Vote for me. Please.

Yesterday, I had an interview at the Guy's, King's and St. Thomas's Medical School. It went really, really well - they were terribly nice and friendly, started having a proper conversation with me instead of an interview, and finished off by saying time was up, but they'd like to spend more time talking with me, I was obviously a talented young woman. I came out with a big stupid grin. Even if they don't give me an offer, I didn't make a mess of the interview. And if they do give me an offer, it'll be my insurance choice. Roll on UCAS deadlines (sixth of June, in my case - twenty-eighth of April for everyone else).

As for today - if I ever volunteer to be candidate for anything ever again, shootmeplease. I am Labour candidate for the mock election, as said before (and I've just noticed Lucy Kinsella is down on the website as Library Democrat candidate!) and up until now, we'd had a few problems but not too many. Some posters had gone missing here and there, nothing serious. Today it got personal. Our campaign material was being pulled off the walls mere seconds after we'd put it up (out of my hands on one or two occasions) and while I was in the Derby Wing standing on a chair with a poster, some Upper Fours came along to tell me they weren't voting for me. The thing is, they have such short attention spans that you can't argue with them.

It was worse with the thirds. When my team and I entered their classroom, they started yelling and screaming and jumping and throwing stuff and threatening actual violence. I was in the process of putting up a poster, knowing it would be yanked down and destroyed, when I finally snapped. Miranda said later that I looked somewhat psychotic; anyway, the net result was my finding Mr Evans at lunch and confessing, "I did a bad thing..."

Oh, not that bad. Miranda later reasoned that if we couldn't have a poster but everyone else could, it clearly wasn't fair and really my pulling down all the other parties' posters and storming out with the intention to shred them wasn't that unjustified after all.

Still, we were all three furious, Sam, Miranda and me. We work hard on those posters, make them ourselves, visit the local party ourselves, use our own money and printers' ink, and our work gets destroyed. Yes, I appreciate it's a middle-class independent school environment. Still, we're the only party that faces outright hostility and stuff getting thrown at us. Anyway, Miranda and I went out to see the local party for stickers. Unfortunately they're not the standard ones - they're either trade unions or Welsh language and sadly I cannot tell which - but I wore mine anyway. Sigh.

There are certain bright spots. Cath was able to give us the names of some of the saboteurs, for example, and apparently their form-teacher had a right go at them, at least according to what I've heard from the team since the end of school. Mrs Colvin sent me a message - "your posters are the only ones with any actual wit!" - and Mrs Custard saved the day by interrupting someone in mid-rant (directed at me) to tell me she liked the posters.

For reference, there are several types of posters. There are the simple Vote Labour ones, edited to put my name on, then the "2+2=5" ones that Sam did, and the billboard ones I did. They're basically the Tories' infuriating campaign slogans (like "I mean, how hard is to keep a hospital clean?") that I downloaded and graffitied with Photoshop. There are also the ones I had a lovely time with, grafting Michael Howard's head onto the head of a Dalek. One person didn't believe I'd done those myself, which was unexpected salve for my ego.

After all this, I went to Biology, and began pouring out my tale of woe. It started with Rice-Oxley saying, "Iona, you're having strokes."

"What?" I said, quite understandably, I felt.

"They were supposed to tell you," she began, and Fidan nudged my foot ever-so gently and said:

"She's had such a stressful day, she's having memory loss."

And then Rice-Oxley wanted to know about all the stress, so I complained about posters and chairs being thrown and the sabotage and relentless threats.

"And," I said, in full flow now, "the lower school are going around saying, 'Do you know the Labour candidate is,' whisper, giggle, shuffle, 'did you know she's a...lesbian?"

At which point Rice-Oxley, Sarah and Fidan all exchanged glances and burst into identical peals of laughter. And Rice-Oxley said it was all quite out of order and she'd be going to have a word with the thirds' form-teachers. I thanked her profusively. It's so wonderful to just have someone on my side. On that note, I love my campaign team with a love that transcends decency. They are on my side. And, amazingly, a girl named Zara asked her teacher how to join my campaign team. I arranged to meet her in the library and she turned out to be shy but lovely.

So, yes. Campaigning is not of the fun. I may dare to canvass people next week, but for the rest of the afternoon I put it out of my head and enjoyed the Biology lesson. There was plenty of food (Cadbury's buttons, Haribo and strawberry laces) and I ate it happily while writing about vaccination. All fun. (It turns out she meant I have to write a side about strokes and present it next week, in the name of kearning about disease.)

And when I went out into the park to go home, a girl I'd never met before stopped me and said, "I'm voting for you."

"Really?" I said emotionally.

"Definitely. I wouldn't vote Conservative." She smiled happily and said, "It's funny 'cause my best mate is Beth Rogers."

I agreed that was funny - Beth is Tory candidate - and went home feeling rather better about the universe. Of course I got home to find anarchist stickers on the lampposts ("Anarchists don't give a fuck about the election!") and a letter from Balliol College to say where is my student finance, and a letter from the student finance people to say where is my birth certificate.

Ah, well, you can't have everything in life. And I'm sure that a whole pack of ickle firsties are going to be in so much fucking trouble on Monday. Heh.

Doctor Who - fandom notes and queries (and scarves)

I've been meaning to make this post for a while because, really, one of life's great pleasures is a new fandom. And one shared with other people - in this case a quarter of the British population - is the best type of all.

Anyway, firstly a GIP, for which we must all blame eternalwings. I was talking about scarves for some reason, and if you would like to know (and I don't see why you would) I own eight scarves. I think this is because my mother once realised I liked them and decided to give them to me at every possible opportunity; not that I mind, because I now have loads. There is my favourite, the red and black that you have all seen, a black and white that is similar, a black and brown that is similar again, a plain red fleece one, a plain cream one, a pink and black that matches the gloves Hannah gave me, another ancient (well, fifteen years old) cream one, and a cashmere one I stole off my mother. Anyway, Sam happened to mention the red-and-black looks like something the Doctor would wear, and one Google-image-search later, she was proved distressingly right.

So I now have an icon of of the Fourth Doctor and his scarf (yay) to use when I, too, am feeling particularly gormless. I blame Sam.

Talking of the Doctor and Google search (I was, a minute ago!), the Mirror today decided to evaluate the various search engines in its online section. They chose to search for Doctor Who as a test - unsurprisingly, Google was the best, but on the whimsical side; it brought up something about how to knit scarves. I was amused.

Anyway! Also on the fandom side, the preparations for Collectormania 7 have begun. Some of the guests I wanted to see have dropped out, but actually, I don't care; I go to cons for the people more than anything. We're planning a new_who meet-up at some point, because several members and all the three mods, hathy_col, amchau and me, are going. We should also meet mettanna, whom I haven't seen in ages, and from this end it's going to be the usual double date situation - Clare&Colleen, Hannah and me - plus Enid, hopefully, and Am-Chau should be meeting us there. It will be, in the words of no-one in particular, fantastic.

So fandom life is all yay, and it's only in real life that people are throwing chairs at me. I'm writing fic at the moment, and need a quick canon question answered - simply, was the First Doctor ever a child? I mean, did he have a Time Lord mum and dad and play hide-and-seek and have an idyllic childhood, or is it, as it so often is, much more complicated?

That is me done. GIP.