Dramatic events

Iwrite with the soporific radio murmur of middle-class English voices in the background, all of them complaining that Radio4 is "too middle-class and too anglo-centric." Those agonized debates about what defines Englishness could start and stop with the ability to complain endlessly about anything. I promise to try avoid this in my blog (although I have to say that the weather since I arrived here has been dire - until this weekend! Hurrah hooray! Warmth, sunshine!)

My big news is that I've landed the lead in the Kirkwall pantomime. This is a huge honour and I only hope I can deliver what they want. So I write to you as The Snow Queen (well you knew it had to be a wicked witch, didn't you?) That's the good news: the snag is that I have to sing. So far, I know there will be 'Killer Queen' with a backing chorus of penguins.

Continuing the theme of Drama, I will draw a veil over my experiences as a supply teacher for the absent Head of Drama at Kirkwall Grammar School, as it's not my favourite event of the week. However, a more entertaining aspect of Drama was my recent debut as a playwright. The Head at Stronsay sprang on me that the entire secondary school (all 15 of them) and all the secondary teachers would be away apart from the S1 group and that I would therefore have to take them for English all day. I felt that this was a shortcut to them hating English for the rest of their lives, so I decided to write them a play. I'd been to see a man performing Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon at a local venue and only fell asleep twice, so I thought this would go down well, if I wrote them a play version. I was so engrossed in writing this masterpiece that I didn't notice the ferry had docked at Houton. Luckily, a ferryman spotted me: "Ye'd best git oaf if ye dinna wantae go back to Hoy." I bumped into the mother of a Hoy student in the building society the next day and, after she'd berated me for not doing enough Shakespeare, we moved onto Beowulf. She and her husband are, apparently, obsessed with Vikings and have not only changed their names to Viking ones, but also do Viking re-enactments and she insisted on lending me some of their gear.

The following Tuesday she turned up at school with chain-mail, helmets, drinking horns and a very large sword, all of which she said would be no problem to get on the plane the next morning. (The chain-mail alone would have caused its tail to fall off. I nearly cracked a rib trying to get it in the boot of the car.) I decided against attempting to get the sword on the plane, seeing as you aren't even allowed a nail-file these days. But the kids loved the other stuff. We rehearsed all morning and performed the play for the Primary School in the afternoon. They laughed in all the right places and S1 loved it. Sadly they'd taken most of their costume off by the time I took the photo, so you can't appreciate the true horror of the monster Grendel's skyblue furry slippers.

(It has taken me about half an hour to work out how to put photos on this, so if there is only one, it's because it's now bedtime. However, I will try to give you a few more...

15 minutes later: well, I tried. There's now a view from the plane as well. The others will have to wait. Night night.)