begin the beguine.

Being a 21st century lady and an all-round modern sort of cat, I got my first blog at the tender age of thirteen, a livejournal, in defiance of a friend who laughed in my face when I told him I was considering it. He said (and I know this, for I have my very first blog entry tabbed as I type; oh, the internet), "What interesting things have you got to say?"

I'm still not sure that I do have anything much to say for myself. But I was never serious about it, and over the years I dabbled, and continually told myself that one day, as an adult, as a real person, I would begin the process in earnest.

That same year, when I was thirteen, I was taken to Normandy on the only residential school trip I ever braved. For the most part I had a slightly miserable time, but we did spend a pleasant morning visiting a rather beautiful and secluded little orchard, the like of which is no doubt very common in northern France. While we were there, we were all given free samples of the orchard's apple juice, which I thought was - beautiful. Was just about the nicest thing I'd ever tasted. I bought a bottle with several of my scrunched up and carefully rationed-out euros, and I brought it home with me.

So enamoured was I with this drink that, in a fit of deferred gratification, I desperately saved it for a special occasion: I wouldn't let myself have any until I was ready, until I had earned it, and by the time that day arrived, I opened the bottle to discover that it had congealed and gone off. It had to be thrown away. My thirteen-year-old self was distraught.

I suppose the moral of the story is that if I put things off forever, eventually they...go...rotten. Rotten, like my soul.

Oh dear, no, that wasn't it at all. And I was sure I had a genuine point to make.

Okay, well, so, anyway. After a long and confusing and fairly drawn-out process, I learned today that I will definitely be spending the next three years in Liverpool, studying English (and some subsidiaries; I think I'll take history?) at the University of Liverpool. I want this blog to be, I don't know, a sort of chronicle of that embarkation; of the trials and the struggles and the excitements that a first generation university student, going up at the beginning of a big old recession, will really encounter. To be some kind of record.

Perhaps somebody will one day find it useful - or, more likely, perhaps I will rediscover it five years from now and laugh and laugh at all the silly things I thought and said. After all, there's no better place to keep a record than the internet. The shallow, eternally-logged thoughts of my thirteen-year-old self, drifiting about forever in cyberspace, are proof of that if they are proof of nothing else. And they really are proof of nothing else. Except perhaps that I spent altogether too much time thinking about chocolate.