Sick day blog.

by theycallmejack

I feel so fucking rough right now.

In the last eight hours I’ve had my head in the toilet puking my stomach up six times. Its got the point where I’m no longer even sure what I’m throwing up, because there isn’t anything left to vomit. So yeah, another sick day, another set of sick day blues.

When I was a kid I used to like having sick days; lazing around in bed all day, eating soup, taking my quilt downstairs to watch TV. But now I hate them. Frankly, I’ve had 4 sick days so far this term, followed by 4 days in New York, and 2 days away visiting universities. I can’t afford to lose any more time. This year is probably one of the most important in my life and I don’t want to have it all fucked up because I’m too ill to go to college. Eurgh.

But yeah, that is the situation and there’s very little I can do to change it so I figure I might as well make the most of having the free time and do something with it. But I’m procrastinating instead.

I thought, I’ll cheer myself up by writing a blog about turning eighteen and all the happy shinanigans that have come since then! So here goes!

I turned eighteen two weeks ago today. I didn’t have to go to college and do my normal lessons on my birthday either, because I was on the university trip that I mentioned a moment ago! We were off to see Warwick and Royal Holloway Universities to see if any of the drama gang fancied applying for them. I’d already sent off my applications to both of them, so it was a little too late for me, but I was able to have a look round and get a feel for the places which was helpful!

The day started early. Earlier than my Thursday mornings are supposed to, because I’m only meant to start college at 12.15 on Thursdays, which I’ve completed failed to do for the last few weeks, but that aside, I got to college and received a phone call from my lovely boyfriend, Mathew, telling me that he’d passed his driving theory test, so I was very proud of him, and since he was in town anyway, he walked up to college to see me before I left on this trip. It did make me feel a lot better about going since I was a bit upset that he wouldn’t be there with me on my birthday, but seeing him that morning made it ok!

So then we set off in the college mini bus and headed down to Warwick University. On the way there was banter about my friend Addie’s Canadian (Irish) accent, how the teacher Lee ‘didn’t look impressed’, and how we were all planning to get drunk that night to celebrate my eighteenth after being expressly told there was to be no alcohol on the trip!

Warwick University was nice, its quite remote though, but there seemed like there was plenty to do on campus so I don’t think I’d hate it if I did go there!

After that we went to our hotel and out to the famous town of Stratford Upon Avon which you may know as the birthplace of Shakespeare and home to the world renowned theatre group; The Royal Shakespeare Company. We ate tea in a nice little pub across from said theatre company, where I was NOT bequeathed a Pimms and Lemonade by my friends Tom, Rob and Binary Rob! Then we went to see this play called ‘Written on a Heart.’

It wasn’t terrible actually. The play was written to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible being written, but that’s not really what it was about. It was more about the process of translation itself; what would be the effects of changing the word ‘congregation’ to ‘church’ and so on, maybe the answer is the obvious ‘nothing’, but maybe changing that one word would create a ripple effect and change lots of other things! Being set at the time of the Tudors’ church reformations, the play also broached the question of the nature of religion and the right way to worship, whether it is best to keep things simple as the Puritans believed, or glamourize religion with golden chalices and the like as the Roman Catholics believed. It was quite an interesting play and a lot better than I thought it’d be. If you find tickets for it on the cheap and have nothing else to do, I’d certainly recommend a trip to see it, it is quite an eye opener!

That evening I was ushered back to the hotel along with Addie, Lauren and Rachel while all the boys and my best friend Hollie, and our beloved drama teacher Jenny set out in search of a Tesco. Upon their return a small party was held in my room with the spoils of their trip; namely many packets of sweets, a bottle of Coke, and a cake! It was a really nice gesture on their part and it made me really happy to have friends who’d go out of their way to celebrate my birthday like that!

The next day, was Rememberance Day so we had a minute of silence in the mini-bus on the motorway and all read out the lyrics from a song about the war to mark the moment. It was the first time that Rememberance Day has ever really made me feel anything, and stopping and taking the time to remember those who died for our country was really nice.

Royal Holloway was great too! I can’t really be bothered going into much detail about it, but I did like it more than Warwick!

The journey home was populated by many more in-jokes and general banter which was really cool, but wouldn’t make sense if you weren’t there so I won’t bother to explain it.

 

*At this point in the blog I fell asleep from illness, then when I woke up, I was too busy throwing up to continue it, so yeah, we’ll leave it there. It was written 24th of November at 10.23am!*