60 Years of 'Monarching'

Two posts in two days? Blasphemy!

The thing is, it's come to my attention that my blog has not just been read by people in Britain. Oh no, other countries have briefly looked at it too. So I thought, well, for the benefit of them, shouldn't I explain something English? 

Well, other countries, over the past few days (2-5th of June) HM Queen Elizabeth II has been celebrating 60 years of being the monarch of 16 states known as the Commonwealth. This, my foreign friends, is known as the Diamon Jubilee. And it basically constitutes for lots of flag waving, street partying and telly watching. Oh, and a few free days off. 

Now, our good Queen Liz was born in 1926. And at the time everyone thought it was very unlikely that she would be queen at all- so I bet those people are all feeling pretty stupid at this point. 

The word 'accession' basically means a new Sovereign is taking the throne after the death of the previous King or Queen. And loads of people come to see it, and the special person reads a declaration and takes and oath and it's all well and good. This happened to the Queen on the 6th of February 1952. This begs the question- with all this excitement going on- who was going to be celebrating Bob Marley's birthday? 

After that the Queen did a whole lot of monarching. 60 years to be exact. In which time she made lots of speeches and did lots of good things and was generally pretty awesome. Which is why over the past few days there's been concerts and flotillas (I don't know if you saw, rest of the world, but on the day of the flotilla it was absolutely weeing down which I suppose is a salute to Britain in itself.) 

However, during the concert last night Prince Philip (that's the Queen's husband for the rest of the world) was not present because he's been unwell which is a shame because it was actually a pretty good concert and the queen now has to go to the service at St Paul's Cathedral with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (for the Americans among you, that's so totes Wills and Kate) rather than with her husband. 

The concert opened with Robbie Williams and had Jessie J and Cliff Richard and Grace Jones (who hula hooped for her entire performance, hats off to her) and Elton John and lots of other people. 

Speaking of Elton John, for the entirety of his performance I couldn't get a certain thought out of my mind. 

In America, I'm led to believe they have these things called peeps. They're basically sugar, covered with more sugar, doused in sugar and on the odd occasion dipped in chocolate. Elton John, to me, looked like a melted peep playing piano. 

Can you not see the resemblance? 

I thought I'd finish off with some facts about the Queen: 

The Queen has answered around 3.5 million items of correspondence. If I were her I'd probably be sick of it by now. 

With her husband she's sent about 45,000 Christmas Cards during her reign. 

She learnt to drive in 1945.

She has 30 godchildren.

The queen currently has three corgis called Monty, Willow and Holly.

Today's song feature's Prince Harry on the tambourine! 

Please Let it Not Be Option E

Hello again, blog, how do?
I realise that it has been a while since we last spoke, but y'know what they say: if you drop something for a bit because you're doing something else then technically that's fine and should have no moral or responsibility related implications on your peace of mind. You may want to paraphrase that for future reference.

You see, quite a while ago the board of education came up with this dreadful thing known as 'end of year exams.' The way I see it is that there could be a number of different reasons for them to do this:
a) they enjoy watching teenagers suffer through the monotony and torture of revision
b) they're trying to overcome some past childhood traumas and the only way to do so is to cry out indirectly
c) they want to see how much of the stuff we've been told over the past few years has actually gone in
d) it's some form of natural selection and all those who receive bad results are going to be taken to a chamber and gassed
e) it was all a dream

It may be of your concern that I only add option e for the sake of covering all grounds and in today's world that's how all things seem to end now anyway. If you are, however, interested in this option, you should go and look at this previous post: http://anunladenswallow.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/giant-horror-rabbit-at-thorpe-park.html

In other news some exciting stuff has been going on.

A few weeks ago (or last month or something) I wrote and performed a 10 minute piece on living with OCD for my drama class. My drama teacher seemed to be pleased with it (well she said a bit more than that, but with option e I don't want to get my hopes up) and asked me to perform it again for an audience of about 70 staff and students.

Following this, I was asked to perform it a third time (third time) so that it could be filmed and sent to the National Theatre. The National Theatre. At this point I honestly could no care about what happens afterwards because it's extremely unlikely they'll even message us back, but I'm still happy that it happened. I think probably the best achievement I've made over the past few weeks is managing to make 4 audience members cry with this thing. Which, admittedly, sounds slightly twisted in retrospect....

So now I just get to spend the rest of this week off school relaxing and enjoying mys-

Oh. Exams in a week?

You sure?

*begrudgingly snatches revision folder from table* 


Today's song of the day is the background music for my OCD piece. It genuinely is music to cut your wrists to, so I apologise profoundly: