Grace

We got back from Melaka around 8.00 pm. It was too brief a visit to completely relax there, but I enjoyed it while it lasted, particularly since it incorporated a fine Saturday night United victory over Bolton, 4 - 1. I also got some marking done and a reasonable amount of stuff prepared with the week ahead in mind. My classes have altered a bit from the first term as I'm taking over a couple of Year 5 groups from a teacher who's left, and I'm losing my Year 3 guys. That's a pity as I was just really getting to know them but switching of time-tables is fairly frequent here so you just get used to it.

I was thinking about the intensity of drama productions over the weekend, how they never quite fade from memory as you might expect. I think I remember several moments in performance and rehearsal from everything I've ever been involved in, and I'm talking about something close to total sensory recall here. Why is this so? The single most important factor I believe to be a curiously impersonal thing: the fact that you are in touch with a kind of creative download from somewhere quite outside yourself and you get some sense of the stunning power of what potentially can come through. That's not to say you are realising much of the potential of that power, far from it, but it's exhilarating just to get caught in a small slipstream of what is more thoroughly available to others. It is oddly magical, other-than-the-everyday. It feels like a kind of blessing, a sort of grace. It seems that in those moments you are somehow more alive and more accessible to important things about life. I know this sounds more than a bit overwrought, but that doesn't alter the fact that I think it's true for most people. I feel privileged to have had the chance to feel many such moments.