Listening For Pleasure

I stole this title from a wonderful series of albums made in the 60s/70s where pop music would be re-recorded by orchestras. I have the Mancini on vinyl and it is divine. I also have Burt Bacharach, for those evenings when strings and cheese are all you need.

My post today is all about listening to audio recordings for pleasure. What do you like to listen to? Are you an audiobook fan? Do you like factual podcasts or discussions? Do you like to catch up on comedy? I’ve found some of the most popular things to listen to and have collated them here.

Let’s start with audiobooks. I tried Audible once, but found listening to a story too relaxing. In bed I fell asleep so missed chunks of the story, sat in the front room I dozed off – I didn’t dare try it whilst driving! So audiobooks and I don’t really get on. My 5 year-old son loves his Ivor The Engine cassette, or anything involving Thomas The Tank Engine. He falls asleep too! The soothing sounds of voices reading stories can be very, very relaxing. Perhaps I ought to try a horror story next – something to keep me stimulated.

If we look at Audible’s Top 10, 3 places are taken by Harry Potter. The hypnotic and addictive stories must make for great listening. The great thing is, the narrators are not world-class actors! These are professional audiobook artists, people who read into a microphone hour after hour, day after day, I would absolutely love to have a go!

Tell me – what are your favourite vocal things to listen to?

My absolute favourite are podcasts. I listen to Mysterious Universe, The Archers, The Moth, Serial, Untold, Woman’s Hour, A History of the World in 100 Objects, Dumteedum, The History Hour and my children and I listen to The Fun Kids Weekly too. People work so hard on their podcasts and I appreciate the work and the content. How about you?

Listening for pleasure can also help our voices. Listen to the way people read sentences, words, phrases. Try keeping the book they’re reading in front of you, pause and repeat their pronunciation, their inflection, repeat and repeat until it sounds the same. Find people’s voices that you enjoy listening to and try to emulate them.

 

Oh. Me. Oh. My. To Blog or not to Blog. Can you tell I’m listening to Hamlet?

The #15secondShakespeare spurt on Twitter last week was utterly fascinating. First of all, Karen Gillan.

Her eye contact and breathless voice made it convincing enough, but the du-dum-dum-dum at the end finished it off. We simply never know, with Shakespeare, whether or not he is using real words or words he made up. The internet is full of pages of ‘How To Speak Like Shakespeare‘ and English / Drama teachers up and down the land thrust pages of Shakespearean insults into their students’ hands with glee, year in, year out.

Last weekend I took my family to Norwich to watch Bill, the new film offering from the team behind Horrible Histories. If you have kids and you haven’t watched HH yet, please do, then pop back to say thank you. You’re welcome. The team write pithy, sarcastic and topical jokes into historical stories, match them with some fantastic cover version-style songs and frankly teach us all something new every time they’re on the screen. The film was great fun. A true family film with enough ‘adult’ jokes to keep us giggling while the kids loved the action and plot. One of the great observations was how Shakespeare’s comedies are basically ‘a series of funny misunderstandings’, which provided a fantastic musical number. This is so true. Look through the fluffy language and bizarre characters and you’ll find some very similar plot threads. Boy meets girl in wrong place / time / outfit / state of health / under spell / married to someone else / in wrong family type thing. This reminded me of a stupendous book I read whilst at college, Seven Basic Plots. I thoroughly recommend this, although its a huge book its worth trawling through it.

Nest let’s look at Nadia Wadia‘s video. That stillness of face and body but still projecting the voice is often seen as very Shakespearean, although truthfully the actions in his day might have been much bigger and bolder, with no amplification save the shape of the theatre, an audience filled with prostitutes and pie-sellers to bellow over, people weeing in the corner to avoid paying their penny twice (so spending a penny in the theatre – ha! ha!), with the royal family potentially in the audience ready to cut off your head if they don’t like the play! Nowadays we have microphones and better insulation and generally people sit quietly in the audience. On comfy seats.

Can we apply these ‘Shakespearean’ thoughts to our every day speaking? If we want to be dramatic, keeping a stillness about ourselves can help. Try keeping your eyes on one point, your face quite still, leave longer between sentences and phrases to build tension. Save your smiles. Push the sounds forward and project them out with passion.

Gosh, it must be lunchtime – I’m Hank Marvin!

Have a lovely day and week everyone – see you soon!

My Story

I fell into running myself as a business, the same way I fell into my career, my degree and many other things in my life. This year has been one of the first I have actually planned things and carried them out. I’m 38, heck, it’s a good time to start growing up.
It starts like this. Having a drink with my friend Josie when she says: “I’m doing a Performing Arts degree, it’s brilliant.” I am working every hour I can; in a flower ‘factory’ picking stems for bunches, waitressing in a busy restaurant and babysitting in my free evenings. Ah well, I always loved acting… “How do I apply?”.
Three years later I have a First Class degree in Performing Arts and a dissertation admired by the top staff at the university, which I pigeonhole in my brain as ‘something to expand later’. There are no jobs. Unless I want to go to London. Which I do not.
I meet, in a pub, a like-minded actor / director and he, I and another madman start a touring theatre company. We suffer the slings and arrows of arts-funding application forms and performing to three people. We also ‘do’ the Edinburgh Festival with an adaptation of King Lear. It’s brilliant and exhausting and my then-boyfriend was ridiculously unsupportive. So, I foolishly gave it up.
Just before I gave it up, one of our actors mentioned their daughter’s school’s Drama teacher had gone off on Long Term ‘Sick’. I agreed to do a few workshops. I became an Instructor, started a Graduate Training Programme, then I was a Teacher! Me! It seemed to happen so quickly I hardly knew what was happening. I had a proper job, regular times, classes, holidays, work colleagues I adored and students with whom I was thrilled to work. They were a tough crowd sometimes but I relished the challenge. I didn’t always win, but I loved the chance to fight to win.
I dumped my unsupportive boyfriend and enjoyed single life for a while. My theatre buddy and his fiancée invited me to go away for Christmas and we had the best Christmas I’d had for years. Full of laughter. The day I got back, I mixed up a large cocktail and prepared for an evening of TV. My friend Bekka called. “There’s a house party tonight, it’s going to be brilliant.” I am so pleased I poured that cocktail away and went, for there I met my new boyfriend, who became my fiancé, then my husband, then the father of my two children.
Meanwhile, I had moved jobs, twice, and moved house. The children arriving were incredible but I had no idea how I was going to teach and have children.
I found a school that would employee me for two days a week and I found a childminder perfect to look after my children. But I was unhappy in work. I didn’t like the students at the school, I found working part-time meant it was impossible to make friends with the staff, I became disillusioned with working in education and as our school became an academy I became even more unhappy. I needed out.
I spoke to my friend Welly. “You should do tutoring for 11+ exams”. I looked into it. It was lucrative, it could be done in the evenings, I would be helping one child at a time and I would be really, properly teaching. I loved the idea.
I spent hours researching, planning then I advertised. I waited. I got a student! I threw myself into it and LOVED it!
As time went on I thought about other topics I could tutor. I added English, then Drama, then I stumbled across Elocution. I thought about it, I researched it, I added it to my repertoire. I developed lessons as I gained students, I learned from my students, they learned from me. I began to gain a reputation, a good one. People wanted me to teach them, to teach their children. I was flattered and a little scared, but I loved it. I taught 5 year olds, 65 year olds, people from every continent in the world, from all walks of life. They wanted to be understood and I knew how to help them speak more clearly. I knew I knew. It was amazing.
Then my luck really, really turned. I was interviewed by a journalist writing an article on the rise of Elocution in tuition. I spoke at length about my passion for the topic and how I’d created my lessons from scratch. I pointed him in the direction of one of my students who spoke to him about how we both sit down at our computers, sixty miles apart and have Elocution lessons via Skype.
The article made The Independent and The Daily Mail. The Independent article was enormous, had a mention on the front page and a double page spread. There was a lovely picture of my student and I was the major focus of the article. I couldn’t believe it. The enquiries flooded in!
Now I only work for myself. I call myself Midwinter Tuition and took on a friend to tutor students in French, expanding my subjects even more. I studied Teaching English as A Foreign Language to continue the expansion. My podcast has over 150K downloads and my website has had over 15K hits. I worked hard, tutoring every night and one daytime a week, it was tiring but so worthwhile.
Once both children were in school I started teaching more daytime lessons, coming home from the school run to plug into Skype, only signing off just before the school run, every day. Evening lessons are becoming harder and harder as the kids’ bedtimes are already stretching towards my teaching time, plus clubs and activities have to take priority.
I am proud to be going solo now, free from the constraints of the education system. It feels amazing. I admire all the teachers still working their backsides off in school, but it’s not for me. I love the independence of working alone, but still reaching out into so many people’s lives through tuition. Long may it continue!