I wonder how many times people, on average, look back on a working day and announce cheerfully;

"I love my job!"

It's certainly taken a long time for me to clamber amongst the ranks of those happy few but today has provided an experience that has rendered all the toil, stress and hair loss of the last two years completely worthwhile!

Y'see, a select few of the unsightly rabble of self absorbed, preening adolescent luvvies that I teach have been entered into the Shakespeare in Schools Festival. Both my fellow drama teacher Lizzy Anthony and myself have worked our tits and testes respectively off, staging a (massively abridged) production of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

As anybody who's tried to direct tired, cranky taurine saturated teenagers will know, the rehearsal process can be a nightmare and there have been many times when we (or certainly, I) have lost perspective of how good or bad the end product is.

Not that we haven't done our best with the material, mind!

We've tried to make the production as visually and aurally rich as possible incorporating lots of physical theatre and soundscaping to create locations and atmosphere, and there are a few moments and concepts that we feel were genuinely inspired (yes the two-headed Caliban was my idea!) but there's always been that nagging feeling that what we were rehearsing might not be as good as our egos convince us that it is. This gets especially worrysome when you're up against other schools. Not that the festival is a competitive event, but that sure as shite wouldn't stop us from wanting to put on the best production on there.

Anyway, we travelled to the Preston Charter Theatre at the Guild Hall for the kids to workshop some of their / our production for some lovely people from the National Youth Theatre.

And, fuck-me-bumways, I've never been so proud or impressed!

Not only were the kids polite, co-operative and supportive with each other and kids from other schools but the small extract they performed from our production was played with such aplomb, focus, conviction ans sheer luvvie-darling-stage-swaggering-panache it was all I could do to restrain myself from hugging them all individually, so hard their vital organs shot out of their ears.

I was impressed by the scene and I've seen it hundreds of times. The kids and teachers from the opposi- er, other schools really seemed to enjoy it too!

The experience was vaguely bitter sweet, however! I did get the familiar twinge that self indulgent thesps like myself get when watching others perform and it did remind me that it's been a long time since I've directed or acted in anything that wasn't school related.

Still, there's life in my arthritic old bones yet and I'm not quite at the age where *choke* *sob* I shall never play the Dane!

Nonetheless all the cast should give themselves an enormous pat on the back before they go out to sniff glue and have unprotected sex behind the recycling bins in front of Tesco!
They've done me proud!