Passions

It’s 2am on a year 9 camping trip; two teachers, my friends and I are sat in a one-doored shed in a field waiting for the downpour of rain to stop (how very British) so we can go back to our now very damp tents and sleep. To pass the time various questions are being asked including “What is love?” Now, this is a difficult question at the best of times but add on the time, two previous nights of disturbed sleep and what I like to call “tent lag” and this is almost impossible. Teachers: always challenging the mind even at 2am.

Everything is going smoothly until my teacher asks: What are you passionate about? At this point my mind is working overtime, thinking about everything I do, have done and even everything I would like to do. This in itself answers the question for me, surely if I have to think so hard do I actually have a passion? So, without wanting to seem completely stupid I half heartedly mutter something about swimming, my current hobby, but, having never been a very good liar and the complete lack of enthusiasm with which the answer was given it’s quite obvious swimming is not my passion. The shock that I didn’t have a passion completely threw me and at the age of 14 I decided to try and find something I was passionate about. Little did I know it had been staring me in the face the entire time and only in the last year/year and half have I really recognised my passion.

English, it’s plain and simple I’m passionate about English. Reading, writing, the opinions, the interpretations and the issues addressed. Having always been completely obsessed with reading and regularly writing my own short stories as a child it would seem obvious that English would be my passion, but I think, for me, it was a case of looking too hard to find something that was already there. With the daunting task of writing a personal statement about why I love English I thought a blog post would be the best way to start putting together some ideas and constructing said personal statement. So why do I love English?

What I like most is the freedom English gives you to form your own opinions and interpretations, and how two different people can come to different conclusions about the same text yet they are still both right. I also like how this freedom extends to writing and how no issue seems too big to conquer or challenge, thus allowing eyes to be opened and minds to question said controversial issues. One of my favourite examples of this is To Kill a Mockingbird, there has been a wide selection of books looking at racial inequality and the unjust criminal justice system in southern America but this book caught my attention due to the way in which it is told. Through the eyes of a child a horrific crime and inequality is addressed and lead to the book becoming a modern classic and deservedly so. The fresh narrative perspective really caught my eye and it is a book that has become well thumbed and remained a favourite of mine.

It sounds cliché but I would quite happily spend my days devouring novel after novel lost in worlds that range from the Great Depression of America in Of Mice and Men to the wild setting of Transylvania in Dracula and to the thought provoking Noughts and Crosses series. The ability novels present me to escape from reality and take time out of a semi-hectic life to just relax and spy one someone else’s life is a factor that inspires me to keep reading as many books as I can. It’s like one long Facebook post or Twitter tweet, only a hundred times better. Of course I am also challenging my bookcase to cope with the ever growing weight and how can you resist that new book smell. :P

So there you have it, a brief introduction into why I love English and a nice little bit of writing to introduce and go along with it. Two birds, one stone spring to mind...

And to quote my favourite bouncing Tiger “TTFN...ta ta for now!” :)