Candyfloss and fireworks

I've never understood Fireworks Night. Well, when I was six it made perfect sense, but not any more. Everyone knows that that bloke called Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the House of Lords with the King in it, but he was caught and tortured horribly until he gave away the names of his associates, and then killed in the slowest and most horrificly painful way possible .... so we celebrate it! Yay!
 However, it's not so much about Guy Fawkes himself any more. Every year most of the people I know go to the fireworks at Rivermead, where there's lots of little kids running around with glow sticks and things, and a wonderful smell of barbequed food, and music (they always play Firework by Katy Perry, and this year they played Gangnam Style and eveyone jumped around doing the official Gangnam Style dance and some people started a conga line). When the fireworks are about to start they do a countdown; little kids are lifted onto shoulders; people push their way to the front of the crowd....
 And then the fireworks start. The sparks swirl around like fishes but shine brighter than the stars. The field is soon full of smoke, which is lit up pink and green and gold. The noise comes from the sky and up through your feet. When you close your eyes you can still see their trails as though they're etched into the front of your brain. The crowd of us all staring up and going 'OOOOOH!' would have been a runner for the record of Most People All with Cricks In Their Necks. I was standing in the middle of the crowd with my sister, putting candyfloss in my mouth, with my eyes lit up like a little kid.
 If you ever have to do an essay on why you like 5th November celebrations, you can quote me.
 Now I'm off to help my sister work the television so we can curl up in armchairs and stare at the screen. =)

Late

 An orthodontist appointment this morning. Today was a school day so that involved a lot of faff: you have to get a pass out to have permission to leave school, and you have to inform the teacher, and you have to go to the main reception to sign out. Once you're in the car you're safe until you get into town because there are never any parking spaces. But once you manage to get inside the surgery you sign in... and then wait. My normal orthodontist, a tiny Polish woman called Dr Rocha, is very efficient and always runs on time - but today I had Dr Harper, who is so late that the word "appointment" is just a reference point.
 It was a short appointment and she told me that I'd be able to have my braces off in three months or so (celebrations! I've already had them on for eighteen months!). Then I went back to school, having missed half of my maths lesson and all of French.
 I have been invited to another thing which may have the potential to be an amazing thing: it's a trip specifically for Gifted and Talented people (that's me, obviously!) to a place called Tirabad in Wales where you do awesome stuff like caving and jumping off waterfalls. There's also a lot of team-building and "personal development" stuff, which I hate, but I will attempt to get into the trip anyway because I think it would stupid to miss it. Once-in-a-lifetime, etc.
 There was a meeting about the trip today after school, but running with the theme of "late", I was so late that I didn't turn up at all. I got the days mixed up because the next meeting about the Somme assembly is on Friday, so I had meeting on Friday lodged in my head and forgot about the meeting on Thursday. I've emailed the organiser of the trip so hopefully it isn't too late.

The Somme Assembly

 Sorry for no post yesterday. Do you ever get those days when absolutely nothing at all of interest happens?
 Well, today after school, I was asked to go to a meeting, and at the meeting I was asked to take part in an assembly about our trip to the Somme. We'll have to present it three times: once for the year sevens, year eights and year nines (my year). It'll be fine performing to the 7s and 8s: to them, we'll be very grown-up and mature, apart from my crazy year 7 and 8 friends who will probably laugh at me. It's the just the last one that will be embarassing because I don't like performing in front of people I know.

Ice skates

 Today my swelled-up foot had deflated enough to fit into an ice skate - so we went ice skating.
 At the John Nike Centre, most things are made of plastic. You queue up to get the (normally young and skinny) girl to swap your shoes for skates, and if you're lucky you get the comfortable red and grey skates rather than the stiff blue ones. Today we weren't lucky. Then you sit on the low black plastic lockers and put them on before walking through the seating area with yellow and blue plastic seats, past the cafe also with yellow plastic seats, and onto the ice rink itself.
 There's music pounding out. There are some little kids stumbling around trying to find their feet on the ice, and some other annoying kids who zoom around and go backwards on their head and things like that, because they're the ones who have been taught to skate since they could walk. There are always some boys who love to do sharp turns at high speed to kick up as much spray as they can - kshhhhh. It goes dark and there are coloured spotlights; the kind that give you three shadows, all different colours. Once you've remembered your technique, you start to go round. Occasionally you go straight through a spotlight, and it's like you've been singled out on the rink; only you.
 As you can see, I quite like ice skating.
 Incidentally, this made me think of a story that I've sadly neglected - there's a subplot based on ice skating in there which I had completely forgotten about. While I was zooming around the ice, all the time I was working on a scene from this story. When I wasn't doing that, I was thinking about a scene from a different story. Really, I don't stop thinking about stories for more than ten minutes at a time.
 When we got home, we had a Sunday roast and I made the dessert. When I cook, there's always something that I do stupidly wrong. Once I accidentally boiled margarine. Once I left a sponge cake in the microwave until it went flat and soggy. Today, I forgot to put an egg in. =0. I did add an egg at the last minute.
 By the way, this is my blog's 1-week anniversary. Thanks to the mystery person in the USA who's stuck with me.

Zoomer Frost

Here's a lovely memory for me: today I fell down the stairs and busted my foot. It swelled up. Since I couldn't really walk anywhere, I had plenty of opportunity to finish this drawing of Zoomer Frost on the bridge:

Sorry, it's not very good, but it's hard to draw cobblestones... I should have said that the imaginary city in my story had paving slabs. If you haven't read my story yet it's down there in yesterday's post.

"Catch me"

My old story, which I have just improved and revamped, is called ''Catch me" and it's five pages long. This is going to be my longest post ever. Sorry. It only took me four minutes and thirty-six seconds to read through it. Can you give it four minutes of your life?

 

Catch me

 

 Zoomer reached into her pocket and closed her hand around a small plastic packet. It was one of her own creations.

 She dashed across the bridge in the dark, her brown leather coat flapping and the gun that was hidden beneath it slapping against her thigh. Crouching down beside the wall of the building, she pulled back her long, wavy blonde hair – she didn’t want to get her hair stuck in this – and peeled off the back of the packet, slapping it against the wall. The sticky solution squelched as it acquainted itself with the ancient brickwork. It had taken her a long time to find out where this house was, by tracking various small, discreet purchases of a certain poison: anyone going to this amount of trouble to conceal the fact that they were buying those certain substances obviously didn’t want anyone to find out why. Zoomer wasn’t going to find out what he was going to use the poisons for; she was going to stop him. Now all she had to do was rip off the other side of the packet and –

  ‘Miss Frost.’

  Zoomer Frost looked up. It was one of Spider’s cronies, looming over her.     ‘Miss Frost, what you are attempting to do is illegal.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Zoomer smiled at him. ‘Fancy that.’ She ripped the back off the packet and shoulder-slammed the man, shoving right past him and charging back up the bridge.

  It wasn’t a good idea to be too close to the contents of that packet when it was exposed to the air.

  She saw the orange mushroom of fire lighting up the night and heard the blast. ‘Catch me!’ she yelled at the flames where the man had been standing, though she could hardly hear her own voice. ‘Go on. Catch me now!’

  She ran. There would be more of them, there were always more of them, and now they’d found out where she was...

  Her motorbike was just the other side of the bridge. It gleamed at her. Nothing could catch her when she was on that; with all the special features and little modifications she’d made, she had once outrun a train, and then destroyed the track to stop it from following her. But she saw one of them looming out of the darkness, between her and the motorbike! Of course! They’d known she would head for the bike. She swerved around and headed in the other direction, still sprinting. The uninviting liquid blackness of the river flowed beside her on one side, and on the other were the shadows of alleyways between the darkened buildings. She could have gone down any of the alleyways, but she knew the Spider. He’d have men down every one of them. But she knew she could escape them.

  They couldn’t catch her.

  Running through the silent streets, the heels of her brown leather boots struck the cobbles irritatingly loudly. Long ago, she’d found that black clothes didn’t work so well: wearing black, you could disguise yourself as a shadow, and moving patches of shadow aroused suspicion. Dark brown was much better.

 Damn! There were the Spider’s men, crowding the road ahead of her. A black, tattered sign was hanging from an iron post on the wall of one of the buildings to her left, creaking gently as it swung in the dark. As she ran she reached up both hands, and when she reached the sign she jumped in the air and clasped the iron bar with both hands, hoisting herself onto the top of it. From there, she managed to clamber onto the building’s roof. Why take the roads? She chuckled to herself. Let them try and catch her on the rooftops.

  ‘Hello, Miss Frost.’

  Zoomer stopped abruptly. He was there. Right in front of her. On the roof.

  He had caught her.

  Her adrenaline drained away and she sagged, giving a tired smile. ‘Hello, Spider. You caught me again.’

  ‘Yes, it would appear that I have.’ Her old enemy had to tip his head back to look in her eyes. The name Spider suited him perfectly. He was small and weak himself, but his web reached everywhere, and you never saw it until it was too late.

  ‘You are unable to zoom out of my clutches this time, then, Zoomer?’

   Zoomer just sighed. She was still smiling wearily, even when she felt one of the men gently take her hands and cuff them behind her. They had caught her. ‘That’s right. You know me too well. You knew I wouldn’t go down the alleyways in case your men were there, right? So you didn’t put any men there, instead you put them around my motorbike and at the end of the road, right? I could have jumped in the river, but that wouldn’t be clever, because the contents of my pockets don’t tend to react very well with water, do they? So I had to go up on the rooftops. You knew I’d choose this one because I could use the signpost to climb up. Naturally there are men on the rooftops on all sides in case I decided to be absent from this particular rooftop. If I get my gun out or even make a movement that looks like I’m reaching for a weapon, I will have more bullets in me than Julius Ceasar had knives in him, because I realise that all of them have their guns out already. Well done, poisonous, vile creature. I couldn’t have planned it better myself.’

  ‘Praise indeed,’ said the Spider mildly. ‘Since you have worked out my plan in so much detail, perhaps you could tell me what I’m going to do next?’

  ‘You’ll signal to your helicopter, which is hovering just far enough away so I can’t see or hear it, and take me to meet my punishment.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said the Spider, smiling. ‘One other thing first.’

  Zoomer immediately braced herself. It was a good thing too. One of the men had silently come up behind her, and punched her in the back of the head.

  Spider watched his enemy crumple to the ground, and smiled.

 

  ‘Hanging,’ smirked Zoomer Frost. ‘A little outdated, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not for criminals like you,’ said the Spider pleasantly. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you with these two, because I must go down and tell the common people that you are dead. Oh, and to see what your dead body looks like when it’s hanging limply from the execution tower.’ He left.

 The execution tower was silhouetted against the dawn sky, looking like what it was: the world’s biggest gallows. Appropriate, because Spider seemed to think that she was the world’s biggest criminal. But I’m not, because I only kill the people who need to die. Flanked by two guards and with her hands still cuffed (she was rather insulted that Spider thought she only needed two men to guard her) they walked up the million steps to the top of the tower. They were called the Last Million Steps, because they were the last steps for many people. The butts of myriads of last cigarettes littered the floor. Ravens circled, their grating cries sounding like an axe being sharpened.

  One of the men Spider had left with her held a coil of rope in his hands. The other had a gun, in case she resisted the noose being placed around her neck.

  Zoomer stepped forward slowly. The guard was wary because there were a lot of stories about this one, but the assassin didn’t seem to be resisting at all. Now that she had finally lost, she seemed perfectly calm.

 The cold wind swept her hair back from her face. She was chilly without her coat, but with all its secret pockets and little tricks, there was no way that Spider was going to let her keep it. This view, with the city spread out magnificently below her, and the river twisting through it like liquid silver, was indeed a view that many people had died for.

  The hangman stepped forward and placed the noose around her neck.

  That was when Zoomer Frost swung round and butted the hangman in the stomach with all her strength. He stumbled into the guard, who fired his gun instinctively, and the hangman gasped as the bullet shot through his lung. Zoomer stepped forward to where the guard, pinned down by the weight of his dead companion, fumbled to aim his gun at her. Before he could, she stamped on the wrist of his gun hand and there was a crunch.

  Zoomer tipped her head upside-down to let the noose slide off. Stamping the heel of her other boot as well, she kicked off both boots and without hesitation leapt off the top of the execution tower.

 She fell for a long time. Cold air in her face. Hair streaming upwards. The roar in her ears sounding like the engine of her motorbike. Below her the city rushed up to meet her.

 Boom...

 She didn’t need to look round to imagine the orange petals of the explosion slowly uncurling. Sorry, boys, she thought when she remembered the two guards on top of the tower, but it was their own fault really. Spider had removed her coat, but – sloppy! – They hadn’t discovered the large amounts of explosives stored in the heel of each shoe.

 The shockwave from the explosion rolled over her like a tidal wave, blasting her sideways so that she was sailing almost horizontally towards the river. She hit the surface and actually skipped like a stone a few times before going under.

 The rubble of the execution tower burned brightly.

 

 ‘Damn her!’ said Spider as soon as he heard the explosion. He quickly turned around to see that the entire top of the execution tower was engulfed in flames. He allowed himself two seconds to stare open-mouthed, and then turned to the nearest man and snapped ‘Find her!’

 ‘But an explosion that size – perhaps she decided she’d rather take her own life than...?’ The unfortunate man’s voice dried up in the heat of Spider’s glare.

 ‘She’s ZOOMER FROST! Find her!’ the small man yelled. ‘And catch her!’

 

 A long way further downriver, a very wet woman with no coat and no shoes staggered over a bridge towards a motorbike. They’d left it there! How clumsy – Spider must be getting old. The woman looked around to see that the shop in front of her was being re-painted, and the men had left the pots of paint out overnight: black, white and red, like the remains of the execution tower. Red paint! How could she resist that?

 She swiped the pot and one of the thick brushes and began to work on something on the pavement. When it was finished, she leapt onto the motorbike, smiled lovingly, flicked one of the controls and zoomed away. The sound of the motorbike’s engines shattered the silence ad drew the men running towards the bridge. All they found were black curves of burnt rubber and a message written in huge red letters on the cobblestones.

 

                                      

 

                       

I don't know if any of the stunts or 'little inventions' are actually possible, but I haven't met anyone yet who could prove me wrong. Please leave comments and tell me if you think my story is OK.

My old stories

 I love big cities. London is the best, of course, with no offence meant to people who live in NYC or Paris or all these other awesome cities that I haven't visited yet. My family are more quiet-cottage-in-the-countryside type people, but I love seeing the clashing cultures and the buskers and the different people, shops and buildings, and I can find a story in anything. There was a tall black girl elegant enough to be a ballet dancer or gymnast; a Chinese man with his three-year-old son; two young boys out on their own for the first time. We went to London last weekend but unfortunately not today; we went to our nearest big-ish town. Here's a picture I took in London of a sideways Big Ben.
 By the way, if you want to get some food from Macdonalds at twelve o'clock... don't. It's SO crowded.

 Yesterday I rediscovered a story that I started writing when I was maybe 11. At first I was alternately frowning and cringing the whole time as I read it, thinking I'll have to change that... oh, that's awful... I shouldn't have done that... but as it progressed, the younger version of me obviously gained more skills, the writing got a bit more meaningful and profound, and by the time I got to the end I was thinking this is amazing. I don't want to change anything at all. But it doesn't seem like I'm complimenting myself - it's as though some other girl wrote that story, who happens to have the same memories as me.
 I will improve the story, of course, but I want to keep the essence and the spirit of it. Normally when I write nowadays I get wrapped up in trying to make it technically perfect. I will now try to get more emotion and fun and awesomeness in my writing.
 I found another story that I wrote even longer ago, just a short one, for the sheer heck of it. I just suddenly had and idea, and I wrote it! That needs some improving too, but when I've finished, I'll put it on here if you like. It's an OK idea, even if the plot's not up to much.