Se7en

I thought I’d be the star pupil this week. I knew, because she’d told us, that we would be having dance class on our dance teacher’s birthday. So I organised getting a card and getting everyone to secretly sign it before the class began and prepare for a big presentation. Then some guy walks through the door and says that Lynne’s off, because it’s her birthday, and he’ll be taking the class instead. Fail. I gave him the card and he sent it to her, so she still got it but the impact of the gesture was desperately diminished.

We finished learning the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Voice this week. It’s fun to be able to write normal English words in a way that often looks nothing like normal writing. It’s helping me become more aware of how we actually form words out of distinct sounds, and this should prove very helpful when we come to work on accents.

Our Mike Leigh project is building in complexity. This week we were given more tasks but this time they involved meeting, or working with, other characters. It was strange and exciting to walk into a pub, as my character, and meet one of my classmates, as their character, and have a genuine interaction as characters, not as a performance but purely as an experience. It’s also very interesting, and often amusing, to discover what new personalities my classmates have decided to create for themselves.

Tiredness is continuing to rear its dreary head from time to time. It tends to be when I stop and sit down, particularly in the evening, after a meal. Drowsiness just steals over me… It happened this week in Bible study to the extent that I would lower my head to look at the passage, my eyes would fall shut, and I would almost drop off! When I’m too tired to study God’s Word that’s when I really know it’s becoming a problem. That’s when it’s even more necessary to be studying the Word. And getting more sleep!

This week, for the first time, I went away for the weekend. I visited Auntie Judy in her home in Haywards Heath. We went for a refreshing walk around the beautiful Wakehurst Place. They’d just had the ‘turning on of the lights’ ceremony for the big Christmas tree the night before.


On Sunday morning we went to Judith’s church, a lovely old building very happily situated, and it was a baptism of a family of three small girls, which was really lovely. It was so great to get out of the city and spend some time in a totally different setting and I’m glad I managed to make at least one social visit this term.

That afternoon I got back to London and went to All Souls to be part of a recording of the New Year’s Day Service for BBC Radio 4. It was rather enjoyable to join a church-ful of people pretending it was the first of January! We sang some great hymns with epic arrangements by All Souls’ Director of Music Noel Tredinnick. It will be broadcast at 8.10am on New Year’s Day and, if I can wake up in time, listening to it would be a wonderful way to start 2012.