Any orchestra with me in it, will never be prim nor proper.

Sunday morning, 10 am, Orchestra practice...
Percussion section, me, and three other girls.

It was great.... well, as great as it gets.
Me, playing the glockenspiel, hitting some notes every minute in a piece or so.
*** playing the snare drum, eniviously expertly.
*** playing the timpanis.
*** standing by the xylophone, standing there, counting the beats until, I guess until the piece finishes and we can all sit down.

And then there was a ginger kid. He was going to join our percussion section... great, we needed a drummer, who could play the drums. Unlike us, drummers who can't.
So the the staff told him to join us, and we would be lovely and look after him and give him parts to play.

We spoke English, he spoke English. And we know his name is Benedict. Or Benjamin. Or something else. Bashfully I admit to you, (I can't remember).
But the beautiful outcome was that he ended up eating cheese and onion pringles for the rest of the 4 hours in rehearsal. He didn't even produce one note. Wow, thats even worse than my first rehearsal. (Call me Corinne, Corinne the trianglist).
Oh, but then, I can't say much about him eating pringles, I ate chocolate digestives in a piece once where there was one note, which I couldn't even play at the right time, and choked in the pianissimo (very very quiet) part.

BUT, that wasn't even the worst part.
Cymbals,
loud,
sonorous,
distinctive.
And the exact instrument you should not entrust me with.
So, I was given the crash cymbal (a cymbal on a stand, usually part of the drum kit, hit with a mallet).
Well, once they found it they gave it to me.
It was already halfway through the piece when we set it up.
And I started hitting it, (to the correct beat, I must boast)
And, silence, a dramatic clean finish.
HA
And, silence, *crash* (everyone swivels around to look at the culprit) *nervous giggling*.

Yeah, even with the conductor waving for a sharp finish, I continued right through, hitting the crash cymbal with all my might. Being me, I died a little inside. Oh, how embarassing.
I nearly ate my scarf, trying to hide my face.

True Story: The maths genius who got a bean stuck in his ear.

He will hate me for this, so lets not make the future worse and call him by a fake name. JB, again.

Once upon a time, when he was about 8, he was doing work in his room, and I was elsewhere.
He recently made a rainmaker in school, one of those long used toilet roll filled with beans and the ends taped together.
I think it was the boredom, but he decided to empty the rainmaker. He probably sorted the beans into groups or something.

So, unfortunatley, no one was there to witness this first hand, but he put a red bean in his ear.



He put a red bean in his ear.



Probably, attempting to retrieve the bean from his ear, he used a cotton bud. That only made it worse. The bean only got further in his ear.

We tried vacuuming it out, we literally put a vacuum against his ear but that came to no avail.

So we went to sleep for that day, ignoring that there was a red bean in his ear.

Then my dad came home from work, we had called him earlier about the bean in the ear, and attempted to pick it out. But that was a fail too, so they went to the hospital together.


I just went along with my normal life, went to school, and tried to keep it a secret.
All my friends knew about it by first break, I was torn between amusement and sympathy.


He was put on the waiting list for a surgery to remove the bean. A nurse thought this was outrageous, as he just a kid who needed a simple surgery. So he received the surgery in the same week.

Now I missed out all the fun, because I was busy at school updating my friends on this.

*I was just told that, he needn't have the surgery, he was bribed with chocolate to let the doctor retrieve the bean with some simple tools. But he was scared and said it would tickle. Half an hour was wasted trying to get him to agree, he curled up to mum and said he would prefer to keep the red bean in his ear than let the doctor loose on him.

He had one of those injections which made you unconscious and they removed the red bean from his ear.


Of course, the doctors wouldn't just let us forget about this incident, so they returned the red bean to us, the rightful owners in a little glass bottle.
And JB was presented with a sticker that said 'I was as brave as a lion.'

11 year old learning Welsh in Wales

Let me be extremely clear about this first.
I hate Welsh.
I've been learning Welsh for about 6 years and the most helpful thing I've learnt is 'Ble wyt ti'n sbwriel?' (Where is the rubbish?)
Our teacher is frankly, bad and I'm in the third year in Secondary and I don't even know the numbers up to 20.

My brother, lets call him 'JB' (Justin Bieber/James Bond/Jack Black/), is in his last year in primary and this is the result I got when I tested his Welsh.

Me: How do you say 'he is dead' in Welsh?
JB: Mae e'n wedi blino iawn iawn iawn... (He is very very very tired)

Me: Which sentence do you know the best?
JB: Ble wyt ti'n pine-afal? (Where is the pineapple?)

Me: How do you say 'I am cooking' in Welsh?'
JB: Rydw i'n ddim oer iawn iawn iawn... (I'm not very cold)

Well done, JB, you know more Welsh than me.

The deadliness of irony

Knives are extremely dangerous, they have a sharp blade, they're heavy and you could easily cut yourself - I'd like to argue.
Daddy disagreed, he said they were no more dangerous than chairs, which have edges, sharp corners and are heavy.
Pah, I thought, there's no way chairs are more dangerous than knives.
Daddy then pointed out how much I would like it if I dropped a chair on my toe. Not much I guess. But I thought that was less likely than losing control of a knife and hurting yourself.

An hour later
I was vacuuming
I moved some chairs to vacuum under the table
I dropped the chair on my little toe
Now my little toe is bleeding
That is irony.

Losing my voice

Today,
I
lost
my
voice.

It was so strange having words planned and said but not coming out of your mouth and unable to hear it.
However, this has made me realised how I much I talk. I realise that our 'conversations' don't really happen as it is usually just me talking them nodding. Embarassingly, I also notice I talk to myslef.

God, I want my voice back, but I suppose it really makes me realise how much I talk. Too much.