"Student Union", SJ Bottomley [free children's online books .TXT] 📗

do and I was pleased with the outcome. I didn’t expect anything else to come up when it came to Kathryn anytime soon, nothing significant anyway, and so I was content to carry on with whatever else I might have been writing about at the time. Beth or Georgina or something. Then what happens? Kathryn goes and swans off down to Somerset for the weekend, to live in a tent and listen to some music and I get wind of it and am left thinking, “Oh, my God. Here we go again...”. I make it sound like I didn’t want to write “Kathryn Meets The Chemical Brothers”, but of course, I did. Very much so. When I first found out about it, I knew that this was something that was too good to miss. I couldn’t not create something out of this. The reason why I was so enthusiastic about it was because to me, it seemed so gloriously unlikely. I couldn’t, and still can’t, imagine anyone that I would think less likely to do that kind of thing than Kathryn. But, then again, I have always been a very poor judge of character. Maybe, despite the fact that I loved her tremendously, I had got Kathryn all wrong. Perhaps she was, after all, the type who really enjoyed the life of outward bound pursuits and all that kind of stuff. Still, I couldn’t see it myself. I couldn’t see Kathryn loving the fact that she had to wear wellies twenty-four hours a day for three or four days and sleep on grass and have to walk everywhere being knee-deep or deeper in mud. Not Kathryn. Anybody but Kathryn. This was why I strongly believed that it had to be done. It just had to be written. Simple as that. Now, allow me to make one thing absolutely clear. It was never intended as a mickey take. That wasn’t the point. Furthermore, I don’t believe, having now written it and read it back myself; I don’t believe that it turned out that way either. Yes, it was an amusing thing to hear at the time and I hold my hands up and admit that I did have a little smile and a chuckle at the very thought of it but still...I couldn’t rip Kathryn to shreds, even if my life depended on it. She means too much to me for me to ever do something as callous as that. And I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I knew that I had done anything like that to someone that I loved as much as Kathryn. I couldn’t sleep at night if I knew that. It would be a horrible thing to do. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to produce was a real, serious piece of writing. Alright, I didn’t know any more than that she had gone to Glastonbury and who she had gone with, but I felt that if I gave it enough thought and put enough work into it, the end result would be something that I would be fairly pleased with and happy enough for anyone to read, if they so desired. As you will know if you have read it, I wanted it to be about more than just what I knew. I wanted to expand on that and make it better than that. The point that I tried to make throughout the piece, aside from what you might call the obvious, was something that I had only experienced twice in my life. This was being mad at Kathryn. This is quite hard to explain and as I have already tried to do it once before in said piece, this may take a bit of time for me to do the same now, whilst also attempting to make it sound somewhat original and not just that, verbatim. If I start repeating myself at any point and you therefore get bored or frustrated, then please, stop reading and go on to the next paragraph. I’ll begin this with something that I know that I have written before. On at least one occasion and most probably, more. What made Kathryn so unique, I think, from my perspective, was that I never lost my temper with her. Well, hardly ever lost my temper with her. I say this was unique because without question, I think, at some point I have become upset with every girl or woman that I have liked. This is an unfortunate, but usual reaction than I have experienced many times in the past. The reason behind it is always the same. Things aren’t happening the way that I want them to happen, I am not in the position that I want to be, desire to be, with the individual in question and it gets to me. I wish that I could stop it, believe me, I do, but I can’t. Anyway, this happens and I then get annoyed with myself for letting it happen and in the end, I feel awful. Fine. Now, for reasons that I am no closer to explaining, to this day, I didn’t experience this with Kathryn. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m not complaining about it. I just think it’s more than a bit weird that I found this with someone that I cared so much about, loved so much, as I did Kathryn and not someone who perhaps, I didn’t have quite as strong feelings for. And this is both times that I am talking about. The first time that I fell in love with her and the second. There were, though, I have to say, exceptions to this. Two of them, to be exact. As you will read/have already read in “Kathryn Meets The Chemical Brothers”, these were New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago and Glastonbury 2007. I’m tempted to say that even in these instances, I wasn’t genuinely angry, just a little bit irritated. The things that made me feel this way, both times, were events that Kathryn was at and that I wasn’t. I won’t say any more than that in case- A- You haven’t read the essay yet and I may spoil it for you or B- You have and again, all I’m doing is repeating myself. The main point that I want to make now, is this. This was what that piece of writing was about, the rare occasions that I was mad at Kathryn and the circumstances in which these occurred. This had really sprung up from out of nothing. As I said above, I was happy with what I had written on the subject of Kathryn McKenna and I couldn’t realistically envisage anything else happening that would mean me writing about her again. That this was exactly the opposite to the way things turned out is just typical, I think.
On her return from the south west and fully showered and cleaned up after her weekend of fun and frolics in the rain and the mud, Kathryn went back to work and subsequently, arrived back in my life. Although I was, without doubt, more in love with her than ever, I have to say that the next few months passed by with little incident. I continued the same routine of going in there, whenever I needed to, and seeing her when she was working, missing her when she wasn’t. But, with us no longer acknowledging one another, never mind speaking, there isn’t much that I can say about what took place during the summer months. Except for one thing that I would just like to go into briefly, if I may. This took place on a Saturday evening, sometime in August. At around this time, I got into something of a routine. With Mum, Dad and Craig away, enjoying the sun in France for the best part of a couple of months, this left only Granny and myself back at home. Because of this, most weekends played out a little bit like this. On a Saturday morning, I would pick Granny up and we would go shopping somewhere, at one of the supermarkets in the local area. More often than not, this would end up being the Tesco near me. Not that I had a problem with this, of course. Always a pleasure seeing Kathryn, as I’m sure you’ve already managed to work out. Anyway, this was what we would do and then afterwards, we would travel back to mine for tea and then Granny would stay the night, with me taking her home at some point the following day. This happened on almost, if not all, of the weekends that the folks were away. And, it was good fun. I enjoyed it. One of these Saturday’s began very much like all of those that had come before it. I had gone to Granny’s taken her shopping and by late afternoon, we were enjoying a drink at my house. However, at that moment, Granny decided that she wasn’t feeling very well and asked me if I minded taking her home. This was the first time that we had deviated from the agenda in the whole time that they had been on their summer holiday. After my initial concern for her wellbeing, I complied with Granny’s wishes and drove her home. Meanwhile, something that I should probably explain is that for the past four or five months or so, I had changed the radio station in my car from Radio One/Radio Four to Classic FM. There was no exact reason for this, aside from me wanting a change. So, in my car, there was now a new radio station and I listened to this, obviously, whenever I drove anywhere. I found, fairly quickly, that listening to a station that played classical music, rather than popular music, as I was used to; listening to this kind of radio station was no different in the sense that the music that was played on it still managed to find its way into my head and stick there. Consequently, I would then spend the rest of the day, doing whatever I was doing, working or whatever it was, with a piece of music going round and round in my brain. This happened just the other day when I spent several hours humming and tapping the theme to “The Magnificent Seven”, which I had heard on the radio earlier that morning. Depending on what kind of mood I’m in, this is either really good or absolutely infuriating. It can go either way, I can never be sure which. So, on this particular day, the day that I had to take Granny home because she wasn’t feeling well; that morning, I had been driving to Granny’s and on my way, I had heard Prokofiev’s “Montagues and Capulets” from his ballet “Romeo and Juliet”. This is a brilliant piece of music, fantastic and on this occasion, it had got lodged in my head. All day, I had been walking round with this unmistakable sound, endless repeating in my mind. Unfortunately, this had been an instance where it had gone the negative way, rather than the positive way. If I hadn’t been with company, I would have ended up banging my head very hard against a wall, in an attempt to make myself forget it. Though, I doubt that if I was able to do this, it would have worked. By eight o’clock or whatever time it was when I had dropped Granny off and was on my way back home, the tune was still there and by now, it was driving me loopy. If there is a remedy for this then somebody please tell it to me, because it would really help at times like this. Some time ago, someone much wiser than myself, had told me that if you have a song in your head and you can’t possibly get rid of it, there is