Trust

There are some writers it's difficult to trust. Leading the pack, surely, is one John Donne. Is he ever entirely sincere, even in the great sermons?

Yet out of his wonderful rhetoric come words to live by: Only our love hath no decay, / This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, / Running it never runs from us away, / But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day. My annual reading of The Anniversary on this day of days tells me, in technicolour as it were, what I already knew in plain black and white.

For Free

Visitors to this Far Place will know that I have occasionally noted how little real change has occurred in schools over the years I've been teaching despite the fact we're always being told about how much progress has been made in education. But one thing has altered over time: increasingly people have found ways to commodify education and these days it's much more of a business than ever it used to be. If this is progress, then let me be left well behind.

Fortunately there are forces that push in a different direction. I suppose a fundamental sense of goodwill is not so foreign to us that we abandon it completely for the big bucks. It's interesting that as much as there are plenty of instances of folks trying to make money out of educationally-related stuff on the Internet, there's a lot of free stuff easily available.

One small but striking example comes courtesy of Harvard. They have made available a whole series of lectures by the excellent Professor Marjorie Garber on Shakespeare's later plays. To be able to sit-in a lecture with a major scholar of the Bard in the comfort of one's home seems to me somewhat astonishing, and for anyone interested in being similarly astonished and edified I suggest you start here.

Under Consideration

It took me all of two minutes on the elliptical trainer just now to figure out I was not going to have an easy time of it. The truth is that that these days I never do. Time was when a run around the taman or the streets of Siglap was distinctly enjoyable. A time to relish the shaking off of the constraints of an ordinary day to become something distinctly, if only mildly, extraordinary - a body in easy motion. I did some of my best thinking on those jaunts.

I don't think of my current 40 minute sessions as anything close to jaunts. They are sheer hard work. Somehow I'm given the grace to forget this when I'm not actually peddling away and I walk down to the gym vaguely expecting to enjoy myself - but that just doesn't happen, not these days. It could be, I suppose, that working against the highest resistance the machine has to offer is not the best strategy. I did this initially to slow myself down to prevent over-doing it, and to get the most out of every trip to the gym, but I'm now seriously thinking of a different approach - at least occasionally.

Of course, underlying all this is a simple truth. I'm too old now to enjoy the kind of rapid improvements in fitness levels that training used to render so easily, and I miss those days.

Hungry Again

One of the uncharacteristic features of my life for the last three weeks or so has been my inability to settle down to serious reading of a particular book. I've been reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue for quite some time yet I'm only round the halfway mark. Certainly it isn't a work that should be rushed, its various arguments being tightly, if cogently, argued and each step of the way demanding a certain reframing of perspectives. But still, despite the fascination of the ideas involved I've found it suspiciously easy to put down, as if part of me just doesn't want to make the effort to match up to its demands.
 
Then I thought I'd find myself swept away by Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, only to fail to manage take-off despite reading the opening chapters a couple of times now. I know I'll read it soon, but not immediately, just not being able to find the energy to get going on it. After that failure I thought I'd have no problem with Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which some kind soul gave me for my birthday. I was wrong. I ran out of steam about thirty pages in, despite enjoying what I'd read.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. I'm busy in terms of the Toad, work, but then I always am, so that isn't any kind of explanation. It feels curiously like a kind of burn-out.

Or, rather, it did until I picked up a paperback edition of James Shapiro's 1606, Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. I've been waiting for this to make itself available for months, and now it's finally in my sweaty palms - having found it in the inestimable Kinokuniya just now - nothing but nothing is going to get in the way of my reading this immediately. Maybe twice, just for the hell of it. Appetite restored, and how.

Lost Time

Watching something on the telly about cyclists in Malaysia I had a vivid memory of how important my bike was to me when I was around ten years old and living at Haughton Green. Our gang created what we considered a speedway track on a field near one of the schools up there, where we also built bonfires. I think we spent more time on our bikes in those days than on foot.

The local speedway team, the Belle Vue Aces were our great heroes. They seemed to win everything associated with the sport. But I don't think I ever actually saw them live, as it were. Hearing of their exploits was good enough for me.

Does speedway exist as a sport anymore? I imagine the Belle Vue Aces must have passed into legend long ago, along with the amusement park. Paradise lost, as it always is.

Differences

Just ten years ago I wrote this in my journal, relating to an interview I'd just undergone for my present employers:

I got back from the interview about an hour ago. It wasn't really at all like I expected it to be - not that I had formed any very clear picture of what might be going to take place. It was pretty informal, pretty short. This is a different country - they do things differently here. The good thing is that they were talking in terms of one year contracts. Now that would suit me down to the ground and lower.

 

The funny thing is that despite my applying for a number of jobs, this institution was the only one that replied, which made me keenly aware that at my advanced age (even then!) people weren't exactly falling over themselves to employ me. At the point of writing the above I was really quite casual about it all; now I realise how lucky I was to walk into another job with seeming ease at that time.

 

The difference I'm referring to above, between interviews here and those one undergoes in the UK for equivalent positions, was striking then, and remains so in my mind. Nobody gives you an easy ride getting into an English school, not in my experience anyway. Odd really - I suppose in a vague sort of fashion you'd expect things to be the other way around.

Battling

In the great battle of life I took a few knocks today, but managed a couple of small victories.

You'd think I might have outgrown military metaphors at my age, eh? Sad, but life won't let me.

The New English

It's one of those times of year in which I'm busy marking scripts from around the world. These days the marking comes to me on-line, which means I no longer have any idea of what geographical background any script in front of me is from. Previously examiners would receive thick envelopes of examination papers from clearly indicated locations - we'd know the specific schools involved. Now the scripts come at random. You download one and it could be answering any one of six essay questions, and it might occupy anything from less than a page (rare, but I got one this morning) to an upper limit of around ten sides or so. (My longest ever was sixteen sides of unreadable handwriting, that being the first script I ever marked for IB, believe it or not, which immediately made me consider giving up the job.) And the script could come from anywhere from Africa to Alaska, from Zimbabwe to New Zealand.

The striking thing is that I rarely, if ever, have the slightest idea as to the origins of a script. It isn't that the essays are all written in a neutral Standard English such that they all sound the same; rather, and this is the odd thing, most seem to be written in the same variety of slightly skewed English, such that one begins to recognise similar odd constructions that aren't terribly wrong but are never quite 'right' somehow. I find myself wondering whether the people writing these essays are all frequently talking to each other since so many of them seem to be saying the same kind of thing in the same slightly slanted kind of way.

One simple example: it's very common indeed to be told in answers that a writer uses a mood in order to portray a theme (especially if a kid is writing an essay related to a question on mood.) Since so many write this or something like it, I suppose that in their minds it means something, that they are thinking of an actual sequence of some kind a writer sets into motion. But what on earth takes place in the course of this process?

Of course, there are some very well written scripts and there are some which are barely coherent. But the vast majority occupy a shared territory in between the two extremes which appears to have developed its own variety of the language. And I'm really not sure at all if this is cause for celebration or complaint.

No Class

Somehow I contrived to miss the FA Cup Final yesterday. I completely lost track of what day it was to be played on, vaguely thinking it was Sunday, and had no idea of whether it was featured live on any of the channels we can get. I managed to watch the highlights on the Internet, but that didn't go far in making up for the excitement of the game live, and exciting it obviously was. Reminiscent of the final when Kevin Moran got himself sent off before we achieved an unlikely victory. And also a United side reminiscent of those inconsistent days.

Unfortunately the victory has been entirely overshadowed by the likely dismissal of Van Gaal and appointment of you-know-who. Now I'm quite a fan of the ex-Special One, but I shudder to think we're in an age when a manager can win a major trophy (well, what used to be major) and be unceremoniously shown the door on pretty much the same day. But then again I shuddered at the dismissal of Moyes given the fact that I thought they'd give a new manager time to actually manage.

Those days are long gone. The sense of continuity that used to underlie the game has gone with them. The turnover rate of players and coaches just about everywhere leaves no club with any real sense of identity, and I'm not at all sure that this will ultimately prove to be what the fans want.

Shelter From The Storm

About an hour ago seemingly out of nowhere came a sudden, violent storm. It didn't last too long, probably around fifteen minutes, but it made up in intensity for what it lacked in terms of duration. I paid witness through the front window and was very glad indeed there was something sturdy between me and the elements as I watched.

It was a reminder of one of the few pleasures of English life I miss: the sense of utter cosiness you enjoy when you're in a gorgeously warm house on a freezing cold day, with no need to venture out. Utterly selfish of course, there'll always be some poor souls out there for whatever reason, but deeply satisfying at some primitive level of feeling.