Rhyd-y-creuau
Aug. 27th, 2004 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenLet’s begin at the beginning, shall we? I have spent the last five days on a Biology field trip to the wilds of Wales, and it’s been… well, it’s been an experience. We got there on Sunday evening, having driven through Liverpool, then Wirral, then mountains and valleys to get there. You always know you’re in Wales by the road signs. About five or so, we arrived at the Drapers’ Field Centre, a small, lowset building with acres of woodland and a stream in its grounds. It’s certified perfectly sustainable and eco-friendly – it actually generates more energy than it uses, or something like that. I thought it was rather pretty if wet a lot of the time.
I was there with all the people I do Biology with, which means none of them have really appeared here before. I was sharing a room with Sarah, and should have been sharing with Emma as well but wasn’t due to an unexpected incident that Emma will probably be bitter about until the end of time. Thus it transpired that Sarah and I were two people sharing a three-person room, which made us much the envy of everyone else.
Other characters were Jo (young, had sense of humour drier than mine, afraid that after four years as freshwater ecologist it was only a matter of time before she found a dead body) who was our ecology tutor and permanently attached to us for the duration of the trip, and of course Rice-Oxley, who’s probably been mentioned in these pages entirely too much. For those who missed it the first few million times, she is my Biology teacher, a small woman, mad as a hatter and obsessed with squirrels.
The place itself is more commonly known as Rhyd-y-creuau, up the valley from Betws-y-coed. I wrote a lot while I was there, because there was so much time and peace and quiet to do it in. I’ve never written so much in a paper journal before, and I do think it’s worth reproducing. Because I wrote it as it happened, it slips in and out of past tense.
Monday - croeso i Rhyd-y-creuau
The day from hell without a doubt. Began with small-mammal trapping, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s very humane – each trap has a nest box with food and bedding, so comfortable that apparently some animals go out of their way to be trapped. Sarah and I caught a baby bankvole, and between everyone we caught three bankvoles and six mice. Having taken some pictures of then, we let them go again, which made the whole thing something of a pointless exercise.
This was followed by a trek through Coed Hafod (climax oak woodland, apparently) that wasn’t fun as such things are supposed to be, but rather wet and muddy and honestly, bloody boring. We were looking at lichens and mosses, some of the most boring organisms in creation, and Helena and I were engaged in something called point-sampling, which manages to be both mind-numbingly tedious and difficult at the same time. By the time we got back to Rhyd-y-creuau, I was pissed off, my clothes were muddy and my boots were non-existent.
One of the high points of the day was, amazingly enough, walking barefoot through a bog. It was a refreshing experience; the ground was soft and pleasantly squidgy, lush with greenery, and the water that ran off my feet was clean. But I had to spend the rest of the day messily, muddily barefoot because I had no boots. It was a long story, but after a day of nothing but mud, I was miserable. Finally, I gave up on the universe and went to take a shower. The shower dribbled. There was no other word for it. And then I discovered I had no shampoo. It was the proverbial last straw, and I yelled at the door and the shower and all other nearby inanimate objects before stomping off to wibble at Hannah. She cheered me up thoroughly, and we discussed things that were not mud and lichens could, possibly, have been vamp!Willow, and thanks to events in the backgrond, she’s now heard Rice-Oxley. She was coming in each evening to check we were all in our rooms by eleven. I was amused, but I didn’t sleep that night either.
Tuesday - a source of organic pollution
The nice kind of not sleeping, because it was raining and I could hear cows outside the window, but I was pretty much dead in the morning, naturally. The post-breakfast agenda (and breakfast was an agenda all by itself, with more food, cutlery and associated paraphernalia than you can shake an environmentally-friendly stick at) consisted of measurements taken in a stream. Said stream is also called Rhyd-y-creuau, and when I first saw it I thought it was too pretty to be natural, which probably says more about me than the stream.
We made our way up there through trees which had that cathedral quality, all height and stillness, and I maintain that I would have enjoyed myself under other circumstances. The stream sampling I did enjoy. There’s always going to be something fun about tramping through fast-moving water in wellies. The tutor, Jo, was talking about herbivores and detritivores in the water ecosystem, and I should have been listening but my inner voices insisted on saying it’s pretty it’s so pretty look see the pretty. No wonder people are driven to write poetry about Wales.
When the investigation was over we tramped back through the wood to the field centre and did a sample analysis. This basically means sifting through the water from the stream and extracting and identifying the invertebrates (read, insects, spiders, and other icky things). It was interesting initially, but it was ridiculous how quickly my sleep deprivation kicked in.
Talking of ridiculous, Rice-Oxley has been taking pictures like a madwoman, and the ones she’s got of me have me resembling nothing so much as a fisherman, with silly waterproof trousers, sillier hat, red fleece, Barbour jacket and big massive huge green wellies. Clearly the ultimate in ridiculous, but sadly necessary for facing Welsh weather.
So, I was falling asleep, Rice-Oxley was taking pictures of me, and as I said to Hannah the night before, things could not get worse. I had to say it. I tempted fate. The afternoon saw us stream sampling again, at a different portion of the stream this time. It travels down the east side of the Conwy valley, through woods, down a waterfall, and under the drive of Rhyd-y-creuau before going out through the fields. Those fields are private property, and consequently there’s nothing to stop the farmers from cleaning out their cow sheds into the stream.
“Manure,” Jo said, a polite euphemism, closely followed by, “Sarah, Helena, Iona – you’re sampling in the slurry pool.”
“I hate you,” I said. Then I grabbed quadrat and sample bottle, pulled on my wellies and descended into the “water” – polite euphemism again there – squidge, squidge, boots sinking into the ground at the base. I held the net while Sarah kicked-sampled in the quadrat. When at last we emerged, I reserved the right to throw a strop. I’ve never felt nor smelt so thoroughly disgusting in my entire life.
Needless to say, our samples were the gungiest, ickiest and generally horriblest. We had to wash out the nets until the water ran clear, which involved buckets upon buckets of freezing cold water, and then, and then…
Yes, and then. Then the sifting through the samples with rubber gloves, looking for living things when we were quite sure nothing on earth could live in the gloop. We weren’t too far wrong – we found two leeches and a dead fish.
By evening, most of which I spent washing crap out of my hair (yes, literally) coursework research was well underway. I approved of the Rhyd-y-creuau library, despite its emphasis on lichens and mosses. I eventually gave up on woodland ecology and went to play pinp-pong. I figured I’d probably earned it.
Wednesday - Bio-amrywiaeth yng Nghonwhy
The coursework day, and coursework really was the point of the whole expedition. I wrote mine quite comfortably, breaking off every so often for a wander through the trees, and narrowly avoiding the rain. I finished in good time for the next portion of the day.
Which was, as Helena put it, “a walk up a hill!” I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it far more than she did. It was a scramble upwards (Betws-y-coed is on the valley floor) but the view from the top was spectacular. I had to cope with Helena carping all the way down, but she did cheer up at the prospect of ice-cream, as did we all. At the same time, Emma was treating me to a recital of her song of the moment. To those reading who are local, it’s the song from the Yellow Pages advert. For others, the lyrics:
“Life is great and life is fine,
‘Cause I’ve met a girl and no-one likes you.”
It loses all impact on paper, but when sung, it somehow became the funniest thing in the universe and survived at least five hundred renditions. I’ve laughed a lot on this trip. And eaten a lot as well, if I may segue into food for a moment. The food was amazing and had to be eaten to be believed. Strange and weird, I know, as everything else was field-trip standard, but people were having quiet orgasms over the banoffee pie, it was that good. Yes, I digress.
Ice-cream consumed, we returned. And that would have been that for the day, if it were not for the fact I appear to have very persuasive friends. I was in the games room (a subterranean cave of a room, with a pool table) playing ping-pong with Emma (an interesting experience in itself, as she considers the table a kind of optional extra and will carry on swiping at the ball on the floor at the other side of the room) when one of the other school’s teachers came in and asked if we wanted to go bat-hunting.
I am interested in bats, as it happens. Caught one once in Mammoth Caves, which I think are in Ohio. But I didn’t want to go! It was the middle of the night and I had untouched coffee!
They dragged me out anyway. And thus I found myself making my way to Betws-y-coed in the dark with a torch and bat-machine-type-thing. We were standing on the bridge above the river (a bouncy, swingy pedestrian bridge) over the water and listening for bats. It was strange but compelling; the water was black and still beneath and the valley rose above up around us into a clouded sky.
And then came the bats. The device we were using simply scanned frequencies and pulled the bats’ echolocating sounds down into the range of human hearing. It was fascinating, listening to clicks and trills in the dead of night, Doppler-shifted as the bats swung by overhead.
We must have been there quite some time, because by the time we came to walk back it was so dark we were searching for the mud on the road with torches. August, but cold, dark and windswept with huge expanses of silence in the valley and I think that was why we felt the need to sing. Anyone passing would have heard four voices in an enthusiastic rendition of Away In a Manger, followed by Good King Wenceslas to the tune of Yankee Doodle.
I fell asleep that night. I think it was the rain.
Thursday - Bio-amrywiaeth; cyfoeth bywyd ar y ddaer
Thus came Thursday, the day I have never quite got the hang of, and the day of the coursework implementation. Interestingly, after four days and approximately 2000 words, I haven’t said what the coursework involved. You devise your own investigation, which generally has to be related to mosses, lichens or freshwater invertebrates, god only knows why. My investigation was based on the age of lichens as related to the substrate upon which they grow, and while I may have written all kinds of crap in my plan justifying this and other hypotheses, my real reason for choosing it was simple. I like graveyards. No messing about with tape measures and tree circumference for me; I like a substrate that has its exact age chiselled onto it.
And I do like graveywards, especially old ones, and St Michael’s, Betws-y-coed, dates from the fourteenth century. The oldest graves we found, we being Helena and me, were ancient: chipped and lichen-encrusted and what was left of the inscriptions proclaimed them as seventeenth century creations.
While we had a specific game plan – quadrats out, mausoleums only, light intensity and pH – we were continuously distracted by the gravestones. The only Welsh word I really know is cariad, beloved, and I saw it again on the graves, etched in stone and worn to smoothness by the rain and lichen. There was a girl called Iona who died in the eighteenth century and was buried in a grave beneath a yew tree. I eventually decided it would be too morbid to take a picture of it.
The afternoon was quiet and lazy; I was sitting outside the lab at a picnic table with Sarah, slowly writing my statistical analysis (I’ve learned too much about stats on this trip, but I have enjoyed it, scarily enough) in weather that was windy and changeable but not actually raining. Rice-Oxley was out there too, talking to us and trying to get signal on her phone. She was wearing a red hoodie, sucking an orange lollipop and standing on a pinic table holding her phone in the air. And bouncing. She’s a very weird woman, but I must confess she’s grown on me during the last year. It only really dawned on me when she was standing there talking round the lollipop rather than taking it out of her mouth. “Lollipops are a great leveller,” she said, and I agreed. It was cute.
I spent the evening by the open window, listening to the rain and writing this. It’s twice as long as my actual coursework.
After I’d written all of that, Sarah came in. It was about five to eleven, Rice-Oxley’s usual time for coming round the rooms, and I asked idly where she was.
“It may be only a rumour,” she said, “but apparently she’s out on the town.”
I pictured it. “There’s a weird concept.”
And the conversation moved on as it generally does. We’d been talking about this and that for quite a while when there was a knock. I thought it would be Rice-Oxley, but no, it was Emma and Becky O, who more or less lived in our room more than they did in their own. It was about a quarter to twelve then. “Hi,” I said, and looked expectant, because Emma generally had gossip for us whenever she appeared.
“I just heard Mrs Rice-Oxley,” she said. “She went into Meg and Bev’s room, and then she went again, and I heard Meg say, ‘She was well pissed, her!’”
“Rice-Oxley?” I repeated, feeling slightly bemused.
Emma ignored me. “So, I said, ‘Georgina, are you awake?’, but she was asleep, so I pottered out into the corridor to see what you were doing.”
Becky disappeared after a moment, and Emma started telling us something else, when she broke off. We’d all heard Rice-Oxley’s voice in the corridor, and Emma looked panicked. She really did. She looked all around her, frantically searching for a place to hide in the tiny, tiny room, and I started giggling and couldn’t stop. Sarah was in no better shape, just about dying with laughter. Finally, Emma bounced up the bunk-bed ladder in about two seconds flat and scrunched under the duvet on the bed that should have been hers in the first place. “Do you think she’ll see me?”
“Only if she looks at you,” I hissed back, and then Rice-Oxley’s head appeared round the door.
“I think this room needs to quieten down,” she said severely, and then, “You’re making a lot of noise for two people.”
No-one moved or made a sound. Emma didn’t stir. I noticed I’d been lying in bed pretending to be asleep with my glasses still on.
“Should I turn the light off?”
“Yes, please,” said Sarah and I gratefully, and she did so, and left. The moment she’d gone, “Do you think she saw me?” overlapped with “She didn’t look very pissed,” and I gave up and collapsed laughing. She had to have seen Emma to have made that remark, but probably just let it go. That said, Emma insisted I reconnoitre and pretend to be going to the loo before she sneaked back to her room. I took a picture of her hiding on the bunk bed. I can’t wait to see all her pictures.
Friday morning, and we started back this morning at nine. Thus ends my trip to Wales, and Biology coursework. Overall, I’m not sorry I went, but I’m glad to be home.
I’ve been catching up slowly with everything I’ve missed – there’s a lot! – and haven’t really been able to get through all my friends’ entries, so if there’s anything I must know, please comment here and tell me. I already know I got![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
crack_vanned for Love Is Not Love, so I’m rather happy about that.
And yes, happy to be home.
I was there with all the people I do Biology with, which means none of them have really appeared here before. I was sharing a room with Sarah, and should have been sharing with Emma as well but wasn’t due to an unexpected incident that Emma will probably be bitter about until the end of time. Thus it transpired that Sarah and I were two people sharing a three-person room, which made us much the envy of everyone else.
Other characters were Jo (young, had sense of humour drier than mine, afraid that after four years as freshwater ecologist it was only a matter of time before she found a dead body) who was our ecology tutor and permanently attached to us for the duration of the trip, and of course Rice-Oxley, who’s probably been mentioned in these pages entirely too much. For those who missed it the first few million times, she is my Biology teacher, a small woman, mad as a hatter and obsessed with squirrels.
The place itself is more commonly known as Rhyd-y-creuau, up the valley from Betws-y-coed. I wrote a lot while I was there, because there was so much time and peace and quiet to do it in. I’ve never written so much in a paper journal before, and I do think it’s worth reproducing. Because I wrote it as it happened, it slips in and out of past tense.
Monday - croeso i Rhyd-y-creuau
The day from hell without a doubt. Began with small-mammal trapping, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s very humane – each trap has a nest box with food and bedding, so comfortable that apparently some animals go out of their way to be trapped. Sarah and I caught a baby bankvole, and between everyone we caught three bankvoles and six mice. Having taken some pictures of then, we let them go again, which made the whole thing something of a pointless exercise.
This was followed by a trek through Coed Hafod (climax oak woodland, apparently) that wasn’t fun as such things are supposed to be, but rather wet and muddy and honestly, bloody boring. We were looking at lichens and mosses, some of the most boring organisms in creation, and Helena and I were engaged in something called point-sampling, which manages to be both mind-numbingly tedious and difficult at the same time. By the time we got back to Rhyd-y-creuau, I was pissed off, my clothes were muddy and my boots were non-existent.
One of the high points of the day was, amazingly enough, walking barefoot through a bog. It was a refreshing experience; the ground was soft and pleasantly squidgy, lush with greenery, and the water that ran off my feet was clean. But I had to spend the rest of the day messily, muddily barefoot because I had no boots. It was a long story, but after a day of nothing but mud, I was miserable. Finally, I gave up on the universe and went to take a shower. The shower dribbled. There was no other word for it. And then I discovered I had no shampoo. It was the proverbial last straw, and I yelled at the door and the shower and all other nearby inanimate objects before stomping off to wibble at Hannah. She cheered me up thoroughly, and we discussed things that were not mud and lichens could, possibly, have been vamp!Willow, and thanks to events in the backgrond, she’s now heard Rice-Oxley. She was coming in each evening to check we were all in our rooms by eleven. I was amused, but I didn’t sleep that night either.
Tuesday - a source of organic pollution
The nice kind of not sleeping, because it was raining and I could hear cows outside the window, but I was pretty much dead in the morning, naturally. The post-breakfast agenda (and breakfast was an agenda all by itself, with more food, cutlery and associated paraphernalia than you can shake an environmentally-friendly stick at) consisted of measurements taken in a stream. Said stream is also called Rhyd-y-creuau, and when I first saw it I thought it was too pretty to be natural, which probably says more about me than the stream.
We made our way up there through trees which had that cathedral quality, all height and stillness, and I maintain that I would have enjoyed myself under other circumstances. The stream sampling I did enjoy. There’s always going to be something fun about tramping through fast-moving water in wellies. The tutor, Jo, was talking about herbivores and detritivores in the water ecosystem, and I should have been listening but my inner voices insisted on saying it’s pretty it’s so pretty look see the pretty. No wonder people are driven to write poetry about Wales.
When the investigation was over we tramped back through the wood to the field centre and did a sample analysis. This basically means sifting through the water from the stream and extracting and identifying the invertebrates (read, insects, spiders, and other icky things). It was interesting initially, but it was ridiculous how quickly my sleep deprivation kicked in.
Talking of ridiculous, Rice-Oxley has been taking pictures like a madwoman, and the ones she’s got of me have me resembling nothing so much as a fisherman, with silly waterproof trousers, sillier hat, red fleece, Barbour jacket and big massive huge green wellies. Clearly the ultimate in ridiculous, but sadly necessary for facing Welsh weather.
So, I was falling asleep, Rice-Oxley was taking pictures of me, and as I said to Hannah the night before, things could not get worse. I had to say it. I tempted fate. The afternoon saw us stream sampling again, at a different portion of the stream this time. It travels down the east side of the Conwy valley, through woods, down a waterfall, and under the drive of Rhyd-y-creuau before going out through the fields. Those fields are private property, and consequently there’s nothing to stop the farmers from cleaning out their cow sheds into the stream.
“Manure,” Jo said, a polite euphemism, closely followed by, “Sarah, Helena, Iona – you’re sampling in the slurry pool.”
“I hate you,” I said. Then I grabbed quadrat and sample bottle, pulled on my wellies and descended into the “water” – polite euphemism again there – squidge, squidge, boots sinking into the ground at the base. I held the net while Sarah kicked-sampled in the quadrat. When at last we emerged, I reserved the right to throw a strop. I’ve never felt nor smelt so thoroughly disgusting in my entire life.
Needless to say, our samples were the gungiest, ickiest and generally horriblest. We had to wash out the nets until the water ran clear, which involved buckets upon buckets of freezing cold water, and then, and then…
Yes, and then. Then the sifting through the samples with rubber gloves, looking for living things when we were quite sure nothing on earth could live in the gloop. We weren’t too far wrong – we found two leeches and a dead fish.
By evening, most of which I spent washing crap out of my hair (yes, literally) coursework research was well underway. I approved of the Rhyd-y-creuau library, despite its emphasis on lichens and mosses. I eventually gave up on woodland ecology and went to play pinp-pong. I figured I’d probably earned it.
Wednesday - Bio-amrywiaeth yng Nghonwhy
The coursework day, and coursework really was the point of the whole expedition. I wrote mine quite comfortably, breaking off every so often for a wander through the trees, and narrowly avoiding the rain. I finished in good time for the next portion of the day.
Which was, as Helena put it, “a walk up a hill!” I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it far more than she did. It was a scramble upwards (Betws-y-coed is on the valley floor) but the view from the top was spectacular. I had to cope with Helena carping all the way down, but she did cheer up at the prospect of ice-cream, as did we all. At the same time, Emma was treating me to a recital of her song of the moment. To those reading who are local, it’s the song from the Yellow Pages advert. For others, the lyrics:
“Life is great and life is fine,
‘Cause I’ve met a girl and no-one likes you.”
It loses all impact on paper, but when sung, it somehow became the funniest thing in the universe and survived at least five hundred renditions. I’ve laughed a lot on this trip. And eaten a lot as well, if I may segue into food for a moment. The food was amazing and had to be eaten to be believed. Strange and weird, I know, as everything else was field-trip standard, but people were having quiet orgasms over the banoffee pie, it was that good. Yes, I digress.
Ice-cream consumed, we returned. And that would have been that for the day, if it were not for the fact I appear to have very persuasive friends. I was in the games room (a subterranean cave of a room, with a pool table) playing ping-pong with Emma (an interesting experience in itself, as she considers the table a kind of optional extra and will carry on swiping at the ball on the floor at the other side of the room) when one of the other school’s teachers came in and asked if we wanted to go bat-hunting.
I am interested in bats, as it happens. Caught one once in Mammoth Caves, which I think are in Ohio. But I didn’t want to go! It was the middle of the night and I had untouched coffee!
They dragged me out anyway. And thus I found myself making my way to Betws-y-coed in the dark with a torch and bat-machine-type-thing. We were standing on the bridge above the river (a bouncy, swingy pedestrian bridge) over the water and listening for bats. It was strange but compelling; the water was black and still beneath and the valley rose above up around us into a clouded sky.
And then came the bats. The device we were using simply scanned frequencies and pulled the bats’ echolocating sounds down into the range of human hearing. It was fascinating, listening to clicks and trills in the dead of night, Doppler-shifted as the bats swung by overhead.
We must have been there quite some time, because by the time we came to walk back it was so dark we were searching for the mud on the road with torches. August, but cold, dark and windswept with huge expanses of silence in the valley and I think that was why we felt the need to sing. Anyone passing would have heard four voices in an enthusiastic rendition of Away In a Manger, followed by Good King Wenceslas to the tune of Yankee Doodle.
I fell asleep that night. I think it was the rain.
Thursday - Bio-amrywiaeth; cyfoeth bywyd ar y ddaer
Thus came Thursday, the day I have never quite got the hang of, and the day of the coursework implementation. Interestingly, after four days and approximately 2000 words, I haven’t said what the coursework involved. You devise your own investigation, which generally has to be related to mosses, lichens or freshwater invertebrates, god only knows why. My investigation was based on the age of lichens as related to the substrate upon which they grow, and while I may have written all kinds of crap in my plan justifying this and other hypotheses, my real reason for choosing it was simple. I like graveyards. No messing about with tape measures and tree circumference for me; I like a substrate that has its exact age chiselled onto it.
And I do like graveywards, especially old ones, and St Michael’s, Betws-y-coed, dates from the fourteenth century. The oldest graves we found, we being Helena and me, were ancient: chipped and lichen-encrusted and what was left of the inscriptions proclaimed them as seventeenth century creations.
While we had a specific game plan – quadrats out, mausoleums only, light intensity and pH – we were continuously distracted by the gravestones. The only Welsh word I really know is cariad, beloved, and I saw it again on the graves, etched in stone and worn to smoothness by the rain and lichen. There was a girl called Iona who died in the eighteenth century and was buried in a grave beneath a yew tree. I eventually decided it would be too morbid to take a picture of it.
The afternoon was quiet and lazy; I was sitting outside the lab at a picnic table with Sarah, slowly writing my statistical analysis (I’ve learned too much about stats on this trip, but I have enjoyed it, scarily enough) in weather that was windy and changeable but not actually raining. Rice-Oxley was out there too, talking to us and trying to get signal on her phone. She was wearing a red hoodie, sucking an orange lollipop and standing on a pinic table holding her phone in the air. And bouncing. She’s a very weird woman, but I must confess she’s grown on me during the last year. It only really dawned on me when she was standing there talking round the lollipop rather than taking it out of her mouth. “Lollipops are a great leveller,” she said, and I agreed. It was cute.
I spent the evening by the open window, listening to the rain and writing this. It’s twice as long as my actual coursework.
After I’d written all of that, Sarah came in. It was about five to eleven, Rice-Oxley’s usual time for coming round the rooms, and I asked idly where she was.
“It may be only a rumour,” she said, “but apparently she’s out on the town.”
I pictured it. “There’s a weird concept.”
And the conversation moved on as it generally does. We’d been talking about this and that for quite a while when there was a knock. I thought it would be Rice-Oxley, but no, it was Emma and Becky O, who more or less lived in our room more than they did in their own. It was about a quarter to twelve then. “Hi,” I said, and looked expectant, because Emma generally had gossip for us whenever she appeared.
“I just heard Mrs Rice-Oxley,” she said. “She went into Meg and Bev’s room, and then she went again, and I heard Meg say, ‘She was well pissed, her!’”
“Rice-Oxley?” I repeated, feeling slightly bemused.
Emma ignored me. “So, I said, ‘Georgina, are you awake?’, but she was asleep, so I pottered out into the corridor to see what you were doing.”
Becky disappeared after a moment, and Emma started telling us something else, when she broke off. We’d all heard Rice-Oxley’s voice in the corridor, and Emma looked panicked. She really did. She looked all around her, frantically searching for a place to hide in the tiny, tiny room, and I started giggling and couldn’t stop. Sarah was in no better shape, just about dying with laughter. Finally, Emma bounced up the bunk-bed ladder in about two seconds flat and scrunched under the duvet on the bed that should have been hers in the first place. “Do you think she’ll see me?”
“Only if she looks at you,” I hissed back, and then Rice-Oxley’s head appeared round the door.
“I think this room needs to quieten down,” she said severely, and then, “You’re making a lot of noise for two people.”
No-one moved or made a sound. Emma didn’t stir. I noticed I’d been lying in bed pretending to be asleep with my glasses still on.
“Should I turn the light off?”
“Yes, please,” said Sarah and I gratefully, and she did so, and left. The moment she’d gone, “Do you think she saw me?” overlapped with “She didn’t look very pissed,” and I gave up and collapsed laughing. She had to have seen Emma to have made that remark, but probably just let it go. That said, Emma insisted I reconnoitre and pretend to be going to the loo before she sneaked back to her room. I took a picture of her hiding on the bunk bed. I can’t wait to see all her pictures.
Friday morning, and we started back this morning at nine. Thus ends my trip to Wales, and Biology coursework. Overall, I’m not sorry I went, but I’m glad to be home.
I’ve been catching up slowly with everything I’ve missed – there’s a lot! – and haven’t really been able to get through all my friends’ entries, so if there’s anything I must know, please comment here and tell me. I already know I got
crack_vanned for Love Is Not Love, so I’m rather happy about that.And yes, happy to be home.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-08-27 01:09 pm (UTC)‘Cause I’ve met a girl and no-one likes you.”
I love that advertisement! The song is fantastic, and I love the guy who sings it.
It is totally unrelated to the rest of your entry, which is also very interesting, but I just had to mention how much I love him singing that song.
no subject
on 2004-08-30 05:00 pm (UTC)