Day 28 January 29, 2012

Day 28

Woke up feeling hungover and then managed to utterly wreck something my back by bending over to pick who can remember what from my bathroom floor. It was (is) agony. It had happened once before: I reached for a coffee cup in school and spent the rest of the week hobbling around the corridors in an nurofen fug.

Gone was the possibility of a clean apartment, a marking catch up and a brisk coastal walk. Instead I lay on the sofa counting the minutes until my next painkiller.

All this lying around gave me the chance to do something I hadn’t done in a while… watch a football match. I don’t really get sports: I’m not particularly competitive and have no athletic prowess or ability. If asked I will say I support Liverpool in the English premiership and Coleraine in the Irish league, but I rarely watch them play, . I only know match scores because they’re ‘published’ on twitter: and presented with either club’s team photo, I could maybe pick out those players that have celebrity status beyond the pitch, or can particularly ‘work’ the look of a pair of football shorts.

Why those teams over any others? The reasons aren’t particularly complex: my little Bro is a Liverpool supporter (an unusual choice given my Dad was a huge Man United fan) so I knew about the team because he did. My very good friends M and GD are huge Bannsiders/ Coleraine supporters and I’ve yelled support alongside them
at the show grounds.

I watched Liverpool beat Man U in the 4th round of the FA cup: cheering loudly at the second and typically last minute goal. Coleraine were prevented from lifting the League Cup by a simply better Crusaders. I was genuinely gutted.

My quiet jubilation at Liverpool’s win was silenced when I read on twitter of the racist abuse again suffered by MUFC’s Evra. Football is a mult- million dollar global business, it’s thought be the coming together of the masses: and there is something powerful about feeling part of any community. But inter team rivalry ( and I can’t even begin to truly fathom the complexities of the Glaswegian football divide) shouldn’t be allowed to spill into vitriolic abuse.

I congratulate King Kenny of the Kop on both his victories this week ( and commiserate with Oran Kearney on his defeat) but beg him and the FA to get their house in order. All that’s wrong with football: the financial excesses, the mob/ hooliganism mentality is denying it the powerful role it can play in a society screaming out ( the Anfield faithful sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ with urgency every match) for something to believe in.

In other news, I successfully cooked my first ever whole chicken but spilt an M&S chocolate soufflé over my kitchen floor; my back pain conspiring with my diet to delimit my calorie intake (didn’t work: I just ate the other one.)

Days 27 January 29, 2012

Day 27: Book club

I have wanted to be part of a book club for years. I envied others’ theirs and threatened to join the one in Waterstone’s in Belfast but lacked the courage to actually go…a wine fuelled conversation with Belle Fierce in her caravan of love last summer got the ball rolling and she made a few invites and we got started.

The first meeting was a nerve wracking experience: I wanted to be informed without sounding like the English teacher I am; wanted to be intellectual: wearing my BA(Hons) with quiet pride rather than arrogance and mostly I didn’t want to sound like a gibbering high school idiot in front of these grammar school geniuses.

As someone in education who was well served by the selection system: my GCSE grades opened the door to A-levels and the much envied (rapidly hated) local grammar school leading to Queens and an English with minor Politics degree that allowed me to end up back in the education system as a high school teacher. And still I’m somehow apologetic (and psychologically scarred) that at 11, I wasn’t deemed intelligent enough. This is a topic I will return to.

Our first three books at book club have been books I’d read before but was more than happy to re-visit. I seem to either be sober and shy or drunk and obnoxiously opinionated… I moan that there isn’t enough book chat at our ‘meetings’ but enjoy the talk of gender politics, motherhood and the various other debates being a woman in 2012 generates.

We meet once every two months and now I have another worry to contemplate. The girls houses are gorgeous: homes and interiors creations: cosy with style. My apartment suits me but it is without style and grace… although I’m moving beyond the idea that these are not women to be intimidated by, I should instead be impressed by their wit and warmth and realise the potential for friendship.

Days 25 & 26 January 26, 2012

Day 25
The problem with doing two ‘working nights’ at school; you’re utterly knackered for all the school days that follow.

I’d the sort of evening last night that typically denotes an ‘I’m tired’ Friday: a comfort food dinner and wall to wall tv. I fear that the large amounts of time I spend with teenage boys in the week is polluting my mind; I shouldn’t have found the ‘Dick the Kick’ jokes in the fabulous Stella quite so funny… loving Kenny Doughty as the charming, sexy and yet some how imaginably attainable Sean.

I’m crawling into bed every night with Rob Lowe, I’m just too young to truly appreciate his Brat Pack 80s youth but was enchanted, charmed and educated by The West Wing’s Sam Seaborn. Stories I only tell my Friends is written with wit, warmth and honesty. It exudes a passion for acting, theatre and performance that I’m using for inspiration.

Day 26

Damn you Marks and Sparkle and your Dine In for £10: yes I’m facing a culinary fear and cooking a whole chicken ( don’t roll your eyes yummy Mummies: what does a girl like me do with such a thing?) and it gives me a potential food buzz on a ‘staying in’ Saturday night BUT not only does the ‘cosy couple’ advertising make me feel every bit the singleton I am, but it also forces lots of chocolate soufflé calories that aren’t supposed to appear on my ‘new year new me’ diet sheet (I could have got fruit salad but who picks fruit when there’s chocolate? Actually, I know the answer to this one… Thin girls, meh.) andI impulse bought creme eggs at the till.

What M&S need to sell is a jar of will power, tied up in a pretty box with a bow, they could stack it on a shelf beside the will power, determination and self-worth: they’d make a million.

Day 24 January 24, 2012

I’ve talked myself hoarse and I can’t remember the last time I was so tired…

Was struck by this tonight (and humbled and shamed by BBC1 <emBloody Sunday: The Long Wait)

From To Kill a Mocking Bird

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’ve been licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

Atticus Finch

Day 23: School Open Night January 23, 2012

There were two moments in school today through which I successfully fought back hot, angry tears…

But tonight I fought against ‘the demise of Drama’ in a different way. At Open Night (when potential pupils and their parents come to tour the school: think car sales showroom and place me as the unlikely charmer, hoping to close the deal) I was enthusiastic, I was organised, I was proud of my pupils, my partner in crime, and our achievements and the potential for us all to do so much more…

There is an enthusiasm out there for all things performance: there are emotional and intellectual connections to be made in a classroom, and it belongs to me.

I don’t think a charm offensive will save my subject, or my job but it may aid the retention of my sanity.

Days 21 and 22: moments from a weekend… January 22, 2012

I moan too much; I use fifteen words when a mere syllable will do, I’ve demanded more blog readers’ time then I deserve…

So here’s my weekend: in vignettes

Day 21
• a freezing walk by the Commons that left me grateful
• feeling part of a blog community again
• a long drive that allowed me to catch up with a friend
•red wine, chocolate pudding and friendship by a farm house fire
• sleeping so very soundly in the ‘sparest of spare rooms’ in a the new house a friend waited so very long for

Sunday: Day 22

• cuddles and toddler wisdom with breakfast
• a restless afternoon soothed by home cooking, Mum’s listening ear and her generosity
• Hearing a definition of poverty on BBC’s Call the Midwife that caused me to gasp at its honesty
• Every moment of Birdsong, especially that utterly gorgeous first kiss and the heart-stopping resurrection in the final moments. Not since first reading Twilight have I been so enchanted by a leading man…
• Michael Buble’s Lost on the radio as I drove home.

(Birdsong is firmly on my ‘why haven’t I read this already list? and will appear in my post box with Warhorse sometime this week… Expect many more words on this beautiful drama… I need to collect my thoughts.)

War Horse: Day 20 January 21, 2012

Some of my best nights out begin with a casual text: not the weeks of planning, taxi organising and outfit deliberations: but a ‘Want to do pizza and cinema after work?’

I had coffee and a flick through Vanity Fair and then a Little Wings dinner that was just lovely. We debated ideas on how to direct an as yet unpublished play; and I was struck again by just how far this one time student has so surpassed all this teacher taught him.

We went to see Warhorse. I haven’t read the book or been to the National to see the play but hope to remedy both those things. It was a slow start, and I feared it wouldn’t live up to all that I’d heard and read, and I have to say although I’m very much an animal lover I’m infuriated by that British viewpoint that places a higher emotional value on animal suffering than human and that glorifies and sanitises war fare: how wrong I was.

It is a psychologically devastating film. I was overwhelmed by the multitude of memories and connections it provoked.

Learning to ride a horse is one of the things that lie alongside dance and piano lessons on that rather pointless list ‘the childhood I wish I’d had’. My Daddy was an accomplished horseman, a competitive show jumper as a child, horses exist in the lifeblood of that side of my family. Daddy a great fan of cinema, would have loved this movie, time makes me miss him more.

The early farming scenes of the film reminded me of Heaney’s Digging and Follower; of the religious connection a farmer (and even a would-be City Chick farmer’s daughter/ granddaughter) has with his land. I was reminded of sweat, hours and lifeblood my grandfather and Daddy gave to the fields at home; and was once again humbled by their years of work and sacrifice.

I, like everyone, find war a difficult thing to comprehend and I realise more and more that it’s impossible to disentangle a personal view from propaganda but I do endeavour to separate my enraged politics from the human cost and experience. I don’t have forefathers that fought for King/Queen and country; they, of course, were busy growing the food for a fighting nation. But I spent my formative years (those Friday nights of pre 18 drinking) in pubs frequented by the soldiers of a near-by garrison town. I like my men in uniform and have a ridiculously romanticised idea of wartime romance. The battle scenes of the film are unrelenting and the Somme scenes truly horrifying, Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth came creeping back to me… How can you measure, re-pay or put true value on such a magnitude of human sacrifice? And how can you not question how is it ever worth it?

The achingly under-played scene between the soldiers in No-man’s land, reminded me of the almost mythical Christmas football match. The film forces its audience to see the soldiers on both sides as the individuals they were and are. I managed to unravel a few lines of Keith Douglas’ Vergissminnicht and look beyond the educational indoctrination of my incredibly British and exclusively Protestant historical education, to look at the German soldiers as boys rather than the faceless ‘enemy’.

The cinematography is Oscar demanding. I bought the book online this morning. The images will stay me for a long time to come but I’m not sure I would put myself through the experience of ever watching it again.

Go see.

Day 19 January 19, 2012

(I have no idea why Day 17 posted after 18: they were written in order…Damn…just when I thought I figured out my phone.)

Last night I watched One Born Every Minute /em> for the very first time. I’d avoided this ‘water cooler’- for which read English staff room-staple for various reasons: I’m actually quite squeamish, and despite the huge number of friends and relatives that have given birth and shared their stories, I prefer to think of the whole process as, well, less messy, less painful: whatever happened to the stork?

(Why do these women want to share what is admittedly an incredibly significant but horribly painful and what should be utterly private moment on tv? I duly cried with the birth of each red and messy little bundle; feeling as if I was intruding on something that was just too special to share.)

Mostly I didn’t watch this or programmes like it because it reminds me of a dream I once had. Visiting friends with babies; is too, this bittersweet experience for entirely the same reason.

Once upon a time, I thought I’d meet a guy, we’d date, he’d propose in the most romantic way imaginable, we’d marry, I’d get pregnant and finally all those wonderful moments I’d imagined since I was old enough to hold a doll would be mine. And, yes, I realise marriage and motherhood brings its own heartache: and that no-one is guaranteed fertility even if they have the Daddy factor worked out.

Putting my Mummy dream way back on the shelf of possibility (right beside the one that has images of me in a wedding dress) is a difficult thing to do but the biological reality makes it an action I must commit to. I refuse to become a woman that other woman ‘protect’ from their pregnancy announcements and birth stories, from babysitting duties and child parties. I want to continue to delight in such things: to treasure the moments spent with my goddaughter and my nephew: rather than looking at each beautiful little bundle aching for the moment I will have one of my own.

Surely, feminism/ womanhood, society of 2012 allows me to have worth in the world even if I’m not a wife and mother.
Moving the motherhood ideal outta the way leaves space for me to pursue something else…or at the very least consider what that ‘something else’ might be.

Day 17 January 19, 2012

Left my phone at home this morning and my handbag at the rather gorgeous dining room table of the house I tutor at… Have waited all night to figure out what the other thing I’ve left somewhere might be, quite possibly my sanity, but hell knows where it might be hiding itself.

I caught up (by text and FB) with a few people I’d neglected tonight. I unearthed a list if school report deadlines almost a week later than I’d feared and actually jumped up and down.

Instead of being totally annoyed by a conversation I had had at the weekend, I suddenly remembered a compliment the same person gave me that was a wonderful boost.

A TV show made me imagine what my leaving speech would be if I ever had the nerve to leave Bangor and I was sobbing at the mere idea.

Our minds, our memories, our emotional psyches they are complex, complicated messy things…I live too far inside my own head,spend no, waste, so much time in rather pointless self-analysis and yet my memories and imagination are two things are two of my most prized possessions, I should put them both to better use.

Day 18 January 18, 2012

This evening I’m too tired to see straight, marking or reading a play is utterly beyond me. School as ever, was busy and I had an after school meeting in which I hope I held my own… But all this ‘go to the mattresses’ stuff is harder than the movies make it seem…Tough to fight your corner when someone else holds all the power…

My half term trip to London is getting more promising in its potential: a musical theatre matinee and the chance to meet up with a great friend I don’t see nearly enough of. Something to smile about… ( if it didn’t require so much energy)