Something Sweet

Rushing the finishing touches necessary to setting off having just come back from the stillness and  peace of Friday Prayers. Today's muezzin was possessed of an extraordinarily mellifluous voice. A practical call to worship combined with pointless beauty. The melody existing simply for its own sake.

Some time later (22.15): Just arrived after negotiating some pretty slow traffic on the highway and now at Wati & Aziz's place enjoying a happy plateful of roti prata telur bawang dua + teh tarik super gajah = satisfaction x 10 = optimal.

On Our Way, Again

We'll be making our way north tomorrow. Destination: the homestead in Melaka. Purpose: a pre-Ramadhan kenduri with as many of the family as can gather. All very jolly.

But a surprising amount of preparation & thinking ahead is required even for a short break. And I'm doing some of the necessary now.

Is it all worth it? Oh yes, emphatically so. (But do wish us luck with the traffic, if you get the chance.)

Not Entirely Integrated

I'm frequently puzzled by people who consider themselves people of integrity. So often they are entirely sincere about this without a trace of hypocrisy. But it seems so obvious to me that you'd need to be a remarkable person not to live without compromising your moral certainties at least some of the time. I'm painfully aware of the extent to which this is true for myself.

Case in point: Earlier in the evening Noi was talking about electric and hybrid cars in relation to the policy being rolled out by the government in the direction of moving car-owners towards owning such. Now I came to the conclusion quite a while ago that it was ethically the right thing for me to buy such a vehicle. But I've never taken action on this, for a variety of fairly good practical reasons; unfortunately none of these genuinely takes priority over what I see as the essential 'rightness' of acquiring one.

So here I am, still causing more damage to the environment than strictly necessary, but, typically, compromising as I so often do on key questions. 

Ouch.

Something Funny

I've manfully resisted posting anything at all about the recent revival of the Mighty Reds. The triumphs over City & the Goners were sweet, and sweeter still was the sense of release in finally being able to childishly taunt their supporters. But going public on all this so early might just be a step too far, so I won't.

But I can't resist linking to a typically brilliant cartoon by David Squires on the weekend's victory. This made me laugh immoderately, as did much of the stuff BTL. Enjoy, if you can. (Arsenal supporters are exempt from the invitation.)

Strong Stuff

Was knocked sideways today by a very powerful article in the Graun. The big interview, featuring Ian Russell, the father of the poor girl, Milly, who took her own life back in 2017 in large part due to the darker influences on social media, opens with a heartbreaking paragraph and then veers into some of the sanest commentary on the dangers of social media and what we might do about them that I've ever read. Mr Russell strikes me as an extraordinary man, admirable in every way. 

And a devastating contrast to those who control social media platforms and make lots of cash from doing so. I thought I loathed them prior to reading the article, but some of the details related by Milly's dad turned that loathing into something quite disturbing. A kind of rage. Fortunately it's the eminently sane Mr Russell who's a key figure in the fight against their pernicious influence and not myself.

I wish him well. We all should. In a world of noise, we need his voice.

A Bit More Ranting

So here goes with an attempt to expand a little on Tuesday's comments. What went wrong with IT in Education, apart from pretty much everything? (Yes, I'm exaggerating, but, honestly, not all that much.)

Let's start with a sort of foundational truism that everyone I know takes for granted: the new technology hugely facilitates communication at every level. The problem is that I'm convinced it doesn't. I reckon it hinders real communication.

How so? Well before I attempt a quick explanation let me explain where my sense of certainty comes from. I started teaching a good decade and a half or so before all the IT stuff really kicked in (which I'd date from roughly 1994. I think emailing in schools here started around 1995.) And teachers had few if any problems communicating with each other and with students. As far as I recall schools were organised such that they managed to do all the things back then that they do now, the obvious exceptions being holding classes and meeting parents online - but that only really started as a result of the pandemic and can't honestly be seen as necessary. You could easily phone parents back in 1978. And I'm inclined to think it's more effective teaching kids in a classroom than through a screen.

Particularly relevant to my own experience is the fact that I directed a number of quite 'big' dramatic/musical productions for schools in those early years. Now I'd say that of anything I've encountered in school life doing a big show (even a 'small' one) is the most dauntingly complex exercise in terms of the need to communicate effectively with lots of people at lots of levels. But it was do-able, without emails and messaging through various platforms.

And here comes the counter-intuitive thing. Communication was easier then. Any messaging had to be clear and kept to a minimum because (joyfully) all the platforms we now take for granted did not exist, so the capacity for last-minute changes of mind just wasn't there. These days it's by no means unusual to find out that a fairly important meeting has been postponed or rescheduled close to the last minute, often in the name of so-called flexibility. 

Someone, somewhere, forgot that fixity & predictability are valuable, indeed necessary, qualities in the general run of things and even when attempting genuinely creative exercises.

I don't know of any colleague these days who doesn't complain about the burden created by the sheer amount of 'information' out there - the tsunami of 'messages'. To adopt a quasi-scientific metaphor, the signal-to-noise ratio no longer favours clarity.

So much noise!

Narratives

I'm just here. I have no story.

The Right Trousers

I was feeling a touch despondent the other week having made myself face up to bad news on the trousers front. My favourite pair - actually my wedding trousers - had developed a badly placed hole in the pocket on the right hand side. In fact, The Missus and I reached agreement it was time to discard them, in line with our policy of getting lean & mean (as per my New Year Resolution for 2025 which we deemed still operational.)

I suppose it was remembering that said trousers had been tailored by her old friend Azman, in his shop in Peninsula Plaza, that prompted Noi to get out the sewing kit and attempt to remedy the offending gap. And I'm very happy indeed to say the remedy proved successful. I donned the garment throughout the working week and all held steady.

With luck the trousers might just last another three decades. 

Lost Worlds

Thinking of Dad, on this the anniversary of his death. Considering how out of step he so often seemed about the world around him, that faintly baffled air he exuded, it suddenly occurred to me how deeply uncomfortable he was with any kind of technological advance since the days of his youth. He didn't like to use the telephone and, if memory serves me well, he had little if any appreciation of the access afforded by the telly to a brave new world. Yes, he watched tv, but I can't recall him having any kind of favourite programme, and his frequent word for the kind of comedies I enjoyed was stupid. In contrast Mum definitely had her favourites and enjoyed identifying which programmes particular actors had been in before, a game Dad could never play - to her irritation, if I remember rightly.

Springsteen's great lines from Independence Day seem so apt for the middle-aged Jack Connor: there's just different people coming down here now and they see things in different ways / And soon everything we've known will just be swept away. I think that by the time I was 17 it had all been swept away for him - the familiar, tough but comforting world of England in the late 1940's. He could be relaxed in Denton Working Men's Club on Frederick Street, and in his little garden on Cargate Road but few other places.

Despite the considerable changes I've seen since I was a teenager I don't think the world of the 1970's has been swept away so completely. I'm luckier in that than Dad, as I have been in so many other aspects of life.

Sad.

Great Reading

Is listening to an audiobook as good as reading? was the question posed in an article in today's Graun. Must say, I'd have thought the answer was a bit of a no-brainer. Of course it is.

Slightly surprised the piece in question fails to mention the obvious fact that many 'readers' in past centuries were illiterate. How so, you ask. Well look at it like this. I reckon there's a good chance the majority of those enthralled by Dickens's great novels were spellbound by literate friends reading from the magazines in which they were first published, or were families gathered around the paterfamilias as he delivered the stories in the way I suspect their author deep down would have preferred to have them 'read'. (Assuming the father could do the police in different voices as per the wonderful Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend.)

In fact, listening to an audiobook could well provide the richer experience of a text. And definitely does in the case of plays that demand to be listened to rather than read on the page.