My Secret Garden

I saw an old man sat alone in the corner of the pub. I guessed he was in his late seventies and he looked familiar though I couldn't place him from where. At that point two men entered the pub and sat at his table. One of the men was middle aged and the other looked younger and they both carried themselves confidently, arrogantly even.
They struck up a conversation with the old man though conversation was not perhaps the right description as it seemed entirely one way with the two younger men talking and the old man saying nothing.
The men's voices were loud and impossible to ignore even though most people present seemed to be trying hard too. One of the men told the old man that "He had fucked his Grand daughter!" Both men seemed to find this hilarious, though the old man looked broken by what he had heard. At that point the two men like nasty children ordered by their teacher to apologise pretended to look sincere and then looked at each other and cracked into giggles before the younger one began a song which went something like this,

said something I didn't have oughta, like I had sex with your granddaughter. But it was consensual and she wasn't menstrual, it was consensual lovely sex. It was full of respect I sent her a text, I've asked her to marry me

As I said most people in the pub were trying hard to ignore what they heard as after all what can you do? However, a group of young men in the corner seemed to be enjoying it, nudging each other and laughing particularly when the old man began to become a bit distraught. One of them got out his mobile phone and began to record it, "Let's get it on fucking youtube." He told his friends.
Well the two men left the pub laughing and on the way I overheard them say

No one could have been offended by anything that went on then
Who could possibly be offended by anything there? If they were they are crazy people.

And I wondered when being openly offensive to an old man had become radical and daring or even funny.

My new partner drew this of me. It's rather lovely don't you think?

Within the sands of the deserts lie the dormant seeds of long dead plants. Without water they simply lie buried, seemingly lifeless, waiting patiently sometimes for years for the rains to come and release them. Their lives are short, they must grow and flower and disperse their seeds and wither and die in that brief time between the rain beginning to fall and the desert becoming parched again.

And sometimes my life can feel a bit like that. Much of the time alone, coccooned in my rented house waiting. Waiting to see my kids and become Dad again or waiting to see my partner.
Otherwise a dormant emptiness.

Puritanism:

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken

I was reading the Guardian last week and came across this quote describing the causes of the collapse of the Icelandic Banks.

Twenty years ago, a world financial crisis might barely have touched Iceland. Today though, it is, in the economists' phrase, globally engaged. And while by a cruel irony it never even touched the toxic sub-prime stuff that proved everyone else's downfall, it is still the meltdown in microcosm: driven, like the rest of us, to the brink of ruin by profit-hungry risk-takers who had closed their eyes to the dangers of what they were doing.

And when I picture the current credit crunch I see the egotistical, narcissists of 'The Apprentice', people for who right and wrong have no meaning and for whom caution is despised as a tool of the weak. They know with such certainty that they are right that they are ready to bully, cheat and lie in order to get their way. In management terms I guess this would be described as "Having the drive to realise your vision." Criticism has no valuable function in this world, it is seen as wholly negative.
Where, of course, criticism is absolutely vital. Perfectly illustrated by the Challenger Disaster in 1986 where NASA management dismissed the safety concerns of the engineers working on the Space Shuttle as the carping of unimportant people who were insufficiently positive.
As the great Richard Feymnan said after the inevitable accident, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

If you value simply peoples ambition and drive and remove any sense of right or wrong then it is not surprising that you encourage unscrupulous risk takers who are quite happy to play fast and loose with other peoples money. Compounded, of course, by a system that ties bonuses to sales but with out any accountability. "Who cares if they can't pay the money back, I've made my sale, now where's my bonus?"

Perhaps we just need some institutions to be cautious and reliable. Like foundations to a house they are not glamorous and sexy but absolutely necessary all the same. In this spirit, perhaps banks would have done a better job for us all if their managers were a little more like Captain Mainwaring and an awful lot less like Gordon Gecko.

This is the last ... by timsuzi Pro @ 2007-10-07 – 22:32:20
This is the last time that I will sit in this room and type as tomorrow I must be gone from here. The children and I have spent our last weekend together in our family home and tonight the eldest, the youngest and I walked from room to room hand in hand and said goodbye.
My son and I then went out into the garden hugged and wept with the stars above shining down upon us so brightly. He promised me that when he grew up he would buy me a house in Cardinham, how blessed I have been with my children.
And now I am alone in an empty house and I need to find oblivion to stop the ghosts from our past haunting me and not letting me sleep.
Oblivion tonight is to be achieved through a bottle of Jura Whisky.

Goodnight from Touchwood, Cardinham.

Tim xx

When I thought of today I remembered this poem,

When will the bell ring and end this weariness?
How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart
My pack of unruly hounds: I cannot start
Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,
I can haul them and urge them no more.
No more can I endure to bear the brunt
Of the books that lie out on the desks: a full three score
of several insults of blotted pages and scrawl
of slovely work that they have offered me.
I am sick, and tired more than any thrall
Upon the woodstacks working wearily.

And shall I take,
The last dear fuel and heap it on my soul
Til I rouse my will like a fire to consume,
Their dross of indifference and burn the scroll
Of their insults in punishment? - I will not!
I will not waste myself to embers for them
Not all for them shall the fires of my life be hot,
For myself a heap of ashes of weariness, till sleep
Shall I have raked the embers clear: I will keep
Some of my strength for myself, for if I should sell
It all for them, I should hate them -
I will sit and wait for the bell.

Afternoon in School DH Lawrence

Do you remember how you felt on May 1st 1997? Did you feel that it was the beginning of a new era or did you think that Tony Blair's New Labour were just a party without any ideological core dedicated to just winning at any cost?

I remember that for many it seemed that with the Tories defeated then somehow life would not only be better but it would be happier too as if by slaying Thatcher's Dragon we could all venture out into the light again and see that the world was beautiful.

And now we are near the end and our relationship as a country with Gordon Brown seems like that between a couple on the edge of divorce. A time when even ones virtues come to be seen as vices and the brightness and joy of the wedding day seem to have happened to someone else so distant and alien does it seem.

Now I really should declare myself here as I was an early fan of Tony Blair and believe to this day that a Labour Party led by the virtuous John Smith would still have come just a close second to the Tories at election time and if you think that's ok then you really believe that it is better to be right and impotent rather than to compromise and have the power to really change things.

You see when Tony Blair said "Tough on Crime, Tough on the Causes of Crime" I really took notice. As a teacher I am part of a system that really doesn't hold to Tony's truism when translated to education which would be "Tough on Bad behaviour, Tough on the Causes of Bad Behaviour". We don't like to be tough on bad behaviour as that smacks of punishment and punishment is a 'bad' thing. So we explain, their behavior is a product of forces we cannot control or condemn, or it is a sickness. There is even still a little part of education that thinks that expecting children to behave is to coin a Seventies phrase "Imposing Middle Class Values on Working Class Kids" as if expecting kids not to victimise the weak is somehow the parallel of eating peas with your knife. Within that rather warped view bad behaviour is somehow almost to be sneakily admired as it is sticking up fingers to authority making bullies and thugs heroes of the Revolution if only they could be properly politicised.

So Tony seemed to be with me on that, acknowledging that crime and bad behaviour needs tackling face on as well as working to remove the causes.

I was also with him when he said he wanted to do what worked and not to be hidebound by ideology. This seemed to make perfect sense to me but sadly we disagreed on our measure of what worked for Tony that often seemed to be 'business' and not a cautious and thorough scientific approach hence the spreading of consultancy like some virus and solutions always 'top down' because Mr Blair and colleagues didn't trust the rank and file. Perhaps that was because they had lived through a Labour Party that had almost committed suicide and so they felt they genuinely did know best but that is no excuse for arrogance and a high handed refusal to listen to and value genuinely those that do the job which you wish to change. Through that attitude very little gets changed in education because those that have to do the job, do what works and simply pay lip service to the bullshit.

But I wonder what the people of Sierre Leone and Kosovo and also Northern Ireland think of Mr Blair and New Labour. For them things did get better and in a way that the rest of us perhaps hoped for ourselves but maybe we were foolish to expect politicians to make us happier, perhaps that is simply not within their power?

I wonder if any of you can identify where these four statues are?

A School for Angels

Are you sitting comfortably? Well believe me one of you won’t be by the end of the story!

Now you may find this far fetched but angels do in fact need training and have to attend school. Normally the selection process is straightforward with the obviously good recently dead being chosen. However, sometimes things don’t go quite so smoothly. People are economical with the truth in the interview with St. Peter, or claim a little overmuch in their cv’s. These people are easy to weed out in class due to their transparently evil answers to basic ethical questions and have to attend purgatory until they can gain a ‘Good’ kitemark. No the problems at angel school come from those that have actually led blameless lives but who really wanted to be a bit more, shall we say wicked, but were too afraid when alive to give in to their dark and devious urges. Now with the prospect of eternity ahead of them they feel a bit freer to experiment as what is one year of mischief when set against an infinite number of years?

Now our story concerns Tim, who certainly fits the latter category. Tim was rather surprised to be even attending the school in the first place what with the Not Believing in God which he would have considered to have been held against him. Still there he was at the front of the class fluffing up his wings and polishing his halo and wondering whether spending his afterlife in school was some cruel joke that fate had played on him as after all he had died of a heart attack in the middle of teaching a rather stimulating lesson on The Haber Process!

The room hushed and a rather tall, and if truth be told, somewhat scary angel entered. “My name is Veronica and I am the Head Mistress of this academy. Our teaching is a little traditional here but you know what it says in he Bible, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the angel’ She let out a little laugh and all the angels joined in hoping to gain a little favour with her. Tim winced, ‘How could they all be such toadies?’ he thought. At which point his halo fell off his head and hit the floor with a loud clang. The Head mistress looked at him and smiled. “No doubt we will be seeing a lot of each other in the coming weeks.” Tim gave her his best angelic smile before slipping his halo back on.

To be continued ……….

Things went quite smoothly for a little while but one day the angels regular teacher was ill. Didn’t you realize there are still illnesses in heaven? Whatever did you think happened to good viruses when they died? Anyway the lessons were covered by a supply angel. The topic of the day was ‘Intelligent Design’ and Tim and his new friend Dawkins had a rare old time asking ‘innocently’ about the human appendix and wasn’t it rather inefficient that 90% of cheetahs died before reaching adulthood which got the supply angel so flustered that she called for the Head Teacher for clarification and the Head Teacher herself got rather muddled too when it was pointed out to her that when the animals went into Noah’s Ark if two bacteria started on the gangplank by the time they reached the ark itself they would have multiplied about fifty thousand times which seemed a bit of an unfair advantage on all the other animals present and also in the cramped and potentially unhygienic conditions present on the Ark rather a health risk too. The Head Teacher suggested that while on the Ark the microorganisms had called a truce which conjured up the strange picture of large numbers of bored bacteria with nothing to do but swish their flagellae all day.
I’m sure Tim would have been forgiven for his innocent mischief making but that night in the dormitory he pushed his luck too far. You see Tim made a little discovery about halos which was that when thrown they made the perfect Frisbee and with a little skill they could be made to come back to you like a boomerang. So while all the other angels were tucked up in bed saying their prayers he was out in the corridor perfecting his technique. Now the speed at which the halo returned depended on the amount of spin put on it. Tim was getting quite confident and perhaps overdid the spin as his halo completed a perfect return journey but then shot over his head and through a stained glass window depicting Saint Jude ‘The Patron Saint of Lost Causes’. Before he could think of running a door swung open and there was Veronica, the Head Mistress.
“Tim collect your halo and report to my office immediately!” Was all that needed saying and Tim did as he was bid. Veronica’s office was a little way down the corridor, certainly far enough for Tim to build up a sense of trepidation. Inside, it was booklined, there was a desk with a plain chair behind it, a dark oak cupboard and surprisingly a piano and piano stool. On the desk was a laptop computer. Veronica switched it on.
“On your first day here I explained that our education was traditional and that also includes our discipline.” Tim shuffled awkwardly.
“I believe that nowadays it is customary to give choices to those that can’t behave. Is that correct?” Tim nodded. “Well here is your choice, you can go to Purgotary or accept my punishment which will be a soundly spanked bottom. To aid you in your choice I will show you a glimpse of your personal purgatory.” Deftly, Veronica selected an icon with a P
“Oh God not PowerPoint” Tim thought . But it wasn’t, the screen cleared and it was a movie. Tim recognised the scene at once and also recognised the person at the front. “Good morning class I will be your chemistry teacher for the next forty years. Today’s topic is permanent and temporary hard water.” Tim had already seen enough to make his decision.
“I’ll take the spanking.” He said.
“I think that is the correct choice.” Veronica said. “One more choice, however, will you be spanked for two minutes on your pants or one minute on your bare bottom?”
“Ill take the minute .” Tim said a little anxiously.
“Put your halo on the desk , fold up your wings and come and stand by me.”
Tim did as he was told. Veronica sat on the piano stool and turned Tim to face the clock on the wall. She swiftly undid the top button of his trousers and lowered them to his knees. She patted her lap and Tim lay across it. She put her thumb into the band at the top of his underpants and firmly pulled them down. Tim felt the cool night air on his exposed bottom. He turned his head to look into her eyes and then almost imperceptibly she winked at him and then the clock begun to chime and the first stinging swipe landed on his buttocks and Tim realised that after all that he had led a good life and was receiving his very own personal reward in heaven.