Emily McGuire and the Sorcerer's Stone: September & October at Capernwray

A collection of moments from my first month at Capernwray, aka a great deal of irrelevant information, which I find amusing even if no-one else does. To make things easier to understand, I have arranged it all within the format of a typical school day. But before I do that, here are some highlights from the weekend that we all arrived at Capernwray.

-I saw a hedgehog on my first day, which was clearly a sign. Never mind what manner of sign it was, it was definitely a sign and that’s all that matters.

-At the “Welcome to all the students” meeting, the principal opened by saying, “Welcome to Hogwarts,” apologized that the staircases weren’t moving yet, and introduced himself as Dumbledore. You thought I was kidding when I said I was going to Hogwarts.

Now, onto the school day format:

7:30-8:00

Breakfast time for stronger students than I. I made it to breakfast about 5 times before giving up and now I keep a stockade of Nutella and croissants in my room and I don’t get up until absolutely necessary.

Events that have taken place during breakfast:

-I had a bit of a disaster the first time I tried to make a cup of tea. You get hot water out of the coffee machine, so all you have to do is press the button and it pours out the necessary amount. Simple, right? Lol, not for Emily Can’t-Handle-Going-To-The-Bank McGuire. I thought the button which makes the water come out was just the select button, which meant hot water poured out before I had my mug in position to catch it, and I only got about half the water in the mug. So I pressed the button again, but now there was too much water, and the cup began to overflow, so I pressed it again to stop it, and all that happened was that more came out! So basically I stood there as tea overflowed from my mug, trying to play it cool and act like that was exactly what I meant to happen. I think this event paints a beautiful portrait of what 83% of my life looks like.

-I put a shot of espresso in my coffee cup one morning, then filled it up the rest of the way with Americano, and I almost died. I was super jittery and my hands were shaking but at least I was awake.

8:15-8:45

Duties. Although we are students here at Hogwarts, we also double as house elves, in that we clean the castle. I have the fanciest duty, as is befitting to one such as I. I get to clean the study of the school’s head honcho, Mark Thomas. It looks like a room from the mansion in Clue, except (thank goodness) that I have never discovered a dead body there.

9:00-9:45

First lecture of the day. Very occasionally nap time. Don’t look at me like that, mother. I really do want to stay awake. It’s just sometimes you have to sacrifice consciousness in one lecture so you’ll be fully attentive for the others. What else am I supposed to do, go to bed at a reasonable hour?

Also, on Wednesdays, we have family groups during this hour. Every couple on staff is assigned a handful of students, and we go to their house and drink tea and do fun things. Every time our family group gets together, the person who is the most behind in their Old Testament reading has to do push-ups. Nothing like a bit of sadism to remind you of home, eh?

9:55-10:40

Second lecture of the day. Sometimes, if you force yourself to stay alert during lecture 1, you crash during this one. It’s a risky business.

10:40-11:00

COFFEE BREAK!!!!!!!!!!! After this, I am awake for the rest of the day and nothing can stop me and it is good to be alive, my friends.

11:00-11:45

Third lecture of the day, except on Mondays, when we have interactive groups. Interactive groups are put together based on who lives near you in real life, so you can have friends who you can visit after you leave Capernwray. We take turns leading bible studies, and it is very lovely. Last time I led, we played spoons and talked about Peter walking on the water. Those two things did have a segue, believe it or not. It’s the idea that if you take your eyes off the goal (getting a spoon) in spoons, you lose, and if you take your eyes off the goal in life (Jesus) you fall into a body of water in the Middle East.

11:55-12:40

Fourth lecture of the day. My heart begins to quicken as the clock ticks ever closer to lunch time.

Things that have happened during lectures:

-We got our course book the second week of school. Most of the student body were very surprised that they were actually going to have to do school work.

-We have assigned seats, and my seatmate is a cartoon fairy come to life called Emma. The other day during lectures she was trying to make up a secret handshake, so she just borrowed one of my hands while I took notes with the other, and created a handshake. She then drew some little dots on my palm, declared, “Birdseed,” then proceeded to draw bird features on my pinky and amused herself by making the bird eat the birdseed. This is all while a lecture is going on. If you hadn't guessed it, we sit in the next-to-last row.

-One day was a guy from a missions organization came to speak who sounded EXACTLY LIKE THE IMPRESSIVE CLERGYMAN FROM THE PRINCESS BRIDE. You know, this guy:

It was the best thing that's ever happened to me.

-I recently discovered AirDrop, which is a thing that allows you to send photos via Bluetooth to anyone with an Apple device. I periodically use it to send strange pictures and dank memes to random people. The other day I dropped this to everyone who was within range, including some people who I don’t even talk to in real life.

1:00-1:30

LUNCH. It’s the meal where we get dessert, and it’s amazing. Except for one time, when I thought we were going to have chocolate eclairs and it was actually fruit salad. I felt like tearing my clothes and donning sackcloth. (That’s from the Bible. Look at all the things I’m learning!)

1:30-5:30

Free time. Favourite activities include homework and laundry. #turndownforwhat

Sometimes on Thursday afternoons we have girls-only sessions with Sue, who is a beautiful and majestic human being who manages to simultaneously be a person to whom you feel you could entrust your deepest secrets and a person who occasionally makes death threats. She is everything I aspire to be in life. Our first girls only session, was a lovely, encouraging talk about supporting and encouraging other girls instead of creating drama. She said to treat one another like sisters, and unfortunately all I could think of in that moment was this:

We also all got a secret sis. We leave each other notes and chocolate and stuff and it’s great fun.

So you know how in Sorcerer’s Stone Harry Potter bought EVERYTHING off the trolley and that was how he and Ron became friends? The same thing happened to me when a mysterious benefactor sent me a parcel full of sweets! I opened it in the main part of the castle, and was instantly surrounded by a fan club. I shared everything but the chocolate. I was the most popular girl in school for 5 minutes and it was glorious.

5:30-6:00

Tea. To the Americans imagining all the students putting on fascinator hats and nibbling on petit fours: stop. It’s just what the English call dinner.

-Canadian thanksgiving was October 10th, which meant there was an outbreak of the Canadian national anthem at dinner. Canada is the most heavily represented country here, so anytime the Canadians put their minds to something, they are a fearsome and unstoppable force.

7:00-7:50

Fifth lecture of the day.

8:00-8:50

Sixth lecture of the day.

9:00-10:45

Everyone gets one last snack from the dining hall, and then we all go and hang out in the lounge, until we get-

10:45

-kicked out of the lounge. Then it’s time to shower and go to bed. The showers have two temperatures: Mt. Doom and Hoth, and the temperature fluctuates spontaneously and with complete indifference to the direction in which you are turning the knobs. It’s beautiful.

You know how Spartan army officers used to wake up their troops in the middle of the night and pretend to be an attacking army so that the soldiers would be ready should their enemy sneak up on them? Apparently this is also how things are done at Capernwray. The fire alarm went off four times during the first two weeks of school. One of those times was at 6 in the morning, when 99.98% of the student body –including me and all my roommates- were still asleep. But do you know where I was the very first time it went off?

In the shower.

So I had to hike my skinny jeans onto my wet legs and get the heck out of dodge. It had gone off by accident, which infuriated me, because gosh-dangit, if I’m going to go through all that trouble to exit the building, it had better burst into flames the moment I escape.

-Another fun disaster, though a trifle less exciting, was that I was making ramen in my room (because I am a real deal collegiate) and I couldn’t fit the whole block of raw noodles into my mug, so I had to break it up. Not wanting to make a mess, I broke it over the sink. What I didn’t realize was that all that ramen would clog the plug hole, and for many days our sink wouldn’t drain properly, and every time someone turned the water on, the sink would regurgitate a small pool of water and ramen bits. It’s a good thing my room mates are filled with the grace of God.

Stories from the weekend:

-We have Sunday morning services at Capernwray every week, but sometimes teams of students will go out on outreach, and help with the service at a local church. The Sunday morning of my first ever outreach started with one of the interns coming into my room at 8:24am, asking if I knew what time it was. We were supposed to leave at 8:30. The first words I spoke on that fine Sabbath morning were, “Oh, crap.”

I made it. I barely made it, but I made it. I didn’t waste time on trivial things like going to the bathroom, because –I told myself- the church would probably only be 15 minutes away, and I could use the bathroom when I got there.

The church was an hour and a half away. But I learned that it is possible to hold in one’s pee for 9+ hours, so that was an important life skill I didn’t know I had. When we got there, we led some of the singing for the church, did some Bible readings, and two of the team members shared their testimonies. After the service, we went leafleting in the village. Because I am an idiot, I wore heels, and so I spent the afternoon tottering up and down very uphill driveways and trying not to look like a new-born colt. We returned to the church after leafleting, and just as I was thinking, “wow, I could really go for a cup of tea right now,” someone declared that it was time to brew up. God save the queen.

-I’ve visited Burnley twice so far. The first time I went, I just walked around the old haunts and cried. It was glorious.

-The school also offers day trips on Saturdays. So far I’ve done a walk in the Lake District and a trip to Kendal.

-We always have group activities on Friday and Saturday nights, and one of them was a Ceilidh (pronounced Kaylee) which is basically Scottish square dancing. The only other dances I’ve been to where awkward birthday parties in middle school and it was hell on earth because everyone was too self-conscious to dance, but this was my first Ceilidh and it was So. Much. Fun. I felt like Elizabeth Bennet at a country dance. We also did newer dances like the Macarena and Electric Slide, and we finished the night with an exuberant version of YMCA.

Miscellaneous events:

My friend Jackson gave me the best compliment I’ve ever received. He told me he reminded him of a girl in a video game who fights her enemies with a giant spear. He said, AND I QUOTE, "I could see you wielding a giant spear."

Apparently Corrie Ten Boom visited Capernwray while she was still alive, and somewhere there is a picture of her surrounded by German students.

I didn't realize how patriotic I was until I came here. Of course, the only thing non-Americans know about America is that our only two presidential candidates were Hillary and Trump, so when you express love for your country, you usually get a shady look.

For any lovers of poetry who made be reading this: my friend Braedan was telling me about his high school poetry class where he got a 100 on a poem he wrote 10 minutes before class started. He said everyone else had like pages and pages of stuff about pain and suicide, and they read all the poems out loud, so after these two really intense ones, came his LIMERICK which went like this:

There once was an artist from Greece Who swallowed some paint in his sleep All shades of the spectrum Burst forth from his rectum And the stain was his new masterpiece He said he started by just sitting down and thinking, "ok what rhymes with rectum." I’m so glad I have such a Christ-like influence as he in my life.

Some of our guest speakers were Jill and Stuart Briscoe, who are the type of old people who never took the time to get old. Jill is a QUEEN. She is like a beautiful, ancient, 1950’s movie star. So classy and elegant and posh. I want her to be the next queen of England, and I want Sue Gilmore to be Prime Minister. Also I want Sue’s face to be on the £10 note. If you know her, you’ll understand.

So those are some fun times I’ve had. Hopefully I’ll be a little more prompt about posting the November instalment, but if I were you, I wouldn’t set your hopes too high.