Tuesday 8 March 2016

Zante

I sat in the waiting area of Birmingham airport with five of my best friends. It was two o clock in the afternoon, and I was wearing a Bart Simpson shirt teamed with a pink sparkly party hat whilst drinking from a can of Fosters. There I was, the moment I’d been counting down to for the nine months prior to it. I was eighteen years old in precisely ten hours, and I’d never been more ready for adulthood.

The Party Starts Here


 Adulthood, I later found out, means downing every form of liquid someone puts in your hand, aggressively making out with every stranger that dances within a five-meter radius, and throwing up apple flavoured neon green gunk all over your brand new white shorts, followed by crying about your ex and having to be taken back to your hotel in a taxi before you’ve managed to reach the end of the strip. Is this what my entire eighteenth year is going to be like? I certainly hope so.

Happy Birthday to Me


I woke up on the morning of my birthday, naked and sweating with sick in my hair and a ringing in my ears. When we arrived the night before, our hotel informed us that there had been a mix up with the bookings, and they were going to have to move us down the road. That’s how we found ourselves living for the week in what can only be described as a dingy, dirty slum with broken air con and a shower so small that our travel-sized shampoo’s took up the majority of the room. But, we were in good spirits, despite the agonizing hangovers and the disagreeable living conditions. After washing ourselves to the best of our ability and scrubbing the sick off Becky’s bedsheets, I decided I wanted to try out the ‘cultured, mature and sensible’ side of being eighteen, so we headed off to explore big, bad Zante in the day time. Armed with sun cream, cigarettes and Kindles a plenty, we left the hotel in hopes of finding the nearest beach.

The strip at night, through intoxicated eyes, looked strangely magical. The clubs were lit up by neon signs and everything was alive and buzzing. Music and people filled the streets, spilling out from buildings, excitement was in the air. The strip in the day time however, was a different story. Everything was a little bit broken, and a little bit sad. The clubs looked dirty and the tattoo shop’s falling down sign was much more obvious in the light. Dried sick covered the pavements, and there were a pair of ‘I LOVE ZANTE’ pants that had been trodden into the dirt.

The first glimpse of peace we found on our trip was when we finally arrived at the beach. Yes, there was constantly large Greek men in floral swimming trunks coming over to try and sell us £10 fake Beats headphones and handmade bracelets, and loud groups of teenage boys with prominent Essex accents and iced-gem haircuts chanting ‘LADS, LADS, LADS ON TOUR’, but the sea was glistening and we put in our headphones, lay back and cooked in the 40-degree heat.

Beach Bar

When we returned to the hotel after a long day of burning my pale British skin to a crisp and sipping cheap mojitos, we had our first introduction to the hotels barman – or perhaps better known as the worst human being I have ever had the displeasure of coming into contact with. At first, we all agreed that yes, he was rather attractive. Not attractive enough however, for it to be in any way acceptable to drag Jess into the back room of the bar, attempt to shove his tongue down her throat and call her his ‘pretty English rose’. Later in the week I came to despise him even more, when I drunkenly returned to the hotel at 4am with a 21-year-old barmaid I'd just met and was told ‘no, no, she no allowed in your room. Gay is no okay.’ This, of course, was after we turned down his not-so polite offer of a threesome.

Our second experience of Zante nightlife was slightly more of a success than the first, in that this time we managed to reach the end of the strip with no tears and no projectile vomiting. This could be seen as a positive; however, it also meant that we reached the very last club – Waikiki. Waikiki was a dark, dingy club right next to the beach. In Waikiki, there were around 500 men, and six girls. Those six girls were us. Now, I don’t know if we didn’t get the memo, or if it was a well known fact that this club is a haven for creepy older guys, but nothing prepared us for the amount of ass-grabbing and awkward grinding we endured for the short amount of time we braved staying in there. It wasn’t all bad though, because we found our favourite club that night too. Cocktails and Dreams, and yes, it was as cheesy as it sounds. With the same sing-a-long playlist on repeat and a wide range of shots for just 50 cents each, this was drunken teenage girl heaven.

Cocktails and Dreams


On the third day of our holiday, we splashed out 100 euros and went on a boat party. We’d all been told this was a must, and none of us were up for missing out, so we put on our nicest bikinis and floral kimonos and headed out for a day-drinking extravaganza on the Mediterranean Sea. We decided to go all out and bought a bottle of champagne each when boarding the boat, and spent the next few hours feeling like royalty. Well, if royalty was to down champagne straight from the bottle, take shots from random people’s belly-buttons and attempt to slut-drop whilst ‘House Every Weekend’ plays loudly in the background.

VVIP Boat Party


Somehow, the next day we ended up on a coach to a beach on the other side of the island to do ‘watersports’, even after I spent hours informing my friends that ‘I do not do sports.’ They laughed at me and told me ‘watersports isn’t sport!’ which I said was quite frankly ridiculous- it literally has the word ‘sport’ in the name. But despite my attempt at persuading them otherwise, I found myself, and my hangover, clinging on to an inflatable lilo-type object for dear life whilst being violently dragged around the ocean. Cheers for trying to broaden my horizons guys, but nearly drowning for ‘fun’ just isn’t my cup of tea.






No thank you


When the end of the week came around, we were all only about 25% alive. All we’d eaten all week was slightly undercooked burgers and chicken nuggets, as this was the only food they sold at our ‘hotel’. We’d also drank our body weight and more in cheap spirits and mixers, slept for a maximum of four hours a night, and two my friends got into a very aggressive fist fight because one of them told the other that she wasn’t her best friend anymore. Drama central. Some of us were golden brown and glowing, and the rest of us (me) resembled a hot and bothered lobster with a peeling face and an inability to move my right shoulder due to the pain. My hair had also somehow turned into dreadlocks and it felt like straw, and all I wanted was my king sized bed, some deep conditioner and a shit tonne of after-sun.


They made up eventually



We arrived back in Birmingham at four in the afternoon. We were barely even speaking to each other, because all we could focus on was not passing out until we got home and into bed. But after sleeping solidly for a good few days, waking up in my cosy bed in my cosy room in my cosy house just didn’t feel right. Why didn’t I have to squeeze myself into the shower? Why wasn’t I violently overheating? Why wasn’t I cramped into a tiny hotel room with five of my best friends? I was left alone, with a ridiculous henna tattoo, an uncountable number of bruises and an overwhelming longing to go back and do it all over again.





Monday 19 October 2015

The Drowning of Arthur Braxton - Caroline Smailes (A Review)

Described by the author, Caroline Smailes, as a ‘dark and brooding modern fairytale’, ‘The Drowning of Arthur Braxton’ is a book unlike any other I have read before.
The first thing I loved about this book was the fact that the narrative voice changed many times, allowing different characters to tell their story. This gave the book a very varied writing style, which kept me engaged. My favourite character was Arthur, the main protagonist, a boy in the modern age who ran away from school due to bullying and discovered an abandoned bathhouse.
The author wrote Arthurs lines exactly as they would be spoken by a modern age teenage boy, using words such as ‘twatting’, and abbreviations like ‘’bout’ and ‘maybes’. This really gives the reader an opportunity to hear Arthurs tone, and it feels as if you get to know the character very well throughout the book. He also often describes time periods not in minutes, but in episodes of ‘Waterloo Road’, which does create humour but also gives the reader a very realistic idea of how long he has been in a situation for, (come on, everyone’s sat through at least one episode of Waterloo Road).
His first introduction starts with the line ‘Not only do I have a boner but I’m running out the yard with my pants around my arse and its raining on my cock’. This instantly creates humour and makes you want to read on to find out more of this truly unusual and shocking opening to a chapter. Shortly after, he goes on to say ‘Estelle Jarvis is fit, there was no way she’d ever be interested in me. I mean, just cause she liked all my profile pictures on Facebook’. This instantly shows the reader the time period and age of the character within the first two paragraphs, without having to directly tell them, which would be impossible without straying from the story.
Arthur is the second speaker however, the story begins with Laurel, a fourteen year old girl who gets a job at ‘The Oracle’. Caroline Smailes portrays Laurel through her individual tone of voice as well, using lines such as ‘they never pay for nowt’ and the word ‘proper’ to emphasise certain situations. This shows she is a young girl who is less educated through the very informal tone she uses.
I was confused when I finished Laurel’s section of the story and began Arthurs, as there hadn’t been any talk of mobile phones or Facebook before. This was when I realised that there is a significant time jump between Laurels introduction and the rest of the story. I felt this was a really interesting way of laying out the novel, as the reader gets all the background information about the past and the setting from Laurel before going into the present day story.
I was drawn into this book after the first few pages and found myself unable to put it down, as there was constantly twists and turns in the story and I was always intrigued to find out where it would go next. When I began reading this, I expected something completely different, and couldn’t possibly have guessed how the story would end. When I got to the last few pages, I still had no idea, and this book kept me fully engaged until the very last word. This story is full of crazy events that could never possibly happen in reality, but the author really brings the fairytale to life in the reader’s mind and makes you completely believe every word she writes.

A truly magical and unexpected story, I would recommend ‘The Drowning of Arthur Braxton’ to anyone, no matter what age or gender.

Wednesday 11 March 2015

My New Room











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