Its been a pretty long time since I lasted posted so feel that this post is WELL overdue. So I think the last thing I mentioned was the Licentiate course I have done, which began in June and ended early July. Well yes, this is all over now and, yes, I have DEFINITELY caught up on valuable, well needed sleep. It was the most tiring 5 weeks of my life to date. I guess this wasn’t helped by the fact that I was commuting and consequently getting up at 5am every morning to catch a train. But c’est la vie, it is complete and yesterday I received my results… YES! £1000 has NOT been wasted! I’m now halfway there to teaching RAD Ballet. ECSTATIC.

I feel this picture is very appropriate at the moment as I am off to Washington on 24th August! Cannot wait. I’ll update when I’m back to RAD in September/October.

Today was a shameful day…

I’m commuting up to London at the moment to get to RAD due to several reasons… ahem… flat issues… ahem…. and the early mornings are proving EXTREMELY tough when doing the commute. We have early starts (8.40am), more or less every day, give or take a couple here and there. For me commuting, this means my day begins at the ungodly hour of 5am, this is made even more ‘ungodly’ and genuinely quite horrific bearing in mind I have never ever been close to seeing this time of the morning, EVER.

Most of these stupid o’clock starts, I do, shamefully, fall asleep on the train. Yesterday was pretty awful when I fell asleep on this peak time train, packed full of people, and ended up waking up from my (somewhat cramped and entirely uncomfortable) slumber, with my leg resting nice and snug on the man opposite me. As I woke up, I got that ‘hideous fear feeling’ in the pit of my stomach, briefly panicked, before deciding to pretend to swiftly fall straight back to sleep as if nothing had happened. The smoothest move possible I feel… oh, apart from the very obviously quick movement of my leg moving back to where it was, whilst clenching the muscles of this leg to ensure it stayed put and didn’t go astray again. The shame…

The shame today was actually, in retrospect, not quite as bad as the above shame but I do feel that it really reiterates what I said yesterday - the ‘zombie-like state’ part; a result of week 3 of LRAD coming to a close. Standard procedure for me is to fall asleep on the way to London, the whole way. Today, I fell asleep the whole way there, the whole way back and again, nearly ended up leaning on a poor, innocent man.

Nope, I haven’t said anything about ballet and/or the RAD today, but to be honest, all that can really be said is PAULINE WITHERS. A legend. No doubt I’ll have some ‘interesting’ things to tell after yet more classes with her tomorrow… Watch this space.

So I stumbled across it, liked the sound of it, auditioned and got in. Pretty straight forward, I know. Little did I know that pretty much the entire reason I’m even there, lasts 5 weeks at the end of each academic year; The Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Dance - basically makes you more employable and more ‘competitive’ in the ‘marketplace’ that is the ballet teaching world. So a grand a year (for just those five weeks), in order to achieve this competitive ‘status’. Sorry, WHY am I doing the degree again? Oh yeah, so that I can get a job, oh, and be able to achieve the Licentiate and consequently ‘RAD Registered Teacher Status’ - the ever important ‘competitive’ bit.

I started the course on 6th June and I finish it, several practical exams, energy drinks and an essay later, on 8th July.

The first day was eagerly awaited by us all to see just what this famous course was all about. By the end of the first week, I was the walking dead. No, in fact DURING the first week, I was already resembling the walking dead. I can’t say I wasn’t warned - we’ve all heard a vast array of horror stories about it. I quote, “The most horrendously tiring 5 weeks you will ever experience - your life will be RAD and you WILL be dead by the end of it” - and yet I still went ahead with it. I am now, by halfway through week 3, living proof of the zombie-like state I was so often warned about.

Oh, and to top it, yesterday our amazingly well trained, highly qualified and extremely experienced teacher tells us we’re all nutjobs for choosing the ballet profession; unsociable hours, bad pay and scattered work. A grand a year!?