Return to the Deep

This video comes to you an entire week after it was filmed, since my camera decided to record in a strange format and it took me a while to work out how to make everything work properly. I decided to do a vlogbrothers-style thoughts-from-places-esque vlog, since even holding up the camera in public felt embarassing. I also discovered during the making of this that my voice features much more of my father's New Zealand-ness than I thought...

But here it is: thoughts on my post-exams return to sixth form.

Lady of the Flies

I woke up at 7 o’clock, which seemed painfully early to me since, it being half term, I hadn’t woken up before 9 in a while. When I was looking vaguely passable as alive, I jumped in the car and picked up two friends – both confusingly named Beth – who my mum had thankfully offered to drive, along with me, to the train station.

That train station brought back memories for me of extremely early mornings when we used to go and drop off my dad when he worked away in York, although now there are barriers preventing you from waving through the windows of trains and watching them pull out of the platform.

This particular morning though, it was considerably later (although still too early for my liking) and so the station was filled with commuters and school groups going to Cornwall on Art Trips. The Beths and I got on the 9:30 train, it being inexplicably half of the ridiculous price of the previous one and began our chug to London. On the way we ate delicious cookies for breakfast and drank healthy water; we managed to have both hysteria at our mouthing to songs from RENT and deep conversations about Universities and Drama Schools and the stupendous amount of money needed to go to them.

We eventually arrived at Liverpool Street Station, though we wouldn’t know what a surprisingly beautiful day it was until about an hour later when we emerged from Regent’s Park. This might have been just as well though, as we would never have otherwise seen the extremely famous you-know-that-guy-Ron-turns-into-at-the-ministry-in-the-seventh-film person in the lift. We were tremendously excited by this, and I was doubly excited by my new ability to tweet about it from my spangly new phone.

We decided to chill out in the park for a couple of hours and walked past the very posh houses on North Park Corner into a truly beautiful patch of green in the middle of the capital. It is huge, and manages to contain a rose garden, a river-slash-lakey-thing complete with ducks and a bridge, deckchairs, and a café which provided us with delicious but expensive chips. It also contains its Open Air Theatre, which was our eventual goal and our reason for travelling to London. Our very lovely and infuriatingly talented friend had landed himself a role in Lord of the Flies there. Of course, missing him a lot and being intensely proud, we had to go and see it.

It was a good production, I very much enjoyed it, although having not taken Liam’s advice to buy some sunscreen it was FAR TOO HOT and I have some very lovely tan lines to prove it. The set was incredible, and led us to much speculation on where on earth they got half a plane from... and all of those exploded bags.

After the show, we waited in the mercifully cool shade just outside the theatre to hug and squeal congratulations at the wonderful Sam, and we were promptly invited to join him and the cast for a meal at Pizza Express before their call for the evening performance. We stutteringly accepted. On the way a group of Japanese tourists spotted that this was the cast and grasped this photo opportunity with them. That was as strange for them as it was for me and the Beths, and we proudly stood back from our ‘famous’ companions, slipping into the plural when explaining to a couple of passers-by that our friends were in the cast.

As we caught up with Sam we were also surprised to learn how old the cast was, given that they were convincingly playing children ten years younger than they actually were. They were all very nice people, and I felt extremely sophisticated sipping my pink lemonade while we chatted and ate. By far their best quality was financial, in that half of them were with Orange so it being Wednesday we split the cost of the 2 for 1 pizzas and came off surprisingly well (which was just as well, since also in our purses were small orange-edged pieces of card worth 50 quid each).

As is always the case, time flew by and we soon had to leave: them for the theatre, us for the tube station, so we congratulated Sam again and watched him walk away with his fellow actors. We weren’t quite finished with them though, as when we walked into the station we were confronted with a very large picture of the very same boys. That was one of those surreal moments for me that I’ve since replayed over and over in my head, all the while with a smile on my face. It reminded me how fast things can change: one moment you can be laughing with someone at your local theatre, the next watching them on a West End stage; you can be walking through a crowd of businessmen on an industrial underground platform, and emerge into the plush greens of a lackadaisical park; you can laugh and sing like typical teenagers, and moments later have deep conversations about the future.

I was proud to stand next to my Sam when we took our bows a mere two months ago, and I am proud to see him go so far. From all of us, good luck with the rest of the run. We hope one day to see your name in lights.