Bob Austin

 Bob Austin was on the news last night along with pictures from 1976 and I was thrown back into reminiscences of my Dad. Three-shed Bob, who couldn’t believe that the wildfire took all of them did that for me.

The Long Suffering Husband looked at me and said, “Bob Austin!” and I replied, rolling the name round my tongue in that satisfying way, “Bob Austin.” Try it. BOBAUSTIN

Bereavement is an odd thing. Sometimes you can forget. Your memories keep the person alive. I count myself lucky that my memories of my parents are positive and diverse, so that men called Bob Austin being on the news can remind me of happy times. 

The last few days have been a bit of a blur. They often are for anyone who has run their battery completely empty and mine took a few days before it even looked like it might recharge again. I will never be able to explain the toll that Ofsted takes, with a deep dive in your subject in a school you passionately care about on the penultimate last two days of the year in a heatwave, where the temperature broke all records, for someone who has a very severe case of imposter syndrome. However, if I mention that I slept a sum total of 6 hours over 3 nights, walked the dog before sunrise and sat in the garden talking to pigeons at dawn that might give you a clue.

Pigeons and Bob Austin.

It was on the morning of the second Ofsted day that I sat in the garden chatting to the wood pigeons. Or were they collard doves? Dad taught me that one said, “My toe hurts Betty” and the other said, “BOBAUSTIN” but I can’t remember which was which. 

That morning, though, they seemed to be saying, “Ofsted are cunts,” (apologies for the language but it’s what they said).

“A bit harsh,” I said, “They are just doing a job.”

The bird repeated itself.

“Ok,” I said, “You are probably right.”

“BOBAUSTIN!” said another.

“Right, BOBAUSTIN!” I shouted back, fearing that I might wake the neighbours.

BOBAUSTIN reminded me of another mantra of my Dad’s which was, “Blag it. Bullshit your way through and fake it until you make it.” So, that’s what I did. 

As a child, whenever he mentioned Bob Austin, which he did frequently, mainly because it rolls around the mouth so pleasantly, I would wonder who the real Bob was. I imagined that it was someone he worked with, like Andrew Peacock (also known as Drew) or Don Kibbles. You would imagine that these men with their snigger-inducing names would be fictional but I met both of them. Andrew, being a young and slim graduate (or educated fool, as my Dad preferred to say) and Don being older and stockier, with a red bulbous drinker’s nose. Don would slide back on his wheeled office chair to answer the phone. The combined effect of the speed of the chair and his general impatience making it sound like he barked, “Donkey Balls. Southend Irish Sea,” into the receiver. 

However, to my knowledge (just like the Prime Minister), I never met Bob Austin. In my imagination he was a small man with round glasses, who knotted his hanky in four corners to improvise a hat to cover his Brylcreemed black hair on hot days, which he could also use to wipe the sweat that beaded on his nose.

The LSH and I looked at the telly.

“So, that’s Bob Austin. I never thought he’d look like that!”

A fine line

 There’s a fine line between being resilient and being an f-ing idiot. (Please feel free to read the f in full)

On Tuesday (which was two million years ago) the highest ever UK temperature was recorded. The thermometer topped 40 degrees and the National Press still made it sound like a war. Before it happened stark warnings were given about severe risk to life. 

While it was happening London spontaneously combusted, railway lines buckled, the landing strip at Heathrow melted, Boris Johnson had a leaving party and made his final words in the Commons ‘Hasta La Vista, Baby.’(there is no doubt that he just is a f-ing idiot), some schools closed or sent children home at lunchtime (to walk in the hottest part of the day - but they had their afternoon mark - so not the school’s problem) and the Daily Mail followed their terrifying warning with grumpy articles about keeping calm, carrying on and a blitz spirit.

There was a lot of talk of resilience. 

The people who had taken the warnings to the extreme and decided that they weren’t going to leave the house again until Summer was over lacked resilience. 

Some news articles encouraged people to make the most of the sunshine. They suggested that as climate change was now a ‘thing’ (as though it hasn’t been since I was a child when they built the flood defences to protect the Wash in Norfolk) people should just learn to make the most of it.

This encouraged people to take time off work and head to the beach, with a cool bag of alcohol and children in rubber rings for barely supervised swimming.  There’s a fine line between resilience and being an f-ing idiot.

Being truly resilient requires adaptation. You can’t just slog on as you did before if you don’t want to tip into the f-ing idiot role.

As usual, I was very impressed with our school. Mostly, there was adaptation. Blinds stayed shut, fans were brought in from home, children put their feet in water or had cool wet towels for their necks, teachers enjoyed spraying them with water, as though they had started their summer holiday and were casually misting their plants. Bizarrely, my music room remained at its usual 28-30 degrees. 

However, Ofsted chose that exact moment to send in Penfold. Poor little sweaty Penfold, who was unable to adapt much. Sitting in the sweaty headteacher’s office in a suit, typing up his report, watching lessons, grilling teachers and school leaders (grilling is always hot work)

I know that you are supposed to get angry about Ofsted in the last week of the year in a ‘national emergency’ heatwave but I just felt very sorry for the little perspiring person they sent in. His ability to adapt had been taken from him, sending him across the resilience line. I wouldn’t like to call him a f-ing idiot because the problem with being a public servant is that you don’t really have a choice. People who think that Ofsted inspectors, headteachers and individual school staff can just say ‘No’ are deluded. 

Because we are a very nice school with a lovely bunch of staff and all public servants, who can’t just say ‘No’ we were forced into a situation where adaptive resilience wasn’t possible. Adding the worst stress a school can face into the mix of a heatwave meant that most of us unwittingly became f-ing idiots. Who needs sleep? Who needs food? The fine line between drinking enough and not being able to get out of the classroom to pee is a tightrope that no one ever manages to get quite right.

Getting angry at the time would have been a misplacement of energy. There maybe time for anger on reflection. Not at poor perspiring Penfold, who was a nice man doing a difficult job in very difficult circumstances but at the people who decided he needed to do it then, without any adaptation.

It seems as though Ofsted sent lots of it’s inspectors into schools in the last week of school during the hottest days ever recorded and I hope an excellent investigative journalist is looking into why that happened. It’s hard not to be suspicious that there was some kind of sinister agenda. That’s what I hope. My positivity makes me want to believe that the head of Ofsted was being manipulated but some unseen political force and isn’t just a f-ing idiot. 

Time Travel

 When you are small and imaginative you can spend a disproportionate amount of your life thinking about which superpower you would choose. 

At the age of 5, my choice would have been flying. I did a lot of flying in my dreams but it would have been a non-starter in reality because I was always a bit scared of everything and terribly travel sick. That thought was firmly put away during an assembly when I was about 9 or 10. It was delivered by our deputy headteacher, a man we called baggy-Adams. Mr Adams paced up and down the school hall in his corduroy trousers that sagged in the seat, as though they had been handed down to him by a much larger man. His favourite assembly was one where he could scare us stupid and talk about Greek Myths. So it was that Icarus ended my desire to fly.

For some, that would end dreams of superherodom but not me. I spent the next forty-something years of my life dreaming of and practising invisibility. I thought I was getting quite good at it but lately my powers have slipped. Children run up to me in school and say, “I saw you!” and accurately describe where I was (somewhere in the town I live) and what I was doing (walking while reading a book). That’s not meant to happen. I’m meant to sit behind the piano with no one realising it’s not just a very bad recording. I wasn’t meant to be noticed.

It all started to go wrong with Covid. The Long Suffering Husband is convinced that not only have I lost the ability to be noticed but that we are actively being watched. I’m sure I’ve written about the blue car before but every time we leave the house it drives slowly past. The LSH thinks we are in the Truman Show and will text ‘blue car’ if it goes past when I’m not there.

When they started giving Covid vaccines some of the less well hinged people on Twitter thought that it was a conspiracy theory and that you were actually going to be injected with nanobots that allowed you to time travel. I was excited about that idea, thinking it would be great to go back to 1882 and have a conversation I’ve been having in my head. If the invisibility was wearing off then my new superpower could be time travel.

I am happy to report that yesterday I genuinely became a time traveller. It was a wedding. A beautiful wedding for our friends’ son. I had been to school with his mum and she married the LSH’s best friend. Not all marriages are forever but once you are parents you are partners (of sorts) for life and our friends do this well. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible friend and after a while I saw a lot less of my old school pal. 

I walked in and it was like being transported back to a wedding party in 1989. The faces were the same. No, honestly. Exactly the same. It was quite emotional. People told me that they’d aged but I couldn’t see it and we were instantly recognised, so I’m claiming time travel. 

Now all I need to do is fast forward a couple of days to make this gift truly pay off and everything will be fine. 

If I can’t and the solid 3 hours sleep I managed last night wasn’t enough at least I’ll have one time travelling memory of a beautiful wedding.

Eighty in the Shade

As usual, I'm about to sit on the fence with all this weather talk, whilst still nostalgically dipping into my childhood.  I'm not quite sure why people feel the need to get so angry about facts.   

Here's a fact that people get very angry about:  THE WORLD IS WARMING

Go ahead, shout at me now. Get it out of your system.

Here's another fact:  IT HAS BEEN STEADILY WARMING FOR A LONG TIME

Gosh, I bet you are furious now.

I'm not going to give you any more facts because you'll stop reading and won't get to my amusing anecdotes about 1976

You wouldn't think it would be controversial to say something like, the hottest temperature in the UK in 1884 was 87 degrees Fahrenheit (30.5C),  33.8 degrees Celsius in 1976, and 38.7C in 2019. (I checked all of these using met office archive data) Tomorrow, the forecasters believe the temperature could top 40 degrees, which is unheard of in the UK  (FACT - sorry, I wasn't going to give more facts but this is the one that has made people angry)

 People are shouting.

  "We've had hot weather before,"

"What about 1976?" (see above)

"What's wrong with people? It's Summer, what do they expect?"

"Where's our resilience gone?  Keep calm and carry on. Don't let those Germans, I mean forecasters stick it up you."

"What happened to the weather map? It used to be happy and sunny, now they've made it look scary.  It was summer when I was a child and we loved it."

"I makes me so angry, the media have so much to answer to "

"It was hotter than this in Turkey. What's all the fuss?"

Now, this is where I sit on the fence. The media didn't make it get hotter, we have had Summer before, yes they have changed the graphic and maybe it's meant to make you a bit more fearful.  Some people do seem to be a little less resilient and the warnings do seem extreme for most people.  

Personally, I will be fine in 40 degree heat. A bit sticky, maybe but I'm a fully grown woman who drinks lots of water and has a lower than average blood pressure. In fact I'm a bit healthier when it is warmer.  Most people will be like me and therefore have no need to worry. 

My puppy (not fully grown, covered in fur and an idiot that doesn't drink enough) might find it much harder.

Anyone with cardiovascular or renal disease, high blood pressure, diabetes or over 75 could become seriously ill.

A numpty who sits out in it all day, sunbathing and not drinking any water could get all he deserves.  Mad dogs and Englishment etc.  

To try and understand why we are being fed such severe warnings I fell down a humidity rabbit hole.  It's called the wet bulb effect, where if the weather is humid your body can't sweat and so 40 degrees in wet heat is so much more dangerous than 40 degrees in dry heat.  There are parts of the world where very soon the heat and humidity combined will make it impossible to sustain human life.  That's ANY human life and not just the vulnerable.  (Honestly I know you are angry but if you don't want more immigration then maybe you should take climate change seriously)

So before you get really cross with me let me tell you what it was like to be a child in 1976.

It was amazing.  

The sun shone every day, we played outside on our own, while our Mums did the ironing in their bras before greasing themselves up with cooking oil and lying on a towel in the back garden.  We walked down the railway tracks and played on building sites.  We swam in rivers, unsupervised. We crossed the road without looking because cars weren't invented. Gosh, it was great.  And we were young, we didn't even know that we had hips and knees.

You see? I'm on your side. We did all those things and survived. 

I will resist giving you any more facts from the child death archive because you don't need that.  It was just great, that's all that matters.  We were young and free.

1976 was amazing.  Truly.  I remember.  We had a holiday in Guernsey and we swam every day with the landlady of the guesthouse's dog, Pepper. We cycled the whole length of the island and went horse riding and visited the little shell church, wearing jumpers (according to our photos).

That long hot summer of 76.

The best bit, though, was that no one made you have your weekly bath.  In fact, washing, in general was banned. We stunk and we didn't care. The grown ups got a bit tetchy about it. Some people had to queue up to get water from a standpipe.  One of our neighbours had green grass but he was a policeman, so I think that was allowed.  

People would meet in the street and say, "It's another hot one, Fred."

"That's right Mavis, it doesn't look like it'll rain today."

"No. You're right there Fred. Watch out though because I've heard it might get up to eighty in the shade."

Eighty in the shade was the go-to reference for a very hot day.  If it got to Eighty in the shade, which it rarely did, then it was enough to made adults talk about it being too hot to work. 

One last fact to leave you angry. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit is 26.6 degrees Celsius.

It's all fine though.  There's nothing to see here.  You probably aren't going to die tomorrow.

Endings

Very tired

Barely make words work

Write a blog? 

Oh that’s a good idea

I’m very sorry but I do need to write about this. It will be even more drivilicious than normal but what can you do?

Education likes to mark the end of something as though it’s a grief. A graduation is a bit like a funeral. You sit in a big building and clap for all those that have passed. The best bit is when you can get outside and throw your hat in the air. It was my son’s delayed graduation this week and I made him go. He wasn’t keen but I hope he will be glad that he did it, when he looks back. A graduation, like a funeral is for those that are left behind anyway. We needed time to be proud. And we couldn’t have been prouder. The one thing that our family is brilliant at it laughing through difficult things. 

His ceremony was for the Maths and Philosophy departments (which are natural bedfellows) and if you ever need reminding that you really aren’t very clever I can recommend sitting through one of these. When the maths PhDs were awarded they reads out what they were for and every single one was incomprehensible to us mere mortals.

Quantum enhanced matter wave griavimetry

Thermal Sunyaev Zel’dovich effect from the Epoch of Reionozation

Neoliberal parabolic stochastic partial differential equation with application to finance

Searches for charging and neural info production in decays to three lepton final states via intermediate bosons using square root of s = 13TeV proton proton collisions with the ATLAS detector

Inverse problems for hyperbolic conversion laws

By the time it got to the Philosophy thesis’ the room got quite giddy with excitement about something understandable and then hysterical about what they pictured in their heads.

After Shave: a cultural history of female body hair removal.

When I graduated and my daughter graduated they picked a celebrity to get an honorary degree. I remember feeling cheated. Why should that person not have done the work I’d done? I had grown up enough to appreciate Una Stubbs at my daughter’s graduation (even if the Long Suffering Husband had misheard and got disappointed that it wasn’t going to be a talk on Mizunu Clubs). At this graduation the honorary degree was met with confused appreciation. This was a genuine mathematical genius, Alesso Figalli, who had been working with the University and deserved their recognition. He also had the best outfit: a bright yellow gown and a gold fez. Of course, none of us understood why he was a genius but they told us that it didn’t matter. That’s the thing with maths, it’s in everything but it would blow most of our tiny minds to understand it all.

From this I go into a final week of endings. It will be time to say goodbye to students and colleagues and we will do this in our usual excited, exhausted, slightly inappropriate state. I’m fully expecting the staff room to be googling duck cloacas and the dark side of duck sex by lunchtime today.

No one is really ready for Rishi.

 And so it begins.

A leadership election in the Conservative party has begun and if you thought that anything that went before was weird get yourself ready for batshit crazy. 

There are no consequences for those currently doing the job, so an Education Minister can wear bright yellow and flip the bird at the singing crowd. 

The right wing press start to gun for the Labour Party, who they describe as dangerous far left enemies of the people, when in fact, most are middle class ex-solicitors, lecturers, bankers or professional politicians (who knew that they wanted to help people and studied the mechanics of how to do that, often to PhD level). If you read the Darkly Nail yesterday, you would have thought that Kier Starmer got away with a wild party in lockdown. What actually happened was that Durham Police decided that the event was just eating something after a meeting and that Labour politicians don’t have to starve.

Serious contenders and distraction divas throw their hats in the ring. 

So far, Suella Braverman, Steve Baker and Rishi Sunak have said they will run. Rishi, with his enormous wealth and desire for power has launched a slightly too slick Twitter #cutnpaste campaign, which could be the end.

My money, however, is on Gove. I can’t believe that his sacking was the mistake that brought Johnson down. What if it was a carefully staged piece of theatre? They knew Boris’days were numbered from the moment partygate started. With 126 fines given, it was inevitable that he would go sooner or later, so Michael Gove fake-leaves his Daily Mail journalist wife and disappears for a while, so that everyone forgets that he was part of anything. Boris holds on for longer than is humanely possible. Then when he finally has to go he has a huge fight with Gove, effectively clearing him of any association. He calls him a snake, sacks him and Sarah (Mrs Gove) Vine writes a piece for the Mail giving all the gory details, illustrating the drama with her children jumping up and down on the sofa with excitement. 

The madness will continue for a while. Nadine Dorries will run interference until it comes down to Truss, Sunak, and Bandock. The Conservative party will be ready to choose but they won’t be sure. Two women and two coloured people and although they tick diversity boxes somehow none of this sits well with their traditional conservative values. This is the moment freshly laundered whiter than white Gove rides in to save the day. Boris’ spare in the whole ‘Brexit Project’. He gets chosen, moves back in with his wife and becomes the next PM. 

Thems the breaks

 It has been a very strange day in politics.

After 48 ministers resigned from their jobs because the Prime Minister lied about whether he knew that he'd covered up sexual abuse by someone he then gave a job to, it was clear he had to go. Many of us were hoping that he would cling on causing a snap election but he agreed that he would go once a replacement was found by Darwinian Natural Selection. 

He gave the most bizarre speech and all day I saw comments, tweets and texts about it.  Most people were commenting on the use of the phrase, "Thems the breaks." or how he mentioned Ukraine, as if he had personally ended a war that is still ongoing. People discussed the timing of his departure and what party he has planned at Chequers, which was clearly on his mind as he appeared to have forgotten that he was actually at Downing Street.  Its hard to keep track of where you are actually partying.  Obviously he also got everyone through Covid (except all the people who didn't get through it)

When I finally watched tthe speech I realised why people were so cross. What a weasel! Not sorry.   Incoherent. Bumbling.  Confused, Pledging as much support as he could give (nothing) to the next PM. 

Then he thanked people.  Maybe I'd got him wrong.

"Id like to thank the pianist of the Civil Service."

I listened to it several times.

He definitely said pianist.

I texted my daughter.

"I thought he said that too.  I listened to it several times." she told me.

No one ever thanks the pianist.

Honestly, being the pianist is a truly thankless task.  

Not only do you have more notes than anyone else, you hide behind the piano, are generally unseen but supportive.

I didn't know that the Civil Service had a pianist but I am so glad that the outgoing PM took time in his resignation speech to thank that person.

Obviously he is very sad to be losing the best job in the world but at least thanked the pianist.

Thems the breaks.

Team

 I’ve got a team!

Thirteen years ago I organised my first school summer music concert. Choir, band and soloists who I taught privately. I enlisted help from my daughter and a couple of her musical friends who were in the orchestra that I ran with my Dad. When she went to University she was replaced by my son and a couple of his musical friends.

Apart from a year off for grief and two for  bloomin’ Covid, it has run every year, getting bigger and better. 

Last night was the tenth Summer Music Concert that I’ve organised. Just over 60 children were involved (about 20% of the school). Two choirs, Two violin groups, a flute group, beginner wind group, band and solos from year 1 to year 6. No one cried (actually the audience might have: two hours is a long time to sit but I think it was mainly pride). The applause was roof raising and the children all want to do it again (which is the best feeling for any music teacher)

I still dragged my son along to move stands (actually, he offered) but this year I had a team. 

It is the most wonderful feeling. 

Five members of staff supported the groups that performed. Three members of staff set up the technical sound stuff. So many of them just stepped in and helped. 

Without getting too mushy I want to thank them all publicly. If I did hugging and stuff there would be big smooches all round.

The end of a long school year is in sight. Just Sports day, Bastille Day, a set of music exams, leavers production, a church service and a couple of assemblies to go before we are all reading books in the garden. I know that sounds like a lot but three of them are today, so we are nearly there team. 

It won’t be long before we need to warn the world.

Little Pluckers and Fingering Fiddlers

 I’m taking a break from my preparations for my school summer music concert. Tomorrow night I will have to play 17 pieces on the piano to accompany the students and as the Long Suffering Husband sarcastically said, “It’s a good job you are so good at the piano then.”

I should be practising but instead I’m glued to the TV. 

 I was going to write about the Chris Pincher thing after Dominic Raab’s car crash interview this morning. He said that Mr Pincher was not guilty, even though he definitely did engage in inappropriate unwanted sexual misconduct of  the groping junior members of staff kind. The reluctance to use the word guilty shows that he doesn’t think it matters. Pincher by name Pincher by nature. Obviously, it does matter and MPs who were sent on TV to say that the PM knew nothing about it when he had been fully briefed before appointing the man must be furious at being made to look like idiots. 

 The health secretary and the chancellor have resigned and we are told the Prime Minister has been on a tour of the tearoom. It’s fascinating. And really sad. 

Boris Johnson is unlikely to resign and Jacob Rees Mogg as said he shouldn’t. Nadine Dorries has given him her full support. So, they may be the new health secretary and Chancellor.

I must tear myself away and get back to my preparations. Apart from anything else, I need to think of better names for the two string groups, which I have provisionally called Little Pluckers and Fingering Fiddlers. It’s not that I don’t like the names but as they make a much better title of a blog about the current state of politics, I’ll leave them here (and keep my job!).