So you found me then?

Here I am! I know I've been hiding progressively more over the last couple of weeks, but I wanted a proper break from college and stuff, or at least from most of the people associated with that. If I've told you where I am right at the start, you're special - ditto if you made it onto new msn (don't stress, I haven't finished adding people to that yet). Should there be ANYONE else who cares enough to ask where I've gone, just get them to email. I won't keep everyone out, and anyway this is an unlocked blog now so hiding things won't happen in the same way, but I do want to have a purge a bit and this appears to be the kindest way I can do it.

Since the last lj post I made, going to Italy with the choir was probably the main event. Finding out my passport was out of date 12 hours before I flew was not a highlight, put it like that. I had to miss the flight with the choir and go into London to get an emergency speeded up passport and another flight that evening, at the cost of an arm and a leg and considerably more than a month's rent. In the end my dad offered to cover that, but I still feel bad about it. I was in such a state that people kept telling me to sit down. When I went through security in the passport office he told me to take my water through the machine rather than putting it through the x-ray because apparently I 'looked like I needed it'. I have never had a more stressful day, EVER. I was feeling really stupid for the not realising the passport was out of date thing (I HAD looked at it - I remember doing it - about a month before, and presumably just went 'this is in date, isn't it?'...because it WAS then, just wasn't by the time we came to fly. Meh.), and then I was feeling bad about what I was costing my dad, and THEN there was the stress of how I was going to get across Milan when I got there, since the airport was about 100km and the whole width of the city away from where I needed to be. All that added up to a Jazz that was right on the very very edge of a panic attack and hysterics the whole way over. When I *DID* get to Milan, I discovered there was a train strike. I ask you. A train strike. Crap. Anyway, I got a bus into Milan Centrale from the airport and then a kind lady found me pretty much crying in the entrance and showed me how to use the metro. I got all the way over to Rogoredo, nearly at the end of the South Easterly line and where I was hoping to pick up a late train to Lodi from, before I really accepted this train strike thing. Then I was stuck, because there was nobody around. I really didn't know what to do then. Eventually I stopped a bus driver, who talked at me in German for a while before seeing that that wouldn't work. He pulled me onto his bus and sat me down, and took me off to the bus terminus at San Donato. He and several other bus drivers then waited with me until a cab came and I got that to Lodi, at the cost of 60 euros (or £40). Ouch. I have NEVER been more pleased to see Simon B-S and Graham at the other end than I was then.

Everyone, including me, was pretty impressed that I got there that quickly, but the sheer stress meant that I spent the next day in bed. Was a bit of a shame because I missed one of only three concerts on this year's tour, but I did have a great time bumming around in Italy and eating nice food when I was better (despite insect bites so big it looked like I'd sprained my ankle), so it could have been worse. Simon and David and I foodied it to the max in Parma, and Catherine and I shopped in Milan. The tour song was comic, even if I WAS singing the tenor part I can't really sing.

I've mostly slept and listened to audiobooks since I came back. I'm really trying to get the rest I haven't had for the last three at least years before I launch myself into work. What with one thing and another, I never really recovered from certain events during my university career, and frankly I don't want to have a breakdown 6 months into my first job. I AM in the process of applying for that first job though, despite the rest thing. I wasn't going to, but it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Zoe Curnow (my baby brother's bass teacher, former ADC manager and now my careers advisor) sent me the heads up, and it IS a perfect job - even getting an interview would be a real boost. It's for production administrator at the Donmar Warehouse - a perfect position for me. Anyway. Need to finish that I suppose. And incidentally get up.