I've told mother that I intend to stay in Canterbury, at least until the end of term, so that I can attend Japanese classes. Weekly classes. So she's asked me to come home Fridays and she'll drive me back on Tuesdays. I've just booked my coach ticket for the start of this commuter-like lifestyle. Uh, such a lifestyle requires packing.. But at least the proportion of my photographs that contain Steve will decrease.

I am pointing at my boyfriend Stephen who is blow-drying his hair after a shower. When he's finished we will go to mine for lunch. At the supermarket yesterday, he bought a whole fish: including head, tail and scales. He's going to grill it. And, er, we might have it with.. Well, I'm going to suggest leaves and potatoes.

Down the hallway, our pal is practising on his saxa-ma-phone. He'd bought it just a couple weeks ago and seems to be making good progress on it. Well done.

TICK

I do like the idea of having a man that makes me want to kill.

 

Things I could do now that my exams are over and I have ridiculously incredible amounts of free time:

- make a dress, esp since several attempts to find clothes to buy on the high street have been fruitless

- read Pope's translation of The Iliad

- begin a photo-a-day project

- learn to juggle

- cook every meal from scratch

- learn to ride a bike

- find Bigfoot

- work out why Steve (the boyfriend) is a big fan of Nietzsche

I was once told that I could find all my favourite people on the walk home from a dream, and so from then on I would try to leave early. Usually I would leave too early to make that journey with anyone and could only watch them in their dreams. When I told my father that I had seen him sail away he smiled and asked me not to tell anyone of what I heard or saw. He believed that peering into people's dreams is worse than having your ear to their door without them knowing.

People seem more interesting in their dreams and it makes me sad to not be able to talk about all the fights I've seen the small kids win or the good food the poor kids ate. At school everyone played in groups, and these groups wouldn't usually talk to other groups, except in class when we had to work together. But I wanted to tell them that everyone dreams about going to the circus. Then maybe we could all be friends and put together our own circus show.

When I dream of the circus I like to be the trapeze artist. I sit on a swing, high above everyone else, eating popcorn until it's my turn to perform. And  everyone cheers for me. I can hang upside down with only a knee holding on, and then I'd loop round and stand without holding the ropes. At this point I might remember that I'm usually scared of heights and slip. The tent itself will gasp and seem to fall with me. Everything goes alright though. I'm a professional. To make the show more dramatic I waited until the last moment to grab the swing and flip myself back onto it, instead of snatching it right away. It sometimes takes a while before anyone started clapping; maybe they follow the line I would make as I fall and not realise that I'm still at the top.

My best friend Jenny also puts on a show. In school, she's usually tripping over because she doesn't know how to do her shoelaces yet, and she's too shy to ask for help. But in the show she has really good balance; like a flamingo because they sleep standing on one leg. She can walk along the tightrope, doing some spins and flips along the way, and when she gets to the middle she jumps on to a big ball. To keep her balance on the ball she has to take little steps to move as the ball rolled, and she juggles as she does this.

My other best friend, Sandra (but I call her Sandy), was ill that day, so in the dream she just sat in the audience. Hot chocolate is her favourite drink and clowns were always refilling her mug to keep her happy. She's never been to the circus before but she's scared of clowns. At first she didn't want any of their hot chocolate because she was worried that their red nose might've fallen into it when they were making it. So they all took off their noses to make sure that wouldn't happen. That made her more scared though: their white faces made them look like ghosts. My mother told me that things make you scared if you don't understand them properly or if you haven't found a way to fight them. So I suggested to Sandy that she should dress up like a clown, and she did. I can lose count of how many mugs of hot chocolate she drinks after that.

I've seen Jack be the lion tamer. In school he likes to tease people about stupid things like wearing odd socks or saying things differently to the way he does. He still seems mean even in my dreams. The lion doesn't like him because all Jack does is try make the lion angry by hitting him and keeps him in a cage so that he can't play with anyone. The lion doesn't want to be angry but merely be allowed to walk around the circus like the other animals.

Then there's Mary-Ann. She does the strangest thing with her popcorn. My favourite kind is sweet, and so is her's but she doesn't tell her mother that because she always runs off to see the balloon animals being made before the show. So her mother buys her a mixed bag of sweet and salty popcorn to make sure that there's at least half she likes. Except that doesn't mean there'll be half left in the bag. Oh no, because to tell whether a piece of popped corn is sweet or salty you have to taste it. So she'll eat half the bag and the other half will have been spat on to the floor under her seat. It's a terrible waste! When we're painting at school she'll take a bit of every colour before she knows what she wants to paint, and there was this one time where she only needed different shades of brown and yellow, because she was painting her dog, and all the other colour paints were thrown away. Things like that make me angry but she never listens when we tell her not to do that.