A Damn Long While Ago

I do realise it has been almost a month since the last time that I wrote a blog, and for that I must apologise. Anyway, what's been happening?

• I was bloody well ill with a chest infection, which, if you've never had one, be exceedingly glad, because they are painful, and annoying, and inconvenient.
• I went back to Manchester for about 11 days to spend some of the holidays with my parents. 
• NYE was pretty much a write off for a couple of reasons :D, but I got to be in London with friends, and I saw some of the Fireworks and partied until about five in the morning, even though I knew I was in work at 1. (Yes, I was ridiculously hung over.)
• I decided that Elephant and Castle is no longer a place I specially want to put up with, so I tried to find a new place to live. It took a while to find the right place to move to.
• I've been trying to sort out a few different things with paperwork for the house and university, and sorting out all the, quite frankly, crap, in my room. 
• Oh, I had a gorgeously mental evening before I went home where I stayed up until the not so very small hours of the morning constructing a novel on my wall, then making a sort of time line, so I can see the links and things between all the novels. It helped, eventually.
• I WENT TO A FULL WEEK OF LECTURES THIS WEEK!!! After last term, that is something pretty special, to be honest. I did actually really enjoy them as well, which is odd.
• I went to see Cabaret with a good friend of mine, but more about that in a moment!
• I've been writing, but I don't really have any focus on one thing...poo sticks!

[[OhMyGod, this is the part where my computer geeky mates will be like, you've only just found out how to do this...BUT I have just managed to get Firefox to stop trying to get me to spell everything the American way!! YAY!!!]]

I really like lists at the moment, so here's another one!

1. Currently, about half of my wardrobe is in those funny vacuum bags that you can get to take all the air out of things you need to store. Remembering how much effort it took for me to move last time I figured that it was far easier, because then my stuff won't take up so much room, but I think that what really takes up space is the volume of books, shoes and novel-y things I have, because you can't really squash any of those...
2. While I was back home, my mum got me listening to a few things that I haven't really been paying enough attention too, because when I'm in London I don't listen to the radio and so I pretty much have my list of music and it stays as it is for months...Anyway, Mum convinced me to start listening to Ed Sheeran properly. The song I've linked there is one of the tracks off of the album, but I wouldn't really call it an album track (since to me the definition of that is the crappy half arsed tracks that were never meant to be released as singles so they don't really matter.) I love the music because it's soft and beautiful and relaxed and his voice works with it so perfectly, but more than anything, I love the lyrics. If you just listen to them, or have them in front of you and read them while you listen, you can hear all the feeling in every track. I know some people are going to call it depressing (I have genuinely heard this said about his music!!) but for me, it's beautiful and calming and it's nice to know that there are men in the world who can still write with that kind of feeling, and even better, who can actually feel things like that...
3. Okay, so I went to see Cabaret at the Savoy in London. It's only being performed for fifteen weeks, so I'm really glad that I managed to go see it. Will Young was meant to be playing Emcee (the narrator, if you will) however he's apparently not been feeling overly well, so instead Emcee was played by a guy called Nuno, (Nuna?, Nunu? I don't know) who has MASSIVE legs. The guy is a dancer, and a helluva dancer at that, but jeez,...not helped by the fact that he was in shorts for most of the performance, and naked for the last scene...Anyway, the last time I saw Cabaret performed, there was very much a focus on the humour side of the show, and there weren't people running around the stage naked, since it was a college performance, but what I loved about this one was the seriousness to it. The power that comes with that kind of story and the way that it was conveyed  was genuinely phenomenal.
4. Okay, I'm about to tell you a big fear I have at the moment...I'm scared that the film  of Les Miserables is going to be awful. Most of the cast that they have are amazing - but Amanda Sigfried, REALLY? Have they not seen Dear John? She can't sing, she shrieks!! - but the stage show is something which gets me EVERY TIME...I remember being about ten and standing in the bar at the Palace theatre in Manchester and waiting for the auditorium to open for whatever it was that my parents were taking me to see that time, and I asked my mum about Les Miserables, and she couldn't believe that I had never seen it, so the next time I had a day off school and there was just the two of us home, she put the tenth anniversary concert on, and I cried like a baby, because it was beautiful. When they released the twenty fifth anniversary concert on DVD, we got it and there was so much expectation there, because a few weeks before we'd been to see the show in Manchester with the WONDERFUL Gareth Gates (say what you will about his musical career, he was amazing in Les Mis, and seeing Alfie Boe carrying him like a rag doll is probably one of the funniest things I have ever seen.) Anyway, we expected so much, then onto the stage walked NICK BLEEDING JONAS, who I think looked a little bit like a fish. He got the boyish youth of the character down to a tee, but Marius is not meant to be a watery little character that the only thing in his life is the girl who's just bumbled into it, and that's what I saw in the performance, and it made me angry. There were a lot of things about that show that made me either furious or upset, but it was all healed when I went to see the show again in London, with Gareth Gates, Samantha Barks and ALFIE BOE!...After crying in Manchester the first half of the show in London scared me, because the chorus just didn't seem to have it. I don't know what it is, but going into One Day More it has to be there. It's something of a strength and a power and a presence and it has to exist or that last word before the first act ends doesn't leave you wanting, craving and needing MOOOOOOOOOORE!!!! I remember clinging to my friend's hand and nearly crying because I had told everyone how amazing this show was, and I wanted them to feel the way it makes me feel, and then it happened. I am a sucker for stage shows. They make me cry, they make me laugh and they suck me into the story and I can feel it. It's amazing what a cast of less than twenty actors and a small orchestra can do to me! Anyway, whatever it is, it had been running late, but it arrived and before I knew it, the curtain was down and Alice and I were tearing up and everyone was making the skin on their palms raw with all the applause. We both cried before the show ended, and at the end, the theatre was on it's feet, because done properly Les Miserables is meant to get you, and it did. And I'm scared the film won't get me the same, and I want it to. I want to be able to feel like that every time I watch the DVD. This is the reason I want a tattoo of 2.4.6.0.1  across my wrist. Yes, I am a theatre geek,

C x

:D