Comparisons

There is a very good Secret Teacher piece in the Guardian today pointing out that the focus on targets and statistics have stopped schools and teachers focusing on children and it made me think about how exam results have affected me as a parent.

I'm not entirely proud of myself, as my thoughts haven't always been those I would choose to think. They aren't always in line with my beliefs. When I meet people I know who's children have just received exam results I ask how they've done. It would be rude not to. What I'd really like to ask is if their child was happy with their results and if they have good enough grades to do what they want to do next. I would like to be individual about it but I'm not. I want to know how many they passed, how many As Bs and Cs. And worst of all I want to know so that I can compare my own children's results. If they have lower grades than my children I feel a sense of superiority that I don't deserve. I didn't sit through the lessons , take the notes, do the homework, read the books or do the revision. I provided the occasional cake or courgette based dinner, which doesn't give me the right to take any kind of credit.. If, on the other hand, the results are far superior I feel shame. I sense the judgement of the other parent, the slightly depressed, "oh," before a brightening and a quick switch to their choice of University or A levels. Why do we do this to ourselves? Maybe I'm the only person who does this but I doubt it.

The day after A level results day I picked up a tabloid newspaper in a coffee shop and read Ulrica Johnson's column. In the corner was a little box containing a few words about A level results and how her son had got 3 A* s and an A (or something similar). A whole load of uncharitable thoughts ran through my head. I labelled her as a boastful Prima Donna, whose stupid son had only got those grades because of his over-priced private education paid for by the fact that she had sold her body and soul all through her youth. I doubt she made courgette cake for her children!

The truth is, none of those letters matter. I want my children and the children of my friends, acquaintances and even Ulricha Johnson to be happy. Happiness is not so easily measured. 

I Like Cake

There was so much excitement in our house last night. It was the start of the Great British Bake Off and already we have our favourites. We sat, rehearsing names and giving the contestants our own subtitles.  "That's Ruby.  No, Ruby is the young one.  Who's the annoying one who quotes philosophy then?  That's Ruby."  "What about satellite guy?  He's Gelnn.  No not Glenn, Mark or Toby?  Not Toby, Toby is my favourite, he's so cute.  What about Howard, is he Howard?  No, he's the other one with glasses. Oh, it's Rob.  He doesn't look like a Rob, we'll just have to call him satellite guy."

What a great way to start - with a Victoria Sandwich Sponge. It got people talking, after all ANYONE can make a Victoria sandwich. Twitter was full of, "what a disaster," "who are these amateurs?" kind of comments. It can be very difficult to make a good sandwich sponge. Both layers have to be straight and the same size with the same consistency and rise. I've not seen (or made) many that are perfect. The thing is, in real life, you forgive how it looks when you taste it because even if it doesn't taste amazing its still got sugar and butter in it and it's CAKE! If only we could taste the cakes then we could give a much more accurate opinion. Like Paul Hollywood I didn't like the idea of a grapefruit cake but he said it tasted good so maybe I will have to make one to find out along with the cardamom sponge with rhubarb filling, which I've been meaning to try for ages.

Then came the technical challenge, an Angel Food Cake. This is not my favourite kind of cake. It's too tricky. Why make life difficult when sponge tastes better?  I shouted, "Don't grease the tin!" at the telly but they didn't all hear me. The passion fruit coulis drizzled over the top looked good though.

My favourite part of the show is the food history bit. I often wonder if it's too late for me to become a Food Historian. The Courting Cake looked good. So good I'm just going to have to make one.

I could never be a contestant on the Bake Off because of the Showstopper. I can't be bothered to make cakes look pretty. The best chocolate cake I make is Nigella Lawson's coca cola cake and that looks like road kill. What's wrong with a spread of Ganache and a box of Maltesers thrown on the top? I love watching other people do it though. The stripy chocolate straws and the balloon bowls were an amazing feat if engineering from my son's favourite, Satellite Guy. I was very impressed with the secret squirrel cake with whole nuts, which seems very appropriate for the Bake Off.

What I really liked though was the Rudolf graveyard cake, with extra thumb.  Toby, the baker was my daughter's favourite and we were very sad to see him go.

There are some dark horses in this competition and I've noticed that they rarely show much of the winner at the beginning, so Beca, Deborah, Kimberley and Howard are all in with a good chance.  I don't think Christine has a hope of winning as she looks too much like Mary Berry and some of the looks that she got from Queen Mary say it all.

I already want Lucy to win.  I bet Lucy could make a cake with a glut of courgettes, beetroot and rhubarb but I'm sure I'll change my mind as the show goes on.

We all love this programme because everyone loves cake, or biscuits or bread.  There was a woman on the radio yesterday talking about her new found hobby of tree climbing.  She was wonderfully passionate about it and Ken Bruce said, "It sounds wonderful," and she replied in a fantastic Northumbrian accent, "It's not very elegant though, I'm 43 and I like cake!"

Hippopotmonstrosesquipedaliophobia

I confess!  I am a hippopotmostrosequipedaliophobe.  Long words scare me.  This morning I was reading an article in the Guardian and I had to look up two words.  Two words!  In the Guardian.  The Guardian was never the Times.  It was the paper for thinking idiots - like me. They spelt words wrong, hence their nickname; the Grundian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/offence-satirical-piece-penis-management?CMP=twt_gu

The article was a response to Suzanne Moore's piece called, '10 Rules for Good Penis Management.'  It was a funny list, written in response to Peter Dowling (An Australian MP) taking a picture of his willy dunked in a glass of wine on his mobile phone and sending it to someone.  This 'news' coincided with the fire brigade reminding men not to put their penis into a toaster.  A&E is constantly full of men who think they will derive pleasure from putting it somewhere, where any sane person knows it's only going to get hurt.  Yesterday, Twitter was ablaze with the news that a man had stuck a fork in his.  Suzanne Moore is probably to the Guardian what Samantha Brick is to the Daily Mail.  She's not afraid to say things that people might not agree with but unlike the most beautiful woman in the world she writes about other things that are a bit more serious and less contentious.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/07/10-rules-managing-penis-sexting-wine-toaster

There were 37 complaints to her article.  I don't think that's many but it was enough for the Guardian to ask someone else to write a story about the complaints and defend the fact that the article was written.  Suzanne Moore posted the article with a one word response - "cock" - and that is the kind of language I understand.  It's how I want to read insults but the people who had complained about her article had used words I needed to look up to understand how offended they were.

My son loves a long word.  It was he that taught me the word hippoptmonstrosesquipedaliophobia, possibly because he has a healthy sense of irony he loves the fact that the word for fear of long words is a REALLY long word.  I wonder if using long words as insults is part of the plan.  If you use a word a person doesn't understand they can't necessarily be offended.  Depending on the self confidence of the person you could use a complicated word and they would either be offended, not bothered or flattered.  I was once highly offended that someone described me as languid.  I assumed it was an insult but now I'd be flattered, as I think of HE Bates' description of Angela Snow as languid (and she was a goddess).

As a tribute to the original article here is a list of 10 long-word-insults that you are welcome to use if you don't mind seeming like a bit of a nerd or to help you understand how you are being insulted by a Guardian reader.

1. Contumelious - as in, 'your article is contumelious and shameful.'  = rudeness or contempt arising from from insolence.
2. Flagitious - as in, 'I'm shocked at the overt flagitious homophobia' = criminal/ villainous (from the word flagrant)
3.Blowsabella - as in, 'Ms Moore is a Blowsabella who needs to comb her hair.'  = hot tempered slovenly woman
4. Fimicolus - as in, 'Ms Moore is fimicolus.' = living and growing on crap
5. Hircismus - as in, 'Ms Moore, as a feminist who probably doesn't shave her armpits and therefore has hircismus = offensive armpit odour.
6. Stetopygous - as in, ' you are stetopygous.' = fat arsed
7.Eproctolagniac - as in, ' you are an sproctolagniac' = someone who is aroused by flatulence
8. Cacafuago - as in, ' by using these long words you are a cacafuago.' = boaster/bragger (literally Spanish for Shitfire)
9. Gasconader - as in, 'if you are not a cacfuago you are definitely a Gasconader.' = boaster who constantly relives old triumphs
10. Aeolist - as in, 'if you keep using these long words I will have to conclude that you really are an aeolist.' = a pompous bore who pretends to be inspired.

Grammar and Trolls

I like correct grammar. People who like words like the proper use of grammar but even the most skilled of wordsmiths make mistakes.

Twitter, with it's quick 140 characters seems to have sparked a huge divide 

between the grammar nazis and those who couldn't care less. People get quite worked up about a missing apostrophe or a mis-spelt word. It has also become the new battleground on which to fight Trolls.

I blame the seventies for our obsession with Trolls. Who didn't keep a couple of those ugly plastic dolls in their pocket to stroke their brightly coloured hair every time they were upset or a bit stressed? Our obsession with Trolls has become so great that I found an article online, listing the 21 types of Internet Troll, which must mean that anyone who comments on anyone else's internet exclamation is a Troll. We complain about them but secretly we love those little guys.

The Grammar Troll is, according to the article I read, a thing in it's own right but it has become the favourite Troll-bashing technique amongst the writers and thinkers that are most popular on Twitter. Piers Morgan has said in an interview with GQ Magazine that he finds correcting Trolls' spelling an effective revenge tactic and I have noticed that others are following in his footsteps.

Another good example is @mysadcat, which is a comedy account, where someone puts pictures of their cat looking sad. I'm not quite sure why people get upset about this but his blog shows how he has been dealing with it.

http://littlecatdiaries.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/man-picks-completely-pointless-fight.html

They are funny to read but I'm not sure they really work. Apart from anything else it gives them a wider readership than they could have ever hoped for without the re-tweeted comment and people who post nasty comments in response to something funny or well written are only going to have their suspicion that that person is a smug wotsit confirmed.

Although I like good spelling and grammar I can't help wondering if it really matters. If you understand what is being said does it really matter if it says there, their or they're?

If you are killing Trolls with red-pen correction then it is only fair that you do the same to yourself.

You have to have massive respect for this Guardian Journalist, who originally tweeted, "The only results that matter today: Magazine ABC's at 12noon. If you can bare to wait."

A Level Results Day

This time last year I was a nervous wreck.  I hadn't slept.  I'd cleaned out every cupboard in the house.  My mind giving me all sorts of wierd scenarios and I was imagining every possibility.  This time 28 years ago, I got up opened the post, thought, 'meh' (not that that word was invented then) and went to work.

My conclusion is that A level results day is worse for parents than the students.

Of course it isn't but the world has changed so much.  We got post before we went to work, now they have to go into school to get their results.  I would have been mortified at having to tell everyone there and then what I got.  It took me a good 2 days to process it.  Some schools with very bright, very beautiful people allowed their pupils to collect their results, so that the newspapers could come and take photos but my school was more realistic.  When I was collecting my A level results, Universities and Polytechnics were different things.  Once you came to the conclusion you weren't going to get into a University then you could apply to each individual Polytechnic you fancied and you could do this after your results came out and that was AFTER CLEARING.  Now, the only back up is clearing.  There are more places but there are also more smart kids, who want to do a degree.  It has changed again in the last few years and now, because of the internet and the fact that UCAS opens at 8am they know whether they have got in to their University of choice as soon as they wake up.  I remember having a laptop thrown at me, whilst being screemed at last year.

As I am writing this, several of my daughter's friends and my friend's children have found out where they are going and posted it on Twitter or Facebook, so we can all breathe again.  Most, so far have got into their first choice but for those who haven't heard there will be a nervous wait until they can go into school and find out how much they missed it by.

Finding out the actual results, for those that got in, can feel like an anti-climax. It doesn't matter whether you got higher or lower grades than you were predicted because the next step wants you.  Those who didn't get the results already feel like failures and so going to get the results probably feels like torture.

For anyone who is feeling like that I would like to quote from the Marigold Hotel film, "It will be alright in the end and if it's not alright then it's not the end."

And for those who are collecting results, wondering if they are those who are going to get all A*s, please remember that it is only the very attractive people that get those grades (I know - I've seen the newspapers)

Even the boys are beautiful.  In my day, the boys were spotty, geeky and hadn't seen the light of day in two years. 

My generation weren't clever enough to do sport and get A levels!

The other things I know must be true about A level results (from reading the papers) is that there won't be enough university places, the results are better than ever before, the exams are easier, there has been a dumbing down of A levels and that  there will be several pictures of Michael Gove claiming to be responsible for everything good and promise to fix everything that's bad.

Love is Blind

Yesterday, we were watching a film and the Long Suffering Husband said, "She reminds me of you, you look exactly alike."  The actress in the film was Helen Hunt.

Shhhhhhhhhhh!

Don't tell him that I really look like this:

If he finds out, he might leave me.  Especially when he realises that he looks like this:

Happy Birthday Brian Cant

I thought today was Brian Cant's 80th Birthday.  It's not.  This is one of the problems with Twitter.  Someone retweets something and those retweets keep going over days, weeks or months and then you think something has just happened that happened a long time ago.  His birthday was the 12th of July and just before his birthday his son tweeted that he would like people to remember his father with the hashtag #briancant80 and to consider donating to a Parkinsons charity.  I don't follow Brian Cant's son on Twitter, so I saw it yesterday.

Brian Cant is an important person for those of my generation.  We were the first TV children. Before us, people didn't have TV's in their home and programmes weren't made for children. It probably seems incomprehensible that we had an hour of TV at lunchtime; Mary Mungo and Midge, The Woodentops or Pipkins and some TV after school that ended with Zebedee saying, "Time for Bed."  Brian wasn't the fun, exciting, brightly coloured dungaree-clad presenter of Children's TV we have now.  He looked like everyone's Dad.

He is most famous for  Play School, which was a programme that taught us all about round window, square windows and arched windows.  Humpty and Jemima helped us count, tell the time and we sang nursery rhymes and songs along with Brian and his easy voice.  

Jackanory was always one of my favourite programmes and I'm sure it was partly responsible for my love of books. There were no flashy gimmicks, just someone with a fantastic voice and an ability to bring a story to life.  I remember Bernard Cribbens, Miram Margolyes, Kenneth Williams and Brian Cant. They showed you that it was a real book which meant you could get the book from the library and read it yourself and guess what? It was the same, you read with the expression of an actor!

But my favourite TV shows were Trumpton and Camberwick Green.  There can't be an adult my age that can't recite, "Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub."  These programmes were my first introduction to musicals.  Now, don't laugh.  Each character had a song, sung by Brian Cant. 

PC McGary No 452

 In fact Brian did all the voices.  The music was brilliant too, the opening title music of Trumpton with the clock was such a brilliantly clear example of pulse and counting that no child could fail to feel a beat (as they do now).  

Trumpton Opening Titles

Camberwick Green had a music box, with a beautiful example of three beats in the bar.  If only children heard music with three beats in the bar nowdays.

Camberwick Green Opening Titiles

The Fireman sliding down the pole were accompanied by music of descending pitch.

The Trumpton Fire Brigade

And these programmes were also full of humour.  The names of the characters were genius; Chippy Minton, the Carpenter; Windy Miller, the man who lived in the Windmill, Mr Dagenham, the salesman, Mrs Lovelace the hatmaker, with her 3 Peeks. Daphne, Mitzi and Lulu and Mr Troop, the Town Clerk.  Artists would appear just when they needed them to paint a picture of the Town Hall for the Mayor's Birthday and Windy Miller would get drunk on Cider and fall asleep outside of his windmill.

Windy Miller and the Cider

Watching these links to You Tube has been so much fun and has taken me right back to being a small child.  Happy Days.  So, Happy Birthday Brian Cant - even if I did miss it by nearly a month!