Tag: life story

Where'd I Leave It Wednesday

Where’d I Leave It Wednesday: Passagers

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Happy Wednesday everyone! I hope you’re all having a good day today. My story today is about my trip to the Theatre last night. It wasn’t quite what I expected.

My mum and I decided to go and see this show called ‘Passagers’ at the Theatre after seeing a poster advertising it. On the poster the show reminded me of the circus, with the aerial acts and the acrobatics. So I went in expecting an exciting circus acrobatic performance.

The first thing I thought when I sat in my seat was thank goodness I was on a corner. Usually, because of how limited my sight is, I have to sit front row but this time I was sat in the second row and because I was on the corner there was a gap between the two chairs in front of me. There is nothing worse than being sat in the second row and having a six foot something person sat in front of you. Yes, this has happened to me before.

Then the show started.

Now, the show itself started with an interesting dance number. I knew it would be hard for me to see but there was so much going on, multiple people dancing in different parts of the stage and it felt like my eye was pacing the amount of back and forth it was doing.

When the acrobatic elements started I realised the show was going to be more difficult than I thought. The aerial acts were beautiful and I think my mouth was open the entire time I was watching their outlines. I say outlines because they were so far away I couldn’t see any more of them. It was like watching stick figures dancing in the air.

Then there was the juggler. My Mum said he was talented and with the amount of cheering the audience were doing they must have been great. The things he was juggling, they looked like bowling pins and as soon as they left his hands – poof! They disappeared in midair. Then they were suddenly in his hands again.

The music of the show was beautiful and kept me entertained as much as the parts of the show I could see.

That’s it for this post I hope you all enjoyed it!

Where'd I Leave It Wednesday

Where’d I Leave It Wednesday: Portsmouth Historic Dockyard – HMS Warrior

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Happy Wednesday bookish people! I’m back with another Where’d I leave it Wednesday and today’s story comes from this past weekend when I went up to Hampshire to visit some relatives. On the day after we travelled up we went to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard – which I really enjoyed by the way and this is some of the things that happened along the way.

The day started off early. I had barely slept the night before, I was in a hotel and I rarely sleep the first night in a hotel anyway but that night there were trains passing by constantly, there was a nearby clock tower going off every hour and my Father’s snoring was louder than a school fire alarm. So I was running on about two hours of sleep and I was in the shower just after six in the morning. We had a breakfast delivered to our hotel door, there was a pot of fruit, a pastry and a yoghurt with a bottle of orange juice.

By half past nine we had met my great aunt and her husband at the train station and so commenced an hours trip to the dockyard. It went faster than I thought, usually on trains I read but there wasn’t enough room so I ended up looking outside the window at all the blurring colours. It looked like a watercolour painting.

When we got to the Dockyard we sat for a a moment to get ourselves comfortable again after the train trip and had a delicious cup of coffee. I am biased, I like coffee even though I shouldn’t drink it for a few reasons. Then the day properly began. While having our drinks out of the window we could see the masts of a huge ship, it turned out to be HMS Warrior.

My journey on this ship began uphill, literally I had to walk up a steep ramp to get onto the ship. The ship had been kept pretty much as it had been when it was being used – or so the men walking around told us. It was very interesting to see the difference between how the sailors and the officers would eat, sleep and generally live. The men on board, telling us about the history of the ship, was dressed how the sailors would have been at the time which added to the whole effect of being on the ship.

The problem with the ship was the rope ladders. If you’ve ever been on this ship, or one similar, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Small wooden steps that you have to climb down one foot at a time with your feet turned sideways, instead of banisters there is rope that swings and moves all over the place as you climb down them. There were many sets of these stairs and they just kept going further down into the ship. It was down near the bottom where I slipped. My foot didn’t get a good enough grip and it fell off the step, I only stayed on the ladder because I gripped so hard to the rope on the side. It shook me up quite a lot. I was happy to climb back out of that ship pretty soon after.

After that we went to the Mary Rose exhibition and I made a friend in Henry VIII… but you’ll have to check back next Wednesday for that story.

Where'd I Leave It Wednesday

Where’d I Leave It Wednesday: The Turquoise Zebra

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Happy Wednesday bookish people! It’s Wednesday which means it’s time for another Where’d I Leave It Wednesday! I’ve decided to stick with a similar way of writing as last week’s story, let me know what you think!

Today’s story is all about swimming, of course when I go swimming (it’s rare) I have to leave my cane and glasses in the changing room… the world looks very strange without them..

On to the story!

It wasn’t blue, not completely but a turquoise colour. A turquoise with diagonal stripes of deep blue, like a turquoise and blue zebra had melted on the floor and left a puddle. An extremely deep puddle. That strangers will float around in like human versions of ducks in a bath. Usually wearing ridiculous things like bikini tops with no straps. Even though water is like a stronger version of gravity to those things. That is how I see a swimming pool – a swirling, whirling pit of green and blue merging together. I imagine jumping in would feel like catapulting myself into it’s wide open mouth. Of course, I only imagine it, I would never be stupid enough to actually jump in. Maybe one day an overzealous scientist who believes they will change the life of someone like me, for the price of a classical painting that is, will invent eyewear that stops a pool from drowning your eyes in salt at the same time as allowing me to stop imagining melted zebras at the local sports centre. Like a Gucci version of goggles. How fancy. The envy of every blind person. Until then I just can’t visit any zoos.
            Swimming and I, we’ve never gotten along too well. From the first time I waded into the blurry expanse of the pool. And by that, I mean ‘gently’ guided in by a teacher after having a tantrum, worse than a toddler told no in a supermarket, before I’d even left the changing area. I shrieked, I cried, I ended up in the water anyway. Clinging to one of those coloured pool noodles made of foam like it was the last remaining lifeboat on the Titanic. Our relationship only got worse from there. A tumultuous relationship that most recently led to an embarrassing moment with a toddler. It wasn’t even my child. When my sister asked me to go swimming with her and her friend, I didn’t realise we would be bringing along the crazed energy that is her five-year-old son. Generally, I love children. Having an uncensored, often brutally honest, conversation with them can be refreshing. But her son could make the most pious nun renounce God and never go to church again if it meant getting away from him. As soon as he clambered into his car seat with yellow armbands on, that could have fit an elephant, I knew that day was not going to be as simple as just swimming in water I couldn’t see. The armbands absorbed the top of his arms like the sleeves of a 1980s wedding dress. Each time he moved they knocked against each other and created a long drawn out squealing noise. If I had any pins in my hair, I would have used one to pop them. Oh dear, he wouldn’t have been able to go swimming. What a shame. Unfortunately I didn’t have anything so her son did end up swimming with us. By us I mean me, considering his mother disappeared to the opposite end of the pool with my sister as soon as we entered. They stayed in the deep end of the pool, swimming around like sharks drunk off mischief. Being short and well, blind, I went no further than the water skimming my hips which meant being an unwilling babysitter. He even began calling me Auntie. I am not his Auntie; he has one who lives in Wales. If I was an Auntie, and my sister had somehow reproduced, I would definitely not take them swimming. I would also make sure their parent was in close proximity so that I could hand them back quickly. I couldn’t do that when his mum was down the other end of the pool.
            I thought that perhaps he would be bored or scared after being in the pool for an extended amount of time but instead he was taking large jumps, as large as he could with toddler sized legs suspended in water. He made for an ungraceful ballerina. It was during one of these leaps that one of his curled-up feet caught on the mottled texture at the bottom of the pool. His face barely had time to crease in anticipation of a complaint before it smacked into the water and disappeared beneath the turquoise. The speed of which he fell pushed his bottom half to the floor of the pool and he bounced there for a moment. The sound echoed around and reached his mother but I had already reached under and pulled his head back out of the water. She stayed at the other end of the pool. Water cascaded down his forehead and dribbled from his chin. His eyes were squeezed shut. I was already preparing for his next move; he might begin to cry or he might make a dash for the stairs to exit the pool. Not that I would have minded had he wanted to vacate the pool as fast as possible. I thought there had been enough adrenaline for one day. Neither option was what he did. His little hands bunched up around his waist and before I had time to ask if he was okay, he pulled his swimming trunks down and let them inflate in the water. He stood there proudly naked in a public swimming pool and said “kiss it better Auntie”. I don’t think so.

That’s it for today’s story, I hope you all enjoyed it!

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The Kitten Escapades Part 2: The Game of Cat and Mouse

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Happy Sunday bookish people! and if you celebrate it – Happy Easter! I hope everyone is having a good day today so far. I knew there would end up being more stories about Shadow, my Sister’s kitten, because he’s a fluffball who loves to cause mischief. So onto part 2 of the Kitten Escapades….

It was Thursday and my Sister and I were sat in the living room doing different things. She had some sort of tv programme on about a detective because it was played by someone she’d seen in another show and she quite liked, this is literally the only reason my Sister watches programmes on tv, If she’s asked for something to be put on the first thing out of our mouths is ‘who’s on it’, annoys her to no end. I was busy working on a script for my Dramatic Writing class. Our Mum was in the kitchen – this feels like I’m going to go off into sing a song of sixpence… which I’m not but it is sounding very similar- anyway, Mum was in the kitchen and we could hear her talking to Shadow. If you have a cat I’m sure you talk to them too. She was saying all the ‘oh have you got a toy’, and ‘aren’t you a good boy playing’ then all of a sudden she went completely silent. My Sister and I didn’t think much of it, we were caught up in each of the things we were doing. Then she called us.

So, me and my Sister go out into the hallway to see what she wants. Mum is there staring into the doorway of the dining room, she had this look on her face which was like half horror and half just pure shock. We moved a bit further round until we could see in the doorway. It was Shadow, curled up on the floor in the doorway like he does when he wants us to think he’s all sweet and innocent – honestly he’s a cat that likes to cause a lot of trouble – and he had something but I couldn’t see what it was. To me it looked like he’d stolen some chocolate out of the cupboard because it was just a shapeless brown lump, to me at least. Then my Sister gasped.

Okay so it wasn’t a lump of chocolate that he’d taken from the cupboard, it was a little mouse. My Mum thinks it was a dormouse but I’m not up on my knowledge of mice breeds so I had, and still have, no idea what type of mouse it was. Other than one that was in the paws of a cat. Our cat. Our indoor cat. So he must have found the mouse somewhere in the house and I really don’t want to know where in the house he got the mouse from.

My Sister bent down and talked to Shadow trying to get him to let her take the mouse. He was patting it, the way you would pat a child on the head, but you know with claws out and thinking the mouse was a new toy. He didn’t let her take the mouse. Instead, he picked the mouse up with his teeth and ran under the dining room table with it. Oh also at this point the mouse was still alive. We got a pot from the kitchen and went back and finally got Shadow to release the mouse. I always thought that when a cat found a mouse it would be very Tom and Jerry and they would be friends but also enemies because nature has made them that way, I was sorely mistaken about this…Shadow then tried to claw my Sister which of course didn’t get her to give him the mouse back. We took the mouse in the pot to the kitchen and shut the door so Shadow couldn’t follow us.

He was crying at the door and meowing the whole time, it’s such a sad sound. He knew he’d been bad. Surprisingly the mouse was still alive. My Sister named it Mickey and we were trying to decide what to do about it. the mouse was so small sitting in the pot and my Sister noticed on it’s side that there was some injuries. So unfortunately little Mickey didn’t last long after that. This was the first, and hopefully only, time that Shadow has brought us any gifts that weren’t hair bands, elastic bands, pens, notebooks, bookmarks or spoons, oh or roast potatoes. We just couldn’t believe that he’d found a mouse, the poor little thing.

That’s it for today’s story, I hope you enjoyed it. I’m sure it won’t be long before Shadow does something else and there will be a Kitten Escapades part 3.