My Secret Garden

Sorry...

2009-11-18T23:07:37+01:00

Tim apologises to all his blog-friends, he hasn't gone forever, but BT have not honoured their agreement regarding Broadband and he is unable to access the internet at the moment.

He looks forward to replying to everybody when he is able to get back online - hopefully on the 24th November

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Not to worry you but ..Moving House - Part 1

2009-11-14T18:34:42+01:00

Well I’m back online, did you miss me?
Now I have read recently that moving home is somewhere near the bottom of the top ten most stressful activities that one can experience, below divorce (done that), losing your job (yep done that one too) and going to prison (mmm – rather glad I haven’t experienced that but there is still time ....) and I felt that if I planned ahead then surely I could take it all within my stride as at least this time I wanted to move .......
The day before I move I phone the Estate Agent to find out about collecting the keys and am told that when my solicitor transfers the money, traditionally at mid day then the keys are released to me, sounds perfectly fine and so I phone the solicitor to check that everything is fine there. As ever the solicitor is with a client but his secretary says “I am sure that if there was any problem then Mr M___ would have contacted you by now.” Well life has taught me that you can never be too sure so I give the secretary my home phone number as well as my mobile number and tell her that I have no signal where I live and that if there is a problem then please could I be contacted at home, she assures me that this message will be past on and reassured I ring off ........
I arrive home to a living room full of boxes and an otherwise empty house with the exception of my bedroom which still has a made up bed in place and the one source of heat within the great barn of a place which is a small fan heater. I snuggle into bed and am joined by my two cats and as I have heard nothing from the solicitor I settle down for an early night and by my standards, a reasonably good nights sleep.

Today is moving day, the phone rings and it is the removal firm to say that they are on their way and will be with me within the hour. I make myself a cup of tea, set my work for school and email it in and begin to tidy around, the phone rings upstairs and without any rushing I climb the stairs and pick it up.
It’s the solicitor, he tried my mobile yesterday and not to make me worry but not all the money has come through from my bank and he cannot complete. I try to fight the rising anxiety and tell him a little white lie which is ‘How on earth can we not complete as the removal firm are already here putting boxes in their van’ the white lie becomes a truth as I hear the sounds of a diesel engine pulling up outside the house.....

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A Time for Every Purpose

2009-11-01T22:48:58+01:00

The house is empty now apart from the room next door which is full of cardboard boxes, bin bags and piles of plates, cutlery and books ready for the removal firm to pack tomorrow. It feels strange to be going but thankfully it is nothing like the pain of last time as then I was saying goodbye to the home that I had loved and now I am just looking forward to having somewhere which is my own again.
Packing is always poignant because you have constant reminders of the past and we have been pretty ruthless this time so treasured possessions from the past have ended up going on their final journey to the charity shop or the dump which brought back memories of

Saddest of all for me was disposing of the diorama that the children and I had made five years ago for my son to play with his Lord of the Rings figures on. He is no longer a boy anymore and this was a sharp reminder of this.

When I left Cardinham I felt that the whole house was alive with the ghosts of my past but this place does not feel as haunted, it has been in many ways a waiting room, the Wood between Worlds of Narnia with me preparing to begin life properly again though there has been much happiness here too. I think, for example, of my lover and her preparing a Burns Night supper for me when we had not long met and her joy as she danced for me.

So raise a glass for me tonight and wish me well for in two days I will be gone from here.

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October

2009-10-19T20:44:54+02:00

I looked back to the earliest days of my blog today and what a different world it described, a world that I barely recognise now. In fact, that there was once a time when I was married and would come home to a family seems within my mind at least just a story that I once heard and not something that was ever real.
http://sulkandpout.blog.co.uk/2006/04/01/my_son~695121/
It seems almost impossible to grasp that each night for seventeen years I would sleep with someone who now only ever joins me in my dreams as a figure to argue and fight with. How hard to imagine that there was once a time when I felt that she would be my companion until death.

Other Octobers drift into my mind, two years ago I was leaving behind the home that I loved, as I am preparing to move on from the big pink elephant that I rent now. But what a change, then I was grief stricken http://sulkandpout.blog.co.uk/2007/10/07/this_is_the_last~3100286/
and now I am simply glad to move on before this house fall in on top of me! I'm looking forward to having a garden that I can tend do and simply being able to declare that somewhere is my home rather than feeling that I am in a waiting room waiting.

Further back still and I am a child in a balaclava gathering chestnuts on Tilburstow Hill with my mother who is ten years younger than I am now, I am a teenager being sick at my best friend's party having drunk too much whisky, I am getting married and I have no-one to talk too about my worries, I am scoring my first try for the rugby club, I am breaking someones heart, all of them somehow me though each feels so different and so far away.

Time sweeps by, never stopping, always onward like some incurable optimist looking to the next challenge but I have always stopped and looked back though the tide always pulls in the opposite direction.

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A Gift - Virtually

2009-10-15T07:50:35+02:00

I know some of you visit the Secret Garden quite often but maybe for somebody today this will be there first time.
Whichever one you are, step through the wrought iron gate that marks the entrance, or if you are brave the scale the ivy covered red brick walls and follow the path through the autumnal trees to the jetty on the ornamental lake. At the jetty step into the boat and row across the now cold and leaf strewn waters of the lake to the island in the middle. Again, if you are brave stroke the giant golden carp that will breach the surface around you but take care as some of the creatures that live within this still bowl are not so benevelent. Moor the boat and take the stone steps up to the folly. The folly is a tall tower made just high enough for the island to be a mountain. Within the tower take the wooden staircase to the top.At the top is a room with one ornate wooden chest within it.
Open the chest and leave something behind that is personal to you and a note to say why you have left it.
The Garden will now always have something of you within it.

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Black Dwarf or Black Hole?

2009-10-10T13:39:27+02:00

I got to thinking about what I would do if I decided to quit blogging. Some people simply delete their blogs entirely and all their own creativity, over months and even years, is sucked into a black hole alongside the thoughts of everyone who ever commented on their blog. It as if they never existed. Now I understand people's reasons for doing this, it could be that what you had written was something that could destroy a relationship or your career and guess under those circumstances I would probably think it a wise move.

Ohter people delete their blog because they no longer like the me that it represents. They are angry and want a new me to replace it with, as if they can only be reborn as a phoenix from the ashes of what was. Now I understand that also because I have done similar things with photographs and then spent years regretting the fact that I have very few photographs of me and my first girlfriend.

So what of my own blog if I cease to write. I think I would leave it be in cyberspace. Like a small star at the end of its life cooling down until it is just a black dwarf, an ember in the sky, a reminder of what once was. My blog after all is my own partial story of my life and so I have never deleted anything because it is a record of what I felt at that time and I find it quite comforting that someone sometime in the future will enter certain keywords into the search engines of that day and chance upon my life and my thoughts and perhaps it will entertain them or sadden them but in some way I, even if from beyond the grave, my influence will still be there albeit in the smallest of ways.

And if she still chances by my blog good luck to Anna ABE unlimited whose blog disappearing prompted this post. She wrote many beautiful things and always took the trouble to comment in full on my own and always corteously even when we disagreed strongly. I know she was troubled and I hope ending her blog was not in part caused by that.

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Filthesses

2009-10-04T22:06:23+02:00

I was listening to 'The News Quiz' on friday and one of the questions concerned the two police women who were told by OFSTED that they coouldn't look after each others children on a recipricol relationship because they would be 'benefitting' from it.
But for once I'm not going to bang on about OFSTED but instead the reactions of the panellists to an item about the police.
Mark Steel proceeded to launch into a tirade about the police which seemed interminable, though probably lasted only a minute and a half and included the word useless at least twelve times. Apparently nowhere else are there such useless public servants with such a low success rate, though perhaps Mark is missing the point here as criminals don't want to get caught making them substantially different to you and I when we go to the Doctors with the symptoms of Swine Flu.
Taking on the baton from Mark was Sue Perkins who referred 'hilariously' to the two women police officers as 'Filthesses'(Female version of filth Tee Hee). Now Sue clearly considers herself to be edgy and dangerous for making such a comment but to me she was playing to the prejudices of her audience in a way that Tarby and Bruce would have been proud of back in the Nineteen Seventies but sadly she is, if that's possible, even less funny than they were.

And I wondered if it would be possible to refer to any other public servant and compare them literally to dirt? Personally, if I had been a copper on duty at Broadcasting House that night I would have let the local criminal underworld know that the car park would be fair game for the next half hour and turn a very blind eye and deaf ear to the cries for help from the braying multitude who considered me and my colleagues so useless.

Does Mark Steel really consider that the police are so useless. For me the Left in this country consider them rather as the public treats the Tommies in the Kipling poem

And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out the brute,
but it's saviour of this country when the guns begin to shoot.

Now I am not naive enough to believe that the police are all noble and utterly public spirited but I do believe that they do an incredibly tough job that I would not wish to do and an entirely necessary one as this quote from Steven Pinker reveals.

As a young teenager in proudly peacable Canada during the romantic 1960's, i was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parent's argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8.00 a.m on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal Police went on strike. By 11.20 a.m the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting .... By the end of the day six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty car loads of store front glass had been broken and three million dollars in property damage has been inflicted before city authorities had to call in the army and , of course, the Mounties to restore order.This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters

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Playing in the attic

2009-09-28T07:53:43+02:00

When I was a little boy I had a friend who I would play with and one of our favourite games was to explore his attic. First we'd make sure that all the lights were off and then armed only with a torch we'd climb from his landing into the attic using a knotted piece of rope. Once in the attic we would crawl through the junk and boxes squeezing our bodies through tiny cracks and then through the hardboard partition to the rafters. At times we would switch the torch off and sit in darkness the only sound being the water in the cold water tank and the sounds of our own heartbeats and breathing . My friend didn't seem to possess much of an imagination but for me I would make up endless stories about where we were and why we were there and what might happen if we were caught!

So let's play now, imagine we are in the attic together.

You find a box full of letters, who are they from and why were they sent?

In an old trunk is a photograph. Who is it of? How is that person connected to you?

If you were playing with me what would the attic be in your imagination? Who would you be? Who would I be?

Who might be trying to catch you? What would happen if they did? Do you secretly want to be captured?

In the corner is a favourite childhood toy that you thought had been long lost. What is it?

You find a small door in the end of the attic. Behind the door is a passage. Where does the passage lead?

You hear a voice calling you home for tea. Do you ignore it and pretend you never heard it or do you leave the attic?

It's your turn to pick a place to play with me. Where would it be?

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Return to Strangles

2009-09-20T09:58:11+02:00

This is my first weekend on my own for some time so as I have been rather neglectful of my photography and I thought I would return to a beach on the North Cornish Coast that I particularly love and see if I could recapture some of my creative spirit.
The beach is called The Strangles and is found below Cornwall's highest cliffs though they are a strange tumbled down sort of cliff made from loose rock, great slabs of which fracture and slide into the sea. Within the rocks hardy plants like heathers and brambles grow unaware that at any moment they could be pitched downhill as the earth that they are rooted in subsides.
At low tide there is a large expanse of sand but it is not a beach to swim at as the currents are dangerous and the waves often huge, but it is a special place and because of the long walk in it is one that you can often have to yourself.
But yesterday, I was somewhat shocked that there were five people also there and three of them were naked!
At first I could not get my eye in for photography, I always say to myself that today 'I cannot see' but I've been doing this long enough to just be patient and wait for the picture to just tap me on my shoulder and say 'look I'm here' so instead I sat on a large slab of slate and read a book about Annie Darwin while intermittanly checking the vast waves that were crashing closer and closer to where I sat. Eventually, the tide forced me to retreat and then in the corner of my eye I caught two figures tentatively picking their way along the rocks on the far beach already almost cut off by the surging waves. Now I swim like a brick and the nearest life belt is 200 feet up the cliff (with a nice little sign that tells you that in an emergency the nearest phone is a mile and a half away!) but even so I began to get anxious for them and set off towards them picking my way across the rocks with a real sense of urgency.
When I got to the far end of the beach I noticed that they were two older men, one about ten years older than me and the other in his, I guess late seventies. I asked if they were ok and they told me they were fine so I walked back with them to the steps up the cliff making polite conversation as you do at which point the younger of the two set off up the cliff leaving his older companion behind who continued to engage me in conversation. After a few minutes I start to feel that the conversation is taking a rather strange turn which is not helped by him producing a plastic bag containing photographs of him with not a stitch of clothing taken, apparently, by a member of the House of Lords!
And I wonder how it is always me that gets into these sort of situations when I have just tried to be helpful? Fortunately, I have a great conversation stopper as I have photography of my own to do and I head back onto the far shore of the beach with the thundering sound of the waves echoing of the cliffs to accompany me.

And now, I get my eye in and picture begin to reveal themselves as the sun falls and becomes golden revealing the texture and form of the rocks and the sea that is crashing against them. I am alone now on the beach and this is how I work best, I cannot 'see' when I have the distractions of company but need to lose myself in where I am and return to the child who would have been terrified and awe struck to be here.

But actually, I am not alone as just beyond the breakers I have been joined by two large grey seals and you know what I am always thrilled by the sight of large, wild creatures. The sun now is almost setting and reaches a bank of clouds on the horizon, the warm glow of its light is replaced by a cold blue light that suits the dark, wet slate of the shingle. One more picture as the waves crash in and recede leaving trails of foam and then its time to pack up and begin the steep climb back up the cliff.

PS The photographs described may in fact be pants as they were taken on slide film and will have to go away for processing. If they are any good they will be uploaded here.

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Thank You

2009-09-16T21:06:36+02:00

Thank you to everyone who has written to support me in recent weeks. I promise I will reply to all of you at the weekend as each of you deserves a full reply to your kind and thoughtful comments which I have so appreciated receiving.

I hope you don't mind but I am going to let you read something that one of my ex pupils from over twenty years ago wrote for me when he heard about what had been happening to me in the last few weeks. I have kept it with me and during a particularly awful meeting yesterday I had it in front of me to read when I felt particularly bleak.

tim,
it was lovely to see you even if you havent aged one bloody bit, and it was lovely to meet ______ (excuse spelling) what a lovely lady and you make a lovely couple.
BUT
i wanted to let you know what a fantastic not only person i think you are but as a teacher and as a human being you inspired me to give a shit at a time when i didnt and the passion you share for things is infectious you tought not only science photography and guitar!! you tought life skills love art passion and even thou i might not be the most academic person youve ever had the misfortune of teaching i wanted to tell you what you mean to me and so many others. The thought of you not teaching anymore and inspiring other kids, like you have done for me is terrifying. school isnt all about exams its not all about having fun its the starting block for life i just hope when rebecca and benjamin are older they are lucky enough to find a teacher who they admire respect no fuck it love as much as i do you(no i dont want a date and its not a cheesy chat up) i just thought you should know that with out you and your wisedom my life would have been very different and i am honoured and priveliged to call you a friend.
love
stewart
(sharon taught me fuck all in english no spelling no punctuation!!!!! lol)

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Bedtime Stories

2009-08-21T21:40:49+02:00

You may have noticed that I have changed my main picture from Forest Palace to one taken from one of my favourite stories of the ones that I read to my children and that is, 'The Monster Bed'. Basically, it is the tale of Dennis the Monster who lives in a cave in a dark, scary wood and who is terrified of humans who his Mother reassures him don't exist. Eventually Dennis comes face to face with a boy who is equally terrified of monsters as Dennis is of humans. The story is beautifully illustrated and as it is in rhyme I can still recite whole chunks by rote much to my very grown up now children's amusement.

I also remembered the last story that I read aloud to my son and that is Tolkein's 'Smith of Wooton Major'. Now a lot of people find Tolkein a little ponderous but this is delightfully written and understated, I won't describe the plot in detail but in brief concerns a mortal man who can vist when he wishes to the land of Faery and how eventually he has to relinquish his gift and pass it on to another child. We also discover that perhaps the King of Faery lives amongst us in a guise that would cause most people to pass him by.

And I was wondering which children's story that you most love reading to your children and why you hold it in such affection?

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I have been outwitted by

2009-08-19T15:06:27+02:00

Our rabbit!
But let me start at the beginning.
My son and I decided to let Fluffy,(look I didn't name him I just inherited him!) have the run around the whole garden as we are likely to be moving soon and wherever we go there won't be as big a field for him stretch his paws in. He sets off across the grass at a canter and then skips in mid air before haring (can rabbits hare?) in a completely different direction. There are two entrances he can wriggle through and we have to herd him away from them but he is very smart and teases us by making little feints towards them before dashing off again. He hasn't had so much fun since we lived in Cardinham and he and his partner in crime Blackjack used to have the run of our garden there terrorising our cats if they ventured near them and 'innocently' escaping to our next door neighbours and their prized flowers and vegetables!

Fluffy makes a rush for the entrance and escape, like a good rugby winger he fixes me before executing a series of sidesteps that Shane Williams would be proud of. I turn swiftly, I will not be beaten by him, but he has planned ahead well as I trip over a grassy bank and fall headfirst into our pond!

So Dear readers do not be deceived by your rabbit, he may be called Fluffy but in reality he is a most cunning beast that knows your measure.

Excuse me must go casserole au lapin to prepare.....

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Trespassers Will?

2009-08-16T14:53:50+02:00

Sorry I have been away for a week and I have checked the visitors numbers and see that some of you have been shinning over the wall while I haven't been here and trespassing!
So where did you play?
Did you climb the trees or skinny dip in the lake? Did you swing above the waterfall and plunge into the pool below? Did you feed the Wild Cats and the Pine Martens?

I hope none of you were in after nightfall as the Garden becomes a strange and frightening place once the sun has set and particularly if I am not there as it craves attention and will attract it through fear if it feels neglected.
If you were in after nightfall did you hear or see anything strange. Were there wild beasts loose or worse phantoms or monsters? Please tell me what you saw or what you would like to have seen if only you were brave enough.

Have left you with a little quiz, as I said I have been away for a short break so can you guess where I have been?

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Judas?

2009-08-06T17:32:28+02:00

I am naturally contrary, give me something that I ought to like or tell me something that I ought to think and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will take the opposite path. This character trait rarely makes life easy and the expression 'cutting your nose off to spite your face' could have been written specifically for me.

Now partly because of this I can appear a bit of a Luddite, I thought, for example, that mobile phones were the work of the Devil and loathed them with a passion and yet now I text like the best of them, though I still, Contrary Mary that I am, use apostrophes and correct spelling!
So, despite being a bit of a nerd, I have resisted digital cameras and have persevered with my wonderful SLR loaded with fuji velvia slide film but the thing is I stopped taking every day shots because the film is both expensive and easy to make mistakes with.
Therefore, I have bought a digital SLR so that I can begin to record life as it happens again, simple things like my daughter on her first drive with me and my son strumming his acoustic guitar in the front room, and, whisper this quietly, I've really enjoyed myself and it has freed me up to start enjoying my photography again.

However, this has left me feeling a bit of a Judas as I walk by my camera case filled with its olympus lenses and light meters and I hope that I continue to take my landscapes using film and that my old camera does not become like my poor racing bike did when I learned to drive, forlorn, neglected and forgotten.

So while my OM4Ti gently weeps I will upload my first self portrait taken on my new camera.

Now Judas's fate is to be chewed for eternity by Satan but what do you think should happen to us Contrary Mary's?

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And the answer to what links is .....

2009-07-31T10:12:39+02:00

Ok, I've kept you guessing for a day but now I have to come clean and tell you all the answer,

now the tag was 'impossible quiz' which meant that actually no-one was going to get it though la spice and brokendown angel got very close, and if I had to single out a winner it would be to blog lands very own little spice rack as she saw that it was something to do with people trying to change their destiny so bravo to her and everyone else who took part.

Now the real answer is that I talked about each one in my last therapy session! (Followers of CBT look away now in horror at the digressions that my wise and lovely Sue lets me get away with.)

I acted out the sketch where Ted tells Ralph that he doesn't have to hold him quite so tight when he is on his motorbike and Ralph, after having been in Seventh Heaven clinging to his secret beau now makes every effort, decent man that he is, to not touch Ted at all.

My goodness doesn't Ralph look like David Cameron!

The Monkey's Paw came up in a discussion on, well done Brokendownangel, on being careful what you wish for. So I told her the story as she did not know it, and if you do not know it you can find it here
http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/mnkyspaw.htm

And Maria, well I was discussing, pretensious git that I am (how do you spell that bloody word) Herman Hesse's 'Narciss and Goldmund' which I haven't read for many years but centres around two monks within a monastery one austere and well suited to what he does the other a wild spirit who can only be liberated to be his true self by leaving Holy Orders behind and embracing the outside world. Luckily, the austere one recognises what the other needs and allows him to leave......

And I suddenly exclaimed

"That's also the plot of The Sound of Music" and sung a quick rendition of 'Climb every mountain."

Clearly, I am having too much fun in therapy..........

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The ghosts beneath the floodlights

2009-07-30T16:25:14+02:00

My time has come and gone so I can simply watch now with only the faintest hint of regret and an easily suppressed desire to lace up my boots and be out there again.
The floodlights are switched on and there is a slight buzzing sound as the filaments heat up and during that time the pitch is lit by an unearthly light which casts little shadow and seems to come from the earth itself. It almost feels like moonlight and during that brief moment, I imagine that, amongst the young muddied men out there now bantering and running, booting the ball high into the night sky and jeering at anyone who drops it, there are also the ghosts of those who once graced this pitch. These ghosts leave the faintest of traces in the air as they run and their voices are almost, but not quite completely, lost. Perhaps, they can only be seen and heard by the living ghosts, ghosts such as myself, who can just discern their younger and better selves as they enact the set plays that we once did in order to outwit the opposition, the same set plays that the adults in the top half of the pitch are carrying out and the same set plays that my son's team perform close to where I am stood. The same move probably carried out since rugby began, number 8 picks up at back of scrum, commits opposing scrum half, feeds scrum half who at pace commits opposition winger and the final pass goes out to winger who should, but never is (!), be free to run.

Myself, and two of the coaches watch our sons' play, two of the boys in their father's position and mine thankfully not and with a smile of pride we imagine when the team sheet in the club house will again contain a Daniels, a Mace and a Knight.

We try not to imagine that our sons' time will also come and go and that one day their ghosts will join those of their Fathers illuminated briefly by the moonlit glow of the floodlights.

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What links .....

2009-07-30T09:32:53+02:00

OK,

What links,

The Fast Show's Ted and Ralph,

With W.W Jacob's 'The Monkey's Paw'

and Maria from The Sound of Music?

Any ideas anyone?

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A compulsion to .....

2009-07-29T21:54:17+02:00

From my archives,

I was listening to Radio 4 on the way into work and there was an interview with Daniel Barenboim who is this year's Reith lecturer. At one point, in what was a fascinating interview, he said that he had a 'compulsion to create with sound'. I thought this expressed a profound idea which is that for some people there is an urgent need to make sense of the world whether that be through sound, light or science. Now not everybody who feels this compulsion is blessed with the same talent but that does not make the urgency to express any less piquant. I remember viewing the film 'Amadeus' and seeing it as a tragedy, not for Mozart, but for Salieri. Both were visited with the same compulsion to create but Mozart was the greater talent yet of all those that appreciated Mozart only Salieri was cursed with appreciating how great Mozart's talent was and how relatively mediocre his own was. And of course in Salieri's eyes how could such beauty be created by such an impure vessel? Nowadays, we share Salieri's horror at someone 'immoral' also being talented but unlike Salieri we feel as if their poor behaviour actually detracts from their talent.

The power of music fascinates me. I am regularly moved to tears by it but it is not the lyrics that have this power but the sheer sound of it. How does it have this affect? Why does it have this effect? Why me and not others? As a student music was so essential to me that it helped me to cope with the pain that I was feeling because it expressed that pain. Or perhaps its power is darker that I was seduced by it and led into a darker view of the world than I would otherwise have had?

I cannot express how I feel through music. I can remember being about twenty two sat down with my guitar, completely frustrated, totally unable to express how I felt with these six strings. I did not want to learn other peoples songs and court favour with others by strumming around the campfire I wanted to say how I felt and I just couldn't do it! Many years later listening to Bjork I saw that it was possible to express how I felt but you needed to be a playful, Icelandic pixie in order to do that.

I have rediscovered photography recently and it tells my story in a way that I cannot achieve through sound. So my compulsion to create will be expressed through light and the alchemy that occurs when this light reaches the film.

I guess all of us have a compulsion to create with words........

Otherwise why would we blog?

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Democracy

2009-07-20T17:59:08+02:00

When I was a student I roomed with a young man from Sheffield who as a devout Socialist proposed that because the masses were so stupid, the evidence for this being provided that they had voted in Margaret Thatcher, that they had forfeited the right to vote. Decisions should only be made by an intellectual elite who, of course, knew best and therefore what was needed to be done. To enter this elite, and prove your intellectual merit, you had to think like him because he was self evidently right. In order to achieve this logical state of affairs there would need to be a Revolution and stupid people like my father who had voted Conservative would need to be shot. Silly liberals like myself who defended everyones right to vote on the grounds that no one group of people can have full possession of the correct way to govern would also, regrettably, have to join the Fascists up against the wall but then, after all the ends did justify the means and to quote W H Auden sometimes murder was necessary. When argued with he would play his trump card which was to prove that he spoke for the romantic but ignorant masses because he came from up North and was therefore a true member of the Proletariat. This despite the fact that both parents were teachers and his Dad actually a Head Teacher. I clearly had no right to comment as I was from the South and therefore a leach on Britains industrial heartlands which made me a member of the Middle Classes despite my Mum being a lolly pop lady and my Dad being a wages clerk.

As an avid reader of George Orwell I had come across the great man's denunciation of this rancid totaltarian tosh before when it had been widespread in the Thirties and I guess in the early eighties it was entering its last and I hoped dying phase so it saddens me to see, again, such views being advanced on blogs.

Now democracy is far from perfect, of course some people are ignorant and sometimes the media can be deceptive but as a system it is so much better than any of the alternatives> Those that think that we would be better governed by a self appointed elite should maybe check what the likes of Vaclav Havel thought about being ruled by that particular system. Democracies make mistakes but they also don't tend to have gulags either.

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Last night I dreamt

2009-07-16T18:35:10+02:00

Last night I dreamt that I was in a sunlit room with a large window that overlooked a beautiful garden.
I jumped through the glass of the window and then ran across the garden, laughing with the sheer joy of being able to run so fast and then I took off and flew! Higher and higher I flew closer and closer to the sun and then, for a brief moment, I was full of its warm and golden light and my body became, for once, completely relaxed and it was the most wonderful of experiences and then I simply atomised and briefly lit up the heavens. There was no pain in this and again it felt wonderful.

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Epitaph

2009-07-15T20:40:08+02:00

I was walking through a local churchyard when I saw carved on one of the tombstones the simple refrain

"He Lived."

My first thought was that I hoped that the stone's carver had got his tenses right,

And the second was that, hand on heart, I don't think anyone could say that about me.

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Dropping the bollock and other fun end of term games

2009-07-09T21:47:30+02:00

Well it's near the end of my 25th year of teaching. Our year 11's have gone, our Year 10's are on work experience and everyone else is doing exams.

Leaving me and my Department with lots of time on our hands.

You must have, by now, worked out that I take work terribly seriously and therefore would be using that time to set targets, maximise potential and facilitate change.......

but you know what they say about the Devil

So I thought I'd introduce you to soem of the prep room games...

Game one involves table tennis bats (I've just thought of Phoebe from Friends here and come over all peculiar!) Everyone has a table tennis bat, the ball is batted around the prep room like keepy uppy until someone misses the ball and has to retrieve it when every one fires elastic bands at them.
There is no winning or losing here just the sheer joy of scoring a direct hit on someones backside with an elastic band.

For game 2 you need a small member of staff and one of those wheely ICT chairs and a broom. In teams of three propel said small person on wheely chair along corridor. Person in front uses broom in the manner of curling. Object of game is to propel small person into bottom prep room the nearest team to achieving it is the winner.

Game 3. One of my managers refers to mistakes as dropping a bollock, he also constantly refers to unpicking problems. The place of the bollock is an over ripe orange which is thrown around the prep room at high speed. When the bollock is dropped then some knotted string around your neck has to be unpicked, the loser is the first person with unknotted string. Variations on this game can involve throwing and catching the bollock with one hand only. As an added bonus the bollock can burst at any time covering said player in orange juice just before they have to teach a lesson.

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If Your Blog was a ... A little quiz

2009-07-08T21:35:48+02:00

If Your Blog was a film which would it be?

If Your Blog was an actor/actress who would it be?

If Your Blog was a book which would it be?

If Your Blog was a song which would it be?

If Your Blog was a city which would it be?

If Your Blog was an animal which would it be?

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On My Nanna's Dressing Table

2009-07-06T21:55:07+02:00

On My Nanna's Dressing table was a photograph of her son, My Dad, taken over seventy five years ago. It is a formal shot, taken by a portrait photographer with him in his scout uniform saluting the camera.

And I look at the frail,old man that he is now, kept alive solely by my Mother's Love and wonder how they could be the same person?
He shares not a cell with the rather earnest little boy of the photograph, each atom long replaced and spread to the Four Winds and he no longer thinks in the way that he did then and his memories, like all of ours, are as malleable as clay and as unreliable to build from.

What do we share with our former and future selves? How are they us? How is the baton of being who we are passed on from second to second from cradle to grave?

As I have said, mamy times, I do not believe in an after life but if that most seductive of myths is true then I hope that his own Mum, my Nanna, is waiting to take his hand when he leaves this Earth and lead him back to his boyhood when he was, I think, most happy.

On my Mother's dressing table is a picture of my eldest daughter, it is an informal photograph taken by me and she is in a party dress cuddling my Mother and smiling at the camera. By the photograph is a poem that she wrote to say that my Mother was the person in all the world who made her feel happiest.

Clearly my Mum is a remarkable woman.

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Exploring

2009-07-06T21:33:39+02:00

A little story from my archives

I visited Kynance Cove at the weekend with my wife, my son and a good friend who happens to be a former pupil of mine (circa 1988) and his girlfriend. It was a little awkward for my son as he was in the company of adults all day and before we left we asked him what he wanted to do so that he would have something special for himself. He said he wanted to scramble on the rocks. So I led him and my friend along the rocks. We started by judging the right time to leap into a gully and scale a little cliff while avoiding the sea as it flowed in and out. The little cliff was quite difficult to climb and I offered my son my hand to pull him up but he was determined to do it all himself.
Onve over the cliff we followed the rocks out until we reached a narrow crack in the rock and behind it was the most gorgeous rock pool, deep and teeming with life and totally inaccessible apart from by scrambling. A little further was an even more magnificent rock pool joined to the sea by a natural arch through which the water spiralled and foamed forming patterns of spray in the deep blue of the water always slightly different but always of similar form. There were shoals of fish there and rock to bask on. I thought of my daughters both mermaids who would love to swim here and discover its hidden depths with their snorkels.

You do not have to travel the world or be pushed to your physical limits to be an explorer, there is great beauty and adventure to be found close by you, you just have to be prepared to play a little and run the risk of getting your trousers wet.

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This Blog is becoming like .......

2009-07-02T17:44:18+02:00

The Bates Motel

So don't say

That you haven't been warned!

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Orpheus

2009-06-28T21:52:15+02:00

Do you know the story of Orpheus?

He lost his love Eurydice and in his grief visited the Underworld where his beautiful laments melted the heart of even Hades and so he was granted the chance to bring her back from death as long as he didn't look back as he led her away from the land of the shades and back into the light.
But he looked back just once
And she was lost to him for ever.

And sometimes I feel that from eighteen years old I have been the reverse of Orpheus in that I have always looked back and because of that have not lived in full the life that I have had and because I always face towards the past I can never catch a glimpse of the future and what it may bring.

And time is slipping away......

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Is Fat the new Black?

2009-06-25T08:01:07+02:00

Do you remember the advert for the Nationwide Bank? It was trying to show that while other banks were only after your money and used tricks to entice you, they were a model of integrity that only cared about the financial welfare of their clients. Now apart from the obvious unintentional irony of a bank that only cared about the financial welfare of their clients there was something else about it that stuck in my mind.

And that was that the central character was fat. Do you think that was intentional? Could you have imagined the lines "For brand new customers only." delivered by a slim, young black woman?
What really were the advertisers up too?

I think that they were using a rather nasty little prejudice and one of the few that 'nice people'are allowed to indulge in and that is against the overweight. By making the banker fat we can jump rapidly to a number of conclusions about him and hence the banks that he represents.
We can assume that because he is fat, he is greedy (like the banks he works for) and doesn't look after himself, his personal hygeine is probably suspect too and no doubt he spends too much time on the internet and has no real friends.

Now, I do not want to get all Susie Orsbach over this. Being seriously overweight is a health risk but what concerns me is that here being fat is used not to say that that such people are putting their health at risk but that they are actually carrying out an immoral act! This strikes me as body fascism gone mad and also reminds me of the similar treatment of the depressed nowadays as if feeling bleak and alone is a moral choice and something that we should choose not to embrace rather than a curse that we are born with and struggle with each day.

Now, I guess, from writing this you may assume that I am too somewhat overweight. Actually, I'm a very trim and still athletic 47 year old, my genes have blessed me here as I am sure they have cursed some people who are not so trim but I wouldn't be so quick, as others are, to condemn them. Maybe those that consider the extra pounds of others to be an immoral act should remember a very moral saying (and me an athiest an all!) which goes "Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone."

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If

2009-06-24T21:30:33+02:00

If elephants never forget,

doesn't that make them an invaluable revision tool

and shouldn't pupils be banned from bringing them into the examination room?

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I read in the Guardian

2009-06-19T07:53:42+02:00

I read an article in the Guardian a few weeks ago that has stuck in my memory.

The husband of an English couple living in one of the Arab states had reported his wife to the police for adultery which is illegal there and so she has been sent to prison and has, obviously, lost all access rights to her children.
Now the author considered that, as do I, appalling but she then went on to develop approvingly other ways in which women, and it was always women, got some form of natural justice when their husbands had played away. You can guess the kinds of things, a variety of forms of criminal damage culminating in Mrs Bobbitt who 'hilariously' cut off her philandering husband's penis.

So, I guess the article was suggesting that instead of exploiting a repressive legal system to send his wife to jail the husband should have carried out a clitorectomy on his wife without anaesthetic.

Which really is appalling.

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