It's an odd quirk of my personality that no matter how burdensome marking might feel I don't really mind it because it's so fundamental to my work. On the other hand, put me in an urgent meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with the kids I teach and will be of no possible benefit to them and I'm liable to blow a gasket.
Yes, it's been one of those days.
Around about this time last year I was valiantly attempting to wrap my poor, tired, aged brain around issues attendant upon AI in education. I still am, and in my small part of the world complicated things have become even more complicated both at the practical level of real problems in the classroom, as it were, and the big philosophical problems looming behind it all. I have no answers and even my questions are confused. So it all remains, as it was for me in August 2025, exciting, destabilising and frightening, but now 'very, very' all those instead of just 'very'.
It seems there a significant number of folks out there who regard themselves as 'content creators', presumably for the Internet. And, again, presumably, some of them, maybe most, do well out of this in financial terms.
The day someone tells me I too am a content creator (of anything, but most likely this very Far Place) is the day I finally shut up shop completely. Just saying.
(And if that makes folks content, then so be it. Hah!)
Alexis Petridis came up with a particularly excellent 'ranking' article in the Graun last week centred on The Kinks (though, I must say, I'm a bit puzzled he didn't go for the 50 greatest songs, at the very least.) And this had put in mind of giving various Kinks' CDs a spin over the weekend. But funnily enough I decided to kick off with a Ray Davies solo album, Working Man's Cafe, before plunging into the hard stuff. Not sure why. Possibly because I'd generally enjoyed the CD when I first acquired it, but thought of it as a bit routine. Not genuinely inspiring stuff. And I wondered if I might have been wrong.
Yes, I was. I gave it a spin on Saturday and every track worked for me, with the title track and Imaginary Man as bona fide classics, up there in the very crowded RD top ten tunes of all time. I suppose I'd finally listened often enough to tune in completely.
I followed that with my compilation CD of all the singles up to 1970 and, as I knew I would be, was blown away by the variety & simple brilliance of it all. It's so strange to think that we all took songs as profoundly beautiful as Waterloo Sunset and Days for granted when they first came out, as if we had some kind of right to be delivered works of genius almost as the throwaways of pop culture. And after that it had to be The Village Green Preservation Society - at which point it came to me that somehow The Kinks had managed to encapsulate in one album all of my feelings about what England has somehow carelessly lost.
Finished everything off by viewing a clip of Ray Davies's 2010 set at Glastonbury at which he dedicated the two songs I mentioned in the previous paragraph to the recently deceased Pete Quaife, the original bassist with the band, and a very tasty player indeed. At which point I dissolved.
I found myself back at the doctor's across the road this morning, having blood drawn for yet another test ordained by MOM before they'll grant me a pass to work here next year. The last time I spoke to the doc was just ahead of the World Cup semi-final in mid-July when we'd talked seriously of it coming home. Today I launched into my rant concerning the ubiquities of a certain German coach following the scoring of England's goal around the 55th minute. Funnily enough I'd launched into a pretty much identical monologue last night talking to Peter & Chris. (Oddly Lia didn't seem interested at all.) I'm now hopping it's all out of my system, but suspect I'm likely to get triggered again before the year is out.
Funnily enough the news regarding my own medical condition continues to get better despite my bitterness over the events of July - though both the doc and myself proclaimed justice had finally been done with Spain's victory. It turns out that a chest x-ray requested by MOM earlier proved astonishingly clear according to the doc. He'd had a sight of the scans of my lungs as they were in late 2022 and 2023, distressingly full to the brim with an unpleasant looking grunge, so he thought the latest x-ray would show some scarring of my breathing apparatus. But it didn't, which left left me a very happy soldier.
I celebrated by performing some pretty impressive dance moves for The Missus in a free-form interpretation of The Kinks' You Really Got Me later in the afternoon. But she just seemed to find these funny rather than alluring. There's no accounting for taste, is there?
Spent the evening at the cinema watching the latest Spiderman movie. Very young, very enthusiastic audience for the screening. Enjoyed them having a great time. Personally felt the thing was too long, too loud visually, too angsty, too complicated, too much. But appreciated the fact that it was well crafted for an audience that might appreciate those qualities.
And, of course, I'm too old.
Got to the gym for the first time since running that foolhardy 5 km at West Coast Park. The debilitating ache in my thigh muscles had finally eased by this morning and I was keen to see if I could handle my usual stint on the elliptical trainer without undue strain. I did, but only just.
Sometimes just keeping going is enough.
I've been airing a clip or two from the classic Elia Kazan movie of Streetcar in the classroom. Fascinating to watch Brando re-inventing acting. Munching & mumbling his way through the Napoleonic code sequence.
And the sweat! And the itching! (Another bit.)
Made me think of the last time I watched On The Waterfront and came to the conclusion that he was acting in a different movie from everyone else. A better one.
It's been a long sort of day - which day isn't? - but it occurred to me some five minutes ago that, all in all, it had gone well and was, to most, if not all, intents and purposes, over. I suppose marking my last essay of the day contributed to my general sense of well-being. And then it all sort of fell apart.
I don't mean that anything particularly unfortunate happened. Simply, whatever energy I had possessed up to that point mysteriously dissipated and I felt almost completely spent. I had nothing left to offer the world; not that the world seemed to care.
Indeed, in the utter flatness of it all I found that odd freedom of not caring in any way at all about anything whatsoever. In its way it's a pleasant state to be in, for a few minutes or so. But best to leave behind before it becomes addictive.
