a day in the life

Now, I have been asked a number of times by various people (various as in Mum, who certainly believes she counts as various people) to give a full and frank account of my average school day. I have so far resisted any inclination to do so since my average school day is singularly, well, dull. Sure there are often small rays of light which spear as (to switch metaphors* for a moment) angels of mercy into my darkened (or mercy-less**) existence; though sadly they are separated by giant gulfs of junior reading and junior maths and well, junior anything, really.

But whatever, here goes:

5.45 am – Wake cursing into the darkened void, even the sun knows that this is a stupid time to be up and about, and we should really take notice of this significant point. Shower, get dressed (sounds easy, doesn’t it).

6.30 am – Leave the apartments. Frankly this is often closer to 6.45, but this is the ideal.

7 am – Arrive at school, spend an hour thinking “Why the hell am I here so damned early? School doesn’t start till 10 to 8!?!”

7.50 am – Start lesson one. What this is depends entirely on what day it is. I could upload my timetable, but then the gang of ruthless ninja assassins I’ve outwitted for years will finally have the information they need and will inhume me right in the middle of a lesson.

9.50 am – After 3 lessons, repair to the staff room and there eat my whole (extended) family’s combined bodyweight in sandwiches. These are kindly provided for the staff, but I must confess that I’m getting rather bored of them by this point. Why no variation? Why no pickle, or marmite? Why no damn toast!

10.10 am – back into lessons… till

11.30 am / 12.20 pm – Lunch. Far to early and I’ve mostly stopped going, because it’s pretty rank frankly.

12.20 pm / 1.00 pm – Lessons again till

2.40 pm – ECAs. Extra Curricular Activities, I presume. Everything has to have an acronym over here, just calling them activities would be too gloriously simple, wouldn’t it.

My ECA programme consists of the Junior production on Monday, Scenefest on Tuesday and Thursday, Orchestra on Friday and Choir on Thursday. Wednesday is my day off and as such I rather look forward to it.

4.30-6.00 pm – Home. Why I’m always in such a rush to get home at the end of the day is a constant mystery to me, since there isn’t much to do there that I couldn’t do here in school. I think it’s perhaps that wearing a suit in the hottest city in the world is just plain stupid.

Love
Dom.

*lies
*yes, mercy-less, not merciless, think about it…

box musings

I’m writing this from the sound box in the theatre at school. Well, I say “from” the sound box, I actually mean “on”. It’s a box. And I’m sitting on it.

With me is Seedy the CD player, Andy the amp and a host of wires and blinking things that go foom. Unfortunately they often go foom in the middle of delicate scenes.

Anyway, this is a rehearsal for the senior play, which this term takes the form of a “Scenefest.” For the uninitiated, a Scenefest is an opportunity for competition (healthy) experimentation (no rob, not dodgy) and exciting cooperation (everyone shouting at everyone else – hence, cooperation). Sales pitch aside, it’s basically a competition between four groups each doing a few scenes from the Northern Lights play. Between them they do the whole thing, and the best one wins. I’m on sound as you may have worked out for yourselves.

This week (and the one before it) has been somewhat busy and promises no less for the coming days. Scenefest took my Sunday, my Monday and now my Tuesday and is certainly to dominate my Thursday and Friday. We have a return to Shrewsbury School UK style rehearsals which extend into the later hours of the evening. At last back home I had an extra hour in bed. Wednesday is to be the concert to end all concerts. Well, maybe not, but it will include songs from every class in years 6, 7 and 8. Since I helped teach one of the classes I have a vested interest. The Chamber Choir (i.e. the teachers foolish enough to like singing and think they’re good at it, i.e. me) will be singing, followed by the Orchestra, in which I’m playing an instrument I’ve been playing for 3 weeks, and a piece I’ve practiced once.

To top that my leg hurts for no apparent reason and I absolutely refuse to ask the internet since it will tell me that I’ll be dead in two weeks. I can imagine overhearing this conversation at the doctors:

Doctor: “Now, my dear Mr. Barnard there really is nothing for you to worry about, you will be completely free of symptoms within a fortnight.”
Patient: “That’s not what the Internet says, you incompetent ass!”

Sad times.

Dom

[not yet] off trippin, 2

OK, so where did we get to? Rhetorical question.

I went to the gym today. Wow, you might say. I was so surprised I nearly walked straight out again, but first I spent a good 2 minutes trying to open the door, which was depressing. Then, having made it to the treadmill without significant mishap, I stood on the thing and tried to make sense of all the numbers and buttons visible. Now, normally I love buttons, I just don't like them in the context of exercise. These buttons had labels like "incline" and another said "hill", which seemed somewhat redundant, but anyway, I put in a random weight (70kgs, god knows if that's significantly more or less than mine), and pressed "quick start". It didn't appear to start at all, so I pressed the speed-up button and held it. I stopped at a random number and paced along for a moment. Felt like an idiot after about 3 seconds because I was being out paced by the ancient woman next to me. Really, really ancient. I love old people, honestly, but dear god, I'm surprised she didn't snap to bits whenever her foot hit the floor, I'm further surprised by the way she was apparently enjoying the experience. The clicking of joints that accompanied her every movement was not so pleasant, however. There was also, as it happened, a really, really old guy who had to be literally led on someone's arm to each machine in turn. How he was able to use the machines once lifted onto them is anyone's guess. Sorry to any grandparents who may be reading this. You know who you are ;)

Spurned into greater ambition, I cranked the speed up a bit more and ended up in a sort of indefinable zone between walking and running, which was most uncomfortable and I moved from that as fast as the machine would let me. Unfortunately, I may have held the button for too long for while I had already stopped pressing, the infernal contraption was still catching up, getting progressively faster and faster. When I was literally sprinting, in some danger of being sucked into the mechanical depths of the beast, I was lucky enough to catch the cable of my earphones with my flailing arm and yank my iPod out of its resting place, landing on the treadmill right under my rapidly approaching foot.

I managed to slow the thing down and had 25 minutes of relatively uneventful slog. It was noticeably easier than a similar distance (or even less) in the real world, which makes me suspect that the machine is lying to me... Whatever.

Anyway, back to half term. I genuinely can't remember where we got too, I need to go home and check the pictures to remind me. I may as well post this story, since it'll be ages before I get around to the rest! Damn choirs and operas and things.

In fact, I'm going to add a work in progress box at the side, to show what will appear if I ever get typing fast enough! It's having to reply to all your massive emails that does it (please don't stop!).

Dom