#anoldfashioned

1. If you could speak any language you currently don’t know fluently, which would it be?

Italian, because it's a much sexier language than French really. 

2. Most overrated author?

Virginia Woolf. Stylistically I do like her sometimes but I like precisely one of her books and every other thing I've read I don't especially enjoy. It's all just a bit too pretentious for me - as is most modernism - and I don't agree with people putting her and Sylvia Plath on pedestals, as though their mental illnesses were things of beautiful intensity rather than just tragic. 

3. Names for your future son and daughter.

David or John for a boy, Vivienne or Penelope for a girl. 

4. Recommend me a holiday destination.

Benidorm. It might not be the fanciest but for sheer silly fun I can't think of anywhere better. Also, the cheap booze and the sun and the dancing and the IRISH BAR. not Sticky Vicky though, that was grim. I would also recommend Brussels for the less chavvy-minded. 

5. Are examination results the best way of assessing the quality of a school?

Well yes, they probably are. It doesn't necessarily mean that the students themselves are more intelligent than other students who get the same grade from a school that isn't considered as good but surely the number of students getting good grades should reflect well upon the school? For example, I went to a school that is, at a push, considered alright by locals. At this school I was in the top few percent so my results contributed to pushing the schools average up but the school was still decidedly average. An ex of mine went to what is locally considered one of the better schools - I should point out that neither of these were fee paying and it's just to do with the catchment area - and she got some of the highest grades in the area, however, the general average of her class was pretty high anyway. Does this mean she and her classmates were cleverer than me? No. Does it mean her school was better all-round because as a whole they achieved higher results? Of course it does! 

On the other hand I do believe that there is perhaps too much emphasis put upon exam results and the ability to learn a curriculum in a set amount of time doesn't necessarily translate itself into your ability to learn as you get older. So being able to get top marks in my year two SATS didn't mean that learning to drive was going to be a doddle. 

6. Fantasy cast your favourite book!

HAHAHAHA!

Okay, picking a favourite book is something of a trauma and my instinct was Rebecca, but I really love the 1939 adaptation so all I'd be doing is doing an update, sooooo, with that in mind, I choose Gods Behaving Badly, which is an AWESOME book about the Greek gods having fallen from grace and now living in north London in a run down house and trying to navigate modern life. There is an adaptation of this book happening but I don't agree with a single bit of casting so :P

(This is sort of just casting the gods, but I'm going to make this post longer and describe the sort of things they do!)

Artemis: Is a dog-walker who goes for long runs over Hampstead Heath and generally despairs of her family. She is the main character, quite young, pretty sardonic and awesomely teenagery at times in the sense that she wants to move out but can't afford it. As such Laura Carmichael would kill this. 

Apollo: An appallingly bad TV psychic who can't really see the future anymore but still occasionally turns women who won't sleep with him into trees. He is made to fall in love with a boring moral woman by Aphrodite and spends the whole thing mooning over her, writing hilariously bad poetry and playing the harp. He can be Sam Claflin because I feel he'd be hysterical. 

Neil and Alice are a pair of awesomely boring sods who are in love but too shy to say so. She becomes to object of Apollo's affection, much to her amazement, and then dies and then Neil has to journey to the underworld with Artemis to save her. They need to be pretty boring and bland so anyone would do but for some reason I can see Joanne Foggatt and Will Mellor. 

The rest of the character are pretty minor really, apart from Aphrodite who makes her money through a sex chatline because modelling's boring, much to the embarrassment of born-again Christian Eros. She needs to be impossibly beautiful and spends a lot of time being shagged by Apollo and sniffing bacon sandwiches. Rachael Stirling might be a laugh in this role so I'll go for her. Iwan Rheon can be Eros. 

As for the rest: Dionysus owns a super dodgy wine bar (he can be Toby Stephens, he looks like he could be an entrepreneur of wine and sexiness), Athena actually knows the solution to all their problems but she's so clever she can't communicate them in a way that anyone else understands. She also wears glasses with plain glass lenses in order to appear more intelligent, as such she is my favourite and can be Siobhan Finneran doing her posh voice because those are a few of my favourite things. Hera lives in the attic, guarding Zeus, and neither of them have been seen for decades. Her only friends are her peacocks and when she temporarily comes downstairs she's so batshit she immediately attacks Athena because she thinks she's being usurped. That level of madness requires Lindsay Duncan. Zeus is just old and weird and I feel Michael Gambon would be suitable. 

Oh and Hades is pretty awesome actually, with his trophy wife who is a little bit dim and honestly they're the best bit of the book because they're like something out of Footballer's Wives. Iain Glen can be Hades and Lily James can be Persephone and trust me it'll be hilarious. I think that's your lot really, Demeter, Hermes, Hephaestus and some nymphs also appear but not to do anything really. Poseidon lives in a shack by the sea. 

7. Five celebrities you really don’t care about but everyone else seems to.

In no particular order:

Tom Hiddleston. Benedict Cumbersplatch. Martin Freeman. The half of the cast of Les Mis that do very little but according to tumblr are the main characters. Matt Smith and anyone else associated with Dr Who in last three years apart from Neve McIntosh. 

8. One subject that isn’t on the school curriculum but really should be.

In a way I think it would be a good idea to have a little bit of psychology offered somewhere, not because I think its important or especially interesting, but mostly to stop SO MANY people taking it at A-level because they think it's cool only to discover what it actually is. I have known so many to fall into this trap. Also, and this is more personal, I think they should offer more practical options. I come from a town that was part of the hub of the industrial revolution and we have a long tradition of chainmaking and glassblowing in particular and yet we are never exposed to things like this at school. I'm not saying start sending kids down the mines again, or training us to walk the walls of a canal but it wouldn't hurt to shake up the DT curriculum. God knows, no one needs fucking graphics. 

9. Favourite style of architecture.

Gothic. Forever gothic. Particularly Toledo Cathedral because it's absolutely spectacular outside and in, with my favourite bit being the chains on the walls that were taken off the Christian prisoners when Ferdinand and Isabella liberated the city. 

10. You are in New York City for a day. You have $1000. What do you do?

Oh I'm not very imaginative, I expect I'd go to the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and whatnot. It'd be amazing to be up high looking over New York but as I'm sure they wouldn't cost that much between them I have no idea what I'd do with the rest. Have a few Manhattan's in Manhattan just to say I did maybe? Buy some overpriced pizza? Go to an ice rink and tell them to skate faster because I have reservations? Who knows!

11. Is it possible to separate an artist’s work from their personal views or how their art was appropriated by others? (e.g. Is it ok to listen to Wagner even though he was anti-semitic? Is it ok to read Plato even though Hitler appropriated him to justify Aryan supremacy?)

I think appropriation is quite a different thing really because of course it's acceptable to read somebody's work/listen to somebody's music, even if that work was used ill by somebody else. Using a lighter example than the one here I find Sherlock a misogynistic, homophobic piece of rubbish, but I do enjoy the original stories. The fact that they've been used in such a way by someone I can only describe as a knob (if not a genocidal nutter, I will grant you) doesn't detract from their original worth, even if you might always associate the things with each other. It's not the fault of the original piece, or the original author/artist, that somebody used them for bad reasons. 

As for their personal views I think it depends upon how much you want to study the artist in question. I know quite a lot about certain authors for example and certain things put me off their character but not their work because they don't necessarily follow the other. With Austen you don't need to know what her views were about marriage - if you do know it adds some texture, but you don't need to know. Similarly you might not be reading/listening to something because you agree with the views yourself, sometimes it's just interesting to read/hear these things for academic purposes so I suppose my answer, in a really long-winded way, is yes, it is okay. 

**

And my questions are thus:

1. What are your thoughts about the fur trade?

2. Which pivotal moment in history do you think is the most interesting and why? (Eg. Pivotal in the sense that there's a big "what if" around it.)

3. Who is your favourite in Friends?

4. Do you think that the good things discovered by scientific pursuit (penicillin) negate the awful things (the atom bomb)?

5. What are you top five favourite performances? (Not, who is your favourite actor/actress, more which performances given by anybody stand out for you).

6. Of the many, many, many variations of the vampire myth which version is your favourite?

7. Do you prefer swimming in the sea or a pool?

8. Pick one thing on tumblr you'd change. 

9. Do you trust people that don't like cats?

10. If you lived in Panem which district would you hail from based on your local industry?