Disconnected

It's amazing what you can get done on-line these days. We're already checked in on our flight and holding our boarding passes, and we've not even been close to the airport.

But I'm sort of thankful that we're about to be disconnected from the web of the world as this far place moves itself halfway around the globe for the next month. There's no computer at either Mum's or Maureen's and no local Internet cafes we've ever been able to find on previous missions. We have to travel to central Manchester to get webbed up, so posting is likely to be intermittent.

Noi insists I take my mobile phone with me, though. Actually it's really hers, one she passed to me when she moved on to something that I gather is thought to be better for reasons which escape me. I was proud to be able to able to boast of not carrying one up to two years ago, but the dreadful things are pretty much unavoidable in my present place of work simply given the sheer size of the premises.

It took me up to the twenty-third of those months to discover what the phone is most useful for. Pretending to be engrossed in checking what is on it is a very effective way of keeping people off bothering you in those moments when you'd rather be alone with your thoughts. There's a small joy in using the hooks that connect us to become blissfully disconnected from it all.

Coping

Noi got back from Melaka late yesterday evening, with niece Ayu in tow. She's delivering Ayu to the Woodlands branch of the family this evening where, it seems, Fafa can't wait for her partner in crime to arrive. In the meantime I'll be spending the evening circulating at the Year 6 Prom.

The news of Mak is generally positive. That's good.

We've got a hundred and one things to do before getting on the plane tomorrow. That's not so good. But we'll cope. I think.

We brought a new suitcase this afternoon, except it isn't really a suitcase as suitcases no longer look like suitcases. This is change and, therefore, a good thing. One of the two suitcases we used to use gave up its useful life the last time we came back from the UK by developing a large rip along one of its corners. I wouldn't mind but I've only had it for twenty years. Nothing is made to last anymore!

A False Start

For the first time in quite a while I seem to have made a false start on a novel and am thinking of putting it to one side. This used to be a regular occurrence in my reading, and I can name any number of texts that I've put back on the shelf to eventually return to wondering what all the fuss was about, but I thought I had cured myself of the syndrome.

The puzzling thing is that I was thoroughly looking forward to the novel in question, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, having devoured Snow at double-quick pace not so long ago. Everything about it made me think This is my kind of book. And I rather think it is, but just not at this time. I suppose being overwhelmed with the stuff known as work hasn't helped the situation. Anyway, I don't think it'll be coming on the plane with me this Friday.

What I have been reading is Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World:- Science As A Candle In The Dark. I enjoyed this a lot when I borrowed it from the library a few years ago as a kind of light but informative read. Sagan says important, though somewhat over-simplified, things and his heart is in the right place. I'm a bit puzzled by Dawkins's encomium at the front which tells us he (Sagan) is incapable of composing a dull sentence. This is thankfully not the case. Carl indulges in more than a small amount of repetition, which makes for a pleasantly relaxing read late at night when your systems are winding down and you don't want to think too much. Sort of comfort-reading, I suppose.

But, again, the book won't make it to the plane as I'll probably finish it by Friday and I don't want it encumbering my luggage all the way to England and back. I generally travel light to leave as much room for as I can for purchases made in Manchester's big bookshops. (There's a terrific Waterstones on Deansgate.) So now I'm thinking of which novel to switch to, with Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as a front runner as the garish cover makes me unreasonably cheerful.

Time Is Tight

On the blower just now, brother-in-law John asked me whether we were packed for the UK, whence we will be bound this Friday night, all being well.

Not only are we not packed, we are nowhere close, being short of one suitcase and not having considered what to put in the other. The fact that Noi is in Melaka doesn't help, but, of course, in present circumstances that's the best place for her. Real life will be resumed when she gets back, which I think will be late tomorrow.

I suppose I should be panicking, but there's so much to do just getting work out of the way it seems beside the point to do so. This is going to be a sort of just-in-time experience, as is most of modern life, I suppose.

All The Right Notes

I did my best to draw it out as long as I could, but I finished Alex Ross's wonderful The Rest is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century over the weekend and I can only think of one bad thing to say about it: a reader who is less than expert on the repertoire covered is likely to finish the book with the wishlist to end all wishlists of CDs that they simply must buy.

One piece of advice I'd give to anyone likely to read the tome. There's a likelihood you'll be tempted to rifle through the text on a dip-in basis. I know I was. In fact, after reading the opening I immediately skipped to the segments on Britten's Peter Grimes and Messiaen's A Quartet for the End of Time. And what wonderful segments they are! But I then got back to reading in the right order, and was glad I did. Although individual segments are outstanding and do easily peel away from the main narrative, it's the inter-connecting sweep of that narrative that the power of the text lies in. Having said that, I'm readying myself to do some dipping quite soon, just as a refresher.

But in general terms Ross triumphantly links the dourest academic developments in twentieth century music to the tumultuous realities of on-going history, and to the various worlds of popular culture. It's this sense of context that makes for sometimes eye-opening reading. I still can't quite get over the fact that the CIA secretly funded concerts promoting 12 tone music as a way of supporting democracy!

Above all Ross is an enthusiast, rather than a critic. He wears his enthusiasms openly, and misses out a lot of stuff I'd have been happy to see him write about. (For example, you get lots of Britten but the merest mention of Tippett.) But it's that sense you are reading a personal account and hearing the world through two fine ears, not necessarily your own, that makes this far more than just a dry survey.

Oh, and I love the jacket design.

All Creatures Great And Small

Well, monkeys, rats and wild boar, at least.

First the monkeys. We were driving from the taman down the hill, to get some breakfast on Saturday morning, when a big group, at least twelve, came down from the slope on the right and crossed the road in front of us. There have also been some unusual droppings around the house. We're wondering if these come from our simian chums. The little guys didn't look terribly cheerful, by the way. Survival on the edge of the city must be touch and go. One of the monkeys, presumably a female, appeared to be trailing a dead youngster with her.

The rats emerged as we were getting the car cleaned late on Saturday night. We were sitting on a couple of plastic chairs up against a sort of office-cum-hut in the compound of the cleaning place, adjacent to and sort of under the elevated ring road, near the Flamingo Hotel, when the two came out. Squeaking quite loudly, they didn't seem at all concerned that we were around, and made their way across the hut and underneath our chairs. We didn't stick around to chat.

And finally the boar. Actually these were in Melaka, and we didn't see them, but I heard about them first at Khir's wedding, when they came sniffing around the cooking area at the back of the house on the Friday night before I got there. It seems there were seven. I say 'were' as today's news was that one of them has been shot, to the delight of all it seems. Except me. Sentimental as I am, I can't help feel a sense of something being lost.

Onwards, Upwards

We'll be on our way northwards soon, to check the house in KL for the last time in 2008, and to see Mak - delivering a walking frame and a new gadget for checking blood pressure and other measurables. Noi will stay on in Melaka for a few days, so I'm home alone again next week. Then it's off to the other side of the world for a taste of real weather.

It's all go, to the point that I feel all gone.

The Results

Today will be a very emotional one in a number of homes across this little island. The results of the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination) are out - this being the one that sorts the mutton from the lamb and sends them onward to their varied shelves. Fifi got her big news today and is pretty pleased with herself, so that's good. Fortunately they'll be lots of kids in a similar sunny situation, which is also good, but unfortunately they'll be plenty over whom dark clouds are looming, which is not so good, but it's the way things are and it's difficult to see how the world could turn otherwise.

When I first came to Singapore I was impressed at the sense of direction that pervades society in terms of recognition of the importance of examinations and education in general. It was refreshing after dealing with teenagers in the UK who were often simply lazy, nowhere close to fulfilling their potential and who often showed no sense at all that school was important in their lives. They appeared to assume the world owed them a living. However, I quickly came to recognise that the unwavering spotlight on examination success came at a price. Paradoxically that price was sometimes a decent education in itself.

Two problems. First of all, the obvious point that letting assessment lead the curriculum is not exactly sensible. You will end up assessing only that which lends itself to being assessed, and, even more scary, a position is quickly reached in which students only take what they can be made to be successful in. Nothing else counts. Secondly, an obsession with results, especially achieving outstanding ones, leads to extraordinary levels of anxiety for all involved. It's to Fifi's credit that she seems to have sailed through the year and found plenty of time in which to enjoy herself (though it's going to be awfully easy to say of her, or any child for that matter, that her 'score' (that's the curious common usage here) could have been even better had she worked that little bit harder and sacrificed some of the time in which she was enjoying herself - like the times she was reading merely for pleasure.)

One thing I discovered very quickly in schools when I first arrived here was the curious reluctance of quite a number of teachers to actually teach what are termed graduating classes, because of the 'pressure' involved. Such pressure came, as far as I could see, not from any obvious extra workload, but simply from worrying about the results that might be achieved. Curiously since I felt no pressure at all, believing that, having done my best to teach as well as I could and worked hard to do so, the results were essentially those of the students who got them, I haven't felt any such reluctance. My guess is that not particularly caring makes me better at what I do.

I am still essentially impressed though with this far place - it's the balance that seems to me to be out (isn't it always?), but there's a base of achievement to build on, which is something. More young people here wake up hopeful and with a sense of what needs to be done rather than bored and lacking in any real direction, and that's no bad thing. I just hope that not too many youngsters have lost heart today.

Puzzling

Caught the last hour or so of that rare beast, an intelligent movie, the other night, and am now looking to see if they'll show it again. The animal in question was Longford with Jim Broadbent as our eponymous hero. Except he wasn't a hero in any simple sense, though deeply heroic in the ways that count. An English audience would immediately recognise the name, but not, as I have discovered through two conversations since, a Singaporean viewer, even the most cultivated.

In brief, he was a lord, of some fame/notoriety in the British media and world of politics generally for campaigning against pornography at a time when permissiveness was beginning to take off (more than in the simple sense of disrobing) and then supporting the cause of the jailed child killer Myra Hindley, in regard to attempting to get her parole as well as visiting her in prison. (Profoundly Christian in his beliefs he visited quite a number of other prisoners, but it was the deeply unpopular Hindley that brought the world down on his head.)

Was he right to believe she had reformed, that she deserved parole? The movie intelligently did not take sides on these impossible questions but rather made it its business to bring these issues powerfully to life in terms of their importance to all those caught up in the nightmare. I suppose I was drawn to the film partly because I grew up in the shadow of the murders, being almost exactly contemporary with the younger children involved. One was taken by Hindley, and her accomplice Brady, from Ashton market, a delightful place my wife and I love to visit when we go back to the UK. I remember the missing poster for another of the children sitting forlornly for what seemed an age in one of the windows of Denton Police Station. Now I know it couldn't have been up for all that long. Mum remembers a woman who worked opposite her saying that something was going on at her neighbour, Myra Hindley's house, on the morning of the big arrest.

The last meeting of Hindley and Longford in the film, at a point when Longford had long since been aware that Hindley had manipulated him for her own ends, quietly seemed to suggest something of a confrontation between good and evil, in the gentlest possible way. The lack of sensationalism about the whole thing was deeply impressive. Normally I'd be distrustful of a film dealing with such raw events. I'm not at all sure it's wise to put appalling murderers at the centre of our attention. But then this film didn't. It put a good, if deeply flawed, man there.

Finally there are never real answers. Just better questions.

Fortunate Encounters

I'm supposed to be working on a chapter on Language for a booklet we're producing for our Year 3 and Year 4 guys for Philosophy of Disciplines, a sort of younger brother to Theory of Knowledge which they get to do from Year 5 onwards. The problem is that I seem to have stalled. It's a question of determining the right pitch for the material. Dumb it down too far and you sort of lose the point of the whole thing, but on the other hand I don't see why the kids should be subjected to ideas that may be beyond them developmentally. I remember doing The Ancient Mariner when I was in the second year of grammar school and being bewildered by the notion of pantheism. I understood the idea, it just didn't have any meaning in the real world for me, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I deftly goofed off from what I should be doing by reading Hedda Gabler which I'm teaching next year. I don't think I've actually read it before though I've seen it on tv a couple of times. There can't be too many jobs that give you the opportunity to read like this and make you feel you're doing something constructive. It set me thinking about those times I've read stuff I don't think I would have done otherwise thus making great personal discoveries.

Two, of quite a satisfactory number, at this moment come to mind. The first was reading Leon Garfield's wonderful Smith back in the UK. I recall the strangeness of realising that such mesmeric writing could exist without me having the slightest awareness of it. I also recall knowing instantly that I could do Smith's voice perfectly - my mockney accent being something of a party piece - and that the class would love it. Which they did, partly, I think, because they sensed how much I loved it.

The second was reading O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night for an 'A' level class. Four pages in I knew I was reading one of the great dramatic masterpieces. Utterly true. Flawless. I gleefully plunged into an O'Neill phase of major proportions, centred around the later plays (A Moon for the Misbegotten, which never opened on Broadway, equally haunting) and a very fine, detailed, biography I luckily picked up at the library - though I'd have to look up who wrote it. Two things about O'Neill that are deeply resonant for me: the way he rose above the alcoholism he so deeply understood; the fact that he had a tin ear for dialogue and still wrote great plays. The man made himself great by virtue of an absorption in craft and through his demons. A great and terrible role model for any aspiring writer. A road that should not be taken.