Just Playing

I want to stay here forever, said this little lass this morning as we got to the end of our second VIA session with the kids from Heartfriends. My basketball guys had just done a stellar job in keeping a bunch of primary school children occupied in the physical sense, sort of teaching them the skills of the game, but mainly just getting them running around mindlessly and having great fun.

What is it about children and running? Watching their obvious exhilaration when they are chasing the ball, each other, or outsize basketball players twice as big as they are, is a reminder of kids' capacity for simple, sheer joy, coming into being out of nowhere.

By Heart

Good to read an article on the Channel News Asia website relating to poetry. Even better to find it's about the value of memorising the stuff. When I was at school setting memorisation as an  exercise was still fairly common. By the time I became a teacher it was unusual, but always effective. The article seems open to the idea it might become a fashionable strategy in education again, but I doubt that will happen. It's so obviously straightforward and deeply powerful that it will never appeal to those who want anything 'progressive' to sound pointlessly complex.

In Order

It's that time of year when I endeavour to clean-up all the books & mags & sundries at home and at work. Given the lassitude I surrendered to over the weekend I knew it might prove difficult to get going today. And so it did. But I did.

In the event it was only a beginning as this year I'm making the exercise extra-meticulous. So progress was slow, which suited my mood, but steady, which it had to be to ensure all gets done in reasonable time. Given the fact I've got a fair amount of work-related stuff to do, the next few days will demand some planning. 

Better than just snoring through the days, I guess.

At Rest

Have enjoyed a very restful weekend featuring plentiful sleep. Yesterday I nodded off any number of times in the afternoon and evening as well as getting to bed early and sleeping soundly. And then I somehow managed to nap this morning despite getting up quite late. It was a good thing we went out this afternoon otherwise I suspect I would have further luxuriated in the land of nod - and added to a mild headache I developed from over-sleeping (I suspect.)

Am now planning to make myself get up and doing stuff tomorrow to avoid another thick head.

Positive Results

Had an appointment with my back doc this morning and am happy to report that my spine seems to be in pretty good working order. I can't recall a single problematic episode in the second half of the year (so far) which is a bit of a record. I was also pleased that the doc expressed surprise (in a positive sense) at the results I recorded on blood pressure & weight & stuff recorded when I checked in at his new office space. Previously this kind of check wasn't carried out so I don't think he had much of an idea as to what I usually score. It seems I have the pulse rate of a much younger man and, since it's definitely my rate & not someone else's, this suggests that my little work-outs at the gym are having a positive effect.

When people - those who are aware of how just touch & go things were for me in late 2022 - inquire about my health I'm apt to say I've never felt better, and today's numbers appear to back me up on this. Of course, all this could easily fall apart, and quickly so, as past experience proves, but I'll happily take the results for now.

Quite A Promise

We went to pick-up a new set-box from Singtel this afternoon to enable us to actually access the channels we pay them for. The previous box failed about two weeks after installation and we just couldn't be bothered to renew the thing for a couple of months. We made the arrangement for a new 'plan' to go with the box before Noi went on her Norway jaunt, but for reasons that escaped me we needed to get the necessary from a different shop on Orchard Road. Anyway we found the place tucked away at the back of one of the big shopping centres and duly picked it up. 

But here's the thing. In a large slogan emblazoned on one of its walls the shop announced itself as a One Stop Fulfilment Centre. (I'm not making this up.) It struck me that even the Vatican doesn't go as far as that. Some danger of over-promising there, I gently suggest. Though the set-box is working, at least for the moment. Not sure I feel exactly fulfilled, however.

Matters Of Opinion

Everyone's entitled to their opinion. It's just that mine is right and yours is wrong.

Worth Listening To

Chanced upon a fascinating account from Donald Hall, the American poet, regarding his interviewing of Ezra Pound, the even more famous-cum-notorious American poet and fascist sympathiser. Hall is wonderfully balanced on the subject, showing great generosity of spirit towards the deeply flawed genius.

I'm troubled to some degree though by some of the voices in the Comments section accompanying the video. Pretty much anything featuring Pound on YouTube gets these weirdly admiring comments relating to his economic ideas and disabling prejudices. And the funny thing is that the stuff that features Pound directly, on camera or just his spoken voice, immediately comes across as more than a bit off to any discerning listener. Given the choice of spending time with one of these writers I know which one I'd choose (and benefit from listening to.)

Perchance To Dream

I was talking today to a colleague who's been dealing with a severe sleep disorder for the best part of the year. It's quite remarkable that the colleague in question has dealt with this so well that I don't think anyone else suspects there has been a problem. Indeed, I wouldn't have guessed had I not been told. I can remember only one morning in the whole year when they looked somewhat out of sorts, and I only noticed that because it seemed to me so atypical.

The ability of people to deal with quite extraordinary personal difficulties and somehow transcend them continues to surprise me, even after many years of encountering such. It also continues to puzzle me why organisations develop so-called 'systems' that assume people can be relied on as high-functioning machines that rarely if ever malfunction.

Our capacity to switch off and sleep (and possibly dream) tells us, thankfully, otherwise.

Sheer Delight

Over the weekend I also finished reading Ted Hughes: Collected Poems for Children. Definitely a book I'll go back to over and over. Such a pity that the wonderful, sympathetically imaginative, illustrations by Raymond Briggs only apply to a limited range of the text. If they'd been featured on every page I think the volume might have been acknowledged as one of the greatest ever 'books for kids'. As it is, it's breathtakingly rewarding. Part of me suspects that some of TH's poems for younger readers might out-live his work for adults.

Actually on putting the book back on my shelves I immediately felt like taking down my copy of What is the Truth?, but since I'd just read the poems involved in the Collected that seemed a bit like over-doing it. Though I would like to read it soon and remind myself of how the connecting prose narrative works.

It looks like the poetry book that will be coming off the shelves is my Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, in the Penguin edition I got hold of in the late 1970s. I was thinking of holding back on the read-throughs of my various collecteds / completes after struggling a wee bit earlier in the year on the epic Robert Lowell reading, but I feel I've got my breath back after reading the Hughes (as I suspected I might.) And I'm still holding off buying any new books until I finally retire. Though if I see any exciting single volumes when we visit the UK that resolution may just crumble - hence the fact that I'm officially putting the Vaughan on hold until the new year.