Saturday 10h November

The second of our Teacher Training Programme weekends opened with a session on Physiology and warm-ups by Janet, who is the best qualified to talk about this sort of thing since at one time she was a fitness instructor. Every member of the BASSC teaching staff has had at least two previous lives before taking up stage combat. Janet, for example, was a fitness instructor but also worked for the BBC creating sound effects (Edge of Darkness was one of hers - the sound of punches to the face in that series were made by mixing the noise of a gunshot with the sound of the biggest bloke they could find being slapped on the back whilst wearing a leather jacket). Jonathan, as I've mentioned before, has lived a great number of previous lives and seems to have been around for roughly three hundred years (looking well on it though). This puts we four trainees in a good position, as we've all come from something completely diffferent: Gordon is an actor, Ronin has managed venues, Sam used to run a fancy dress shop and I have a tattered history of crap jobs streaming behind me like a length of bog rol stuck to the heel of my shoe.

In the afternoon Philip came in to lead another session on theories of teaching, in which I can make it appear that I know far more than I do, by making sure I use long words and sentences with at least three clauses.

At the end of the day, Ronin, Sam and I went to the pub for a couple, where I listened to the lads' torrent of enthusiasm for the future of stage combat with the growing realisation that this was what I felt like about theatre fifteen years ago, whereas now I've really stopped caring.
Hmm.