Sweet sixteen

Ploggers, at the request of my good friend Hazel, please find below an excerpt from my 1995 diary. I was just sixteen, so you can imagine my life was full of all sorts of naughtiness - bunking off school, smoking, drugs and all types of illicit relations.

Or not.

I literally just opened my diary randomly and this is what greeted me:

11.12.95

I had a ton of work again at the weekend - I had to produce a six-sided poetry appreciation. Mine's nearly nine sides but it's not very good and I still have to copy it into neat before Thursday.

Otherwise, I've had a really good day today. These are all the good things that happened:

- I got 92% on a Maths practice exam paper

- I got English coursework back. I got an A(-) for my charity piece and my first straight A for my newspaper piece

- I got two things in the school magazine - my childhood memory and an article about 'Carmina Burana'

- The carol service I was reading in went well

So all in all I've had a pretty good day. The only thing now is all the work I have to do. I have to copy nine sides of English into neat before Thursday, revise for a Biology test before Wednesday (now is 10.15 p.m. Tuesday night) and enter my music composition into the school computer. Plus I have Mocks after Christmas. Argh!

I am the only person in the world whose mother did not read her diary. Not because she respected my privacy, but because it was just far, far too dull.

Several things here - 92% in Maths? I have no recollection of this. Perhaps I meant 29%. I've never been good with numbers.

Copying into neat? What a waste of time! Even though we had a PC at home, and I did do some of my homework on it, I remember even right through to the Upper Sixth, insisting on writing my English out long-hand, because I cared about it enough to physically craft the letters. That all changed about two seconds after I arrived at uni.

You might notice an absence of sex, drugs and general rock 'n' roll. Unless 'Carmina Burana' counts as rock 'n' roll and I'm fairly sure that it doesn't. I would like to defend myself, but having flicked through the rest of this diary, I genuinely can't, as the most scandalous thing I do is snog some bloke at a disco who then tells me he's too busy to see me again because he's got a new job stacking trolleys at Sainsbury's. I also had four friends over for a sleepover on New Year's Eve. We didn't drink, didn't do drugs and didn't even have one of those "all-girl pillow fights" that you see on the internet, just before the clothes start coming off.

I like the implication that the school only had one computer.

So yes. I was a gimpy geek. Official. Even geekier? I can remember which poem that particular appreciation was about. Remembrance - Emily Bronte. "Cold in the earth and the deep snow piled upon thee".

I guess I haven't changed that much.