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Revision

‘Revision is essential’, we have been told so many times these past few weeks that the refrain is streaming from every orifice, especially the one beginning with ‘a’. But I have to admit that revision is essential for me because I have such a faulty memory for dates, names of characters in stories, the correct order of historical periods, the exact location of countries east of Germany, and just about everything else you are required to remember for exams.

I have therefore devised the following rules to make sure I revise well.

Item
We are told we should not revise for hours on end, as good concentration is not possible for more than an hour at a time. Therefore, we should make sure to take a break every sixty minutes. I do this by making a drink and taking it into the garden, weather permitting, so that I can benefit from some fresh air, as I’m sure it’s unwise to remain cooped up in my room. I also find that a little weeding provides some exercise, even though weeding is not a chore I normally do, no no, not at all, and o dear, my ten-minute break does rather extend to fifty minutes before I know what has happened, and it’s almost time for the next sixty-minute break, but never mind, I add this break to the one I’m still on and feel all the better for the double-strength relief.

Item
We are advised that when a stray thought occurs during revision it’s best to attend to it and get it out of the way, otherwise it will impede further work. A good example occurred this afternoon about halfway through the session of revision after the double-strength break, when I realised I hadn’t written to Izumi for over a month. She must be wondering what has happened, and whether I no longer love her. So I set aside revision of the History of the Russian Revolution 1905–1921 and wrote her an email that I’m afraid took much longer than I’d intended, stretching well into my third revision session, but never mind, because, after all, Izumi is one of my very best friends, and one should not forget one’s friends, even for revision, and writing to her got rid of this intruding thought.

Item
Julie, especially, has gone on at us for the past two years about the importance of background reading and reading
around
the set books. For example, we should read other novels by Virginia Woolf so that we will understand the context of the set text, which is her favourite,
To the Lighthouse
. (O my god, doesn’t she just adore it, I’m sure she must be in love with the aforementioned but sadly expired Mrs Woolf.) It occurred to me today that I hadn’t done as advised and that
really I ought to, so I made a trip to the library to borrow other books by the adored Virginia, none of which were in (I expect the others in my English set have had the same notion and got there before me) so I cycled to the bookshop, where all I could find was
Mrs Dalloway
, which I bought and have spent the rest of the day reading, and already feel much better, because I’ve followed Julie’s advice (indeed, instruction). However, I read in the introduction that it’s necessary to read the brilliant genius aforesaid Mrs Woolf’s short feminist book
A Room of One’s Own
if you’re to understand the underlying thematic nature of her novels, so I shall have to hunt out a copy tomorrow morning and read that before I can go on with
Mrs D
. and understand
To the Lighthouse
better. But I have a vague suspicion that this might not be enough background reading and I shall have to do even more. O well, that’s life.

Item
Revision, we were informed, is helped by keeping your notes in good shape and in suitable folders. This evening I realised my history notes are not properly organised. They are in entirely the wrong folders. What is needed are folders of different colours, one for each period and one for each subject likely to crop up in the exam. So I’ve decided to go into town tomorrow to buy appropriate folders – I think twelve will do of the sort that have those snappy elastic bands that go across the corners to keep the pages from falling out, and are produced in attractive shades, not the garish crude basic colours used on cheap folders. Having purchased the folders, I think it will aid my revision if I produce decorated title pages for each one on my laptop’s Publisher program, then go through my notes, highlighting in appropriate colours the facts and quotes, etc., I need to memorise, then print these out on separate pages with suitable illustrations dropped in as aides-mémoire. I’ll need to download these images from the internet and scan them from books, which I’ll have to search for, and which will take hours to find
unfortunately, but never mind, if you’re going to do a job you have to do it properly, and I’m sure it’ll be useful when eventually I actually get down to revising.

Item
We’re told it’s essential to eat properly during revision and to eat regularly, so I’ve written menus for myself for the next three weeks – this took quite a long time and a lot of thought and research in cookbooks, but will prove worth it, I’m sure. On today’s test run I find that cooking these will require about three hours per day, but there it is, if one is to eat properly, making meals must be allotted whatever time it takes. And, by the way, I
must
make myself eat slowly and rest afterwards in order to aid digestion.

Item
We’re instructed to get plenty of sleep. I am therefore going to bed at least one hour before my usual time and getting up one hour after my usual time. And I think I ought to take a top-up nap in the afternoons.

Item
We are told exercise is as important as diet and sleep during revision, so I plan to take an extended run each day and to add a second run before my nap in the afternoons, just to make sure.

Item
One becomes forgetful of everything else during revision, it’s such an absorbing activity. So I’ve combed the list of my relatives, friends, acquaintances and members of Dad’s and Doris’s staffs for everyone who has a birthday during the next month – eleven in all – and must buy presents and cards and write amusing letters in preparation for their birthdays, as I would hate to be thought uncaring and selfish.

Item
Relaxation is essential during revision, so I’ve made a day-by-day plan covering the next month of tv programmes, DVD films, music, and purely-for-pleasure reading that will provide rest and relaxation and restore my energy. I calculate that these will take at least four hours a day, but the benefits will far outweigh the time taken from revision.

Item
I’m sure regular phone calls to share progress with friends who are also revising will help, and I must not refuse
calls from them when they need comfort and support, even if these take time I ought to spend on revision.

I’m sure if I stick to these plans I’ll be very well prepared for the exams. However, from a quick calculation, I’ve worked out that the above will require roughly twenty-two and a half hours a day leaving one and a half hours for revision. Will this be enough? As my plans are based on sound advice from teachers, who must know what they’re talking about, I’m sure it will be.

Room (My
)

The only place where I feel really at home is in my room. As soon as I go through the door, it’s as if my body knows it’s safe. My room is the only place where I can think and feel fully as myself. I definitely cannot do that at school, which is ironic when you think about it, because school is a place where you’re meant to spend your whole time thinking. I can never get any serious work done at school, least of all any serious reading, which is why I sit around talking.

My room contains everything that I value, except my piano. All my books, CDs, clothes, computer, objects with special meaning (like the Nine Men’s Morris board and the carving of the White Horse that Will made for me, the pottery egg Julie gave me and the picture of her icon, the poems and presents Izumi gave me – that sort of thing – and, yes, the necklace Edward gave me, which, though it reminds me of a big mistake, is part of my life from which I learned a lot, and I don’t want to forget it). Also boxes of letters and postcards and printed-out emails from friends, with a special separate polished wood box for the ones from Will. There’s a box of things that belonged to my mother, including all the photos I can find of her.

I change the pictures on my walls whenever I’ve had enough of the ones that are there. At the moment, I’m bingeing on
Elizabethan portraits. The Queen herself of course (what an amazing woman). Also: big butch lumpy-nosed obese Ben Jonson, friend and rival of Shakes; girl-pretty, sensuous-mouthed, boy-bearded Christopher Marlowe (Shakes’s rival, gay, and purported spy) with his fly-away bronze hair; John Donne with the looks of an intelligent and educated rock star (if that’s not a contradiction in terms); Henry Wriothsley, third Earl of Southampton (Shakes’s patron and, some say, lover for a time), with his black-and-white cat with its old man’s face and know-all yellow eyes sitting on the windowsill; William Cecil, chief minister to the Queen, founder of the English secret police, with his suspicious authoritarian’s eyes and devilish little forked ginger beard, dressed in sharp black with gold buttons, the gold handle of his sword poking out from his side, not a man to cross, as those who did learned the hard way; and, the dear Bard, Will Shakes himself, who is always on my wall whatever else is there, though I change the portrait from time to time, because no one knows which one is really him, if any of them is. Just now the Flower Portrait is there. As usual, the wonderful, important thing about Shakes is that no one really knows him. He is everything and he is nothing, he is everywhere in his plays and nowhere. He is ambiguous, he is ambivalent, he cannot be labelled or categorised, he cannot be pinned down by anyone. We know lots about him, and yet it adds up to not knowing him at all. I wish I were like that.

The colour of the walls is important, and like the pictures I change it from time to time. When I’d finished my Year 11 exams, Doris helped me to paint three walls in lilac and one wall and the ceiling in ivory white. Woodwork deep deep blue-green. After I’d lost Will and I was in need of comforting, she bought me a thick-pile white carpet. The floor had been blond-wood with a scatter rug in autumn colours. At the moment I’m leaning towards painting the walls and woodwork ivory white so that the room glows, especially at
night when the lights are on. I often read and think and write late into the night so I like my room to be at its best then.

Therefore lighting is important. I’m very fond of my old angle-poise bedside lamp, for example. It’s nothing very special, in fact it wasn’t meant as a bedside light, but it belonged to my granddad Kenn. He was a light to me because he taught me the kind of things about life in the past that they don’t teach in school. I have a slim adjustable standard light beside my reading chair that Dad gave me for my fourteenth birthday. And one of those green-shaded lamps on my desk that I bought for myself for my fifteenth birthday because it seemed romantic (I think I associated it with writers for some reason; perhaps I saw a film about a writer who had one). I know it’s naff but it amuses me and is actually very good as a desk lamp. I like soft light in pools. I hate overhead lighting; it’s too harsh. I never use the one in my room. The neon tube-lights at school buzz all the time and give me a headache. When I was about twelve I went through a phase of only using candlelight, which drove Dad mad, because he was sure I’d set the house on fire.

I never allow anyone to stay in my room (except for Izumi, when she was here, and Will of course), and am even reluctant to let anyone in at all. I don’t care if this is regarded as possessive or selfish or ‘being territorial’ (a masculine crime, but hard cheese).

Tidiness. When people ask if I’m tidy, Doris always says I’m not. But what she refuses to understand is that I quite like making my room a mess because I like tidying it up. The act of putting everything in its exactly right place gives me a feeling of control, I feel I’m sorting out my life, so I think what I do unconsciously is throw things down any old how until there’s so much stuff lying around it annoys me, at which time a tidying-up mood suffuses me and I just
have
to put everything back where it belongs. When I’ve finished tidying (which can take about five hours) I go off somewhere
for an hour or two so that I can come back and look at my tidied-up room with new eyes and feel surprised and very pleased at how tidy it is now. I walk round, checking everything is where it should be, open my cupboards and drawers and view the contents, and in fact conduct an inspection quite as rigorous and critical as my beloved granddad told me the officers were when inspecting the soldiers’ quarters in the army (into which he was conscripted during the Second World War, and was one of the men who landed on the Normandy beaches on the famous D-Day, 6 June 1944). I don’t know why I do this, except that it’s some sort of recognition that my life, like everybody’s, is itself a bit of a mess and that I have a duty to try and tidy it up from time to time, but which then becomes a mess again pretty much straight away. In other words, and to use a phrase Julie has just taught us, my room is the ‘objective correlative’
¹
of me, not just its contents and colours but the way I look after it.

Lately, I’ve been feeling the need for more space. My room has too much in it, it feels stuffed full, and I dislike stuffed rooms quite as much as I dislike crowds. More, because I have to live in my room but don’t have to live in a crowd. I’m sure D&D would let me expand into another room, but that’s not what I want. What I’m beginning to want is a place of my own, a small flat or house like Julie’s that I can make my own – make all of it my ‘room’, my home, my objective correlative, the place that is me.

This room is beginning to feel like a skin I need to slough, or a shell I need to get out of because it’s not big enough for my growing body. I think that’s why I’ve been spending more
and more time at Julie’s. Not only because we’re friends, but because it’s not my place, not my home, but I feel safe with her and ‘at home’ with her while I grow a new skin or build a new shell.