About a shooting completely unrelated to anything (made relevant)
31 Oct 2005I discovered this on Wikipedia today or yesterday… I can’t remember how.
On September 15, 1595, a group of pupils of Edinburgh High School barricade themselves in because of a dispute about holidays. When adults break in, pupil William Sinclair shoots city bailie John McMorane dead. The boys were arrested but acquitted later.
Um… proof violent video games aren’t the sole cause of school shootings? They were even acquitted!
Yeah, tangential. Whatever.
I think I absolutely killed Extension English today. Not by shooting, but still. Felt very good about the whole thing. My creative was an inversion of a story I’d previously written for an exam (this was the closest I think I’ve ever gone to repeating myself in what I write for an exam), which was based on Robert Browning’s poem The Laboratory (go ahead, click, it’s very readable). The last version was an extrapolation of the persona’s experience (extending to her murder of two women), whilst this is a journal entry from a remorseful apothecary.
He knows from the persona’s monologue her intent is to kill two women for her husband’s [alleged] indiscretions, yet is compelled by her imperative to “take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill”. Afterwards, he is overcome with guilt and fancies he could kill himself with a drop of poison dissolved in his wine, which he takes and swills around until the colloid is no longer visible, dissolved in the glass… but he does not wish to take another life, to put another mark against his already-damned conscience. So he pours the wine back into the bottle, with some care, and replaces the cork, returning it to the darkened cellar. Thus, he will die by poison and not at his own hand, seemingly freed from the damnation of suicide, absolved from his crimes — and he must die because he is London’s last apothecary of this kind [that is, the malevolent!], bringing death unjustly and remaining beyond reproach, the crime of poisoning enacted by other agents.
I’m a little annoyed we don’t get the papers back, actually, but oh well. I didn’t particularly care about English Advanced, but I was actually quite impressed with my efforts for this one! Modern, on the other hand, will be rather the opposite… so I must go and study. Or try to. Cram.