I beat Paul at table football today. Just. He beat me at pool. Just. This was after school. No one else was around because they'd all gone to give blood. The only reason he hadn't was an interfering school musical ("The Wizard Of Oz") rehearsal, but, as the title role (The Aevil Wizard Paul?), he wasn't involved until late in the script.

I hadn't gone because I'm squeamish. If I was only entitled to one phobia, it would be needles and injections and the like. When one of my penpals mentioned that a friend of hers stood on a needle, I shuddered for days afterwards. I refuse to sew because of it. (It's a good reason to get my mother to mend my clothes too.) Even listening to talk about blood-giving makes my hands go clammy and my handwriting turn big. Earlier on, I'd been forced to put my pen down due to the conversation Will, Helen G and OJ were having.

I showed Helen G the picture of a burning giraffe I downloaded off the Internet yesterday. She wrote "HERMAN" on it and pinned it up on the noticeboard (as Herman's nickname has been Giraffe since the dawn of time), but he wasn't back when I left the building at 4pm.

But then, no one was back. Chris returned as he had to supervise prep and told me the queue was massively long. "Why do so many people want to give blood?" I asked rhetorically. "There'll be a surplus."

"Yes," he agreed. "An EU blood lake."

Wednesday 17 March 1999

Put it this way: typing isn't the most comfortable activity I could be doing at this precise moment in time.

Or this way: I've only just begun to realise how useful it is to have a flexible left arm. Have you ever tried doing up the top button of a shirt with only one hand? Or tying a tie properly? It isn't easy.

Netball. Big bad game. "Yesss," I was thinking, "only two netball lessons left. Ever!"

But this one was not proving to be a good one. "The tournament last week was ok," the teacher said, "but you were all running around all over the place and getting tired. Today we're going to work on passing to certain positions only."

Like, why? It'll be another year before the fifth and lower sixth have to play netball again, and us upper sixth will never be playing it. (Unless we join university netball teams, which seems slightly doubtful.)

Anyway, a six-aside game started, I ended up being goal keeper. Now this isn't my favourite position at the best of times, but since there wasn't a goal defence, I had to be that as well. I was not a happy camper, or a camper of any description for that matter. My aim in netball is to do as little running and marking as possible, which is why I'm shooter if at all possible. (I'm quite good at shooting too. After all, I've had my brother as target practice for nearly sixteen years.)

And the inevitable happened. I was marking goal attack but she got the ball and passed it to goal shooter. So I ran back to the net, only to trip over someone's foot.

It all happened in slow motion. I could see exactly what was going to happen, but I had no option but to fall. My left elbow scraped along the ground first, followed by my hands, which I had instinctively put out to save me.

"Are you ok?" was the immediate question.

"Umm, not really," I said. But I sprang to my feet, thinking it wouldn't seem too bad. The same sort of thing happened during the netball tournament in a year or two ago, and I had to carry on playing and it was ok.

"Take her to Matron," the teacher demanded. So, to Matron I went. (Yes, it's partially a boarding school; we can't have anything as normal as "a school nurse", oh no!) I didn't dare look at my hands, due to my blood-phobia and I was glad I couldn't see my elbow, which instantly became the focus of my injuries.

Matron was not amused. She had just been intending to watch "Casualty" - but instead she was really going there.

"Nooooo!" cried I, "I have a clarinet lesson at 4.15! It's the second last one before my grade eight exam." But, in no real position to play the clarinet, I had no real option but to agree.

It was hardly an emergency. After watching some exceedingly retro children's TV programmes, I told four medical type people what had happened, and the final one cleaned the wound and bandaged it. Then I travelled back to school.

It was - and still is - painful and annoying, but I would have been happier if there hadn't been so many crises attached.

1. The netball team was now left with no defenders that could go in the circle. Not my problem.
2. I was supposed to be secretary for the open debate tonight. Writing rapidly did not seem terribly appealing. Fortunately, they found a replacement.
3. After school, I was going to post a Big Scary Form Thing which has to have arrived by Friday. I now have one day in which to post it, and I could easily forget.
4. I have to go to hospital tomorrow too, so they can find out if I can breathe properly (since I have benign scoliosis). I'm sick of the place.
5. I missed my clarinet lesson and I now have no opportunity to organise a practice in the music centre tomorrow (since my teacher trusts no one with her phone number).
6. I probably won't be capable of playing the clarinet tomorrow anyway.
7. I agreed to play the clarinet part for a GCSE Music Composition tomorrow. This will probably not be possible, and no one else will have their clarinet in school.
8. I lose valuable practice time between now and the exam.
9. The wound is to be redressed on Friday and Monday. In other words, my elbow will still be bandaged on Tuesday, the day of my clarinet exam. While it should hopefully be less painful, my arm will still be inflexible. The exam cost money.
10. This might be the last chance I'll have to take this exam, since I may well be in Nodnol at this time next term.
11. My inability to play cat's cradle tomorrow could well drive me insane. It is the one thing that keeps Smill and I alive in this Time Of Tyranny. (The table football has vanished, as have the darts, we can't play computer games anymore, the Internet's broken and we get very little chance to play pool.

But one good thing resulted from the accident: Matron said she'd write me a note next week getting me out of netball. Therefore, I never have to play the game again.

Sunday 21 March 1999

I suddenly have a lot of sympathy for Krycek (from "The X Files", not the tennis player). For some reason, last night Dad suddenly decided to set up Ye Olde Pinge Ponge Table again. Not that it's a real ping pong table: more like an undersized snooker table with a heauge piece of wood on top. The net had moved into the house next door, so we used five hard backed books instead.

Ping pong is a deceptively one-armed sport. You hold the bat in one hand and the other hand's only purpose is to hold the ball. Ping pong balls do not put a great deal of strain upon injured limbs, and after a little while I found that I could even catch it when it flew off the table.

The trouble with ping pong is that it is very tiring. The actually hitting of the ball is not; the retrieving of it, when it flies off the table, is.

And alas! One-handed deodrant has not yet been created. And trying to have one-handed showers really sucks.

I haven't been having much luck with showers of recent times anyway. The four showers I had before the injury all went wrong. The first one was all right until I turned the water off and it decided to turn itself back on again. Twas cold. The second time, I forgot to take any shampoo into the shower. The third time, I left my glasses on. The fourth time, after a ten-minute search for the shampoo, the shower decided to fall to pieces. Gah!

Monday 22 March 1999

My teenyboppery side showed its blood-tear-stained face yesterday. The plaster came off my left hand before its time and I thought, "Keweliez! I have scarz! Must scan them in and put them on my website!!!!!" (Well, they're more like grazes, but close enough.) But the scanner had evaporated! It is a Sign. The Scanner Gods are telling me to stop even pretending to be one of Them.

I had three actual lessons today and six frees or relative frees. In the two Physics lessons we just had to get on with revision, so I did very little in the first and spent the second playing the box game and hangman with Smill, to the disapproval of the teachers. I spent the others playing pool and surfing the 'Net.

Yays, the school computers finally work! (Although they were meant to be working as soon as the Christmas holidays ended; the Easter holidays start in three days.) But, oddly enough, I find surfing there really boring. We're only meant to look at educational sites, and if I look at personal pages it's always like, "Is that your homepage?" Why would I be looking at my own website?

By lesson nine, I was bored senseless. Smill wanted to play hangman and the box game and consequences, but I didn't want to play any of them. So I made a board game, and we played that. It involved doing fantastically daring stunts like going to the common room and back, and telling heinous secrets such as when we last brushed our teeth. I ended up having to tell Alice to die; Smill muttered, "I love Roe NOT!" We had almost finished when we both landed on "Go back to square one" and then the final bell went.