Whoever thought ten days at home could be enough for a whole year? It sounds ungrateful to say it, but at home I feel like an entirely different person to the Jemima I am at school. Or Miss Farley, there; at home I am only Jemima, always little, always young, always the same no matter how the years go. And my parents, well - they are always there.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like, to be like some of my friends. From proper pureblood families, of good name, respected... of course Frida's family are rather a mixed bag, some respected and some feared and some oddly removed from society; and Frida is there like a poor ugly duckling, rather crushed under the weight of the family name. And Darling's family have their oddities too. So did Clem's, in fact; their guardian now sounds like an odd fellow, but that is less damaging than those odd whispers about what happened to their parents...

But they're all orphans, you realise. They don't have this, this suffocation. It almost seems fashionable to be an orphan, these days. All the best heroines are orphans - it's quite romantic, really. Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Fanny Price, Becky Sharp, Pip and Estella and practically every Dickens protagonist... and all my friends too, and they seem to have come out of the experience more worldly and sombre (but not too sombre!) and grown-up; I should like to be all these things. And even if there was once talk of their parents' eccentricities, at least they are all dead now! My parents are still here, and that way get to nag and scowl and tut and, of course, be more and more embarrassing every day. However shall I ever grow up?

---