Journal Entries
28.11.11 Public Speaking
Posted Nov 28, 2011
Next week I'm presenting at the UK stroke forum. Actually no, it's not 'next week' it's Wednesday, and I'm nervous. Very nervous.
The last time I spoke to a room of 500 + people was when I was a student. I was presenting at a national conference on sex education. I was presenting on 'LGBT issues in sex education'. One of the slides was a list of all the questions about gay sex that we had been asked during our sex education programme.
I have a distinct memory of explaining what 'rimming' was in a very large lecture theatre, In the front row was a delegation from a certain African country. These group of devote Christians, who had started an HIV testing and treatment service in their city were clearly horrified that 14 year old boys knew about such sexual acts, and that some were likely to want to take part in them. 
Wednesday is different. There is no sex involved in this presentation. There is controversy though. Hopefully there will be lots.
My boss gave me a useful tip, 'Don't worry about how many people there are, think how exciting it is that there are all these people here to listen to what you've been working on for the last 18 months'.
And that is exciting.
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Latest reply: Nov 28, 2011
27.11.11 Z's Journal - a proper one this time
Posted Nov 27, 2011
I've had a good weekend. I've caught up with my friends who are living in London, A and J. I lived with A and university and he's living in London, working as a Classics teacher and in a lovely relationship with J. J's one of those young people who was born at the age of 20, because he's now 22 and acts about 40. He's study Theatre Directing at Birkbeck and is doing a work placement at Rada. We caught up in the bar at Rada after the show.
There were cool tables with various newspaper articles about RADA under the perspex, and arty black and white photographs of the final year students on the walls. The coffee was served by three very enthusiastic young people, who I suspect were Rada students. For some reason it took three of them to serve us one coffee, and my it was cheap, £1.20 a cup is cheap for Scotland. In London I'd normally expect to pay about £3. It didn't taste that bad either.
I didn't actually see the play, just gossiped with A and J afterwards as young pretty things from the cast wandered around. They were all very very thin, and looked very very young. I was assured they were all over the age of 18, but I didn't really believe it. I was also amused to find out that RADA offer a service where they will visit your Christmas party, serve drinks and then 'surprise and delight your guests, by bursting into song'. I wondered if this was providing practical training in the service industry for budding young actors, and helping them to get jobs as waiters if acting didn't work out.
A was very excited, he'd found a shop in Bloomsbury that had a massive range of books in the original Greek, the young manager was a PhD student in Classics at UCL and liked to ensure that he didn't have to order them in. We talked about tempting them up to Scotland for Hogmany, and perhaps a joint holiday to Pompei. I've just read Mary Beard's book about Pompei and I really want to go there.
It's lovely seeing my friends happy and doing well in life.
And RADA accepted a Scottish £5 note as well...
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Latest reply: Nov 27, 2011
26.11.11
Posted Nov 26, 2011
Sneaking in before midnight
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Latest reply: Nov 26, 2011
25.11.11
Posted Nov 25, 2011
A bit of a cheat of an entry- we're to the station to get the night train to London..
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Latest reply: Nov 25, 2011
24.11.11 On not having a TV
Posted Nov 24, 2011
As a child we didn't have a TV. This was a big thing. It marked us out as different. It meant that my internal perception of the world came from Enid Blyton Children's books and other books mainly written in the 1950s. I knew I didn't live in the 1950s, but I couldn't work out which bits were our family being odd, and which were because we weren't in the 1950s. My internal perception of 'normal' came entirely from 1950s children's books. My parents disliked the world, it was a bad thing, that we should be sheltered from.
I hated that. I love working in A&E because it's so real. You cannot be sheltered from the ways of the world, anything can come through that door, the alcoholic hosing blood, the teenage diabetic who won't take their insulin, the failed suicide attempt, the rich the poor. But you're there.
I wanted to find out about the world, because you can't rear children in a blissful 1950s bubble and not tell them stuff about the world. I remember grabbing every minute of TV I could find, that was a window on the world. I remember watching everything I could find at my grandparents, and then mull each programme over for months.
We didn't buy newspapers either, but our neighbour would give them to us to line the hamster cage with. In the evenings I would quietly read them all. When I was 12 I discovered radio 4. Another part of the world revealed itself. We finally got a TV when I was 13. The next year my parents split up and my remaining parent abandoned such things as discipline or trying to protect us from the world. Suddenly we went from living in a 50s bubble to being allowed to do anything we wanted to do.
Back before the internet not having a TV meant that you were cut off from the world, in a bubble. Now it doesn't matter. We have the internet, and we can be connected to the world anytime we want.
Children with out the internet live in a bubble of unreality. There must still be children out their who live in a bubble. Maybe there are parents that want to keep their children away from the internet. I get the feeling that there are a lot less of them though.
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Latest reply: Nov 24, 2011
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