St Patrick's Day Eve

I had a funny old day today. I felt like I should do something TCRG related given the date, so I decided on trying to learn the King of the Fairies set. I got old faithful, the blue dancing notebook, out of my bag where it's lain untouched but still carried around daily, for months on end.

The book is neatly laid out into 4 sections. First - light dances. Second - heavy dances (ran out of paper in this section due to the weighting of the exam). Third - notes, to-do lists, various thoughts. Fourth - somewhere to write music quizzes.

For some reason the first thing I did was wonder if I could still name all the set tunes. Popped on the iPod, shuffle...named them all. 100%.

Second thing I did was flip to section three where, on the way home from my first failed attempt at the TCRG exam, I wrote my notes. I didn't want to forget anything so I wrote down everything that happened, how I felt, what went wrong, less of what went right, and predictions for my results. I must add that on the way home I was a couple of hours past my teaching exam which was the worst exam I've ever experienced. I predicted they'd give me 30% on solo teaching, that's how awful I felt about it. In the end I did plenty enough to not fail outright, I was close to passing, but reading it back was scary. I could remember my own terror, how I just couldn't process what they were telling me, how I wanted to walk out and cry. Or cry and walk out, whichever came first. It's so horrible. Happy St Patrick's Day to me.

I decided to close that book, open a fresh page and start to learn King of the Fairies. I actually watched back some of the other dances to see if she taught it so very fast as how she does in KoF. It's SO hard. I'm furiously trying to write, trying to work out which foot, then we cut to the dancers and they do it differently - I'm SO glad this is the last one to learn (finished Three Seas, by the way).

So I haven't had a particularly upbeat St Patrick's Day. I feel like I need to go and paint my nails green or something.

Oh, I'll get there. I'm just exhausted and angry at myself all over again for not practising lilting enough and not being confident enough and just being a complete deer. If you learn one thing from this blog, learn. to. lilt.