Its rather ironic, possibly even a tad moronic, that I absolutely haaaaated English at school. Despised it. All that riy-tin they made you do, couldn’t bare it. Wouldn’t want to be writing all the time, would I? And readin’. Who needs it? I didn’t voluntarily pick up my first book to read until I was 24. (Exodus by Leon Uris, if you’re interested). And since then I’m never without a book. In fact the same book. Read it 19,426 times so far…

Now whether this English hatred stemmed from my mild dyslexia (how is any dissleksic supposed to spell that wrod?) that we didn’t know at the time, or whether this was attributable to the dire standards of teaching at London grammar schools, which managed to poison Shakespeare and every other wonderful book we ‘read’ at school, I don’t know.

I think it stems from the disappointment of discovering that the subject ‘English’ was all about words. Whereas I’d thought English class would be about eating bacon and eggs, hating Germans, revering Bobby Moore, drinking warm beer, singing the national anthem and getting Union Jack tatoos on your legs.

And for O-level English literature (which I failed due to total lack of enthusiasm and the discovery of ‘girls’) we read Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s finest. In fact her only. Whilst her sisters were busy churning them out as fast as the cow operated the flour mill, Emily only contributed one. That one.

So here’s three sisters, stuck out on’t Yorkshire Moors, in the bleakest of bleak (I’ve been to Howarth House, years ago, Mel made me go), with nothing to do and nowhere to go that wasn’t a three-day journey and no-one to see who wasn’t either family or some dim-witted Yorkshire yokel, so they created their own fictional word of passion, of love, of pain, suffering, cold and ice and all those other rotten, nasty things that can collectively be termed ‘life up north’.

I studied the book for a whole year and yet had no idea what the story was. Surely it would have been advisable to read the bloody thing before dissecting it to shit under that sharpest of scalpels; Lett’s Notes. But no. Start with the dissection at line 1 so the story never really unfolds.

But last night we went to a ‘fringe’ production, over a pub in Islington, of Wuthering Heights. And it was bleak and it was passionate and basically, a girl’s in love with her bastard step-brother (before you go ‘eeeuuuww’; it was her step-brother, it was up north and it was long enough ago that incest was as popular back then as invading Ukraine is today), she marries someone else, dies in childbirth but haunts the bastard step-brother, who marries her sister-in-law in revenge, has a son, who marries her daughter, sings a wierd song whilst prancing round like Marcel Marceau on tranqulisers.
In other words, typical life in Yorkshire. Where Mel grew up. Hmmmm…

Great production. Even though Kate Bush never made an appearance. I love theatre pubs, they’re just great. Still not sure about Wuthering Heights though. its no 50 Shades.

Happy sunny, bank holiday Monday

A xxxx