Saying Goodbye

My grandma died early in the morning on the 25th June. No one was surprised - she'd been so ill for months, meaning that the sadness was wrapped up in relief. We all felt it was better that she wasn't suffering.

When it happened, I thought a lot about the way I'd reacted to her illness. I felt so guilty for trying to disconnect myself from what had been happening. Now I see that I was just trying to protect myself from an increasingly painful reality while attempting to keep my life together and not fail all of my A levels at the same time. I think I coped as well as I could.

One thing hit me really hard.
In the haze, I had somehow forgotten that when a house is empty it needs to be sold.

HOMEBODY

(noun) A person who enjoys the warmth and simple pleasures of being at home.

I've always been a homebody, but that can be tricky when you've lived in seven houses on two continents for various periods of time.

My grandparents' house was the fourth house. I moved in there with my parents when we permanently came to England in 1999 and realised that our Australian dollars didn't convert very well into pounds. I was five. 

Even when we'd moved out, their house remained a constant in my life. There were the family rituals, whether the annual near-death experience of bonfire night or the warmth of Christmas. But maybe even more important were the seemingly ordinary days: the sleep-overs, the reading, the walks, the cheese on toast.

I realised I needed to say goodbye. Properly. 

My mum gave me the keys and my girlfriend drove me. I wanted to show her around, I said, and indeed I did. But I also wanted to show myself around, one last time.

I led her around, showing her each room and telling her all the stories that went with them. How my cousin Freddie had once locked me in the cupboard under the stairs, how Granny and I would make jam every summer, how I would let my imagination run wild in the clump of trees we called 'the Jungle'.

She saw the pencil marks on the wall of the bedroom had been my mother's and then mine, where Granny had recorded the ever-increasing heights of her grandchildren, and the spot in the garden where the swing had stood until its tree blew down in a storm. 

I wanted to take my time and do it properly. I wanted to do the house justice.

I showed her the box on the hall windowsill where my grandma had collected stamps to raise money for research into MS, the disease that killed my grandad. The special tin I used to steal biscuits from. The big red bag of paints and papers she would take to art classes. Her collection of teapots. 

To me, the house and its contents are so inextricably intertwined that to separate the two seems not just sacrilegious but actually impossible. So much of my childhood is woven into those walls. I've just turned 18, and I feel as though I'm being forced into growing up. It's as though someone has taken away the safety net but still expects me to walk the tightrope. Give me a harness and then maybe we'll talk.

When my grandad died, I spent years feeling guilty about things I didn't say or do. I don't feel like that this time around, maybe because I was much more aware of the time that we had and therefore more determined to make the most of it. She lived long enough to know I'd won the school prize for English, and I don't think I'd ever seen her so happy.

It still doesn't feel like she's gone, and maybe she isn't, really. I just hope that, when the time comes, we sell her house to a family, so that they can fill it with their own history. It still hurts, but I'm beginning to realise the great thing about memories; they're always with me. No matter how much time has passed or how far away I am, I can still relive those moments whenever I need to.

So goodbye Granny. You'll always be with me.

I love you.

Characters in the Closet: Victor Frankenstein

I out fictional characters. I do it all the time. Whether intended by the author or not, I just can't help myself.

I realised that, instead of keeping this as some sort of peculiar eccentricity, I could turn it into something else. Something new. Something productive.

A feature.

So I welcome you all to Characters in the Closet, where I reveal the fictional people who, in my head at least, just can't be straight. This feature will be written on an as-I-think-things-up basis, so don't start any internet death rumours if I don't update for an age. I'll probably just be watching Castle or eating junk food.

Introduction over, I bring you to today's main topic for discussion.

Victor Frankenstein.
I am utterly convinced that he is the most homo of homosexuals. And this is why:


Frankenstein is a novel almost entirely devoid of sex. Kenneth Branagh obviously noticed this and tried (unsuccessfully) to sex-up the story for his 1994 film adaptation, but the fact remains.

Helena Bonham Carter may be perfect, but this is still WRONG.

Victor has a fiancée, Elizabeth, but the two don't exactly share a normal relationship. The pair are cousins and Elizabeth was adopted by Victor's parents as a young child, meaning that they were essentially raised as brother and sister. They barely spend any time together across the course of the novel and Victor's treatment of Elizabeth leads her to believe that he is in love with someone else. Not an especially healthy relationship, as relationships go.

After successfully bringing to life the Creature, Victor has a rather troubling dream:

I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.

The man clearly has issues with women.

If he had a tattoo, this would be it.

Victor is very close to Henry Clerval ("Dearest Clerval"), his childhood friend and fellow Ingolstadt student, who sacrifices months of his time to nurse Victor back to health during a dangerous feverish episode, and various eyebrows have been raised over their relationship. Daniel Sadownick, in his essay The Man Who Loved Frankenstein calls Clerval Victor's 'intimate friend' - he also makes an interesting point that Frankenstein and Walton (the Arctic explorer who rescues Victor on the ice) may have outed themselves to each other using coded homosexual language of the day.

The creation of the Creature can be read in two ways consistent with the theory that Victor is gay. Either, he is attempting to take on the mother role and create his own child without having to engage in a sexual relationship a woman or he is striving to create his own partner, a perfect man with whom he could live out his desires. Both readings have merit, though I prefer the second, which essentially turns Frankenstein into a gay love story gone wrong; Victor tells Walton that he desired to create "a being like [himself]", that he had "selected his features as beautiful", but that the reality of what he had created filled his heart with "breathless horror and disgust". 

"At last, a man of my very own!"

Victor's malice when destroying the Creature's promised bride could be rooted in jealously following the realisation that his creation is firmly heterosexual; like a child, if he can't have something then he doesn't want anyone else to have it either - in this case, love.

With most readings subscribing the roles of The Norm and The Other to Victor and the Creature respectively, it is interesting to consider turning this on its head, with Victor as the marginalised (and then illegal) homosexual and his 'Monster' taking on the role of the 'healthy red-blooded male'.

I just can't help thinking that, as he is running for his life from the Creature, maybe what Victor is really trying to escape is the spectre of his own repressed sexuality. Unfortunately for him, societal prejudice means that Victor's race could never truly end happily.

That's why he looks so sad.

Favourite Poems: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I like Keats. I like Ben Whishaw. This is perfect.

'Desert Places' critical analysis

Robert Frost’s poetry was shaped by the tragedy that followed him throughout his life; of his six children, four died and one was later committed to a mental institution. Metal illness appeared to run in Frost’s family. As well as his daughter, Frost had to institutionalise his younger sister, and both Frost and his mother suffered from depression throughout their lives. The influence of this is clearly shown in his poem ‘Desert Places’.

The vast emptiness of Frost’s landscape in the first stanza is a reflection of the narrator’s own sense of isolation and desolation. His use of language creates a sense of urgency; because of the repetition of the word ‘falling’ and the addition of the phrase ‘fast, oh fast’, which ends the first line, the reader senses that the narrator is fighting against a rising sense of oblivion, represented by the snow. The ‘few weeds and stubble’, a symbolic reminder of the influence of man, are gradually being ‘covered smooth in snow’, which indiscriminately envelopes everything in its blanket of obscurity. In the third stanza, the lines, ‘A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express’, relate to Frost’s feeling that the world which surrounds him no longer responds to his existence, and so he is likely to experience only more loneliness before he is saved by death, his one escape. The lines ‘And lonely as it is, that loneliness/ Will be more lonely ere it will be less’ shows that, in Frost’s eyes, the mounting snow mirrors the weight of his loneliness.

Under the raw, natural force of the snow, the field ceases to exist as a field – it becomes, in the poet’s eyes, merely a negative space, an ‘it’, defined only as an object by the presence of the woods surrounding it. Faced with this almost apocalyptic nothingness, it is paradoxical that, while the narrator is so excluded, ‘I am too absent-spirited to count’, he is actually included, ‘The loneliness includes me unawares’. Frost’s choice of the word ‘smothered’ creates an ominous, claustrophobic feel to the stanza, reminiscent of some of the darker childhood fairytales. This idea is strengthened by the image of the dark woods holding the field, with its unblemished snow, in its clutches.

 In the last stanza, the perspective seems to shift, so that it encompasses much more than just the narrator’s contemplation of the scene surrounding him, and the feelings that the landscape inspires. The anonymous ‘they’ in the first line seems to suggest some higher force at work, which perhaps links in with the phrase ‘on stars where no human race is’. The poem finishes with the lines, ‘I have it in me so much nearer home/ To scare myself with my own desert places.’ In these lines, Frost explores the darkness and depth of the human soul, and the poem finishes with the thought that the loneliness and isolation we feel within ourselves are far greater than any external forces to which we will ever be subjected. The fact that the title of the poem is taken from the last two words creates a sense of completion and of having come full circle. 

 ‘Desert Places’ uses an AABA CCDC EEFE GGHG rhyme scheme, although the word ‘snow’ ends the third line of both the first and third stanzas, technically making the rhyme scheme EEBE. This is similar to Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, which uses an AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD rhyme scheme, creating a chain rhyme which links all the stanzas together. However, in ‘Desert Places’, Frost deliberately did not link the rhymes, keeping each stanza in isolation on the snowy page and thereby emphasising the loneliness of the poet.  

Throughout Frost’s poem ‘Desert Places’, the reader clearly senses the utter desolation that Frost feels. The poem is peppered with oblique references to depression, which plagued Frost for his entire life. In the poem, winter and ‘desert places’ are synonymous with Frost’s depression and he is more afraid of continuing to be depressed than of the concept of an afterlife, ‘They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/ Between stars’. He finds the idea of life much more challenging than the idea of death. He fears the loss of self.

Personal Statements

Throughout year 13, between the messy breaks ups and the messy breakdowns, there looms large the spectre of the UCAS application. My classmates and I came to the conclusion that the UCAS system is actually a covert admissions test, because you have to think about things you've never thought about before and will never think about again. But once you've beaten the various course codes and finance codes and unit codes into submission, and extracted your crumpled GCSE certificates from underneath your desk (yes, you really DO need them - start looking) you realise it wasn't all that bad. There's usually some very knowledgeable person who is patient enough to deal with 20 people per hour crying 'But WHERE do I put resit grades?!'. Hunt down this person and make him or her your new best friend.

Still, no time to relax. It's time to begin... THE PERSONAL STATEMENT. Throughout year 12, this is whispered about in hushed tones as though it's some sort of mythological beast, but it's not until it's staring you in the face that you realise what you're up against. On the surface, it seems impossible: writing about how brilliant you are without explicitly saying you're brilliant in 4000 characters or 47 lines (whichever comes first) with no bold text, italics, underlining, accents, curly quote marks or long dashes.

But dont you worry! Sit back and take a deep breath - I'm here to help.

TIPS

1) Know your deadlines

By knowing exactly when everything needs to be done by, you can work accordingly and cut down on stress. Once you know the key dates, you can use this handy timeline from UCAS, ranging from three months to two weeks before the deadline.

There are always people who either write the whole thing over the summer and spend all the rest of their time gloating or who only start it 5 hours before the deadline. I wouldn't suggest taking either of these approaches, but just make sure you have enough time to get everything done.

2) Plan, plan, plan

Starting the actual writing can seem very daunting, but it's a lot easier if you've planned exactly what you want to include. The UCAS website has more great resources in this department, including a mindmap covering things like 'What to include', 'Presentation and style' and 'Technicalities' and a marvellous worksheet for you to fill in.

3) Tell the truth

Do not lie in your personal statement. I repeat: DO NOT LIE. This is the tip that everyone tells you and yet people still do it. Please, for me, don't be one of those people. Don't say you've read a book if you haven't: you might make a glaring error which admissions tutors might pick up on, or be asked a question on it in an interview.

Likewise, don't copy. Online resources and old personal statements are scanned for matches, and anything that's been copied will show up highlighted in red for all the admissions tutors to see.

4) Avoid clichés like the plague

If you were in charge of accepting or turning away students and had to read a few hundred personal statements which all said exactly the same thing, you would probably get so bored that you'd reject them all on principle. Don't say you're passionate about your subject - that's kind of vomit-inducing, so instead try to show that you're passionate. Just write something straightfoward and avoid fussy metaphors or fancy figures of speech.

5) Introductions aren't as important as you think they are

I understand that people want a really memorable opening, but most of the time they just overthink their introductions and end up sounding pretentious or weird. So many people open with a famous quote. I don't think this is a good idea unless the quote is truly relevant and from someone you are mentioning elsewhere - just using a quote for the sake of it , especially if it's one that everybody uses, it very pointless. The same goes for stories of how you became interested in your subject: this is good if you are studying something very specific and/ or demanding, such as medicine, but otherwise only use this style of opening if you have a very exciting story to tell.

My personal statement didn't even have an introduction. I just jumped straight into the first paragraph, discussing my English studies, and it seemed to do the trick! Don't feel like you need to write a seperate introduction - they don't always add to your statement as a whole.

6) Proofread and show friends

Any kind of mistake is obviously going to look really bad. Microsoft Word's spellcheck isn't enough, so make sure you double check any book titles, names, or technical terms. Show copies to your friends (especially any renowned for being Grammar Nazi's) and tell them to be brutally honest. One of my best friends told me my first draft made her want to throw up. I immediately cut all references to 'passion' and 'cultural nourishment', or whatever tripe I'd managed to come up with. Instant improvement.

7) Don't trust the character count

For some unknown reason, the character counts on Microsoft Word and the UCAS website don't always match up. Keep checking with UCAS so that you're not faced with having to cut 7 more characters from the finished article on deadline day.


Good luck!
Once you've succeeded, you're officially invincible. Now go and climb Everest.