Five-Year Diary: I didn’t sleep well. There was a boy snoring again (the usual culprit). Someone went into his cubicle and yanked his bedclothes off at one point, but it didn’t make any difference; he carried on as if nothing had happened. Another boy started sleep-talking in the middle of the night, shouting, “Go on! Go on! That’s it!” as though urging someone towards a finish line. Between the two of them, they disturbed my sleep. A light sleeper, I didn’t take much to wake me. If I couldn’t get to sleep, I’d wander around the house, and in summer, head outside.
By morning, I had remembered what I should have done for Chemistry. I made a belated stab at fixing it.
A Saturday, so we stripped the beds. There must have been a set routine, weekly or perhaps fortnightly, when we pulled off the sheets and left the mattresses bare for a while. The dirty linen was crammed into the large wicker laundry basket out ok the landing by the washrooms. Clean sheets had to be collected from Matron, who dispensed them from her floor-to-ceiling cubby hole of shelving.
We had lessons on Saturday mornings. That’s boarding school life for you.
Back for break, and I had two boiled eggs mashed up on toast.
The Chemistry test turned out not to be hard after all, which was a relief.
French followed. We were reading Petit Nicolas, but I struggled to understand it. The humour seemed to pass me by.
Then English: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We read. I took Theseus again and read aloud, giving his lines more weight than they probably deserved.
Double Projects after that. I made a mask, half young and half old, and deliberately ugly. I remember working carefully on the contrast, trying to make the age difference sharp and unmistakable.
Lunch was bacon and turkey. And all the trimmings.
Later, I went on a run. I’ve written “gable?”. It wasn’t Great Gable, but maybe a fell somewhere outside Sedbergh.
Too many entries are written like this. The inconsequential, cryptic, bullet points. No heart, no reflection, little to distinguish this day from any other. I learn to seek out something that made the day stand out.
The sleep talking, perhaps.
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