My name is Lavinia and I turned eleven in December. I live a little north of London with my mum, sister Matilda, step-dad Andy, and step-brother William. William comes here every other week and for the rest of the time stays with his mum. Sometimes Matilda and I go and see Daddy, our step-mum, step-brothers Jago and Ambrose, and newborn step-sister Willow (this year we went very recently, only two days after Christmas).
Matilda and I are home-educated – we don’t go to school! Instead, we spend the day with Mummy, working or playing or going out to see our friends. This week Mummy has made us a timetable (we’ve just finished Latin), but apart from now we’ve only had one this year for a couple of weeks or so. Often we go to a nearby stately home, Wrest Park, where they have a mansion and grounds that we like to walk around and a playground we play in with our friends.
Unlike most people my age, I adore writing stories! Every time I have free time I will be writing on my laptop most of the time, or occasionally on paper. However, I have only finished about seven of my thousands of stories! On Google Drive, the app that I use to write on, I have about twenty folders on the home page, twenty folders inside them, twenty folders inside them, and sometimes even twenty folders inside them (not to mention the fourty abandoned stories in each folder – even if the folder they’re in is called ‘MUST FINISH’ or ‘WILL COMPLETE’). I also quite like to draw, but most of the time I’m not in the mood – in which case I will go and write my story! As well as writing novels, I like to correct other people’s grammer. It annoys me most when people write ‘its’ without an apostrophe when there is supposed to be one, or the other round! I like to do spelling tests too, and often get the most marks even though I’m the youngest by a reasonably long way!
I have many other (more strange) things I like to do too. I have an enormous collection of clocks in bedroom (at the moment I have exactly twenty-one, if you include the one that has no face). Almost all of them are vintage, and none of them work. However, I know the code of my clocks, so for instance I know that if I wake up in the morning and see the small, ochre, floral-printed oval one it is fifty-five minutes too early, and so on with all of them. At night I find it hard to sleep if even one of my clocks are taken away, because I know the distinct ‘tick tock’ or ‘click clack’ of each clock, and so I cannot sleep without the ‘tick click mick tickety tock clack mock tockety’ noises in my ears. I also have a collection of foreign coins, and at the moment I have ninety-five. I like to write them all down, their currencies, where they’re from, how much they’re worth etc. in my notebooks. I also enjoy memorising all of the roundabouts I come across; to name only a couple, I know ‘Fen Roundabout’, which has a statue of Greg Rutherford, the long-jumper, and also ‘Black Cat Roundabout’, which has a sculpture of a black cat arching its back.
I hope you enjoy reading the posts on my website this year. Lavinia 🙂