Posts Tagged ‘Wimbledon’

And no, it is neither Ed-related nor puerile.

As I may have mentioned, I am writing a play. It will be performed at the International Youth Arts Festival in Kingston, and is the brainchild of Matt and Smári, two lively young turks of the acting variety. My job in this whole malarkey is to translate their idea – “what if you put Andy Murray and Roger Federer in the same changing room before the Wimbledon Finals?” – into a play. So far, so something – a first draft of the thing is about 30% done. I recently hit the all-too-familiar place of readying the script for picking up another day, writing out the outline of what happens next, not being able to help myself and going on to the end, then going ‘…short. It’s too short, dag-nabit’. The time, it will tell, though. As usual. Work is casually planned for the easter break; script handoff is tentatively set for the 15th. Good times, good times. It feels nice to be making something again.

In other news university is going okay, work is good but exhausting. I will not – I repeat, not – turn this into a Wedding Blog, but I might mention that in exactly one year from now I will most likely be happily exhausted and most definitely be married. Which is delightful and strange and frightening in a good-scary sort of a way. This growing up malarkey is quite fun, as it happens.

I’ve signed on to write a short comedy for two young Turks (of non-Turkish descent). It’s about tennis, and the working title is ‘Balls’. That’s how mature I am.

In other news, I was derping around on Reddit when I found this. Enjoyable? Yes. Bad? Twice as. Read at your own peril.

I may have gone and got myself into a spot of bother.

This is not related to my steadily failing relations with Eastern European embassies in London, but rather with my imminent and not-so-imminent future.

This autumn I will be starting on a teaching course.  This might be followed by getting a haircut, a shave and a real job. In short, I’m moving into teaching and while my 19-year old self might not believe this, I couldn’t be more pleased.

Oh, and thanks to the excellent Magic Mat I have a new keyboard. It’s soft, it’s smooth, it’s super-responsive… and it squeaks gently at me. It’s like having a conversation with a polite hamster. Among the side effects of having a new keyboard is that the story part of my brain is kicking into overdrive – this means that among all the other things she has to put up with, The Lady now has to contend with two out of three conversations end swiftly on me making massive, grand sweeping statements about the subject being ‘an essential part of human nature’ or ‘an interesting trait, related to [something completely un-related]‘. We can only hope that this stage passes as I clear the school term, get to my holidays and get down to some proper Viking wrestling.

On another note, I’ve watched quite a lot of the Wimbledon tournament this year and found myself getting quite into it. This is partly because it’s really really hard – and partly because of the cultural side. The Wimbledon tournament represents a couple of quintessentially British traits. Tradition, pride and organization are the most eminent – and then there’s Andy Murray. The prime British candidate unleashes a strange mixture of hope, expectation, worry, self-loathing and an almost pathological longing for disappointment. If the papers are to be believed, the whole nation is in the grip of Murray Mania; the fact that no British male tennis player has won the tournament for 75 years since Fred Perry did it is rehashed 3.283.401 times; the camera shows countless shots of well-dressed people staring glumly into their overpriced punnets of strawberry . I don’t even know what a punnet is, and after hearing the word for the best part of 2 weeks I’m growing determined not to find out. I’ll put a punnet in my ears if somebody tries to tell me.

And inevitably – because, you know, it’s bound to happen – Andy Murray loses in the semi-finals, this time to Rafael Nadal, and thus we arrive at the real point of this tennis-related ramble. Andy Murray is roundly slated by the media for being ‘surly’, ‘uncommunicative’, ‘charisma-challenged’ and downright ‘grumpy’. ‘Not easy to love’ was one of the complaints. And you know what? They’re all bang on. In fact I saw Murray on tv this morning talking about how he ‘needed to improve by 10-15% because that’s how far he was behind Nadal” (for the uninitiated, Nadal is ranked #1 in the world, while Murray is a contemptible #4). And this Murray lad sat there, at the grand old age of 24, and delivered what to my eyes and failing memory must be something like the 7th worst live tv performance I’ve ever seen. He looked like talking was a chore, like words tasted of sand in his mouth, like no-one was worthy of hearing what he said and it didn’t matter anyway.

And I loved it.

Andy Murray has helped me realize that I’m sick of slick. All hail Andy the Grump! Just leave him alone to get on with his tennis – or he’ll punch you right in the punnet.