Ayp! After years of nothing ever happening to me, the events of the last few hours have been positively soap operatic!

This morning, I woke up just in time to see Noj about to leave for his first day of college (sixth form college, not university).

A few minutes later, I received a phone call from the only other female Computer Science student at Churchill, a third year. Just as I expected, I get to be part of an endangered species! She’s going to be my "parent" when I get there, so by the sound of things, I’m going to be part of a single-parent family too! She assured me that the college never tells anyone anything and that as soon as I arrive, everyone will talk jargon and boast about their programming experiences and how many languages they know. Yojy yoj.

While on the phone, I heard sounds that indicated that the kitchen was falling apart. Closer investigation showed that Dad was home. After I hung up, I found him sitting in the garden.

"I’m on holiday," he explained. He was very angry with my uncle (who’s a partner in his business) and had therefore taken indefinite leave. After about an hour, he went to the travel agents to book a holiday in Crete. While he was out, Mum phoned me to say my uncle was on his way up here. However, when he arrived, Dad was with him.

Naturally, the rest of the day was slightly less interesting. Dad and my uncle went back to work, without telling me and leaving the back door open. Luckily, there were no burglars. Or if they were, they must have only taken one of the eight million monitors in the front room, because I can't see anything missing. (Well, obviously: when things go missing you can't see them.)

Wednesday 8 September 1999

Everyone else is going to university before me! Mimph! Well, everyone who is going away, and of the regular characters to appear here, there aren’t really that many. Marion is staying in Carlisle to do a "foundation year" (followed by a lipstick year, then a mascara year). Smill is taking a "gap year": she’s going to Uganda to teach next spring (I’m not sure whether "next spring" is the pupil or the subject, but it should be fascinating either way), but in the meantime, she has no plans other than to work in a pub. (Which has the appropriate name of "The Mill Inn".) Not the most likely career, you would have thought, for someone who got 4 ‘A’s in her A Levels, but such is life.

Will is taking a gap year too, but doesn’t know quite what to do with it yet. He intends to continue to work in Marks and Spencers for the rest of this millennium (sounds like a heck of a long time, doesn't it?) and take a computer course with the unlikely title of "European Computer Driving Licence". Let’s just hope he finds it easier to obtain than his normal driving licence (which took him five attempts). Noj is doing it as part of his course, though, and it sounds flipping easy.

Chris is going to Bradford University this Sunday. Everyone else I’m not so sure about, but I’d imagine they’re all going in mid to late September. Except Alice, who is also doing a gap year and is going to Australia in a couple of days’ time to shag sheep.

Wednesday 15 September 1999

Last Friday, I received a letter from Paula (my parent-to-be at Churchill College) revealing that I won't be part of a single-parent family after all: I'll have a father and a brother too. It'll be just like home! Oh Mykos!

Thursday 16 September 1999

My Dad has boycotted Spar, a convenience store, on the grounds that they refused to take his fifty pound note. The geens! I'd take a fifty pound note any day!

I have a confession to make. I've seen the sappy teen flick du jour, "Never Been Kissed". I plead innocent under the charge of geenery on the grounds that it was Will's idea and I've already seen practically every other film showing.

If you're thinking, "Woo! She went to the cinema with Will!", I'll please you even further by letting you know that we went shopping together first (he bought a squeaky toy [for his dog, he claims, but I get the feeling he'll use it more]) and we had the entire cinema to ourselves at first. I guess at 2.50pm on a Thursday most people are either at school or work. The film didn't appear to be starting, so we wondered whether we were in the right cinema, or if they'd decided the film wasn't worth showing to an audience of two. But it began in due course, and six more people entered.

Being there made me start thinking about The Plan: an operation devised by me, Will and Marion, in order to make Verbal Voodoo come true.

No, not for Zed and Will to live outside Tesco and for Chris and Alice's house to explode, but for Roe and Smill to get together. Despite the fact that they claimed to hate each other, we agreed that they were infinitely compatible.

Phase One was to get them to go to the cinema together, unaware that the other would be there. After some failed attempts at this scheme in January, it was abandoned in favour of Phase Two, to send Roe a Valentine's card supposedly from Smill. After a lot of problems, this did occur. Unfortunately, Roe didn't take long to work out the truth, and The Committee were out of ideas.

But! Eventually, they did end up spending the night together! Unfortunately, only in a technical sense of the word. In the same house, after my birthday celebration. But! Oddly enough, earlier that evening, Phase One of the plan actually occurred. They went to the cinema together. But naturally Zed completely forgot to pay any attention to that, because she was so excited about the person sitting next to her-

You mean Chris.

Certainly not! I mean the aisle! (And, yes, it is a person.) Because I knew that when the film was over, I'd have an opportunity to walk down the aisle-

With Chris.

You're obsessed with Chris aren't you?

So are you.

Oh, shut up and die.

Anyway, I'd already decided by that point that Roe and Smill were a lost cause and Will and Smill was where the future lay.

It's perfect. They're going to be among the few members of our school year remaining in the area for the next twelve months. They have very similar taste in music, TV programmes, films, clothes (Will wears strappy tops all the time), people, everything. And better still, they actually like each other! Here, from a month ago, I have the proof! (The following exchange is also completely typical of all of us.)

(Smill, Roe and Will are walking towards the cinema. Zed is hobbling after them.)

ROE (on spotting a cash machine): Just a sec!

ZED: Heech! Blarg! Mimph! Ni! Scank hempular wenchular aevil shoes o dume and geenery! They must die by my rser of eternal oblivon in angest and suffring and pane.

WILL: So, how was Canada?

SMILL: Well, in Canada we. . .

(Will and Smill stroll off into the night, completely oblivious to Roe contemplating the deeper meaning of cash machines and Zed devising 101 painful deaths for each of her shoes.)

Anyway. I think I'll phone Smill now. My phonebill is going to be heauge, but size isn't everything. It's what you do with it that counts. So I think I'll conveniently feed it to a passing chimpanzee.

Thursday 23 September 1999

I used to call the kettle "Bill". I wrote letters to him. My mother wrote back to me on his behalf (since he didn't have any hands). I was about thirteen at the time.

I've decided to start naming my possessions again. My toothbrush is called Henry. My old toothbrush, which I still have, is called Spike. A while ago Meaghan insisted that if my word processor had a name (Woody), my Acorn computer needed one too, so it's called April. The PC doesn't have a name yet: Percy would be the obvious choice, but that name always makes me think a seagull or the little green train from "Thomas The Tank Engine". I guess calling him "You scank dodgy aevil computer of doom" will suffice.

"Do you want a Yorkie?" Dad asked at the garage.

"Nah," I said.

He went inside and came out with two Yorkie Bars. "Here you go," he said, handing one to me.

To paraphrase Neil in "The Young Ones", no one ever listens to me. I might as well be a Leonard Cohen record.

He proceeded to take me to Penrith (Dad, that is, not Neil or Leonard Cohen) where he deposited me at Ullswater Community College. The event? An opportunity for those in the local area starting at Cambridge to meet each other in advance and ask questions. The only thing I found out was that people at Queens' College get called "queens".

It was meant to end at 7.30, but didn't. At 7.40, Smill started making faces at me through the glass door. I eventually escaped, and we hurried to the le cinéma where we saw "Mickey Blue Eyes". (And if you've seen it you'll know that the two "the"s in the last sentence were intentional.) It was the third time I'd been to the cinema in eight days.

We went back to her house, watched "Bally McEel" with her parents, then went on the Internet where we sent a couple of silly e-mails to all the people in our former school year whose addresses we knew. Then we looked for some chatrooms.

I never go into public chatrooms on my own accord. I used to go to WBS 13-15 chat when I first got the Internet, but it stopped working, and I couldn't be bothered with places where the level of conversation was "any sexxee ladeez???" But that night we chatted to a couple of strangers and had a good laugh at their expense.

We entered a rather cyclic conversation with a thirteen year old boy (although the grammar was nowhere near this correct):

[Him] What do you look like?
[Us] People.
[Him] What people?
[Us] Us.
[Him] Us? [Him] Who are you?
[Us] People.

Eventually he left us [sob!] to chat to a girl his own age. Then we talked to a seventeen year old bloke. "You're too young for us," we told him, but he insisted he would be eighteen in two weeks' time, so we gave him a chance. Not much of one, admittedly:

[Him] What would you like me to do?
[Us] Make monkey noises?
[Him] Ek! Ek!
[Us] Do you do dolphins?
[Him] No.
[Us] We do.
[Him] Do dolphins then!
[Us] Ok! We'll go and have some kinky sex with dolphins!
[Him] Does this mean you want cyber?

At that point we gave up and went to bed. Although not to the same one, in case you were worried / excited by that prospect.

As Smill took me home in the torrential rain this morning, the windscreen wipers sounding exactly like some geen playing techno music on a car stereo with the bass turned all the way up, she observed that the petrol tank was getting fuller. "Maybe you're driving so fast we've gone back in time?" I suggested. She pointed out that she was only travelling at 45mph, but neither of us couldn't think of a better explanation.

Sunday 26 September 1999

I always call this song "Why She's A Girl With A Chainsaw". I am currently eating an orange felt tip pen. Noj has just invited me to watch "The X Files Movie". I declined, having already seen it and being very unfond of the near kiss. Microsoft Splerd now has no objection the word "Noj", but I still have six red underlinings and a green one.

The Buzzcocks are geens. Or maybe it's whoever decided that Cambridge terms should be so short. Yes, I think the latter, since they are responsible for another grievance: today, in the course of two hours, at least a hundred people (former teachers mostly) must have asked me if I'd started university yet, and when I replied in the negative, the conversations withered and died.

The greater annoyance? This evening, the Buzzcocks, only my favourite band of all time (the last couple of weeks to be strictly accurate), played in Cambridge. And where was I? Quite a long way away from the fair city in question. Mimph.

At 7pm yesterday, Smill and her mother arrived and took me to The Woodrow Wilson. And no, I have no idea why they named a pub after the president whose name makes most GCSE / A Level History students cringe in terror, as it is directly linked to the *shudder* Treaty Of Versailles and the *cower* League Of Nations.

I had a particularly bad time both, since the first time I learnt about them, I had the most appalling teacher, who treated us as if we were about six. I have more or less managed to erase that memory from my mental hard drive, but I can't help but recall the shootings. Firstly, she made us act out The Corfu Incident (we were fourteen or fifteen at the time). On being shot, the geen playing the ambassador fell dramatically into the whiteboard and subsided to the floor. He was so impressed with his own performance that he insisted they did it again and the teacher agreed happily. Secondly, in an attempt to get us to behave, she said, "I've just heard on the radio that a class of little boys and girls have been shot, so think about them!" That was Dunblane, and I am not proud to admit that my initial reaction was, "I wish someone would shoot HER."

Anyway, Smill and I met up with various acquaintances and went to various places. My mother collected us from Buskers at 11pm (a bit early, but she couldn't stay up any later) and brought us back to my house, where Smill played Captain Courageous (a funchie computer game written by my online friend Aaron) for a few hours.

The following morning, we played Cap'n Courageous again then proceeded to Speech Day. Speech Day being when pupils receive trophies for being The Third Most Diligent Female 4th Year Religion Student Of The Year and the like. It's called "Speech Day" as opposed to "Prize Day", since the prize-giving only takes about an hour, as opposed to the speeches which take about a year.

It was a bit of shambles really. The teacher reading out the prize-winners got the very first name wrong, and nearly called one of the pupils "Freddie Mercury".

As well as going up on stage to get my A Level certificates, I won two awards. One was for "Best Year's Work In Music". How I managed that I'm not entirely sure, since I didn't even *do* Music! Presumably it was for passing grade 8 and being the most - wait, the ONLY - devoted member of School Band ever.

The other prize was even more dubious. I predicted I'd get an award for being the biggest geen, but what I ended up with was even worse: The Ho Award! To make matters worse, this is the second year I've won that! Are they trying to tell me something? It's for mathematics, and presumably it's named after the person who donated it, but still!

Well, I got forty pounds worth of book tokens out of the ordeal, so I shouldn't complain. I also acquired a copy of the school magazine. Mixing Physics With Romance was printed and I got three other mentions. A load of complete bunkum about my performance in the school concert. ("The technical demands on the clarinettist were fiendish, but one is left with the warm memory of poise and expertise". What? The band conductor had to rescue my music because I couldn't do the second page turn!) I got a five-line "obituary" (for making it to the end of Upper 6th). And The Convivium report contained the sentence, "'The King and Queen Of Bloxed's' attacks on one another certainly kept us entertained". (Resulting from a debate about war in which Will mentioned a very silly thing I'd said, so I declared war on him with a pad of file paper.)

Tuesday 28 September 1999

I am not having a very good week, health-wise. I had that unspellable illness starting with a D last night. And on Monday morning, I had an injection to protect me from the Men In Gitis. It struck me as rather pointless, since it doesn't do any good against the type of Men In Gitis university students are most likely to be confronted by, but the needle was most certainly not pointless.

It didn't really hurt and it was over surprisingly quickly. However, a few hours later, my upper right arm started to ache a bit. This alone would have been ok, but then my left elbow decided to ache in sympathy. My upper left arm felt left out so it started hurting too. And then my wrists became painful as well.

I wish my body parts weren't so nice to each other.

I've been working at my parents' shop (which sells musical instruments). It's exhausting and freezing. You wouldn't have thought that counting "gimp pins" into plastic bags and alphabeticising pieces of paper is a particularly strenuous task, but it is. And although I don't live in Siberia, I have to wear my coat and gloves in the office.

But it's money and how can you hate a job where you get to type orders for "Hot Rods" for the attention of music teachers with names like Miss Scales, G. Sharp and C. Lillicrap?

My family are geens! Last night, we all went back to the shop to move boxes. When they were shifted, Mum, Noj and I went home. As we pulled onto the drive, Mum said, "Gloops! We haven't got the house key!"

So she and I travelled back to the shop where Dad gave her it. As the car came to a halt outside our house for the second time, I remarked, "Wouldn't it be typical if he's given us the wrong one?"

And guess what? He had!