: About Me

The world is a scary, wonderful, confusing, disorientating, gratifying and expansive (and expesnive) place, as I am discovering. I'm only 19 years old and I consider myself to have lived a relatively sheltered life so far, but I want to get out there and explore what life has to offer. I study English Literature at the University of Exeter with the hope of eventually going on to work with children with Semantic Pragmatic Disorder, which is a disorder that - as the name suggests - hampers children in the appropriate use of words and the understanding of language in social situations.

Nobody really believes that I ever had it. This is beginning to sound incredibly self-indulgent but I shall not rant on for too long. Basically until I was 7 I was educated in a small class of about eight kids with speech and language defects. I transfered to mainstream school at the Junior level and have been in mainstream education ever since. Can it be classed as "ironic" that a kid with problems with language ended up studying it at Degree level, or is that just one of life's mysteries?

I write because I want to organise my experiences of the world. I want to express how I feel in universal terms. I want to entertain and inform, amuse and move people. Writing is something that I consider to be a passion of mine and I intend to regularly post articles and poems on here over the summer as at the moment I'm a student dosser (that's dosser with a "D" :P). I may post excerpts from a novel I'm working on based on my family life and you can see how that is progressing.

Other than writing, I adore music. A lot of kids my age claim to love music and that music is -cringe- "their life." Obviously I could live without music, but I would miss it a hell of a lot. Lyrics are poetry and instrumentation itself can breathe so much life into words that already connote so many things. I love ska music in particular, but my tastes are quite eclectic.

I follow English soccer avidly and support Portsmouth F.C, who are currently playing in the English Premier League. I also love watching pro-wrestling (the fake stuff) which is somewhat of a guilty pleasure; I need to re-affirm it to myself that it can be considered "a soap opera for men."

Thanks for reading my profile and more importantly my work. I look forward to reading yours!

My passion is ...

life and living it to the full. It's a really cliched answer, but life incorpoates everything that I love, so in truth my passion is existence.

I know too much about ...

a "sport" with fixed outcomes, fake violence and sweaty men in tiny shorts. So soccer =p (I meant wrestling)

My parents always told me ...

that I can achieve almost anything if I set my mind to it.

My childhood ambition ...

was to play professional football when I was very young.

My favorite memory ...

is hard to define, as I have many great memories. The memory that has been on my mind the most recently is when I stayed up 'till four AM listening to the Lennox Lewis/Evander Holyfield bout on the radio (the fight which was somehow called a draw?!)...we thought it was on television but it wasn't, but thankfully we found the old radio. It was one of the most memorable boxing matches of all time, and I was only a casual fan and still am. I miss my grandad a lot.

Why I write ...

I write because I can and because I want to. I like expressing my opinions. I like to entertain people.

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Tom Sawyer, The Specials, Streetlight Manfiesto, Mad Caddies, Mock The Week

My first job ...

was a christmas temporary job working as a sales assistant in the discount book store The Works. The pay and the hours were horrendous.

My best moment ...

was being intergrated into a mainstream school after being in a "special needs school" for the first 7 years of my life. I HAD Semantic Pragmatic Disorder. I firmly believe that now I'm perfectly "normal" so =)

My inspiration ...

comes from everything I see, hear, do, feel and touch.

Entertainment > Movie Reviews Movie reviews: This is England

6 of 10

Director Shane Meadows' 2005 indie-hit This Is England is a faithful recreation of England in the 1980s; the era of Two-Tone ska revival, Roland Rat and the emergence of Princess Diana into the public eye. It was also the era of Thatcherism, the National Front and the Falklands War. Meadows recalls the 80s with a confusing combination of fond nostalgia and shame. The confusion that was rife within an England which was re-defining itself politically and socially is fantastically portrayed through main character Shaun Field (Thomas Thurgoose), a young fatherless boy who finds himself subject...

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