's perhaps a little /too/ poetic for most settings. Especially in longer pieces.

    Finally I think perhaps your spelling and grammar could do with a little sharpening up, but that's nothing to worry too much about. After all, that's what copy editors are for :P

    I feel a right fool writing a criticism of this, so I hope it helps if only just a little!

    -Katrina

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  2. i really don't have anything bad to say tbh , except a few spelling points which can easily be fixed (:
    i want to read more of thisssss. x

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