A letter to my younger self

*this is a letter I wish I could send to my younger self, with things I wish I knew then, and although this letter won’t be received by myself, maybe it will help someone else*

Dear Eleanor,

Reading through your thoughts in that ridiculous diary of ours makes me laugh and cry, in good ways and bad. You should really say some of those feeling out loud, but I understand – you’re better at writing things out. It’s like if you press you pen hard enough against the page, forcing the paper to absorb the ink filled with your feelings, all those emotions tumbling out from your body and embedding into the page, then that will help. That will work, for now. You’re a pretty emotional person, dramatic too, but most of your friends just see the sunny side. I know, I know; you think that if your friends see only light and laughter from you, then they’ll like you more. Any hint of sadness or tears or anything not just good an happy, then maybe people will like you less. Here’s my first tip for you: they get it. Your friends will understand it if you have a bad day and need someone to vent to. You might pride yourself on being a good listener, but it doesn’t mean you’re the only one that knows how to do it. So stop acting like a martyr, don’t arrogantly think no one will understand you, and start whining to your friends. It will help.

You’ll probably want to know what’s going on with me – how many books have we published, how many celebrities have we met, what incredible adventures have we had? Well, you might be a bit disappointed to hear that being nineteen-going-on-twenty does not an adult make. No great bolt of knowledge of how to be an adult has shot out of the sky and struck me – at least, not yet. In all honesty, I’ve still no idea what I’m doing. My plans change every day, the path on how to achieve the far-off dream of being an author twists and turns in unpredictable ways. What I’ve learned? Just go with it. Don’t bog yourself down with panic over the future. Don’t stress and fret and let the days pass you by. Just live in the present while you’re there – you’ll figure out what to do.

One thing I can say is I’m glad I don’t have to relive everything you’re going through right now. Homework sucks, and I can say that work from uni isn’t much better – but what I try to remind myself is at least I’m doing work on a subject I actually like and that I chose, instead of chemistry. Or physics. Or worse, maths. What I can say is that it will be over soon – just get through it all now, work your arse off, and you’ll get there. Don’t let other people tell you what you should and shouldn’t do – especially that person who says ‘what can you even do with a *insert humanities subject* degree anyway?’. They’re idiots. You can do whatever you want to do, as long as you work hard and keep your head on straight (and, please, for the love of everything, stop being such a drama queen).

Speaking of idiots, I’ve got some bad news for you. We were blessed and cursed with going to a good school. Unlike some other people, we can’t later sit back and watch our bullies end up with a shitty job and living in a shitty place and look down at them. We have to watch those bullies, those secondary school bitches, do well, and that sucks. Really sucks. We have to watch them and hear about them going to university, getting degrees, getting jobs, getting married and having great lives. But I’ll let you in on a secret – when you hear that one of them hasn’t done so well? It’s. The. Best.

Now for a bit of a pep talk. You need to bloody well stand up for yourself. And, again, I know, you’re rubbish in the moment. Even now I think of brilliant comebacks to insults hurled my way over five years ago. You’ll write what you think are fantastic stories (don’t worry, your ideas are good but your writing isn’t so great right now – that will get better) with these strong female characters that don’t let anyone hurt them, standing their ground retorting with the most incredible comebacks it’s a wonder their enemies don’t just fall at their feet. You get hung up on that a lot. So much so that you call one of your best friends the Comeback Queen, because she seems so unruffled and somehow manages to snap right back at anyone who tries to be mean to her. You’ll try to be like her for a while, convinced that she is who you want to be, but you need to stop trying to be other people. Honestly, you’ll figure it out soon, but just try and be yourself and stop getting hung up about everyone else.

Time for some good news: we get into our dream uni, we manage to get onto our dream course doing our favourite subjects, and we make fantastic friends along the way. We learn that it’s ok to be the one who’s obsessed with books, so much so that you start working at a well-known bookshop and start up a book blog to help control your addiction. You stop caring that you become that person who always posts dog photos on social media (oh yeah, did I mention that we get a dog? Because we do, and he’s our best friend) because really, it does not matter what other people think. You be you.

Now, keep your head up, keep going and, once more, stop being a drama queen. Don’t splutter at me, you know very well what I mean. Now go back to pestering Mum and Dad about getting a dog – I’m 99% certain they bought Pete just to shut us up.

All my love (and luck),

You from the future.

P.s – stay away from boys. They’re icky.

Why every teenager should have a job

So many people disagree on this topic, but I feel like it’s one that needs to be brought up – then again, the best conversations to have are often the ones that many people disagree about.

I got my first job at the age of seventeen by applying online, working as a hostess at Wembley stadium. My second came in the same year during dinner out with my parents and overhearing the landlady of a pub complain about how they needed extra help, so I offered to work for a couple of days a week. I stopped working at the pub after school finished and I stopped working at Wembley last year after becoming a bookseller at my third, and current, job.

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There are a few things I want to say about the topic of teenagers having jobs, and by teenagers I mean from the age of sixteen up. It’s at this time where you actually learn about the ‘real world’ and the true meaning for working for something. I mean, sure, you can argue that working for grades at school is the same thing, but let’s be honest – nothing quite hits home like getting your first paycheck after working your arse off at a job you may or may not like. You learn about people from all walks of life, far more than at school (at least, that’s how it was for me), and, maybe more importantly, you learn how to tolerate these people. There’s nothing worse than having to serve or work with an utter arsehole, but you have to learn to keep you calm and just get on with it. You learn to appreciate people more – no longer are you going to be that awful person strutting into a store only to bark out orders to employees there like you own them, because you know from experience of being that employee that those people are the worst people.

Maybe I just want everyone to work in retail for a week so I won’t have to deal with those people. Oh well, a girl can dream.

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The main argument I hear is about how teenagers in school need to focus on their studies, not worry about having a job and earning money. In many cases, some teenagers are lucky enough – and I was one of them – to have parents  who are able to support you. Having a job was not a necessity for me, but for some it was an absolute necessity. There are so many children and teenagers and, hell, anyone, who studies for school or a degree or any kind of exam, and does bloody fantastically, as well as having a job. It can be done. In fact, having a job on top of everything else means that you’re forced to sort your life out and prioritise getting work done. Last year, before I started working every weekend all weekend, I did absolutely nothing with my weekends unless I had a shift at Wembley. Saturdays I would sleep as long as possible, shuffle to the kitchen to rummage around for food and a cuppa, go back to bed and read, maybe take a nap, then repeat. This year, however, I’m having to sort out my schedule to make sure I have time to get all of my university and journalism work done in time. No more kicking back after uni if I finish late, I need to read all of these articles and take notes and read these books (not for pleasure) and get these essays planned and written and god knows what else.

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It’s interesting, really, talking to teenagers in school who have jobs and who don’t have jobs. It’s all well and good if your child is poet laureate or if they’re the star of their school play, but after applying for university that normally means absolutely nothing to everyone else. So what? You don’t really know about proper work. Great if your parents can buy you cars for your 17th and flats for your 21st, but do you know what it’s like to work a nine-hour shift pulling pints for rowdy blokes making crass innuendoes about how to ‘give a good beer head’? (Spoiler: it’s crap) But that’s the sort of thing you have to learn to deal with. You need to work and bust a gut doing work for awful money. You need to see that nobody cares what your mummy or daddy earns or who they are. You need to try and do something for yourself and earn your own money for yourself.

One comment I get is how I’ve been ‘so lucky’ with my jobs, as if I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, standing around with my arms wide open ready to catch something falling from the sky. Many people get jobs, again, because of their parents, and they’re not jobs involving pulling pints in a grotty pub I’ll tell you that. I worked hard to get my jobs. For the hostessing, I researched online and applied for loads of different jobs. When my profile was given the thumbs up, I kept my details updated, emailed incessantly about when I was free until they gave me some work. With the pub, I put myself out there and offered to help. The temptation to just not say anything was right there, but instead I marched up, unapologetic for eavesdropping, and offered myself up like a lamb for slaughter. (Honestly, it felt like that after working there a while). I left my details, took their number, called when I didn’t hear anything. Finally, with my current job, I applied online as well as going in store to hand in my application, managed to do well in my interview and get the job. It’s going the extra mile, not sitting back like the world owes you something, waiting for that job to fall out of the sky straight into your lap.

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It’s obvious that I wasn’t too fond of my first two jobs – honestly, there aren’t many people who were fond of their first few jobs. I dealt with having my bum pinched, having crude comments flung my way, smelling like grease after work, having to massage my feet after wearing heels for nine hours, learning to not burst into tears when someone insulted me.

When you’re a teenager, you need these things – you may think you don’t need them, nor do you want them, but you do. You learn to tolerate people and, more than that, understand them. You learn what working for yourself is really like. You learn to follow rules not set by your parents and putting in the extra effort in the hopes of getting some praise and maybe a promotion.

(I’m not even joking, this gif is from a site called ‘I hate working in retail’ – COME ON NOW)

Hell, I’ve perfected my fake smile and laugh, which have come in handy many times. My favourite thing about my jobs though? The people I’ve met. The same people who will listen when you tell them about this customer who told you ‘stop being silly’ or that one customer who said ‘I bet daddy pays for everything, doesn’t he?’ (Yes, because that’s why I’m here, working, serving your pretentious arse), only for them to reply with awful customer stories of their own, of how someone snapped their fingers at them or those blokes who took a selfie with their bums.

Those people? Yeah, they’re the ones worth knowing.

Teachers change your life…or something

My family is moving in two weeks out of the house I’ve lived in for my whole life, so it doesn’t really come as a surprise that there is a lot of crap to sort through. I came across my old school reports (teachers really need to use words other than ‘conscientious’) and it came as a bit of a shock that I wasn’t always good at English. Now, this isn’t me being all ‘I am a genius, how could I have ever been bad?’. No, this is me saying that there was a time that my best subject was Maths and my worst was English; which is something a Classics-with-English student never expects to discover. I was looking through my primary school books (it’s unsurprising to see that I was never good at art), only to find that English didn’t really appeal to me early on. In fact, the comments from my teachers mainly told me to ‘stop writing about horses, think of other topics’ or ‘stop using the words beautiful and lovely in every piece of work’. It seemed sightly strange to me that, yes, although I was a seven year old obsessed with horses, my teachers were telling me that I shouldn’t write about what interested me. So what if it’s a creative writing piece with the title ‘prints in the snow’, we don’t want to see you following them to find a pony.

Ok, some of you might be thinking that they had a point and sure, I could have tried to write about something that didn’t include horses (or horse related creatures, such as unicorns or a pegasus), but that’s clearly what inspired me to write. That was what I enjoyed. Soon after my horse ban, my writing went downhill and there are comments on my sudden lack of effort and enthusiasm. Clearly I wasn’t impressed with being told I couldn’t write about the one thing that interested me.

Then comes secondary school and in my first year my English marks pick up, only to plummet in my second year (a year which I detested English due to the teacher). Then, out of nowhere, I suddenly start to get really good marks in my third year which only continue to improve throughout the rest of my education – all which was taught by the same English teacher, who I loved. Which brings us to today, where I’m pursuing a career in writing.

If that teacher hadn’t come along, I might have never enjoyed English. I might have stopped having lessons after GCSE. I might have chosen a completely different career path, maybe even choosing sciences, god forbid. It just seems absolutely bizarre to me that something like what teacher you have, which shouldn’t impact your education, changes your whole life. Maybe if I had a fantastic chemistry teacher who inspired me I would have decided to take it for A Level, and then gone on to do something like biochemistry. It’s pretty terrifying, actually, to think like that. English (and Classics, of course) is what I always think makes me, well, me. I’m the girl who is always reading, always writing, who wants to be an author, who is desperately trying to discover how I can get publishers to send me books for free to review – because, of course, everything is better with free books. Of course there are other things that make me who I am – this is where I include a shoutout to my family, my dog, my friends etc – but I’ve always thought that English was always my thing. I found a script, of all things, for a play that I wrote at a very young age (it’s about a group of kids who investigate a graveyard where there’s a vampire who they eventually defeat with the help of their dog – Scooby Doo, anyone?). Reading that, I just assumed that I always knew writing was what I wanted to do. But apparently not.

Teachers change your life. They do, as silly as it sounds. You think it all depends on what school you go to, but it also depends on what teacher you get. Maybe if I had been encouraged in primary school to write about whatever makes me interested, I would have been better at the subject earlier on instead of being upset that I was told to stop writing what inspired me. Maybe if that history teacher I had in my first few years of secondary school had taught me for GCSE as well I would have continued it. Maybe if my maths teacher didn’t ‘jokingly’ call me Twit every single lesson, I might have been more confident about my abilities.  Maybe if my PE teachers didn’t make me feel completely inadequate at AS, asking me constantly if I my handicap in golf had dropped every week, I might have enjoyed it and done better in the exam. Maybe, just maybe, teachers are far more important than you first think.

Why the education system is flawed

As a seventeen year old student about to face my final exams that will essentially determine the rest of my life, I think that I have a bit of experience in the education system from when you first learn your times tables up until you’re eighteen trying to get the grades that your university offers are demanding.

I’ve already ranted and raved about how ridiculous I think it is that we have to decide our whole lives before we’re even deemed ‘adults’ (because of course as soon as we hit the age of eighteen we immediately become sensible, knowledgable adults). I have friends who didn’t do so well in their exams and are suddenly stuck because no university wants to take them in, meaning that they have to reevaluate their whole life plan. Another friend of mine has applied to, and received offers from, universities but since she applied a few months ago she’s realised that she doesn’t want to study what she’s applied to do. Instead, she wants to do something entirely different and is currently debating how she’s going to change it now. Luckily someone in my school realised a few weeks before applying to universities that she wanted to take an art foundation course rather than medicine.

So what is it that I’m really ranting about today? I’ll tell you the one word which simultaneously strikes fear into our hearts, makes us groan in frustration and have mental breakdowns multiple times a day: Exams.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that we all have to do exams but the exams that we have to take these days are bordering on pointless. Let me give you my education for example and I’ll start with my GCSEs. I’m considered to be a ‘good’ student but I can safely say that I don’t remember most of the pointless information I had to remember for my GCSE exams. Yes, I said ‘remember’ and not ‘learn’. We spent more time looking at mark schemes to see ‘what the examiners gave marks for’ than looking things up in our textbooks. It didn’t take skill in understanding the depths of Chemistry to do well in the GCSE exam, but rather knowing what words you had to churn out in order to get those marks. I once dropped a mark by writing the answer ‘fossilised animals from millions of years ago’ instead of ‘dead fossilised animals from millions of years ago’. All we had to do was remember a bunch of information which we immediately forgot a few days later.

Moving on to A-levels, I’m going to focus first on my English and Classics exams. My first point to rant about? Time limits. We’re tested on how much we can write in a small amount of time and yet still expected to produce a high quality, thought-provoking essay that demonstrates our ‘flair’ to the examiner. I was told in one of my lessons today – another ‘exam prep’ lesson where we looked at mark schemes – that I needed to talk about what other people taking the exam won’t. I need to come up with something unique and original that no one else will think of so I stand out instead of stating the points that everyone will mention. My skills in mind reading and seeing the future aren’t up to scratch, so it’s going to be really difficult to know whether the points I make in my essays written in an hour will be made by anyone else. Not only that, but for English I have to memorise as many quotes as possible for a Shakespeare play, a Jacobean drama and one of the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer – quotes that aren’t in modern english with, to the ‘untrained eye’, a load of wacky spellings. I know I sound like a whining teenager – living up to the stereotype here – but I’d rather be tested on my analysis skills rather than writing incredibly quickly and churning out a load of quotes that I’ve been memorising, most of which I will write down just to show the examiner how many quotes I can remember.

Next, and final, subject on the list? Geography. To give you an idea, one section of my geography exam is the ‘physical geography’ section where I will answer a few questions on the topic of ‘plate tectonics’. It’s taken over a term – a long time if you think about it – to learn everything we might be asked on in the exam. I’m talking plate boundaries, plate movements, landforms, volcanoes, hot spots, volcanic eruption types, different types of volcanoes, earthquakes, ways of measuring earthquakes, the history of plate tectonics AND MORE. I will spend hours and hours and hours learning all of this information – as well as refining my skill to be ‘synoptic’ and a bunch of case studies which I must know facts and figures for – but in my exam I will be tested on a minuscule part of my knowledge. I could just be asked about earthquakes, which means all my knowledge on volcanoes will be made pointless, or I could even just be asked on ways to measure earthquakes and how they vary, in which case everything else I know will be, you guessed it, pointless.

Now don’t go taking this rant the wrong way. I actually adore all of my subjects and I’m one of those abnormal teenagers – again, fighting the stereotype – who actually enjoys school (well, to an extent, anyway). I’m planning on going to university this september to study English and Classics and I can’t wait, but what I really want to get across to you is that I think the way we are examined doesn’t best demonstrate our knowledge. So many students will be doing exams this year and will do badly – not because they’re dumb or didn’t revise or had bad teachers, but because they couldn’t write fast enough and ran out of time, or couldn’t remember that one word the examiners are looking for to award a mark. Maybe their ability for memorising information isn’t fantastic at the moment or maybe they’re just so stressed out that when they walk into the exam they can’t remember a thing and spend the whole exam time writing meaningless detail which will just receive a big, red cross.

I want the way teenagers are tested in schools to change – and for the better – so that we can all have a better chance to show how well we can do.

Anyway, if you’re facing exams this year then I wish you the best of luck and, if you want, leave a comment to tell me what you think about exams, pressure or anything of that variety. I’ll just be sitting here revising some mark schemes so that, when summer rolls around, I can walk into my exam and write exactly what the examiners want to see. ~Eleanor

My Two Reading Brains

I always feel that when I’m reading that I have two completely different brains. My first reading brain is the one that I use for challenging novels, such as classics like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. I’m meticulous when I read with this brain, paying attention to every word and little detail. How can you not when you’re faced with lavish descriptions, dramatic imagery and poetic language? Using this reading brain I’m an incredibly slow reader and I can only read chunks at a time before I have to leave the book and go to something else for a while to give my brain a break.

Then there’s my other brain – my teenage brain, as I like to think of it. I use this one when I’m reading those wonderful books you can get on a Kindle for £2 that require very little attention. They’re books that don’t make me search for deeper meanings or question my existence – these are the books that I can read in a couple of hours without difficulty. In all honesty, these are also the books which allow me to completely loose myself and forget the rest of the world for a while.

I was thinking about my two different reading brains – or mindsets or however you want to call it – when I was thinking about the book that I’m in progress of writing at the moment. It’s no secret that I want to write novels one day (be that tomorrow or in 15 years) and I’ve been writing since a very young age. My first ‘book’ was written in primary school when I was so angry that a boy I liked moved away that he got bitten by a spider in his new house (Don’t worry, he gets better in the sequel and buys me a pony to say sorry which I ride off into the sunset on). 

The book that I’m trying to write at the moment is a book that I would choose to read when I just want to loose myself again. It isn’t serious – it’s just a bit of fun; your typical teenage, fantasy, romantic-y type that doesn’t need you to focus. You don’t need an extensive education to grasp the meaning of it or need someone else to offer up different interpretations; it’s straightforward and, most importantly, readable. Well, I think it is anyway. I’m sure someone else will disagree, but then when is there something that nobody disagrees with-

Sorry, getting too deep for a Saturday evening now. Hope you lot are well and catch you next time ~El