are the stars out tonight?

yeah yeah, i'm evil and so on and so forth. the last week has hardly been busy, but my brother is addicted to the computer so this a rare opportunity to use it. i have been updating my cv.

stu has come to stay, while he works at the national army museum hurrah. i have mostly been reading books, many, many books.

stu and i went to sussex at the weekend which was pretty ace, not least because in the corner of a crazy antiques market in the north laine, i found a stylophone. still in its box, with its record, its instructions, even its bluddy guarantee card for £35! so i bought it. and it's g!r!a!t!e! i'm pretty sure that whoever owned it before me played it about once and put it away in the back of a cupboard forever, because it's in amazing condition, it needed a bit of a clean, but apart from that it was pristine. the records are completely unscratched, and the instruction booklet looks unread. so i am now a very content stylophonist. if not very competent.

feather boa 4:48 pm

wow, i'm blogging from the top of the london eye! is what i would have written if i'd remembered that i could blog with my phone from one of the pods. It was the first time i'd done it (hee), and definitely worth it. It was really amazing to see london looking so beautiful in the sunshine, even sarf landan looked gorgeous. Enough superlatives there for you? It was a really great thing to do though cos it really reminded me how much i love living in this city. Woo london!

feather boa 8:17 pm

i'm a dreadful show off i know but see how i can blog with my exciting new phone? It's soo cool. I fear you can expect drunken posts from pubs and suchlike. Also i'm really struggling with this predictive text malarkey (i just had to add malarkey to my dictionary).

Oh and don't ask about the piccies - i've lost all faith in the interweb. Gah!

feather boa 8:09 pm

things i'll miss about york #7: constant fast internet access

significantly enough, this is the thing i'll miss most: i do after all spend a lot of my time on the t'internet (as someone in the four yorkshiremen sketch might say). and i heart it. so dealing with crappy aol and with the slowest computer known to man may take some getting used to. *sigh* but at least i should be getting a new phone tomorrow (graduation present huzzah).

feather boa 10:43 pm

things i'll miss about york #6: randomly seeing people i know

one of the best things about york is that it's a pretty small university, which means that it's quite easy to get to know a large proportion of the people here. so wandering across campus, which ought to take a matter of minutes often takes longer because of running into people you want to talk to, i really like that.

when we were showing the first years to their rooms last october, one girl was really worried she wouldn't make any friends. i told her what a friendly uni this was, but she didn't seem that reassured. but then at the summer ball, there she was, surrounded by mates, and having a wicked time. so i'm going to miss the amicability(?) of york, i suppose.

gradball last night was kind of like that: lots of running into people who i know vaguely, and who i'll probably never see again now. what a weird thought.

feather boa 6:56 pm

things i'll miss about york #5: ladybird ladybird

coming to university, i knew that more than anything else, i wanted to join a band. i'd messed about with mates, but i wanted to play gigs and have proper rehearsals and stuff. and lo it came to pass that chris also wanted to form a band, and that chris j and stu came to a sinister picnic in the summer term of first year, and the mighty ladybird ladybird was formed.]

i'm really proud of our achievements: playing woodstock twice, and getting to the semis of battle of the bands, and i like the fact that we're the kind of band that i would listen to myself, and that we haven't compromised on our twee indie principles. but above all, i like the lads: chris, chris, stu and robin have been a real laugh to be around, and i'm going to miss them all next year (especially as they're going to do a joy division/new order thing and carry on without me under a new name)... but i'm already planning my next band... the girl pirates.

feather boa 3:32 pm

things i'll miss about york #4: being able to do my own thing

the following is an actual conversation:

me: well, what'll happen if i want to bring someone home after going to a club?

mum: well we'll give him breakfast in the morning.

me (very quietly): what if it's a she?

have had a day of shepherding parents around. and obviously, y'know graduating. and drinking too much. and eating some very nice food at melton's too (and i didn't even faint this time!). but i'm slightly thinking maybe living at home is going to be... harder than i thought.

feather boa 11:41 pm

very quickly, because i'm meeting stu, his parents, my parents and both our brothers for dinner i fear a culture clash.

things i'll miss about york #3: knowing where to go

ok that sounds a bit strange, but today i had my legs waxed and my hair cut, at places i've been going to since i started here. moving back to london is going to mean finding a new hairdresser and a new leg-waxy place. my problem is that i find it difficult to make decisions, and i like to try things out before i decide to stick with them. the bonus of york is that there aren't that many places to try, so it's easy to make a decision very quickly. whereas london has hundreds of those kind of things, and they're all really expensive. gah.

in other news, i have paid £40 to make my hair look like... my hair. sarah and mike (my housemates) didn't even realise i'd had a haircut. and my parents didn't notice that i'd dyed it.

feather boa 7:33 pm

things i'll miss about york #2: baby ducks

there are still a few around, and they're just darlin'. there's something about their little fluffy bodies and the tiny squeaking noises they make that makes me come over all maternal. and as everyone at york knows "feeding ducklings bread kills them", because it swells in their little tummies and then they explode. maybe.

in other news sarah and i are cleaning the house from top to bottom in preparation for the coming of the parents tomorrow. we don't want them to think we live in squalor you see. i had to clean the bin. my hands smell of bleach.

feather boa 2:52 pm

as this is the last full week i shall spend in york, i thought i'd give you a rundown of the 7 things i'll miss most about the old place (not in any particular order).

things i'll miss about york #1: good bread

we don't have warburton's bread in the south, so i'd never tasted it before i came to university. it is by far the best mass produced bread i've ever eaten - you can take your hovis, your kingsmill, your sunblest, warburton's is the god of bread you can buy in rubbish supermarkets. i occasionally tell people that i spent my first year eating nothing but bread and twixes, well it was warburton's danish loaf that sustained me, although i've since moved on to the 800g toastie, which makes fantastic greasy spoon style toast. huzzah!

also, browns in heslington village makes the best properly baked bread i've ever tasted. in all its wonderful varieties. i have never, never, had bread this good. hooray! the sandwiches (well, they're really rolls) are also superb, featuring a range of exciting opportunities like barbecue sausage and humus and lots of salad, and my personal favourite: smoked turkey and cream cheese.

feather boa 6:33 pm

i listen to a lot of radio 4, when i'm in york, because i can't really stand to hear radio 1 any more, and the local commercial stations are terrible. at home i listen to xfm, because i am little miss indie, although the adverts are inordinately annoying.

i suppose it's quite a middle class thing to do, but i enjoy listening: i get recipes from woman's hour, and i've particularly liked the serial this week: the journalistic adventures of an american girl in london. and i've discovered that i don't actually need to hear music all the time (although i miss the opportunity to try the latest indie sensation before i buy their album and am inevitably disappointed).

last week (i think), the today programme had something on "weblogs", it was on at some unheard of hour (about 8:30), but i think you can hear it here. it had a truly priceless moment, as cory doctorow attempted to explain trackback to james naughtie (i think), and some bird from handbag.com, who for some reason thought blogs were a bad thing because there aren't any editors to tell you when you're rambling, or if maybe your sentences have gone on for far too long ...snip

then the other day, on front row, i heard a really wonderful segment on jazz and classical covers of radiohead songs. such as the jazz prodigy lad jamie cullum's version of high and dry, christopher riley's album of songs in a classical stylee true love waits, and then an amazing version of paranoid android, by someone called brad mehldau, which you can hear here. the second two are vocal-less, which obviously means that they sound completely different from the originals, and cullum has fiddled about with the syncopation of high and dry, so it too sounds like a different song, not least because he kind of croons it.

my favourite covers have always been the unlikely ones: blur's daisy bell, b&s's don't stop me now, the manics' bright eyes. they're the ones (well kinda) that bring something new to the original, and that's what makes them exciting to hear. sarah calls radiohead a "green biro band" - the kind of band with such obssessive fans that anyone who dares mess with them gets a mound of letters (or i suppose emails metaphorically) written in green biro. brace yourselves lads.

feather boa 9:26 pm

well, after all the stress and stuff, i finally have my degree results: i got the same as stu, and sarah and chris j, and really pretty much everyone (except for french nick and manics tom who got firsts. hooray for them).

so, tonight we're going to cut at fibbers, which is andy (who used to edit nouse) and tim (who used to chair halifax)'s club night, and should be quite fun. in a kind of trashy way, so i think i'll wear black. or my miniskirt, have been wearing it lots recently though. weirdly enough. i've already bought a £25 bottle of champagne, which we shared between the 4 of us. huzzah. drinking good.

i might be more coherent at another point, in which case i'll post something better then. at the moment i'm just kind of euphoric. (i got 75 on my text and performance module. 75!). oh yeah, it was a 2:1 over all, in case you were wondering.

feather boa 6:54 pm