The thing about Shakespeare...

Is that he always seems to need a heck of a lot of words to say something that could be said in what? Two? I mean yeah yeah, literary genius, language devices, that's all very well, but when I'm trying to learn my lines and I'm repeating six or seven thou's and hateth's when I could say what I'm trying to learn in six or seven words (and I'm a verbose sort of person) you do have to wonder what was going through the great man's head. I mean, really!
Ok, so lets be honest, when he wrote the play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' it's...unlikely the poor bloke was in his right mind, (and using Puck to apologise, cos even if he's having a funny phase, that man could self edit). Don't get me wrong, I love how bonkers it is- kind of like me, but you look at Midsummer and then you look at, say, Hamlet, and you think, yeeeaahh, ok Shakespeare...
Mind you, he was a funny guy. I mean, I don't think I've ever had the fortune to partake in such amusing rehearsals, I spent most of the time on the floor laughing (and the rest of the time on the floor holding onto the legs of my true love, who hates me). Whether he was a farm boy or a secret Royal (I don't buy the whole gang of people idea, I mean c'mon, they'd have to have a Hive mind to synchronise their style to that degree, and I don't think there were ever that many people who were that brilliant in the same place) Shakespeare was brilliant. A bit like any one of you.
Because Shakespeare, if I'm honest, in my opinion was absolutely exceptional, and I'm not saying that any of you are going to sit down one day and write Macbeth, the sequel. At the same time though, no matter how low your self-esteem, how bad your latest grade or what kind of job/lifestyle/family you've got at the moment, I think it's important to realise that each and every one of you is brilliant. (Especially you, since you read my blog, obviously. ha) Because it's true! There's something special about every single person I've ever met, and I've got to tell you, it continues to astound me. Whether they can sneeze like donald duck,(yeah I know, so cool!!) or just know exactly what to say and when to say it.
Because if you think about it, it's not necessarily the fairies or the Athenians or the dukes that stick in your head when you watch A Midsummer Night's Dream, it's not those fantastic costumes or fancy (over worded) speeches, their ceremony or power. I tell you what, when I saw it the first time when I was twelve, all anyone could talk about was the mechanicals. A bunch of ordinary, average, clumsy people putting on a play in a play. The least remarkable characters, the ones who's very creation was a joke- and yet even as they stumble through their lines and overact into a tragedy so prolonged it's funny, they're great.
And maybe that's what was quite so stunning about Shakespeare. Not the sheer brilliance, or the way he painted words into a dance of tongues and an explosion of colour and emotion. Just the way he could recognise and forge something extraordinary into anyone or anything. Or maybe he just brought out what was already there.
It's a bit like my director said- it's all very well to want to enhance the mystery by saying there's some kind of conspiracy behind Shakespeare and his plays, something to make the intellectuals feel better and us ordinary folk less intimidated.
But isn't it magical enough to just think that some bloke, just an ordinary, average bloke five hundred years ago sat down in an inn with an old feather and a pot of ink and made something so beautiful, so brilliant, so outstanding that it's still alive even today, throbbing at the heart of our society?
Thinking like that, I guess I can probably forgive Shakespeare all those words. But just this once.

Gimme a sec..

..I'm feeling sentimental. Hello all! Did ya miss me? 'Course not, miss never ever updates any more can't be too popular around her lovely readers at the moment, but I promise I'm going to make it up to you. Promise. Really. I've written the post and everything, just in case I forgot. However, first off, I really am feeling rather sentimental, and I just wanted to say a token farewell to David Tennant. Yes, I watch Doctor Who but lets be honest, I've done worse. (I'll give you a clue, it starts with T and ends with t and has got a whole lot of guilty pleasure but not all that much plot in the middle) And really, David Tennant is just a fantastic actor, and that last episode was brilliant. Maybe Russel T Davies could have made it a touch more believable, but it was epic, and Tennant flew through it, pulling on my heartstrings, and even convincing a few tears (ok I admit, I was sobbing). It's a new year, a new doctor, new resolutions (ever actually kept to 'em?Yeah thought not, haha) In fact there's quite a lot of new things, but lets just have a moment to say goodbye to last year- 'cos you know what? It was fantastic.

Britain's education system...

You know the real problem with British school's these days? You know- apart from the obvious incapable dealings with the weather, persistent struggle against the addition of any useful subjects, abhorrence of a decent exam board or system and insistence on 'talking about our feelings.' Seriously, apart from all that, you know the real problem with British education today? Stationary. Well, stationary refunds, anyway.

Because, you see, in the past two weeks I've been doing practice examinations for my GCSE's, (which lets be honest, will be almost completely irrelevant by 2011) and I've got a really big problem with the way my school's been running things. I'm not referring to the 'men' in power's pointless struggle against mother nature and their own pride, or the bizarre tenacity with which the school insists on cramming two weeks worth of exams into one with only half their pupils present. No. I'm talking about the fact that before I travelled my 6,000 miles to go to school, I, like a good little school girl, got myself a new pack of pens. 4 of them, black Biro's, as specified by the exam boards our school has chosen (in it's infinite wisdom) to associate itself with.OK, I'll admit that one was, inevitably lost in the etha, most likely whilst my brother and I conversed in Pig Latin whilst going through security in Paris- (we were a little 'slaphappy' what with having just travelled for 13 hours watching my mini TV go technicolor and trying to convince ourselves the strange pieces of meat in our little tin foil packs really were pork, really...). However, the other three, perfectly fine looking, decent, average black Biro's remained in my possession. I even managed to get them to school.

In fact, I hung onto them whilst I unpacked my things (again), the boarders went on our weekend trip to the closest shopping centre (again) and I got soaked and freezing and hyper in a snowball fight (again).

But now, with my 'actual' GCSE biology, French reading and History exam looming, I find I am without a suitable implement, and I really honestly think I deserve recompensing.

Why you ask? Because, that school has destroyed all three of my lovely new black Biro's in less than two full weeks! No, my physics teacher did not finally lose all sense of reason and put them on the ice in front of his car before running them over repeatedly whilst cackling madly in his latest attempt to shut me up. No, because of our mock exams, all three pens are completely out of ink!

I mean, I know I've been criticised for being somewhat verbose, but it was all the school's fault for setting the questions in the first place- I swear! Really, they demanded that I wrote a sum total of 52 A4 pages so far...honest!

And now look! Three more big exams and I don't even have a pen. Can't even recycle it! I mean it's no wonder they've got problems with excess waste, the amount of exams we're having these days...I mean that's a heck of a lot of black Biro's!

Lets face it, climate change is happening, and it has been for a long time, and always has been going to (ice age anyone?), whether or not it's global warming speeding it up for quite such an eclectic multitude of reasons is debatable, but really, instead of looking back on a past we can't change, shouldn't we be looking forward to future that we can prepare for, and a present in which we can act?

I mean seriously, they're the educators, they ought to be providing the stationary in the first place! And whatever happened to the pencil?