The Naked Truth

Dishonesty is a way of life. Simple, convenient and awful.

I cannot remember the last time I went a day without wilfully concealing something or misleading someone. Whether this arises from a need to protect myself, to shield others or simply to make life easier, it is something that never ends. While I am far from a pathological liar, I hate that I accept dishonesty as a convenience on a daily basis.

As the first untruth that passes your lips more must follow, to conceal the first foray in to the realm of the not quite true. And by the naively experienced age of 19, you are surrounded by people and circumstances who only know as much of you as you dared to show them at first, and now believe in somebody who doesn't really exist.

From here on out, I want a detox. If I can change my body by controlling my exertion and diet, why can't I take down my façade by controlling what leaves my mouth. I feel false, and I want to be clean again. I know that removing the trace of all lies is impossible, people who have departed will forever believe the stories I spun them years ago. Doubtless I will lie again. But from this moment onward, I am vowing to myself that I will practice truth with my words to the best of my incredibly flawed ability.

Starting here, a few truths, unexpressed or previously twisted, for some clarity at bed time.

1. I am constantly afraid that the fragile balance I have found between home and university will be ended by a disaster at either end.

2. I hate Ricky Gervais. He is an idiot, whether or not I have ever watched The Office.

3. Last week I skipped work to sit alone in the living room eating crackers, my granddad is ill, but I wasn't with him.

4. That I very occasionally look at a facebook profile picture for a couple of minutes and appreciate very good looks whilst contemplating the poor timing of the summer holiday.

5. I exaggerate anecdotes in an attempt to impress teachers.

6. I never read A.J Ayer fro my IB coursework, thanks for the A though!

7. You were number 2 in male influence, but I thought you might be hurt given how bummed you seemed the day before.

8. I am obsessed with certain television shows and cyber stalk my favourite actresses until I move on.

9. I have never been in love, despite having told past boys otherwise.

10. I always hope that the people who occasionally filter in to my blog will read it, then am simultaneously terrified when they do, and relieved when they fail to recognize that they appear more than once.

Life Carries On

Today the ceiling fell in. Again.

I also stewed apples and made pork with apple ginger and shallot compote.

Then I did laundry.

It seems strange to think that for 5 days, your life can stop. Everything which usually spins by so fast, is thrown in to focus in a sickening jolt. The eye of the storm is a strange place to stand, with chaos in every direction, where stillness gives you the time to recognize the many places you can fall down and disappear.

And when the spinning starts, it is almost a blessing to forget the cliff edge for the moments it takes to make a gingerbread man, to iron a shirt or even to try and stop the ceiling falling in.

The forgetting process proves that time stops for no man. Tomorrow doesn't care if its arrival is dreaded, it just keeps ticking on, callous in its refusal to acknowledge even the most beloved in their moment of pain.

Life just carries on.

Bleak House

Yesterday I walked in the valley in the shadow of death. I was afraid.

I came home to escape from the hell-hole my life had become in the last week, and was confronted with a more terrifying reality. What happens, when a part of your framework can no longer stand? The rest tumbles in is what.

I have spent the last two days in and out of a hospital, watching somebody I love more than myself fight his way back from the edge. To see someone so big, and immortal, looking so very small and vulnerable makes everything else meaningless. This is the farce of the hospital. The wards in visiting time are full of people, hiding their pain from their loved ones, to save them pain. The loved ones hide their terror, to help the patient. In the corridors, behind closed curtains, both parties can silently break. The empty sobs of an old man, holding on for his young. The silent tears of a son, wiped away for a brave face to hide the truth which is death. Because there, the only constant companion is death, whether you can escape it, or welcome it as an escape, it is there. And all we can do is push it away for those few minutes, and live that lie.

Even the tiny light of the maternity ward, cannot illuminate the darkness of the crying football team outside intensive care. Through those hospital doors, the immortal, the youthful and the brave, become so many dearly loved pieces in a cruel game of give and take.

Dear God, whatever you are. Please give him back to us.

Amen

Small Beauties and Secret Places

Life, for the most part, goes by in shades of grey. Days roll together, not happy or sad, just happening as the things we have to do fill up the hours. But within all this averageness, there lie those things which can make life beautiful. Some of them are planned, holidays, birthdays, the fruition of long laid plans, all of these are wonderful in their place, but nothing compares to the magical moment in which you experience a small beauty.

Dozing off in the sunshine in the library and waking to a sunset, catching leaves as they blow off the trees in the garden, sitting at the piano and picking out a tune. It is these moments that make me so profoundly grateful for the life I am lucky enough to lead.

But when the shine fades, and I'm left without direction, I can run to my secret places. The secret places are not necessarily private, perhaps they even hold little beauty to other people, but they are the places I love. A windy hillside, a bookshop, the end of a garden, the top of the world, or just a bench hidden in the middle of a busy world where I can sit and think, and catch a leaf from the liquid amber above me. And then looking at the leaf burning red in my hand, I remember the beauty in the world, and I can get up, and move on.
XX

The Way We Write

Yesterday somebody asked me why I began writing this blog, and I had to think about it. I am not a person who writes with agenda, I do not aspire to be a great writer, I have no expectation that my words will change the course of history, or if they will even make sense to those who stumble upon them. And yet I write.

Some days I write for self discovery, to force me to be cogent in my thoughts. The process of typing arranges whispers of ideas in to a web and holds them for me to better understand. But this is not the reason.

Some days I write for the beauty of words. The structure of a sentence, for the glory of expression. It is on days such as these that I am staggered that there are so many to whom this simple means of expression is denied, and the idea that 200 years ago, I would have been one of them fills me with a sense of how blessed I have been. Worthy though this is, it is still not the reason.

On rare occasions, I write for somebody else. A message in a bottle, with little chance of reaching its intended subject, and a slighter yet chance of being understood, so cryptically do I package it for my own protection. The thought that they may read it, understand it, understand me, is a motivation and a fear. But it is not the reason.

The reason is this. I cannot let my life pass undocumented. One of over 6 billion tiny pieces in an enormous game of win and lose, I am essentially unimportant. I have no idea at what point my life may be ended, but should it be tomorrow, I know I will have lived without having left behind anything which will transcend the memories of those who have known me. This is true of most people who have lived and died on this earth. But I cannot accept this as a certainty. In writing myself, I am putting a little of my life in to the ether, where should I disappear, it will remain. It is likely that that is where this simple memoir of a simple girl will remain, but should chance favour me with just one person reading this in my absence, then for that moment, I will live again, and I will be remembered.

Flesh is transient, but words, especially virtual, indelible and quietly desperate words will linger on. Unnoticed perhaps, but with the hope of one day being uttered again. And this, this sad little truth, is why I write.

XX

The Student Myth

When two years ago, I submitted my UCAS application, I felt as if I'd just taken an enormous step towards the sort of life I want for myself. It didn't matter that my family had no clout, no money and no university tradition, I was officially making something of my life. Grades pending, interviews looming, what the heck, I was in the system, headed up.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, I've discovered a lot of pretty demoralising truths that they don't list as side effects of attempting to graduate

1) You are now, officially, bottom of the heap. It makes no difference if you are responsible, intelligent or morally upright, the rest of the world will treat you like a common vandal. Some of the perks will include filthy looks from the elderly, the assumption that you are constantly drunk, promiscuous AND lazy and companies attempting to rip you off because you are a "high risk" human. I could go on but I'd only get shouty and you really don't need to read that.

2) You don't actually have any rights. From the get go the university, your landlord and the government have you the your proverbial balls. They will tell you they care, run for the students, by the students is the favourite tagline (obviously not from the government). But it remains that if any one of those organizations changes its rules, guidelines or even the law, you just have to deal with it. I mean the fact that when you started in 2009 you'd leave with a just about repayable 20k of debt, which for an English graduate is pretty daunting, by 2012, the university could be allowed to charge you whatever it wants. And you can either drop out, and just casually pay back the three years you've already undertaken outside of the governments repayment scheme, or you can take the hike, and leave uni with 20,000 (+undisclosed amount £££) of debt you have no certainty of ever being able to pay off.

3) No one actually cares what grades you get. Sorry, but the completely sterile set up of the lecture hall, is not tempered by the vaguely more human structure of seminars and tutorials. Lecturers may be smart, interesting and driven, but interested they are not. Perhaps once in a while some exceptional young thing comes along to be lauded, branded as a genius and noticed by all. But for the rest of us, sitting week after week in the same room, we will be lucky if the lecturer ever learns our name, let alone what we aspire to and where our strength lies. The homogenisation process is instantaneous and almost inescapable.

Having said all of this, my time as a student has been incredibly blessed, but by the people I have met, not, as I had naively believed by my entrance in to an institution of higher education and intellectual betterment. In eighteen months I will be entering the world of uncertainty, unemployment, tax and ladder climbing, with a 20 grand well in my pocket, a piece of paper saying that I'm mildly intelligent to fight hordes of similarly poverty ridden, former social outcasts for access to one of the tiny pool of graduate careers. If all this should fail, the light I carry with me, is that at least I'll have plenty of friendly floors to sleep on when I finally get out of debtors jail.

XX

Ambition is a dangerous game.

Living in a house-share for the first time has had a fairly massive impact on my life. For the first time I'm truly exposed to the frolics and foibles of other people, without the option of just saying "jog on" and letting it go. While for the most part who does and doesn't leave pills on the table, and who never turns on the extractor fan is fairly mundane, there are some things which have led me to re-examine my own standing in life.
So we have P. She is a pretty, athletic, intelligent, 19 year old girl. Basically the average student, right?
Wrong.
She is also an obsessive CV booster. For P, to do the work to guarantee her an Honours degree is not enough, she joins enterprise schemes, sports teams, volunteers, dances, attends meetings, rallies, works a counselling hotline for rape victims.... you get the idea. Sleep and nourishment fit round the edges.

Now personally, I have always considered myself a pretty well rounded human, I have interests, I'm competitive, I'd even call myself ambitious. But when I look at myself next to P, I'm a regular layabout.

At what point does ambition become all consuming? Ambition, for ambition's sake seems so meaningless. I want to be successful in order that I can afford a good lifestyle, this in turn will make me happy. But if my quest for success costs me happiness along the way, and all I can do is moan about having two meetings at 8 o'clock, does the means justify the end? Seems to me this is how we end up with 28 year old burned out, divorced executives, who sold out their youth for their future, only to get to the top and realised that they've dropped what they needed on the way.

I need to figure out how ruthless/self-serving I can afford to be, and without hindsight, it's a pretty tough call.
XX

Male Influence

Living in what is essentially a sorority, it is increasingly easy to gauge the effect which various male cast members have on my life.

Today, there were three players who influenced the passage of the day, and their after-effect is something I need to learn to apply to the next day, for self preservation.

Number One is someone who a month ago I would have disposed of, obnoxious, cocky and generally not my cup of tea, a mellowing process has rendered him someone I enjoy having around. Not impacting on my mood, but allowing the upward curve of the morning.

Number 2 is an enigma. No, that's too generous. Number two doesn't really care. By no means unpleasant, just disinterested. This is the one I waited to meet, only to feel disappointment at the man standing in front of me. And while I expect nothing, and feel animosity towards any future dealings with him, a little part of me keeps reaching out, and I need to use my head to beat it back.

Number 3 never changes. He is a constant, and where the others demand nothing, he demands everything. While I would give it all for his happiness, I need to serve my own for the time being. And the separateness which is hurting him, and hurting me, is allowing me to grow. This is the most bitter-sweet, and the most important of all.

Because I have realised, that no one can make you truly happy, if the absence of that same action would not break your heart.

"When you love someone, you open yourself up to suffering. That's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart, maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks. The thought of losing so much control over personal happiness is unbearable. That's the burden. Like wings, they have weight, we feel that weight on our backs, but they are a burden that lifts us. Burdens which allow us to fly"

Radio 3

This morning my house-mates and I had a debate about Classical Music. To me, it is the only soundtrack to my early mornings. I can't stand the banal misogyny of Chris Moyles, and I would far rather wake up to a string concerto than a pounding bass line.

However, their insistence that it was depressing got me thinking. Why is it that I find it so satisfying, and I came to two conclusions. Firstly that I am my own grandmother. Classical music with breakfast, tea leaves brewed in a pot, baking skills and an affinity for pruning things at the wrong time of year. I love this. Don't get me wrong, I love my laptop and blackberry also, but nothing makes me feel as safe and as loved as realising how much I have in common with one of those I love most in this world.

And the second is that I derive a strange pleasure from melancholy. I have a whole ipod playlist entitled rhapsody which is bloated with pieces in a minor key, which I adore. I listen, and I get that thing there you feel kind of like your heart is actually expanding. Sometimes I cry, but you know what, it makes me happy. The expression of the spectrum of human emotions as told by music isn't all lust and love, and heartbreak as Radio One would have us believe, but encompasses the history of human hope, tragedy and remembrance. And for me, the sadness of any given piece gives me such great faith in the ability of humans to deal with life, that Barber's Adagio for Strings is a source of comfort to me, rather than the most tragic piece of music ever written.

I have dance and my grandparents to thank for forcing a know-it-all western kid to open her ears, and then her heart, to such a gift as this "depressing"/"boring" music
has given me.

XX

Letting myself down

Once fooled is a lesson learned in expectations and people changing.
Tuck it away, fill in the cracks and move on.

Never let yourself go twice. It isn't what you wanted it to be, push off, forget it and never be so naive again, little girl.

Got it?

Didn't think so.

Life Hiatus

This summer, I took a break from my life. I didn't go out, I didn't really talk to anyone, I didn't extend myself, or break boundaries or achieve anything to be proud of, I think it may have been one of the best things I have ever chosen to do.

I'd almost forgotten what it felt like not to have someone else's problems set in front of you, to be the glue holding a rickety operation in place. To be actively self-interested.The thing which makes all of this bizarre, is that I'm pretty sure I started changing, for someone else, though having finished, I can see it was all for me, and that I'm pretty certain the person who started it all means nothing to me any more.

And now I'm back, back in the real world, with a better, stronger me to deal with whatever comes my way. I have some loose ends to tie up, a few ties which perhaps ought to be cut. Easy? Perhaps not, but simple? Without a doubt.

XX

Missing.

Tonight, I feel like everything is just beyond my fingertips. A chain of hands, clasping hands, something solid and worthwhile, but I can't reach it.

I can't connect with the old, the internal setting isn't right, and to keep me sane, this ending cannot be a tragedy. While its a reminiscence it can't hurt me, but if the book closes on a tragedy, then it will be finished forever.

The new has me in its sights, I feel its breath on my cheek, but I cannot embrace it. All of those people who surround me, who seem to care, but I'm not ready to throw myself in to this hurricane.

The constant is shaking, and I cant be quite what it needs of me. I dig it up so it can trip me over, and I fall in to its familiar arms, to find them pushing me away even as I am drawn to it.

And at the centre of it all, is me. Steadfast, with no reason to lean, to fall in to any of these worlds, looking up for an answer. And all I see, is the tiny bait of your words, flickering, in the corner of my sight, an unknown taste, a tease and a warning sign, but when I look it straight in the face, it is beyond me, and I do not know if the climb is worth the likely fall.

XX

You're like the shine on an apple

The last thing I do before I eat an apple, is buff it up until it has that wonderful opaque sheen. Without it, the apple tastes just as good, the flesh will be as crisp, and the flavour will be unchanged, but it is the shine that makes the apple beautiful. This evening was good, relaxing, longer than the last four, but I was hoping for that gloss to make it perfect.

.

A tale of three homes

Tonight I cried from homesickness, for the first time in a long time.

The thing is, I'm caught in the middle of three homes, but my heart is not fully in any of them. My family home sometimes seems so many more miles away than the 100 which separate us, the sound of a voice only causes a yearning for the arms of my family, but at the same time, I know that my time in that house is limited. Whatever I make of myself, I will soon have to leave it, to create a space for myself, a life for myself, and so the first home, while welcoming and familiar lives on without me, and this is breaking my heart.

My second home is also ending. While it has not been the foundation for the magic I imagined freshers year at uni would bring me, it has become my place. As each of the people who shared it with me leaves, in one way or another, I feel the wind begin to creep through the cracks, as another home, a temporary home yields to the constant change my life has become. While I am anxious to return to my family, I hesitate to fill the boxes, as if somehow moving the things I love in to them will take them away forever.

And yet I anticipate my new home, my first house, the home I chose, paid for and dreamed. I am projecting all my hopes and prayers in to this new vessel. The little women I will share it with, all with their own dreams, what we will make of it, who will come to be a part of it. All of these questions burn with a nauseatingly anxious excitement, for the home which I hope will make everything make sense.

As I work to pay for my one small fantasy, I hope most of all, to find a place I can pour my heart in to.

A home, a hearth, a heart.

Catching a moment

This week, it has been proved to me that good people will make the wrong time right. Without agenda, expectations or promises, the beginning of something, a friendship, a work relationship, with or without the glimmer of romance, is a beginning to be treasured.
When a beginning arrives at the end, finding out that this doesn't spell a premature finale to something which seemed so natural from the get-go, is a small blessing. Being able to work at a chosen pace and on my own terms proves that against the odds, there are people in this world who are worth getting to know.
Capturing such seeds, alongside the fruition of other, longer laid plans, has made this weekend one of the happiness since I left for university. Spending a perfect day with two wonderful people, acting like kids on our way to growing up, has made me appreciate those relationships, and will help to sustain them through the long summer ahead.
To the people who made these days what they have been, I owe two days of laughter, sweet dreams and the promise of more to come.
XX

Year end

As a year, or at least the length of time uni has deigned to give us and call it a year ends, I find myself sitting in my room on my own, in a bizarre reflection of my first week here. Outside, the sun is bright, boys walk wrapped up in their shorts clad not quite grown women, there's an air of frivolity, but also finality and I can't muster the mood to match the weather.
People laden with boxes stagger to their cars, and I'm wondering what the things that I'll carry from this year will be.
People for one. I feel a bit like a jeweller, presented with a box of someone elses jewellery. There are those pieces I immediately desired, their lustre, size and boldness dazzled me, but now I've polished off the surface, I can see the flaws, the shiny gold is cheap metal and the design has been stolen from a million better places. There are the smaller pieces, which linger in the mind, but never capture the imagination. And the hidden gems, maybe tarnished, or with a clasp that sticks, but having worked with them, I can now see the beauty. I am weary of wearing some of my jewellery, the pieces I have worn for years are losing their appeal, they don't suit me anymore, but equally, I worry that with other, newer ones, that my initial valuation will be disproved, or over the long four months to come, I'll lose them. And then there are a few pieces I've picked up on the way, that I still don't know the reality of, and the closing of the year means I may never get the chance to see if they fit.
I'm going to leave behind many of my fantasies. Rolled up and hidden in the backs of drawers, for next year's fresher to put on, and naively wear, maybe for them, it will be the year it was meant to be. May they find themselves, find eternal friendships, find passion, direction and love. But for me, I now expect to have to search those things out for myself. A moment in time can echo the portrait of this year you had ready, a moment outside on a sofa at a seedy bar, where a connection can be made, and then snapped short days later by just the passage of time, never quite knowing what may have been, and wondering if you handled it wrong. But knowing the limitations of such a lovely moment is necessary to move onwards.
I'll spend four months, in the tiny village where I've lived out 14 years of my life. I'll visit the same places, stand in the same skin, in the same well loved clothes. I'll go in the sunrise to my favourite place, look at the world falling below me, but will I dream the same dreams? Am I the same girl who wrought such romances of her future as the curly haired child who stood in those shoes a year ago.
I'm afraid for the answer to be no, but in my heart of hearts, I know that child has moved on, vanished inside that which I have become. And while I can miss that, it is the woman who will stand there a year from now who I need to try and reveal.

Pop

Abraham Lincoln once said, 'It's not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.'

This year, I will have been alive for 20 years, and for the first 18, I feel like I lived 2 years for each birthday. For 18 years I lived with passion, making choices seemed simple, even when I had to choose between the trip of a lifetime and a dance show, I always knew the path I was walking, and I was happy to be on it.

For 15 of those years, my feet danced along the way, while I never felt truly appreciated or values, the movement sustained me, I thrived on pushing myself to do what so few do, to be the best of myself. When I danced, whether in front of a class, or in front of a thousand people in a West End theatre, I was dancing for myself, hell I was dancing myself.

Until it just stopped. You can replace someone's heart with a donated organ, but it'll never be their own again. I feel like I sealed up a little piece of myself in a glass ball, along with all the happiness and release I associated with it, and stored it where that heart used to be. And all it takes, is some tiny reminder, some tiny bump, and it all begins to escape, and I have to remember what I'm missing.

What I really want is to be able to go back in time, and to have those years again and again. Forever. All the living to fill up the farce that my life seems to have become.

What does this translate to?

A lost, lonely 19 year old, sitting in a half-made bed, and crying to R. Kelly.

This is meant to be reflective, not depressing, and I guess what I'm trying to say is not that I'll never be happy in that way again. It's just that I'm scared, so absolutely terrified that it's gone forever, so while I can tell myself logically that its not, I cant really convince myself its true.

Waiting

Do you ever feel like your entire life centres around something you are waiting to happen? Sometimes it's a logical anticipation, some excitement you have been expecting, but right now, for me, it's something different.

I don't know what I'm waiting on. Sure, I have short term goals, I'm nervously anticipating the season finale of my favourite TV show, my exams, and the summer to come. But under all this there's a kind of emptiness.

I'm waiting for something to start me up again. I have no direction, no underlying goal or motive. maybe sometimes the little things are enough, but I dont feel myself, I haven't done since last summer.

I'm hungry for life, real life, to come and take notice of me. While I tell myself that I have to make things happen, I can't if I don't know what I want, and I'm at an age where I can ruin my own life, or make it what I desire, and I feel alone.

Alone with this gnawing ticking clock inside, waiting, begging even, for something to start.

It's just on of those mornings when..

I woke up this morning wondering if I slept any at all
I can't quite remember a struggle so big
or ever feeling so small
it took all my strength just to get out of bed
as the ache in my heart went straight to my head

I just can't keep my feet on the ground
I guess we all learn the hard way and we all fall down

Sometimes the answers dont't fall from the sky
Sometimes they hurt too much to hear
and sometimes you sweep the truth under the rug
and deny when it reappears

I know there's no use in running away
When it's hard enough to stand up and say

That I can't keep my feet on the ground
I guess we all learn the hard way and we all fall down

Maybe tomorrow is counting on me
To learn my lessons today
I'll start by taking a step at a time
And stop throwing my blessings away

I'll get myself up and I'll brush myself off
And take back some of the pride that I've lost
'Cause you can't always keep your feet on the ground
I guess we all learn the hard way and we all fall down

I hate when...

you are so sure omething is going to happen, and then it doesn't.... its kinda like being winded... you just feel that it's all wrong and nothing (for the moment)will be okay again.

Woooooosh
XX

If I had a million dollars

or 10.... I'd Give it to you because then, you'd go away and let me spend,

my life in shu shu shu,
shu shu shu
shu sh-shu sh-shu shu

sugartown

Laying out my clothes

for the next morning, symetrical and crisp, gives me a genuine sense of well being before bed. I feel a control over the morning knowing that my shoes are together, my products layed out and waiting for me to arrive and make them move.

This week it's Bach, Babra Streisand and Anne Bronte...

Can't wait for tomorrow, it will make everything alright.

XX

Life in repeat

I will always swim against the tide.

School is uni, uni will be work, and work will end in old.
The people change but the parts don't it's like rehearsing a play that willl never open.

And I will run against the grain.

Sometimes, I think I care, that I'm the big round button that doesn't fit the peg board, let alone the square hole. But really, this is a blessing, because I will always be a suprise, and I am proud to be who I am.

When the tide washes out, I'll still be standing on the beach.
XX

I have a fear...

.. that nothing can match up to things I dream.The feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see films, and hear songs which describe the life I want, I'm scared that I'll never find anything real that will make me feel that way.

Here at uni, life is very empty. Surrounded by people and yet completely alone, but left with my inadequacies and concerns that I'm not who I want to be and that I don't even know who that person is. I worry that I've lived as much as I'm going to, that from here on in life will bring things to do, and time to fill, but no more.

In the small hours of the morning when I sit alone with fairylights and the much sought silence which eludes me here in the zoo that is halls, I'm filled with a sense of nothingness. It's like I'm in a waiting room, waiting for something, anything to come along and tell me it needs me. Because that's the biggest fear of all, that I'll cease to be necessary, that my purpose is non-existent, and that were I to vanish, just melt in to the air, that the world would not be changed by my passing through. I'm a ghost train, runaway in an endless desert.

A is for Austen, Albeniz and Aerosmith

This year I've decided I want to know more about the woorld so have commenced project"know everything". An alphabetical breakdown of the year will let me explore an author, classical composer and contemporary artist every week. I just figured with so much time on my hands I might as well better myself!
SO I begin with
Austen's 'Persuasion'
Isaac Albeniz
Aerosmith
and a healthy dose of encyclopedia knowledge,

to 2010, and an all new Beth