My name is Lottie Biggs and in three weeks time, I will be fifteen years old. At school, most people call me Lottie Not-Very-Biggs.  I’ve never found this particularly funny.  I am five foot tall and a fraction over half an inch.  My current hair colour is Melody Deep Plum which is not as nice as Melody Forest Flame but definitely better than the dodgy custard colour I tried last week.  My eyes are bog-standard blue, my chin has a dimple in it and my nose looks like a King Edward potato.  My favourite subjects at school are English, History and Art, my favourite food is sweet and sour chicken and egg fried rice, and my favourite living person in the whole wide world is my best friend, Goose.  My favourite dead person is the actor James Dean. I’ve got posters of him all over my bedroom walls and on the back of my bedroom door.  I know it’s a bit tragic to be erotically attracted to a picture of a dead person but he does have exceptionally cool hair.  When I’ve finished my GCSEs, I’m going to study English, History and Art in the sixth form and then travel around the world, making especially sure that I visit Indonesia so that I can see orang-utans swinging about in the wild.  After this, I’m going to settle down with a very rich and handsome film star (one who is NOT dead) and get a job as an Art Historian in a small gallery somewhere in London like Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square.  Until then, it looks like I’ll have to stick with the occasional snog from Gareth Stingecombe and my Saturday job, selling shoes in Sole Mates.

This is the kind of yawny-yawn boring stuff that Mr Wood, my English teacher, has asked me to write for my coursework.  I have until the summer holidays to come up with a piece of extended personal writing.  That’s NEARLY EIGHT WEEKS AWAY.  I have no idea how much time Mr Wood expects me to spend writing this thing but I can tell you right now that I won’t be needing nearly eight weeks.  A couple of evenings should be ample.  Mr Wood says that if I’m ever to achieve the good grade I’m capable of, I need to paint a clear picture of myself in words.  He says that I should use the ‘blank page as my canvas and the rich vocabulary of the English language as my pallet.’

I asked Mr Wood what exactly he meant by this and he said, ‘Learn from The Bard,’ and gave me a poem to read called ‘Sonnet CXXX’.  This is a colossally boring title for a poem, I reckon.  It was written by the famous expert in creative writing, Mr William Shakespeare.  Apparently, The Bard was his nick-name.  The first four lines of ‘Sonnet CXXX’ go like this:

‘My Mistress eyes are nothing like the sunne,
Corrall is farre more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her brests are dun:
If hairs be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:’

When I read this, two things immediately became apparent to me.  Firstly, William Shakespeare may have written a lot of stuff that is widely admired but his spelling was disastrous and, secondly, anybody who looks like this has no business being rude about the personal appearance of anybody else. I didn’t bother to read the rest of it. I asked Mr Wood for some further clarification and he said that I need to write something unique and personal in order to give the examiner a flavour of who I am. Now, if I were somebody special like Jennifer Lopez or Christina Aguilera or Beyoncé Knowles this would be a fairly easy task but it’s much harder to be unique and flavoursome when your life is pretty much stuffed solid with school and Sole Mates.

I’m so bogged down with coursework assignments and selling shoes that I don’t actually have a proper social life. I don’t even have a boyfriend. Unless you count Gareth Stingecombe - which I totally DON’T. So, in order to get around the problem of not being a pop star, not having psychic powers, not being the mother of alien triplets and, in short, not being in ANY WAY remotely interesting whatsoever, I’m just going to keep on writing as much about myself as I can. And then, hopefully, when I’ve finished, there’ll be enough reasonable stuff to cobble something together to give to Mr Wood. So here goes… Seeing as how it’s practically the only part of my amaZZZing life which is not connected to school, I’ll start with Sole Mates. Sole Mates is a shop which sells shoes. You could be forgiven for not knowing this because Sole Mates is not a very helpful name. If I were going to open a shoe shop, I would call it something like New Shooz or The Shu-per Market. At least, that way, everyone would know what they were going to find inside. I’ve worked in Sole Mates for four whole months now and I still think it’s a totally stupid name for a shop. Half the people I talk to think I work in a fish shop and the other half think it’s some kind of dating agency. In fact, it’s only the brainy people who actually work out that we’re selling shoes and as the only brainy people in this entire place are me and my best friend Goose, that doesn’t leave too many of us who get the joke. And believe me, we’re not exactly laughing our heads off. Mind you, it gets worse. Next door to Sole Mates is a chippy called

and next door to that is a CD and record shop called

and go two further along from that and you come to

which would be perfectly fine if they sold jeans and stuff but they don’t. In actual fact, it’s a hairdressers owned by Gareth Stingecombe’s mum. And guess what! Her name is Jean!!! The main street in Whitchurch, where I live, is called Merthyr Road and at the top of it, where the Hippo Eater pub is and just about where the cars come off the flyover, there is a big sign which says:

Obviously, this sign welcomes people, in English and in Welsh, to Whitchurch which is a lovely idea except that

1. Although Whitchurch is in Wales, I don’t know anyone around here who actually speaks Welsh - except Mrs Rowlands (who is evil) and Mr Daniels (who is sweet but leaving our school soon – probably because he’s scared of Mrs Rowlands) and they both have to speak Welsh because it’s their job to teach it - and
   
   
2. Whitchurch is not a village.  Strictly speaking, it’s a part of Cardiff – just a much less interesting part than the city centre.

Anyway, I think that the council should make that sign a bit bigger and add another line.

Or better still, they should just scrap it altogether and design a completely new one. Mr Spanton, my Art teacher, says I am a keen visual learner with a naturally artistic streak so if the council wanted, I’d be perfectly happy to design it for them. I wouldn’t have any Welsh words on my sign because that would involve me having to enlist the help of Mrs Rowlands at school and she hates me which makes communication between us quite stressful. My sign would look something like this.

A word about Goose. Goose McKenzie is COOL. She is already fifteen. Like me, she lives in appreciation of James Dean, Melody hair products and GCSE Art lessons but unlike me, she thinks that History is for dead people and sixth form will be tragic. That’s OK because when Goose leaves school, she is going to be a solo folk-rock singer/songwriter and guitarist, and - as she told me herself just the other day - this means her GCSEs are ‘essentially superfluous’.

Goose is good with words. I am as well but Goose is even better. She always gets top marks in English without even trying and in her spare time, she writes enlightening verse and electrifying song lyrics which are ripped straight from the core of her soul. Goose says that she is planning to secure a six-figure record deal by the time she is eighteen years old. She says that this will allow her to travel far beyond the limiting confines of Whitchurch and bring her into contact with other like-minded Bohemians who are equally cursed and blessed with the burdensome gift of an artistic temperament. Goose especially wants to travel to Iceland because it is in total darkness for six whole months of the year and she says that this will encourage her to stay indoors and be creative. Goose can be quite deep and intellectual sometimes. She says that she is an Existentialist Absurdist which means that she thinks her life is ridiculous. Goose says that I’m an Existentialist Absurdist too but I’m not sure. My mum just says I’m awkward. She even tried to make me see a counsellor once to cure it. Sometimes, Goose has ‘Existential Days’ and on these days, I don’t see much of her because she tends to stay in her bedroom and think. It doesn’t bother her though. Whenever she’s in an intense mood, she likes to harness her negative energy and turn it into something good by using it as an inspiration for her song-writing. It doesn’t bother me, either. She’s my best friend and I love her.

Life at the Scatty End of the Street, Backwards Names and the You Pays

Sole Mates is at the scatty end of the Merthyr Road. All the places worth hanging out at are up the other end. To be strictly honest, there’s not that much going on up there either but there is at least UneeQ Boutique which sells a good range of urban accessories and fake tattoos, and there is the Dragon Coffee House where me and Goose sometimes go for a double choca-moccaccino (with extra cream and marshmallows) and a chat. There’s also the public garden which is really quite blatantly just a big traffic island in the middle of a T-junction. The council has tried to make a feature of it by planting some daffodils and putting a bench or two there so that tired shoppers can rest for a while and admire the passing cars and the premium view of the graveyard. Some do but, mostly, the only people who sit there are Elvis Presley who is usually drunk and a random selection of Goths from the sixth form. I always say hello to Elvis and give him a smile when I see him. Smiles are free after all and I reckon if everyone smiled a bit more, there’d be fewer heart attacks and murders and stuff. I also smile and say hello to the sixth-form boys. Most of these are fairly ugly but it’s always worth keeping an eye on them just in case.

And then, just opposite the garden and the last shop before you come to the graveyard, there’s Suitably Booted. Now don’t get me wrong, Suitably Booted sells shoes which are even more dreadful than Sole Mates. And the name is not good either, by anyone’s standards. But it’s still a prime location for hanging-out and always will be while Neil Adam works there. To put it quite simply, Neil Adam is LUSH. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that he is SEXADELIC. He has flaxen blond hair which grows right down to his shoulders and razor-sharp cheekbones which would look very good pressed right up next to mine in our wedding photo. I do think his parents have got a lot to answer for though. Bringing a person into this world is a very big deal I reckon and giving that person a name is just as big a deal. So WHY ON EARTH his parents have given him a name which spelt backwards is actually MAD ALIEN is absolutely beyond me. A thing like what your name is backwards is very important. Sometimes, it can tell you a lot about a person. Take Lee Fogel for instance. He’s in my Double Science class and it occurred to me one day while Mr Thomas was droning on and on about electrical circuits and ticker-tape timers and other random pointless stuff that Lee Fogel’s name is actually LEG OF EEL backwards. As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with Lee’s leg but I do think that he’s a pretty slippery character. My name backwards is either SGGIB ETTOLRAHC or SGIBB EITTOL depending on whether or not you are my friend and while I agree that neither way is very pretty or easy to pronounce, at least it doesn’t reveal anything sly about me. Having said all that, the fact that Neil Adam is a mad alien when viewed from a different angle still would not stop me from going out with him if he asked.

Goose fancies Neil Adam as well. She once tried to express her emotions on this subject by writing a song about him. It was called ‘Song for Neil’, and with her permission, I have a reproduction of the lyrics right here.

Personally, I don’t think that Goose got anywhere close to conveying the pure physical beauty of Neil Adam and I don’t think that Goose was that chuffed with her effort either because she never bothered to develop it into a proper song. She says that as song-writing goes, it’s a bit basic. She says she might use it as a filler track on her album though.

Neil Adam is the Saturday sales assistant at Suitably Booted and as he goes to a private school in Cardiff city centre, this is the only contact we ever have with him. As contact goes, it falls well below the satisfactory standard. Sometimes, one or other of us will visit his shop on our lunch-break and pretend to be interested in buying a pair of old ladies’ indoor slippers or peep-toe sandals in the hope that he will serve us, and sometimes, if we’re really lucky, Dionne, our manageress at Sole Mates, will send us up to Neil’s shop to borrow his hoover or something. So he does know that we exist. It’s just that he doesn’t seem very excited about that fact yet.

But, like I was saying, Sole Mates is stuck right down the other end of the street. Immediately to the left of us is the chippy, then there’s the record shop that sells dusty old LPs from around the time of Jesus, and then there is Gareth Stingecombe’s mum’s hairdressing salon. Bang opposite us on the other side of the road is Bright Eyes Opticians. If you walked any further to the right, you’d be approaching the flyover and unless you are the type of freakoid who gets a weird thrill out of walking on a very narrow pavement one hundred metres up in the air with four lanes of fast moving traffic whizzing by you, I’d strongly advise against it.

I’m Head Saturday Girl at Sole Mates. I’m not actually sure that I should be empowered with such a position of responsibility because I’m still not quite fifteen but, to be honest, I don’t think that Dionne, my manageress, is all that bothered about the finer details of employment law. Thanks to me, Goose works in Sole Mates too. She started two weeks after I did. All I had to do was put in a good word and Dionne rang her up the same day. Goose arrived for an interview within the hour wearing the most grotesque skirt that I’ve ever seen in my life. I think she must have borrowed it from her mum. When Dionne asked her why she wanted the job, Goose went tomato red and whispered, ‘I truly believe I can help you sell more shoes and also it would get me out of the house and stop me spending all my time doing homework.’

She was very convincing. If she hadn’t been around my house until eleven o’clock the night before watching Free Willy 2, I might even have believed her myself.

Dionne smiled and looked at Goose as if she wanted to eat her all up. And then she gave her a job.

Anyway, just a few weeks later, the last Head Saturday girl - Scary Mary who has a metal spike coming out of her face - left to start her college course, leaving ME as the longest-serving member of the Saturday staff. Me and Goose were then joined by Emily who goes to a girls’ school a bit further down the road. Emily is generally quite nice but a little bit lacking in life experience. I think she is frightened of boys. Dionne must think that Emily’s a little bit wet too because even though Emily is the oldest, Dionne said that unless Gina is in, I’m in charge. And as Gina mostly only works during the week and Dionne is nearly always asleep in her office or else looking at Face Book on the Sole Mates computer, this means I officially have the power. I think this gets on Goose’s nerves a bit but she does have to remember that I have two weeks more experience of selling shoes than she does.

As manageresses go, Dionne is OK. I’d even go as far as to say she is actually fairly cool. She is only twenty-two years old which is still fairly young I reckon, dyes her hair Melody Platinum Sun-Kissed – I’ve seen the boxes in her shopping bags – and doesn’t really seem all that interested in shoes. Every Friday night, she struts her funky stuff to a pumping rhythm at Gigi’s Dance Emporium in town, which means that she spends almost every Saturday asleep in her office with the door locked. This is good. Gina, on the other hand, is not OK. Gina is deeply annoying. She is getting on a bit – I’d say at least forty – has one of those very loud luverrly-jubbly style voices which comes from London and URGENTLY needs an introduction to the world of Melody’s hair-colour enhancers. I think it’s fair to say that in the battle against grey, Gina’s hair has well and truly rolled over and died without a decent fight. To highlight her hair problem further, she persists in wearing it all tied up in one huge side pony-tail. The weight of her pony-tail together with the weight of the enormous amount of gold she wears means that Gina is almost always leaning to one side. This is not generally a problem for her but it can make trips up and down the step-ladder look particularly treacherous. Gina mostly only works during the week but sometimes, just to throw us out of our comfort-zones, she’ll rock up on a Saturday and start barking orders. This is blatantly very bad.

Gina is particularly obsessed with the YOU PAYS. She probably dreams about them in her sleep. The YOU PAYS are the round stickers which we have to put inside the most tragic shoes in order to get rid of them a bit quicker. They look like this.

As far as I can tell, the original price is always a figure dreamt up in the vivid imaginations of either Dionne or Gina. Anyway, Gina is OBSESSED with these stickers. I wouldn’t even be at all surprised if she has hundreds of these stickers sneakily stuck all over her underwear to give her a warm glow throughout the day. A typical conversation with Gina goes something like this.

Me: Hi Gina.  You in today?  You’re not usually in on a Saturday.
Gina: Yeah well, someone’s gotta keep an eye on you girls, innit.  ‘Ave you   ‘oovered this morning?  I can see clumps of dust under that shelf.
Me: I’ve put Emily in charge of hoovering.  Shall I have a word with her?
Gina: Yeah… No…. Yeah… Hang about...Why are all these YOU PAYS still on the cash desk?  Int you sorted these out yet?  If you don’t put the YOU PAYS out first thing in the morning like I’m always tellin’ yah, it’s the customer who loses out.  ‘Ow many times ‘ave I got to drum it in, Missy Biggs?  BEGIN NEW DAYS BY DOING THE YOU PAYS.’

Gina’s scatty command of grammar really winds me up. Mr Wood, my English teacher, is always telling us that ‘there’s no such thing as must of, should of, could of, it’s must have, should have, could have.’ Mr Wood says stuff like, ‘The day you all get that simple little fact into your tiny little heads is the day I can retire a happy man.’ Well, this is all very well and good, but he doesn’t need to be moaning on to me about it. Even though I’m Welsh, my English is banging . It’s the likes of Gina that he needs to start talking to. Mind you, I’d like to see him try. I reckon Gina could beat Mr Wood to a pulp if she wanted to.

Gina’s moan about the YOU PAYS generally last for a mean average of seven minutes and twenty-six seconds but she did once manage an impressive eleven minutes and eighteen seconds. It’s only me who is ever on the receiving end of this particular form of moan. Never Goose. Never Emily. Only ME. Sometimes the responsibility of being Head Saturday Girl can be an extremely troublesome and tedious experience.