when lizzie doesn't know what to write, she googles "thought provoking questions" and things like this occur...

Do you remember that time five years ago you were really upset? Does it matter now?

At my primary school, we had this very, very open and politically correct headmistress and this was probably a good thing most of the time. We celebrated Diwali and had to fill out sheets with an anonymous compliment for each of our classmates each year. Anti-bullying policies were jammed at us constantly, and there were motivational, positive posters everywhere with things on them like pictures of a black child and a white, hand in hand, and I'm not sure if it was lovely or maybe just a little too enforced.
There was this one poster, in the girls bathroom - and when I say poster, I mean a laminated piece of A4 - and on it it said "If it won't matter in five years, it doesn't matter now". It was a quote from Cher.

I honestly think being in Year Five (that's aged nine and ten here) was one of the toughest years of my life, because in the earlier September of that year, my best friend left the school. It's really hard to explain why this upset me much more than it should have, but you could say that I was always one of those children who liked to have one, single best friend, maybe within a few others. She and I were inseparable. We'd have these slumber parties and the whole week before those Saturdays, at school we'd write out these plans of what we were going to do every half hour. At break time we strolled around the edges of the playing field and did impressions of all of the other girls in our class, who talked about their "boyfriends" and made up sexy dances and lay on the disused football pitch with their polo shirts rolled up and tied in a knot.

But because of how close we were, there was never really room for anyone else and so when she left I was at a complete loss of what to do, who to talk to, because for two years I hadn't needed to make more friends than the one I had already.
The class I was in was an absolute wreck - there were three or four misbehavioural boys who I think probably all had ADHD or something, (one of who I think moved to Australia after he was expelled) and girls who wanted to grow up much too fast. Everyone was loud and obnoxious, and by now I had pretty much no self confidence at all. Our teacher was new, and he was male, which was a first for our school, only two years old. But he was very, very nervous, and left a while after a boy shouted at him. We went through three teachers that year, and the third left at the end of it.

I was permanently upset. One time about a year ago I realised how bad it must have been when my mother told me the things they'd said to her that parents evening. I can't imagine how big an impact something that simple could have on me. Apparently I stopped raising my hand in class, nearly became mute and lost a lot of weight. At breaktimes I would sit on my own and read, or write stories in a leather-bound notebook I still have in my drawer and smile at sometimes. I was picked on and laughed at, and for why I understand completley, but the lower my self-confidence got the worst it became. The boy I had to sit next to in lessons was the worst of all - the other boys idolised him because he was cocky and wore hair gel and swore that, in the bathroom of the public swimming pool, his fourteen year old girlfriend had given him a blowjob. (I'm fairly sure I didn't believe it at the time, and I know I don't now). We'd done a spelling test (remember spelling tests?) and everyone who got ten out of ten was told to stand up, to be given a sticker or something. It was his job to write down all of the names of those of us who got that score. I think there were probably about eight. And he moved slowly around the class, calling out the name of each child, one at a time, and writing them down. He was smirking and doing it very, very slowly and I realised early on what he was doing. As it became that there were less and less of us stood up, I started to feel a lump in my chest rise (you also need to know that back then I cried ALL of the time). And then in a moment tears started trickling down my face and I could hear myself from inside my head making tiny noises. And it went quite quickly from some people in the class asking if I was okay to everyone of them laughing and taunting me, the teacher ignorant and embarassed and awkward, staring down at his desk.
They thought it was for no reason, but the boy next to me didn't. He knew exactly what he'd done and he seemed to feel nothing. He carried on the torture, leaving me until the very end.
The teacher never knew what to do about things like this so he took me to the headmistress' office, where she offered me water and gave me a big box of Kleenex and played Zen music. I was a regular visitor there, now I think back it was probably a sort of therapy they arranged for me. She asked me what was wrong but I couldn't explain what he'd done in the right way - it was a link in a chain of mini incidents like that, and they seem silly now and I can't remember what it was like but I know he was doing it on purpose.

I know how ridiculous it sounds. I feel guilty that it's easy for me to laugh at now, because of what it did to me then but that always seems like a different version of myself.
And the point is that of course it still matters now, the in five years.... Because in some ways I think maybe all of that changed me as a person for the better, because if that situation happened in school now I'd probably either not notice or just have a bit of a bitch and a moan about it in my head. But a lot of it's to do with the people I'm surrounded by - although people this age are still immature, I think ten year old boys are much more powerful than we think.
I don't know if it changed me as a person. More stuff did, more recently, but in the years after that it forced me to develop social skills and I became much less co-dependant. It was even the time I started to turn to the internet. And there's things which happen to me nowadays - even things which have happened in the last month which I know I'll remember when I'm twenty. (woah, I'm halfway to twenty from all of that. I'm getting old :/ )

I don't really know why I wrote that. It got me away from French revision. Beth asked for a post. Myeh.

Lizzie xx

The David Keenan Story, Part II

So maybe you'll remember a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how when I was five, I bit a boy named David Keenan and still couldn't remember why. Though my parents punished me at the time, since they've said that it wasn't my fault and I was provoked, and he possibly even deserved it.
I mentioned this the other day when I went out for lunch with my mum, and guess what?
I found out why I bit David Keenan.

There was no need for boldness. It isn't that exciting.

I wrote a retelling of the story, but it wasn't necessary because it's too mundane. David Keenan was blowing rasberries in my ear, over and over again until I screamed at him to stop but he kept on doing it. The teacher didn't listen to me, and so I bit him.
"So he deserved it?!" I was faintly excited about the idea of finally shrugging off years of guilt. I remembered my useless primary school teacher, Mrs Hindley, her pale eyes and wrinkled lips, unflustered, lifeless tone of voice. We'd never liked each other very much. And I remembered David Keenan - huge, blonde, bright-eyed and large, cherry-coloured lips.
"... but you still shouldn't have bit him," my mother told me.
"Why?" I asked. "What would you have done?"
"Just thwacked him one. Biting him is sort of animal."
"I was a five year old girl! I didn't have much physical strength, I had to bite him!"

And thinking about it now, I sort of wish I was more like my five year old self.
We moved house and I moved schools when I was about seven, and during that time I was a one best friend at a time "sorta gal". Until we were in Year 5, Molly was my best and also only friend, and when her mother moved her to a Catholic school I didn't know what to do with myself. Interacting with pretty much only one person in my class, since falling out with Samantha, I'd become too shy to talk to anyone else and the rest of the class saw me as a laughing stock. For that year, though I didn't really realise it until now, I was lonely and bullied and depressed. That Lizzie wouldn't have bitten David Keenan.
I'm not sure whether I would now.

I've heard somewhere your entire personality's formed by the time you're eight, but I think that probably isn't true - it depends what we go through and how we have to face things. When I was five I was carefree and strong-willed and I even sort of idolise that former self. When I was eight or ten, I was the complete opposite and couldn't talk to people I was intimidated by at all, I'd simply act like I couldn't hear. I'm not sure which of those I am now, and maybe it's just a good job I don't have to deal with those situations. Because I don't know whether we grow up from being children, or it just gets easier once we're all surrounded by sort-of adults.

Biting David Keenan

Hello.

If you don't have time to read another post made up of ramblings about stupid things when I was a child, that's fine. But please scroll down to the bottom where there's a poem by Carol Anne Duffy I found, which I've looked for since I first read it and I guarentee it will make your day a little better. I don't know how.

When I was a child, I went to two primary schools - one in Year 3, from age seven onwards, but before that I went to a different one, and there I had more confidence and I was a different person. Thinking back, I'm fairly sure that when I was about five, I was a badass in school.
I don't really remember many of the things that gained me this reputation, I just know I had it. I was intelligent but I got into a lot of trouble. I have memories of standing against the cupboard at the back of the class - the ultimate punishment - up in the stocks for townsfolk to laugh at or maybe just inspect.
But I do remember biting David Keenan.
The whilstle had just blown for the end of lunch, it was cold and we were lining up at the end of the field. I was daydreaming, looking at the sky and the grass and the seagulls, eating leftover playground crumbs of snacktime KitKats and Nutri Grain bars, and in front of me was David Keenan.
I honestly haven't seen him since, but from what I remember he was quite chubby, at five, and he had very bright hair, and for some reason he said something which made me angry and so I bit him.
I don't remember why, and it bugs me a lot, and although I think I was probably evil in a lot of ways I don't think I can have done it for no reason. Nowadays, if I ask my mother tells me I was provoked. My teachers and parents were angry, back then. I don't know why I bit him but I did, right in the stomach, and his pale skin swelled up straight away with a volcano of pink and red, swirling blue and purple patterns forming around the edges of the bruise.
I was too proud to admit it. I remember my dad getting home and me begging him to read to me but my mum said no, not until I'd told him what I'd done and I wouldn't do it. We were in the conservetory and I was screaming and crying. Everyone said I had done wrong, I should feel guilty but I couldn't because I somehow knew I was right.
They tell me now that it was almost deserved, that it isn't on my conscience but I know that I bit David Keenan, and that it was wrong but I have no idea why.
Perhaps I never will.

I'm in understanding that that was a pretty stupid thing to talk about, so here is something beautiful.

TEA
by Carol Anne Duffy

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you're away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile on your lips.

I like the questions - sugar? - milk?
and the answers I don't know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea's names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it's any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.


If nothing else melancholy, or squishy or sentimental, read in a really shallow way it makes me feel like simply walking around Whittard's and smelling sweet air, examining packets, leaves and syrups and shakers I'd never have the time to use. I stick with instant pearguava, and it's delicious.
Goodnight.

- Lizzie

PS
What I was actually going to do today is write a blog about how much I love webcasts and why, but I didn't, but it was because tonight I watched some of Imogen Heap's #live4capetown and although signal was bad and I only saw some of the songs, it was mostly just awesome talking to other fans, people who like or even just know my kind of music, having fights with people about Amanda Palmer and Tori Amos, that kind of thing. I love all of it. :) But yuss, I'll go on more in detail about stuff like that one day.

How a Pencil and a Potplant Lost Me an Entire Night's Sleep

From when I was around seven years old, up until the year I turned eleven, I entered a phase where things scared me all of the time.

When I was in Year 4 (that's Grade 3 for you 'mericans, so I was about eight), my best friend's name was Samantha. I was also friends with her twin sister, Bethan, and our parents were also friends which was useful. They had a lot of money and their father, now I think back or just listen to my parents talk about them, was very, very right-wing. This doesn't really come into the story, because I was nine, and all that I cared about was that I had some close friends whom I liked even though they bossed me around a little.
One day, at school, Samantha told us all a story which rocketed throughout my primary school and became known as "Dolly On The First Step" - you probably heard it at some point in your childhood. I was a fragile little girl, an only child with too much of an imagination, and it stayed with me for days. I couldn't sleep alone. I would come to my parents room at night crying and trembling because at the time, it was the most terrifying thing I could imagine, and they were patient at first but lost it. Because after two or three days, gave up on letting me sleep at the end of their bed and I lay in my room alone, and it was quiet and I kept on hearing noises and it ruined me for about a month.

Another traumatising experience I've had as a child was a couple of years later. I was about ten or eleven when my cousins, Sam and Annie, came to my house. Annie was about seventeen at the time and my dad was helping her write a CV I think, so they were upstairs in the study.
Let's back up slightly. I have no siblings but my cousins were kind of the equivalent of that, when I was growing up. Aside from Annie, who was a teenager when I was younger and wasn't around as much as she is nowadays, I have four cousins, a set of two sisters and two brothers, and when we were together a strange kind of politics went on between us all; we had an age range of four years I think. There's a time every year, a little before my birthday in February when Sam is 16, Kate 15, onwards until Jake, the youngest, is 12. I'm the middle one.
Sam was always sort of a leader for us; he came up with the dares, decided which games we were going to play and, in this case, he picked the movie.
The movie was The Others and he reassured me it wasn't scary, because it was rated a twelve and, of course, it couldn't be.
I didn't want Sam and my dad to think I was being a winp, and I watched it just because of the pressure, because, even though we were at my house there wasn't much else to do and because even though I didn't believe him my cousin said it wouldn't be scary.
He lied. At the time, it was firetrucking terrifying.
This led, of course, to another period of over dramatisation and of lost sleep. There were never nightmares, I was just scared that they'd happen. Instead of shutting my eyes and letting it be dark, I'd turn my bedside lamp on and simply stare at the wall whilst I was falling asleep, until my eyes shut themselves because I was too tired.
And I was probably angry at my cousin and my dad at the time, but now I'm not because I'm generally a hard-ass when it comes to scary movies.

Apart from a few things, the only thing nowadays most of all which can keep me awake for a while, fictionwise, is the idea of rape. I don't want to go into detail because it makes me shudder and my head hurt, but a part of "The Kite Runner", and one particular scene in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" involving an anal plug (at this in the movie adaptation, I even cried a little) left me lying in bed afterwards in foetal position, gripping a duvet protectively around me and shaking slightly. I don't know why I'm such a wimp when it comes to that, it's like some people get with blood or needles or vomit.
So that's just a thing. But then recently, something happened which set this off.
It was last week and I was leaving French class, moving down the stairs to Catering when I noticed straight away the yelling, the signs of excitement, a crowd and the grumpy school receptionist frantically trying to block off a certain area of the corridor.
I only ever heard it second hand, from several people, but what had happened was that in a kind of relaxed lesson, two guys my age had been messing around, and thought it'd be a good idea to sit on a pencil. Whilst his friend held it still, he sat on the pencil and myehhidontwanttotalkaboutitbutyougetthegist. He left the classroom, quite calmly, and didn't come back, so the teacher sent his friend to find him and they did, in pain and rapidly bleeding. They carried him off on a stretcher, his face covered with blankets because he was embarassed. Everyone seemed to think it was pretty funny, I suppose it is slightly, and I tried to laugh too because I don't like talking about my weird hysterical fear of anal pains, so I was sort of quietly choking in my throat and crossing and uncrossing my legs and wanting to vomit the whole time my Catering teacher was talking about how serious it was, what the consequences could be, the parts of his body it's affected and how it must have felt....
fpskhgjhoishejgp0ishg.

Let's back up a little. Another thing that day, was that that morning we'd been potting plants in Biology and following the recent death of my desk cactus due to running cats, my friend Poppy decided that it was important that I take this geranium home to replace it and I agreed, thought I think that both of us were mainly doing it for the thrill of stealing a plant from school.
That night I was with my friends at our favourite coffee shop, where I took the plant out of my pocket and put it on the table.
When we left, I realised I'd left it on the table.
I wasn't so worried that I'd lost the plant, but that our Biology teacher would get them out again and spot ours was missing or why the people working at Costa would think we'd left a plant there.
Anyways, that's a secret: I worry a lot. I know it isn't very badass.

The combination of the two, the guilt and the panic and the imagination of all the surgery and the skin and just that moment of shock and slow, slow pain left my lying awake in bed. My muscles were twitching, I gasped for breath and rolled to a different side every time I imagined the pain again.
And that's how a pencil and a potplant lost me an entire night's sleep.

For once, I'll be back tomorrow. I'm sorry that it was probably sort of a waste of time reading that. I do try to be interesting.

- Lizzie

multiple personality disorder: a strange kind

If ever you read something on the internet, maybe somewhere like wordpress or livejournal, some forums, possibly even fanfiction.net, vaguely dark or sexual or violent that's written by someone named Beth Barrow, it's probably mine. Let me explain.

I first combined the internet and writing when I was younger and for around a year, I frequented fanfiction.net. Stupidly, around this time I thought it was a good idea to talk to my parents about the stuff I wrote and I didn't realise there'd be times when I didn't want them to read things. Although it's unlikely, I know people can Google me now and occasionally find things, and that is bad, sometimes, so I'm doing what everyone on the NaNo forums seems to do; I want a pen name.

When I was a child, every time my friend and I went on a day out with our mums, I would demand that we change our names for the day. I was the sort of child that liked to imagine things, to make everyday situations more like something else - there was a phase when I was about seven where I would call my coat my cloak, for two years of primary school I kept a diary of things that were just absolute lies, signing it at the end of every entry with the name Lyra. I can't remember all the names I'd had over the years, but I recall being Marina one time we went to a farm, demanding my friend Charlotte name herself Aqua. If we went to Cadbury's World, my name was Lola for the day. I was Laura, then later Melanie, after a phase I went through where I was a fan of a girl band called All Angel's, who I later realised were very Christian based. Aged eight, I once went camping and made friends with a girl who spent a whole two days believing I was named Lulu.

We all told lies when we were children. Mine were just less purposeful.

The idea of a pen name or maybe, for now at least, seems like a good idea. I won't tell you what it's going to be because that would ruin the pen name idea. Soon, I will start to write things which will appear on the blog and they will be kept under my real name, which although I'm pretty sure nobody reads this, I don't want to take any chances. If I make an account on a website I've never been to before, under a username or pseudonym, or what they actually call them, I can be free to write about anything I feel like. It doesn't matter if I say stupid things, or mess up. It's not like it's me, anyway.

I feel tired today. I have to go to the same food festival twice this weekend. A few days ago I sat down to write a blog, then realised a lot of blood was exiting my foot. That's all I have to say right now.

Lizzie