Painting the Beauty Queens Orange - extract 2

Later1

I’ve just read over this and it isn’t really a proper diary, so my next resolution is to make it a proper diary, and tell you about my day. I’m supposed to be describing my day and not rambling on about whatever flits into my head. Mrs H is always saying ‘Oh Lilly Barker you do write too much, and will you please (big emphasis on the perleeeeeese) put some paragraphs in for me?’ It’s not that I don’t know how to paragraph, but my head works quicker than my pen (Platignum red barrelled cartridge, not the Osmoroid Italic, Carol sat on that). I can paragraph, we learnt how to do that in Standard 2 with Mrs Jones.2

Change of thought3

Change of place/time4

Change of speaker5

Easy. It’s just my thoughts don’t always naturally organise themselves like that. I’m rambling again. 6

New Year’s Resolution No. 6: WRITE A PROPER DIARY WITH PROPER PARAGRAPHS!!!!!!! I mean, if I want to be a top barrister I’ll have to be able to write brilliantly argued speeches and make the jury cry to get my client off if I’m defending. I’ll have to use eloquence, I’ve just learnt that word, I borrowed Grandad’s book on ‘The Trials of Marshall Hall’ and it said he had eloquence and made all the juries cry. They don’t on Crown Court though, perhaps they can’t get good enough actors, because they aren’t real barristers like Marshall Hall. Real ones are paid millions and they all talk posh. 7

New Year’s Resolution No. 7: stop saying BATH and learn to say BARTH, PARTH and so on. You never hear a barrister on Crown Court say any of them without that secret R, must be special legal barrister language, so I should make an effort to stop speaking like a commoner.8

Proper diary starts now!9

It’s taken me two minutes to write it’s taken me two minutes. I can’t describe my life, it’s far too boring, nothing exciting ever happens here, it’s just me, the family (and they’re so boring, never have anything interesting to say) my friends, school and I’ve known all of them since playschool, especially Phoebe, we’ve been friends since we were two. We’ve done Brownies and Choir even though she says she’s an atheist, but I think that’s only because she’s just found out what the word means and she likes the sound of it. her dad is Scottish though and she supports Partick Thistle so that might explain it. I’m doing what Mrs H says I shouldn’t, going off at an angle, a tangent she calls it. I’ve got a butterfly mind she says. A clever butterfly, but still a butterfly. If I focus then I can be quite scary for a ten year old, even if I have got curly red hair and glasses. My brother calls me a freak, what’s freaky about knowing all the Kings and Queens of England since William the Conqueror (well, before him was Harold and then Edward the Confessor but I get a bit confused with all the Ethelreadys, Canutes and Aethelstans, think Alfred’s in there somewhere as well) or the Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century up till now, and their dates. He knows all the Derby winners since the world began and their jockeys, who cares about little men with squeaky voices and posh stuck up horses who look like those orange women with big pink hats? My mum only wears a hat to weddings. I’ve only got one hat and that’s my Brownie beret. It flattens my hair a bit and clashes according to my sister who thinks she’s a fashion expert, though I didn’t hear mum calling her a fashion expert when she came home with a feather cut and yellow splodge she called a streak over her forehead. She called her a few things but fashion expert wasn’t one of the words she used, more like common, but she is. She can’t hide the stink of John Player No 6 with polos and I found them in her top drawer when I was trying on her denim bikini, but I had stuff socks in the top to stop it falling down. She said she wanted to look like David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust man. Dad said he could tell her exactly what she looked like and took her straight back to Mirror Curls in the High Street and made them cover up the splodge thing. She wasn’t happy but she wasn’t sixteen then so she didn’t have a choice. She’s grown out of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, but so’s he. He’s called something else now, Golden Year’s is still in the Top 40 (I quite like it) and he wears normalish clothes too and not quite as much blue eye shadow. Carol doesn’t suit turquoise, her eyes are dark brown, she hasn’t any sense.10

PARAGRAPH!11

Begin proper diary now! (exclamation mark to denote (another new word) a command) I’ve had a new dictionary for Christmas, stretching my vocabulary and one of those thesaurus things which is to help me use more synonyms. Mrs H will be impressed, I do listen to everything she says although you’d sometimes think Susie W’s better at sentences the way she goes on. Well, let me tell you Mrs H, just because you share a coffee with her mum in the staff room when she’s on supply doesn’t mean Miss Susie W is cleverer than everyone else. Who got 99% in that last comprehension? Who’s got a reading age of 16+ and a spelling age to match? The only word I got wrong was definitely because I made the mistake of writing DEFINATELY which I will never do again. Top barristers must be able to spell definitely when they say ‘My learned friend has definitely presented a valid argument but I can definitely blah blah blah..’ if I wrote definitely wrong they’d probably take my wig away or something.12