New Decade? Pah. Gimme The Old One.

Happy New Year faithfull viewers.
I thought I'd start by examining my Top 10 Things of the last decade because... I feel safer looking back than looking forward. This was the first full-decade I've ever seen, so it was pretty important. I grew from a little girl into a (I hate this expression but it seems fitting) young woman. I guess. So: My Top 10 Things.
1. Harry Potter and JK Rowling.
Thankyou for giving me a role model, and an ambition. Thankyou for telling me the best story and giving me years of going to bed and pretending I was in a Hogwarts dormitory. Thankyou for giving me and endless game of 'lets pretend' where I could be magic. Thankyou.
2. The Summer of 2007.
This was the summer that I stopped trying to be someone I didn't know very well or like very much, and became the girl who wears shoes with stars on and sits cross-legged at dinner and gets inky fingers. This was the summer I realised that I was a wonderful person in my own right and that I could be that person.
3. Alice Arnold, Lauren Rowley, Amelia Caffrey.
It seems unfair to lump these girls together. They could each have pages in their own rights, but I don't have enough numbers. These girls are my best friends, and the first friends who I feel that love me because of my faults and not in spite of them. They are part of the reason that I am who I am at the start of this new year, and shaped who I have been.
4. Young Rogues and Vagabonds.
My theatre group. I had some of the best weeks of my life there, backstage at the Civic hall putting on shows. I fell in silly teenage love there, which felt like the most important thing in the world. I made best-freinds there, and lost them too. I learned (as an only-child) how to be with other people and love it.
5. Alcester High School.
My secondary school, where I grew up more than anywhere and where I discovered that history was important and that I could write and that I could pass maths. The three best teachers that I will ever have in my life taught me there. I made friends and enimies and I cried and I laughed. Sometimes I hated the place and sometimes I cursed it. That school was amazing.
6. Writing.
Pretty self-explanatary. If you write, you know. I guess it gave me another language. And another way to play lets-pretend.
7. David Tennant.
Because he's my only MAJOR 'celebrity' crush, in that cliched teengae girl way of posters on the bedroom wall. Becuase I spent one whole, hot summer hanging around my hometown, struck down by the luck he was there too, and trying to catch a glimpse. Because when I did meet him it was the single most exhillerating feeling in my life. And because his Hamlet cemented completely my love of...
8. Shakespeare and The RSC.
I love The Courtyard Theatre and I love the actors and I love the words and I love the way that he changed the course of literature forever. I love the way that he captures real humanity.
9. America.
It opened my eyes to travel. The people and the places and the variety and the sheer wonder of a country not many people take the chance to explore like we (my mum, my dad and I) do.
10. Reading everything and anything and my Dad reading everything and anything to me.
Proabably the most important thing on this list, as if one thing has made me into the person I am is reading.