Twelfth Night And Struck Down By Lurgy

All week I was right back to studying big time. I had done so well! I got right back into it from New Year’s Day and even before that I started to read the set book of Twelfth Night. By Thursday I had worked through two weeks of study. I gave myself the day off on Friday and I was hoping to get out of the house but we’ve been having problems with our boiler and a guy was going to be coming to repair it so I decided to just stay home. As the day progressed, I progressed more into cold symptoms. Twelfth Night, eh! Lol

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely crap! I just stayed in bed all day. Today I am still heavy with cold but I feel better and although I am isolating myself in my room (I don’t want my OH to get a cold as the last time I had one – in November – she got it too and it took her about 8 weeks to get over the thing! I don’t want to subject her to that again), I have been up and about and out of bed and I even had my bedroom windows open for a couple of hours to get air in and rid the room of germs.

I’m not behind by any means, but I didn’t want the study I had so diligently done to then be swallowed up by me getting ill!

I really enjoyed the study. I actually liked Twelfth Night and it is the first time I have studied Shakespeare like that and I FINALLY got to appreciate what a clever sod he is with his use of language. Reading along to the play while listening to a BBC Radio 3 adaptation of it really helped me to get to grips with the dialogue. We were also given short clips of a theatre production to watch and that helped with interpreting the characters.

Yesterday, despite being full of lurgy and in bed, I watched a production performed at the Globe Theatre in 2012. This production starred Johnny Flynn (of the universally panned David Bowie biopic, Stardust) and Samuel Barnett as Voila/Cesario and Sebastian, respectively, Stephen Fry as Malvolio and Mark Rylance as Olivia. I actually found myself not that taken with Stephen Fry’s Malvolio – I didn’t think he played it with enough emotion to draw in the empathy that the character is deserving of from the audience. Mark Rylance’s Olivia was great and he gave her comedic overtones which was great. I could watch Samuel Barnett all day and wish he had been playing Voila/Cesario instead of Sebastian as he didn’t have as much stage time as the role of the brother offers. Johnny Flynn seemed wooden to me. I kept thinking that if his performance here was anything to go by, no wonder the Bowie biopic got panned! (It was as much for its ludicrous script and the refusal of the Bowie estate to allow any of his music to be used in the film as anything else that sealed its fate.) I sadly came away from having watched it more wishing that I hadn’t. Rylance, Barnett’s and the actor playing Feste were the people that saved it. The actor playing Maria was quite good too. He played her with a particularly conniving nature.


Samuel Barnett as Sebastian, Mark Rylance as Olivia and Johnny Flynn as Viola in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night directed by Tim Carroll at the Apollo Theatre in London. (Photo by robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images)

I’m still on target to get through reading Jane Eyre in good time. I had set myself a reasonably doable target of two weeks to read it, in tandem with studying the course material as I go. Actually, I am allowing for some days in which I won’t be able to read any of the book at all (too many tutorials in one day, and a gig in Edinbugh in about 10 days time) – so I have over 2 weeks from tomorrow ro get it read and there being two weeks left until the next assignment is due.

I’ve been drinking a lot of water today and trying to get myself feeling better to shake this cold off nice and early. I’m sure I’ll feel even better tomorrow and should at least start reading Jane Eyre even if I actually don’t start back up with study until Tuesday.

Seasonal ‘No Mans Land” – Yet Study Waits For No Man

You know that period I mean? The time between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day when you’re not sure what day it is and time seems to both crawl and travel at the speed of light at the same time. There’s so much food in the house that you feel obliged to eat it and feel like a permanent beached whale. That.

Well…today is Kerrsday (aka Thursday for the non-Jim Kerr obsessives – you lucky bunch!) – 29 Dec. It’s the penultimate day of my Christmas break from uni study. And although I’ve not been looking at any of the course work since I handed in my assignment, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been studying! Oh, no.

For the past few days I have been tackling Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, as both it and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre are literary pieces we need to read for the English Literature block of study we have coming up.

I’d read the 80 page introduction to the play and are now starting to read the play itself. I’ve just read Act I and about to start Act II. I’m reading through without the notation and will then read it again with the notation. I was apprehensive to start it but it feels okay at the moment. I feel as though I actually have a handle on what’s going on even if the ‘olde English’ phraseology is a tad intimidating to get to grips with.


Anyway, I best crack on!

Happy New Year!

Merry Kerr-istmas!

No dreams of Jim this year. Then that has been the case for a few years now. I used to look forward to those beautiful Christmas dreams – like I’d get my very own Solstice Kiss. About the only chance I’d get for one, that’s for sure! Lol.

Anyhooooo – had I been able to dream about him, a scenario not dissimilar to this one would have been welcome. Lol.


Whatever the season brings to you, I hope it’s kind and joyful and if things aren’t going well for you and the spirit is not within you, I hope you’re able to get through it quickly and safely. 

Be kind to yourself and do whatever you need to do to get through it. Try to obtain some joy and comfort from it. There is ssoooo much pressure to enjoy this time of year that…if for you it means retreating and staying in bed until it’s over – do that. Forget the judgements. Those who judge don’t suffer any mental illness or have never experienced the way you might be. We’re all different and we all have different coping mechanisms. 

All the best for the season and I hope 2023 brings all of you good times and happiness. 

Feliz Navidad!

Christmas…

Today feels like Christmas can fuck off. Have really not been feeling it this year. Hey ho. There’s always next year…

Necklace Gold Dream

I went out for a Christmas meal last night at the stellar Non Viet Vietnamese restaurant located at the section of Sauchiehall Street near the M8. Great food was had with Birdy and Michelle as fellow dinner guests.

Michelle gave me the most wonderful gift – pictured below. I was knocked for six by it. Such a lovely thought out present.

Demotivation…

I feel low today. Demotivated. I feel like I need to do something but I can’t conjure up the energy within myself to do it.

I think it’s a little bit of “be careful what you wish for.” Jim had been quiet and the past couple of days I found myself wishing he’d post something. Especially in light of Terry Hall’s passing. Years ago I’d freak out if he went quiet. I’d start to doom think – begin to worry if he was okay and start to be concerned something had happened. Of course it never had. Then I would be scornful of myself for caring so much and give myself a telling off. “Jim’s as fit as a Mallee bull” as the Australian colloquialism goes, “dinna fash” – as the locals say when appearing to fuss or stress over nothing.

Then yesterday he posted with his review of the year/“best of” kinda post. Mr “I don’t look back” seems to have at least reviewed the past 12 months. I do wish he’d stop with this “never look back” business. It gets a bit tiring after a while. It’s always said with this air of superiority that grates on me. Like, he feels “a better person” for this perceived lack of desire for nostalgia tripping. Except he constantly contradicts himself with it and cannae even see it.

Good luck with “never looking back” while writing your memoir, Jim!

Without even thinking, I replied to his post. It’s something that has been such an unconscious response that I did it without any second thought. Until after I had posted it and thought “Oh, you fool! There you go again. Straight in with a response. As if he’s waiting on your response. HE DOESNAE CARE! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET THAT IN YOUR THICK SKULL?!” I guess I could have deleted it. Or just responded on my blog instead but the action was so spontaneous – as it has always been that I just initially didn’t stop to think.

Then I keep going back to the post to see if he has liked or responded to anyone else. Feeling a weird sense of relief that he’s responded to no one at all. I don’t feel alone.

I keep thinking about the person who described Jim as “esoteric.” It’s a good description. I think about it in relation to Jim’s previous post in which he talked about the fans being “our tribe.” But there are those who are within an “inner circle.” They’re the REAL “tribe.”

I loved feeling involved. A part of it. If not right within that inner circle, then at least able to delude myself I might find myself in it one day…or something like that.

It was always just that sense of wanting to matter.

Today is the winter solstice and a lot of people are sharing the SM song Solstice Kiss. My mate, Birdy, sharing a photo of her signed CD – “Solstice Kiss Birdy.” A reminder that I was not “worth it.” That, combined with the weather and the disappointment in myself for STILL desiring that sense of exchange with Jim that long passed – eating me up inside.

These days it feels like I write AT him, not TO him. It has ALWAYS been one-sided. It very rarely was two-sided. I have held on to those little exchanges for so many years. It’s ridiculous. And just when I feel like I am getting stronger and getting over it, a few days like these are enough to bring me down into a spiral.

Wishing for a word from Jim. Terry passing away. Telling myself that Jim will be fine – he’s fit as a fiddle! A word about Terry from him would be nice. I think of “Skin” (Tony Donald) and Alan McNeil and the contemporaries of his that have left us and I get maudlin. That time for us is precious. It’s nearly Christmas.

He posts. Present for a moment, then gone. It’s solstice and there are no kisses. Not even a like…or anything. And I have to try and stop myself from wanting to “talk” to him, because it’s absurd and it doesn’t matter. “It doesn’t matter to you, it matters to me”, to quote Bono’s line from So Cruel. I think it is probably just about my favourite U2 song. Certainly is from my favourite U2 album.

I have a Christmas dinner meet-up tonight. Birdy and I are out with our friend, Michelle, to have tea at a local Vietnamese restaurant. And I am trying to get myself in the mood. I don’t want to be the wet blanket tonight at the tea. I have been looking forward to this meal and the “girl’s night out” for weeks…and now that it’s here? I just want to stay home and curl up in bed.

So…in essence, one must be careful for what one wishes for.

Tomorrow is the last Kerrsday before Christmas and … oh, Lord is there something visually splendid coming to the Priptona Weird blog! Look out for that! Other than that, it’s gonna be a quiet old Christmas and I should probably just bury my head in my uni study because, there ain’t nothing else doing.

I wish I could write something good…

First 79, Now 80!

I received my mark for my assignment this afternoon. I honestly was not expecting it until the New Year. I always feel ssoooo nervous when the email notification comes in letting me know that my mark is ready for collection.

I can see the mark before I actually collect my tutor’s assessment and feedback. Again, as I arrived to the page to collect, I see a score of 80 and I’m just bloody stunned!

I can’t really go into any more detail than that. I have to be careful with what I discuss. Once again I am incredibly happy with my mark and fully understand and realise why I was deducted marks – or not scored as highly – for certain things I didn’t do right or shouldn’t have done.

Overall my result is really good and I got very positive feedback.

The tough stuff is to come next year. Tough in that these are the subjects I am doing my diploma for – English Literature and Creative Writing. I have William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to tackle next with 600 word essays to write on each one of them.

In the meantime, there is some stuff happening with the house that’s going pretty crappy. When one part of your life seems to be going okay, other areas will be crap. It’s always the way!

I must apologise for the disruption to the blog today. I was sorting out my domain linking and changing over the blog’s theme to something I liked more. I hope you like it too.

Lastly, here’s another bit of Kerr Christmas fun. Yes…Jim will feature here now and again…he’s unavoidable. I’m more comfortable with him featuring here than my personal stuff and uni stuff featuring on the Simple Minds/Music blog.

The Relief Of Making It Over The Finishing Line In Time

That’s another assignment completed! Two assignments completed by Christmas! That’s pretty good going. I’m not sure when we’ll get our marks back, but I guess it won’t be until the New Year – probably the middle of January. Maybe at the end of the first week of Jan if we’re lucky. Either way, I won’t be stressing about how well I did. I’ll just relax and enjoy Christmas and think about the next phase of the module to come. It’s all down to the nitty gritty next because we’ll be tackling the English Literature and Creative Writing topics in the New Year and into the spring. I’m feeling quite a bit nervous about it. Will I really be any good at this? Who knows. In the meantime – IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!

Yes, one fell off the wall and I’ve yet to get the frame sorted out and replaced. And the is paint peeling off the wall. Such a great look! Lol

One thing I will say is that for one part of my assignment we were asked to write a short piece about a portrait that we’d recently come across. With the image above in mind – just one of my bedroom walls adorned with an endless array of Kerr portrait photographs, I seriously contemplated doing this short piece about one of my photos of Jim but I became waaaaay too worried about how that might reflect on me to the other students and decided to make a different choice. All for the better, I think! Which one of the Jims would I have chosen? Well, to have made myself a little less like a woman of 52 acting like a girl of 12, I probably would have gone for one of the photos of him on the stage performing. Our task for this part of the assignment was to write about what we thought the portrait’s purpose was. I’d have had a better justification of explaining the purpose of a photo of Jim on a stage than I would have of one of the promo photos of him.

It’s all irrelevant now anyway but, yeah…talk about spoiled for choice had I gone with my initial idea of choosing a photo of His Kerrness to go on about. Lol

I’ll take a final look over the assignment tomorrow, make sure it’s all reading right, the word count is correct, references are correct and…in she goes! And then the next assignment is just under a whole two months away. Phew!

And When I’m Not Studying….

For uni. I’m studying this fine creature…

Sigh. (This one fell under the “where do I stick it?” dilemma. It was too much fun to just keep it on the SM blog, hence it ended up here as well. Jim Kerr under my tree? Yes, please! And thank you very much!*)

*not gonna happen in a month of Sundays… or Kerrsdays.