Post by sepia on Jun 23, 2010 4:39:54 GMT -6
Full Name: Philip John Grey
Nick Names: It’s very, very rarely that his name gets shortened to Phil.
Student or Staff: Staff, History teacher
Age: 28
Ethnicity: British
Gender: Male
Physical Description: Philip has a very unassuming appearance. He likes to be neat and tidy, but beyond that, he doesn’t know what the word fashion means. As far as he’s concerned, if he looks decent in it, and not scruffy, then it works for him. This neat and tidiness extends to his hair, which he gets cut fairly frequently - he hates to have to dangling in front of his eyes, especially if he’s trying to teach.
He tans quite well, and, as he likes to spend time in the sun, is very rarely incredibly pale. Oddly enough, he doesn’t freckle – despite the fact that every other member of his family does. Quirk of the genes, or something, but it’s useful in that he has to try pretty hard to get sunburnt.
Hair: His hair is dark brown and blessedly easy to maintain.
Eyes:Grey – something his friends have great fun linking with his name.
Build:Robert is on the tall side of average, being about 183cm tall. He’s fairly lanky, and his legs look rather too long for his body (but serve him well when he rides). Not particularly muscular, he’s actually surprisingly strong and flexible.
Distinguishing Features: A series of rather nasty looking scars on his left forearm, from a fight with some barbed wire that he lost.
Personality:
Likes:
- Warm weather. It’s probably growing up in Hong Kong, but sunshine and high temperatures make him happy.
- Paradoxically, he likes snow, and gets terribly excited about it. It’s probably the fact that he never saw any until he was eighteen that leads to his glee at waking up to find the place covered in snow.
- Logic puzzles. His friends know that it’s always a safe bet to give him a logic puzzle for a present – he loves fiddling with them, and will happily spend hours immersed in a crossword book – so he’s got several shelves filled with puzzle books, carefully completed and half-completed wooden puzzles and several designs of Rubik’s cubes.
- Company. He’s surprisingly gregarious, and likes socialising – be it with horsy people, or friends who haven’t the first clue about horses.
- Horses, and riding. Ever since his first ride on a pony at an open day, he’s never looked back.
- Dogs. Philip has always been a dog person, and has tried to have at least one hanging around his house ever since he was old enough to tell his parents they should go to the SPCA to adopt one.
- History – being a teacher of it, it’s probably quite a good thing he enjoys it. It was always his favourite subject when he was at school, and
- Teaching. He never thought he’d actually be able to be a teacher. When he was a teenager, hanging out with kids younger than him had definitely been at the bottom of his to-do list. Upon growing older, though, he’d realised that, actually, once children got past about eleven, he could handle them. More than that, he actually quite enjoyed giving them advice. That led, fairly naturally, into teaching.
- Students who really enjoy history. He loves seeing that interested light in their eyes, or hearing the questions that actually show they’re interested in what he’s telling them. One of the best feelings in the world, in his opinion, is getting a student who doesn’t like history to find the subject interesting.
- Baked potatoes. If he’s depressed, this is the food he likes. With baked beans, or cheese, or plain butter, or broccoli...
Dislikes:
- Cold, wet, grey days. They depress him, and he feels the cold keenly, so they make him go around in about six layers of clothing, which is just plain irritating.
- Rules. They only ever seem to make his life difficult, and though he appreciates the need for them (he knows a school run without them would be total chaos) he doesn’t have to like them.
- People who are only interested in winning. This dislike applies to both horseriding, and other fields. He feels that the participating is far more important than the doing really well, and appreciates people who try hard, rather than are good at things through sheer natural talent, or luck.
- People who think of animals as machines. Be it horses, dogs or goldfish, Philip hates people who treat their animals as ways to make money, or look good. If you don’t care for your animals, you’re on his black list.
- Meat. Brought up as a vegetarian, he’s never considered being anything else (the one time he’d tried meat when he was twelve, he’d hated the stuff). He eats dairy products, though he doesn’t eat fish, either – he’s never seen why fish should have fewer feelings than chickens or pigs.
- Cars. A staunch environmentalist, he’s never taken a driving test, and never plans to. As far as he’s concerned, if he can’t get someone on public transport (even if he was to hang around for hours) he doesn’t want to go there.
- People who are continually unhappy. Being a generally happy soul himself, he feels rather uncomfortable around those who aren’t of a similarly sunny nature. It’s not that he expects people to be cheerful all the time, but when people are unhappy, he always feels obliged to help – and if he fails to cheer them up, he feels bad about it.
- Ice-cream. He just doesn’t like – never has done, never will.
- Diaries. People have been after him for ages to keep one, and he’s never managed to, with the result that he now responds to the idea of them somewhat aggressively.
Strengths:
- Enthusiasm. He throws himself into projects with all he has – be it helping a struggling student with the Kings of England, wallpapering his bedroom, or learning about a new area of riding.
- He’s easy-going, and hardly ever gets into arguments with people, far preferring to defuse situations with a casual comment or, if all else fails, by walking away. Not that he is approached by arguments very often, as he’s very unobjectionable.
- Optimism. An eternal optimist, he hardly lets anything get him down. He’s the sort who’ll fall of six times, and still get back on fairly cheerily.
- He respects people for their opinions and views, no matter how old they are, or whether he agrees with them. He won’t tell a student they’re wrong without explaining himself fully, and tries to avoid it entirely
- He has a quiet seat when riding, and so can get a lot out of horses that are somewhat wild. He doesn’t let what they do phase him, and seems to have an endless amount of patience with their antics.
Weaknesses:
- He tends to be a bit butterfly minded, and gets distracted rather easily. This can be a problem when he’s teaching, as his students sometimes try to sidetrack him onto things that aren’t at all relevant, just to see how long he can talk about the Andes and llamas rather that the Second World War.
- He can be too laid-back and casual about things, which sometimes leads to problems when it comes to keeping discipline in a classroom.
- He hates to be pessimistic, and so often ignores the bad side of things, preferring to believe the best of everyone and everything, sometimes until it’s too late.
- Being a cheerful sort of person, he can find it hard to relate to people who are going through bad patches in their lives. Though he will try his very best to be supportive and sympathetic, having never really gone through a particularly bad patch of life, he can’t really empathise.
- Sarcasm. He tend to use it liberally, and it can be misunderstood, which is always awkward.
Aims:
- To travel more – he finds it rather sad that most of the cultures he teaches about he’s never actually seen.
- To get his horse to figure out that being on grass does not mean he can charge off into the distance.
- To inspire his students into actually liking history – an aim that is always ongoing.
Paragraph Format:
Philip is practically the epitome of laid-back and cheerful, though he does have his serious side. On the surface, he’s easy going, having a friendly word for everyone, and being willing to help with most things (this willingness has gotten him into a few sticky situations). He’s gregarious, liking to be around people, but even more liking to talk to them, finding out interesting things about them, and responding in kind.
He runs his classes relatively loosely, encouraging students to come up with their own opinions, and frequently throwing questions open as class debates. Fairly relaxed about rules, he does insist on homework being done and handed in on time, and punctuality, though he tries to make his lessons as interesting as he can.
With his friends, he’s in some ways less laid-back, though that’s really him just relaxing a bit more, and not worrying about keeping up appearances. Thus, his friends are pretty much the only people to see him in a temper, or depressed, as he prefers not to show his emotions to those he doesn’t know very well.
He’s incredibly patient, both with students and horses, and doesn’t mind going over something a million times as long as he feels either student or horse is actually trying. People who don’t try, though, are one of the few things that get his hackles up.
Background:
Mother:Leonora Grey, nee Richardson, 74 years old, formerly a lawyer.
Father: Francis Grey, 72 years old, formerly a landscape architect.
He gets on well with both his parents, and tries to visit them once a year (they still live in Hong Kong, having said they have no desire to move). Neither of them ride themselves, but they were very supportive of his riding from the word go. Back in the day, they spent lots of time together, but now their contact is limited to weekly phone-calls, more frequent emails and Philip’s yearly visits.
Siblings: None.
Significant Other: Engaged to Julia Newton.
Children: None.
Others: A cousin, Nancy Atkinson, who lives in Australia. They haven’t seen each other for years.
History;
It was several decades ago that that Francis and Leonora Grey decided to move to Hong Kong, in search of jobs, away from the weather, and in the hope of something different. They certainly got all of that. Two years later, they also got Philip, who was born on May 24th. A highly planned child – and from the very beginning the only one – he was born at a time when money was fairly plentiful, and so he wanted for very little.
When he was eight, a friend invited them along to the open day of the stable where they rode, Philip got a short ride on a pony, and that was that. From then on, he rode regularly once a week; working up to three times a week by the time he was twelve. Being in Hong Kong, his riding was slightly unusual – all in arenas, and, when he’d graduated from ponies, almost all on ex-racehorses.
This gave learning to ride its definite quirks, and has meant that he’s never been particularly comfortable not in a paddock. He’s never tried cross country, and though he’s just about taught himself to hack out without totally panicking, he can’t do it on nervy horses. It’s also given him a love for thoroughbreds in general, and ex-racehorses in particular, and in fact every horse he’s owned or loaned has been an ex-racehorse. Yes, he realises they might not be the best horses in the world for things other than racing – and some of them are total nutcases – but he loves them all the same (and, some they can be pretty good at show-jumping, or dressage).
The first horse he had on livery was called Top Gallant (it’s surprising what stupid names racehorses can end up with...) and they worked together from when Philip was fourteen, to when he left for University. A fairly pathetic racehorse – he’d run six races, and been last in every one – he’d been a fairly good dressage horse, and a very good jumper. Of course, being the best teenage jumping combination in a pool as small as Hong Kong – it was unusual to have more than three people in the 1.40metre classes – doesn’t necessarily mean much in the great scheme of things, but they enjoyed it.
He went to school at an international school (Australian International School, to be precise) and got good A-level results, enough to get him in at Oxford, doing History, both Modern and Ancient. He enjoyed University, loved the free-form of it, the way he could study what interested him most, the people he met...
Once finished with his history course, he went straight into a teacher training one, for several reasons. The first was that he doubted he had the patience for research, the second his slightly surprising liking for tutoring people, and the third the fact he’d found a horse. That hadn’t been nearly as much fun as his History course, but he’d lived through it.
After a few years of drifting from school to school, he’d come across Blue Ridge Academy. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Misc.: Owns and rides Savannah Win, a Thoroughbred ex-racehorse; and Akhenaten and Hapshetsut, two Border Collies.
Face Claim/Playby: Paul McGann
Threads:
New Pastures
History Class
Kiss Me and Play
Game Night 111
