Halloween and elf shopping

 Have you ever gone shopping dressed as an elf?
 It wasn't a very good Halloween costume, and I took it off before I could take a photo. But, in the shop, I didn't actually get any funny looks because people wear all sorts now, don't they? You see a man walking along with silver spike cuffs all up his arm and jeans that you could strain tea through, and it's not that unusual.
 On the way home from the shop, I was in the car with my two sisters, my brother and my mum, and our car broke down. Yay! We pulled over into a weird little side street and rang my dad, who was at work with our other car. Then we sat in the dead car for half an hour, outside some sort of Polish supermarket. My mum said that there were a lot of Polish immigrants in this area. The houses were ancient Tudor-style terraces; the kind where one family gets about a two-metre-wide part of the house and one broken-down fance - there's an area like that in every town. The area intrigued me. I could have written a story about that area; one with an amusing romantic subplot.
 Then, after my little brother and sister had gone well and truly ballistic from cabin fever, my dad arrived.
 So that is another memory for the collection: I was 13 when I was first trapped in  a broken-down car.
 When we got home, I took Harriet and Lucas trick-or-treating, dressed as an elf, a wizard and a vampire bunny. We had so much fun; it was a great laugh.
 No, that is a lie. I had a really rubbish Hallowevening. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but really Halloween is just a bunch of kids in cheap, unconvincing outfits running around in the rain begging strangers for sweets.
 God, the doorbell's just gone off for the sixth time. My poor dog. He loves it when visiters come, and he's getting frantic and confused when none of them stay to fuss over him. He's a black dog, three-quarters cocker spaniel and one quarter poodle, one year old and called Caleb. Thank you for making my viewcount get to 15!

The drawing wall

I don't still own every drawing I've done since I was five years old. Some get lost or are in drawing books, and also some of the books got lost. That's why the wall of my bedroom only has 30 drawings on it. This is a photo of one half of the Drawing Wall.

 These drawings are, apart from one or two, all characters from my stories. The wall is where I put all my drawings (apart from the ones in sketchbooks, because although there are many things that you can do with Blutack, you can't use it to stick sketchbooks to a wall).

Here is a horribly grainy picture of a drawing that I finished this morning of a mechanic girl and her warrior boyfriend. The girl's name is Tinker and the boy is called Tarquin; he's one of my favourite characters, who comes from a circus in Pakistan. In the circus he used to dance and be a fireater, sometimes both at once on a tightrope - so what's not to love? Then again, I have a lot of favourite characters. And the girl likes dancing and banana sandwiches. She is always covered in oil and keeps a spanner in her hair.

Mourning witch

 Today I dressed up as a witch. I was going out for coffee with my grandparents and I wore skinny black jeans, black boots, a black coat over a black top, grey and black fingerless gloves and a grey scarf with black stars on it. I mused that I was either being a witch, or mourning my dead husband. You choose. Hahaha.
 OK, I'm being a bit wierd.

 My mind is well and truly blown right now; people are actually reading what I've written! I saw that people in the USA are reading my blog! This is bizarre! My viewcount has reached 7 now.

Thiepval Memorial

 Sorry for the delay with this second post. My grandparents are staying with us so no laptop time for me right now.

 It was cold, and quite drizzly, because this is the part of France that's so far to the north-west it's practically England. Early on the morning of our last day in France, we walked to Thiepval Memorial, which is a beautiful monument to the 72,500 people who went missing in the Somme campaign and never got a proper grave. In front of the monument was a perfectly mown sweep of grass, bright with dew, lined with an avenue of trees. Behind us, a clear view over the hills where the German trench system used to be. It was so early in the morning that the sky was grey and the mist still clung on to the trees.
 I was walking with my new friend Matt, who is one of the shortest thirteen-year-olds on the planet, because his body doesn't actually have any growth hormones and he has to inject it into himself. On the other hand, when he talks it is like having words fired at you from a machine gun at a million miles an hour. But even he was quiet now. It was one of the quietest places I have ever been. For once there were no random Canadian tourists or badly-behaved students screaming, or making other people scream. It was as though the thing was so huge and solemn that it sucked all of the sound out of its surroundings. I enjoyed the silence. And, rising in the mists, the red and white monument was so beautiful.

I said so to Matt, who said 'Yes, that's ironic, isn't it? Because it's pretty, but...' which actually almost brought me to tears.

 

 We walked up to the memorial and laid a wreath of poppies on it, and one girl read out a military remembrance poem - the one that gets read out every Remembrance Day. Then we did one minute of silence for the missing, before being free to look at all the names carved into the columns. It's strange, because although I've said that there were 72,500 names, you can't really picture that until you actually see them and get struck by how massive the number of missing people are.

 

I don't know if you can see this properly, but it's the names of all the people from the Royal Berkshire Regiment who went missing, which is where I come from. To give you an idea of the scale, hopefully, this is one half of one face of a column. There are four faces inscribed with names on each column, and sixteen columns altogether, meaning that this photo shows one hundred-and-twenty-eighth of all the names.

 Some people had left poppies or little wooden crosses around, saying things like 'Lance-Corporal S. James, from your great-great-great grandaughter' which was touching. Or sometimes there was just a name.

 And that is the most amazing thing I have done when I am 13. I went to France and saw the Thiepval memorial for the 72,500 missing people.

 

 P.S. Thanks for reading this! I saw that my page had had 3 views and that blew me away!

 

 

Hello, world

     Hi. My name is Alimonsoon and I am 13 years old. I have wanted to start a blog for a while now (I want to be a writer, and everyone says that blogging is good practise) but I've never known what to write about. Then, when I was in the car on the way to the dentist (in case you wanted to know) I had the idea of making the blog my memories page, because I think that creating memories is important. This is how it started out:
     For a long time, I have known that I wanted to do something amazing when I was thirteen. It was quite a random desire, but I want to be able to look back and say 'Ah, yes. I did that when I was thirteen'.
     But you know how it is with deadlines. My 14th birthday will be in December, and then I will not be 13 any more and will have run out of time. It got to October and I hadn't done anything. So I joined a school trip to the Somme Valley in France, where what is described as the bloodiest battle in the First World War took place. I wasn't sure if it would be special enough; it was only a three-day trip and the first day wasn't very promising. In fact, it was verging on boring. The second day didn't get off to a good start either: I almost didn't have enough time to have a shower and, at breakfast, the only thing that I wasn't allergic to was the toast. The French just don't seem to understand nut allergies. But the good thing about the day was when we went into a field - one of the muddiest fields in the entire world - and collected some WWI memorabilia: shrapnel ball, pieces of barbed wire and fragments of shells. One boy found a whole eighteen-pounder shell case which everyone told him he should sell online.
     And then, on the third day, it was amazing. I'll tell you about it now that I have finally started my blog. I probably won't mind if no-one actually reads it. You are under no obligation.