X Factor

OK, I'm sat here with the housemates watching the inevitable X Factor, chocolate mug cake in hand, and decided I should give my current lowdown:

Groups

• One Direction - not fussed. Sweet lads but I think the boy band thing (as much as Simon says they're not a boy band...) is a tad passé.
• Belle Amie - pretty, nice styling, not singers. Sorry, they're just not.

Over 28s

• Mary - absolutely adore that woman. She's the kind of woman that I reckon if you were having a crisis you could go round to her house and she'd put on a brew and give you something warming to eat. But they need to give her a new genre to sing.
• Wagner - oh no. Please, no.

Boys

• Aiden - nice unusual voice, good singer, pretty beautiful. I think they're playing up the "intensity" thing too much; he's becoming almost a caricature, which is a shame. Pretty sure he's on the autistic spectrum.
• Paije - mint lad, lovely personality. Mint voice. Makes me feel like sunshine.
• Matt - love love love him. Amazing voice, lovely bloke. Bad song choice for him last night (the Leona Lewis one). Kind of hoping he wins.

Girls

• Katie - beautiful, cool style, but she is not that bloomin' original. She's styled herself somewhere between Madonna and Lady Gaga, but people keep harking on about how original she is. I also get the feeling that singing is just a means to an end for her too, she wants to be an icon come what may, I think. Beautiful voice, but find her too annoying to really enjoy it. 
• TreyC - I find that spelling of her name quite annoying, but she's got a superb voice. It's a shame that she keeps being so overlooked. I think her personality hasn't come across that much on the show, and so much of it seems to based on that (perhaps unfairly).
• Rebecca - same as TreyC really. Fantastic voice, and she's very beautiful and sweet, but I don't feel as though we know her as much as the others.
• Cher - very quirky and distinctive voice. She's a fab singer, but I feel as though the judges don't really know what to do with her. Cheryl's so conventionally pop (and inferior in the way of talent) that I don't think she does her justice with song choice. Cher's kind of become a parody of herself. But, I think she's still mint. 

So there you have it, here endeth my judgement. As I speak Belle Amie are singing for survival against Katie. And, as much as she irritates me, I'm hoping Katie stays. It's only fair really.

briefly

I've got about 10 minutes before my next lecture, and I've darted into the nearest computer cluster to write a quick post about something I find exciting.

Autumn is here! Somewhere between my last post and now, the world has decided that summer is officially over. The temperature has dropped a good few degrees and the trees are shivering off the first layer of their leaves. As I'm walking home I regress to young childhood as I march determinedly, crunching all in my wake.

I've dug out my collection of scarves (which, at the moment, totals a disappointing 2) from the bottom of my pyjama drawer and the other night I had to sleep in a jumper, not for the last time this year I reckon.

So, we're battening down the hatches in our little student house, bracing ourselves for the frosty freezing weather that is soon to come and stocking up on thick socks and hot chocolate.

I love this time of year :)

Wednesdays

(I was listening to this at the time)

Oh happy day!

For those of you who don't know, at uni (in the UK at least) no one has lectures or seminars on Wednesday afternoons because it's set aside for the sports teams to be able to practise or play matches.

Now, I have a lecture at 10:00 on Wednesday mornings, which incidentally is just in time to walk through the crowds of sports teams as they congregate outside the Union waiting to go to their practices and stuff. This is indeed a highlight of my day.

I go all high school and giggly and feel overwhelmed by all the 6-foot-plus lads milling about in their team tracksuits.

Now, ordinarily I don't go for the "jock" type, but all those self-confident lads milling about and preening themselves in their apparent overt masculinity is evidently too much for my primitive little mind. I've even caught myself looking at the initials on their trackies and putting them into some puerile hierarchy - these are the shameful not-so-subconscious judgements that go through my mind:

• rugby/hockey/rowing - yum.
• football - not too bad.
• lacrosse/volleyball - pshh.

Good grief. I'm so basic.

grinning

I just had a seminar ("Atlantic Renaissance" if you really want to know), and I got told that a point I made was "excellent" - eeee! It got me grinning and preening like a primary school kid - happy days.

Gold star

mystery

There's a house at the end of my street that's always been a bit of a mystery to me.

Now, my area admittedly isn't the most upmarket neighbourhood, but there's a particular house that catches my attention every time I walk past. Its window frames are old and wooden, painted black and slightly rotting away. The curtains (yellowing and moth-eaten)  are always drawn, and there's bubble wrap lining all the windows. Strange.

Well, stranger still is if you look up to the upstairs window the bubble wrap stops about halfway up the window, and through the gap you can see a huge rhododendron bush growing inside the house. Seriously. It's there growing in the upstairs bedroom with huge purple flowers.

Now, I've never seen anyone go in or out of that house, nor any evidence that anyone even lives there at all, but someone must go in there to water the plant.

Whenever I walk past I'm always hopeful that I'll see something. A face peering out of the upstairs window, a light on inside, or even a twitch of the curtains. So far, nothing.

For now, at least, it remains a mystery. I'll keep my eyes peeled.

moments

I still love it.

books

I took a trip to Blackwells today to buy another couple of books for my modules this semester (yeah, I know it's more expensive that way, but I'm one of those people who likes to - you know - have the smell of a bookshop in my nose as I browse). The first was this little delight:

Not exactly a saucy riot, but actually surprisingly interesting. Now, I know you're not supposed to judge a book etc., but this isn't exactly a cover to set your heart pounding. But I must admit that I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would - it's got some interesting (and some barmy) ideas.

The second (for my children's lit module) was much more appealing:

Now, any book with a Quentin Blake on the cover is enough for me, but more than that I love its shape. Tricky to tell from the picture, but it's actually shorter (height-wise) than a standard-sized book. It's stocky and cuddly enough to make losers like me salivate on sight. It set my fingers a-trembling, let me tell you.

Puffin Classics have obviously done a bit of a revamp, and I would love to have been there when they decided what to change. How do they come up with these things? I imagine the meeting: "Hey, guys, I've got an idea - why don't we just make them shorter?" Genius. 

Anyway, enough of that geekishness.

secret obsession

So, I just got back from my first lecture of the year (and, incidentally, my only lecture of the day...) and I'm now parked comfortably in my living room, contemplatively polishing my shoes.

I love polishing shoes. Have I ever mentioned that? It's actually become a strange compulsion. Well, the thing is, I bought some new winter shoes with some birthday money that I got particularly for the purpose. They are, if I do say so myself, completely gorgeous, and it's been bothering me that I can't find my shoe polish from last year.

So, this afternoon I decided to kill two birds with one stone (that's such an awful expression) and took a trip to Morrisons to buy some new shoe polish, and also to pick up my brolly from the lost property. I'd stupidly left it hooked onto my shopping trolley last week after being distracted by battling with the Newcastle wind and attempting to cling to any remaining scrap of dignity as my skirt flew up with gay abandon.

After heaving myself back through Byker I was bloomin' boiling (it appears that 3 layers and a scarf was slight overkill for early October) so settled down for a good ol' polish.

In other news - I WENT RUNNING THIS MORNING! Yes, you heard me right. I am in fact training for the Great North Run (aw man, see, now I've said it on here it makes it official). I've signed up on this website and it has sorted out a training schedule for me. For those of you who remember the list a wee while ago you'll know that jogging was one of my aims for this year. I did go a few times earlier this year but now I've got a training buddy, and an actual aim. So here goes!

I'll let you know how I get on...