it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that
you're gonna get tired very quickly
tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—
you're not gonna be as composed as you expect
humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)
As in like what was the default thing you would draw on the margins when you were in class and had no creative ideas? Personally I was a wings and eyes kid. Usually wings though.
no idea if it's my hormones, what I've seen in the news lately, the weight of living the past few years, or just because it's Judi Dench...but this impromptu performance really made me cry for a good ten minutes, no kidding.
If anyone wants to read anything about Aberfan, I read two books the other year which dealt with it - Aberfan by Gaynor Madgwick, who was one of the children buried in the disaster, and it is absolutely fucking heart-rending and will make you sob and rage, and A Terrible Kindness, which is fictional, but deals with the idea of PTSD in a wider sense and also made me cry with some of its descriptions.
The clock from the school is in the museum at St Fagans, still stopped at 9.13, the minute the disaster struck. I don't think I've ever cried in a museum before but I don't know if you can help it when you're confronted by such a tangible sign of a whole generation of a village, lost.
Aberfan is one of those places that I really can't speak or write about in any kind of eloquent way. I don't think you can go there and not be affected by it. It always lives in you afterwards.