Miracles

 I’m here if you need me. Tap me up now. It might not last but I suggest you make the most of my superpowers while they last. I’m honestly not sure what they are or how you could make use of them but the fact that I am the source of miracles at the moment is the only explanation, so get in quick.

Yesterday. I taught, using Chromebooks. We used them for three lessons and not one single device ran out of power. Miraculous? I know? 

When I got home I made tea and burnt my hand on a tomato. I know that’s not the kind of miracle anyone wants but it was, nonetheless, miraculous. I had put some cherry tomatoes in a frying pan and started to squish them straight away. Although they were cold on the outside, some boiling hot pips leapt out and burnt my hand. 

Then the major miracle occurred. I fell down the stairs -What? That’s not a miracle - I hear you say. But…. …. My foot missed the 4th from bottom step. I stood on the edge of the stair and my sock slipped around my foot. “Oh,oh,” I thought. “This could be nasty.”

The next thing I knew I was cutting interesting shapes through the air, like a synchronised swimmer out of water, before landing on the offending right foot, on the floor in the hallway. My right foot, slowly descended to land in a perfect dismount. The judges held up their scorecards. Perfect 10s all around. A miracle.

So get in quick. I’m not sure how long these superpowers will last. 

A luxury we can’t afford

 In the last few weeks I’ve seen a worrying trend on music teacher online forums. Every day someone posts something like, “Has this happened to anyone else? I’ve just been told I’m not needed next year. Apparently, music is a luxury they can’t afford.”

  I’m not surprised. Paper is a luxury most schools can’t afford at the moment. The government don’t pay for the increased fuel bills or add anything to a school’s budget to cover the necessary support staff pay increase that was awarded in September. When they finally settle on teacher’s pay they won’t fund that either, so many of us who work in schools will lose our jobs or have to do the work of three or four people. 

The idea that music is an unaffordable luxury, though is bizarre. We need music. It’s important to all humans.  The BBC singers and the BBC orchestras have also lost all or part of their funding this week, this won’t stop people making music but it is a worrying trend. I hate the idea that music is only for the rich but if we keep calling it’s exorbitant extravagance then it will put people off trying it.

I was lucky with my musical education. My grandad played the piano in a pub for beer and even as a small child I was allowed to play fairies and giants on it when I went round. There were recorder clubs and choirs in infant school and a local music school encouraged us to learn instruments. There was a local brass band and teachers in junior school who were enthusiastic and encouraging.  

I loved my recorder: pocket-sized, portable and useful for playing tunes you’ve heard on the TV or radio. I still have a good repertoire of Doctor Finlay’s Casebook, Black Beauty, The Archers and Crossroads amongst others. One of the best on a recorder was Match of the Day. It starts with a second inversion of a G major arpeggio, which has a great finger feel. I feel that I’ve lost you but trust me, it’s a banger of a tune and easy on the recorder and you don’t need to know the theory to play it. It was so good that I played it all the time. We weren’t a football playing/watching family, which I suspect made my obsession with this tune even more annoying.

The Long Suffering Husband called me upstairs to see what had happened on Match of the Day. Due to a disagreement between Gary Lineker and the BBC about partiality of tweets he had been pulled from the show and everyone else had walked with him and so they called it football highlights and just showed the games. It was like going to watch a match without the beer and other people to talk to through the boring bits. I offered to whip out my recorder and play the theme tune in a minor key to help the mood but the LSH declined.

A quick look at Twitter this morning and I found I wasn’t the only one to want the theme tune back. Lots of dogs offered their services.

https://twitter.com/mrnickharvey/status/1634566935173111809?s=61&t=DGJHUr4cNHJ4lTQpvkya9A

This was my favourite and the Prime Minister appears to be looking for a solution  to the luxury that we can’t afford but clearly need.

I wouldn’t recommend it

Going away for a long weekend at the beginning of March sounds like a good idea but I wouldn’t recommend it. You come back ill, cold and slightly bemused about just how mad our country is at the moment. 

I was out of the Country when Suella Braverman launched her latest round of attacks on the ‘invading boat people pouring into our country’ as one of Sunak’s five-point plans. We also missed her upsetting the Civil Servants who are supposed to get this Bill into a shape where it is legal enough to be used by writing an email where they were described as an ‘activist blob of left-wingers.’. 

Holidays aren’t how they were in the Eighties, where you were desperate for news from home and you would grab a  two day old copy of the Sun from the corner shop at 3 times it’s normal price just to see what you were missing. Now, you can use your £2 daily data allowance (free before the new Brexit benefits) to check your favourite news sites through social media. You can have a highly personalised experience of what is going on. But I didn’t. News? No thanks. I enjoyed the weather, which the locals kept apologising for, but meant I didn’t have chilblains. 

I arrived back on the day the Home Secretary smirked in parliament about her policies but due to airplane bugs I was focusing on staying alive. 

I did notice Gary Lineker’s first tweet on the subject before falling into a snot filled haze.

I thought it was interesting that she was calling her own bill illegal (everyone knows it won’t get through the Court of Human Rights) and Gary was right, it was a beyond awful video for many reasons. 

I missed the Tweet that really upset. 

The tweet that proves that this Country really has gone mad. 

I missed Question Time and the discussion over whether Gary needed to be shown the red card.

The programme that nails BBC’s partiality. 

And then I noticed what was going on. Gary Lineker pulled from Match of the Day, all his co-workers pulling the ‘I am Spartacus’ trick and football is going to be broadcast to the strains of soothing classical music. Sounds perfect. No more shouting. No analysis over who was the luckiest (they never say that). I might even watch it.  Gary Lineker is a nice guy: a popular man who is pretty good at his job; not someone anyone is willing to throw under a bus to get their foot on the greasy pole. (Yes, I know I’m mixing my metaphors). He hasn’t done anything awful. The tweet was just an example of Godwin’s law - The longer something is discussed online it is inevitable that someone will compare it to Nazi Germany. The migrant debate/Brexit has been debated so often online that it’s almost impossible not to be the one that lets Hitler slip. 

The BBC will argue that their most high profile stars shouldn’t be allowed to make political statements and coming up to an election they don’t want to be seen to take sides. (Even faced with idiotic policies that are designed to whip up hate) However he has always tweeted his political opinions, so it does seem bizarre that they pick now to stop him. 

The tweet they object to, although are not showing on any of their News programmes and now seems to have been deleted is this:

Whether you like him or his opinions it would be hard not to know that he is one of the most naturally gifted presenter anyone has ever seen and that’s before you even think about crisps. Even Piers Morgan is supporting him. The wrong person to pick on - or the right one depending on what you are trying to do.

Now, forgive me for being a conspiracy nut but I have a theory. 

The master manipulators are at it again.

• A conservative government doesn’t want to fund public broadcasting. They believe everything should be run like a business.
• For years people have been trying to get us to believe that the BBC is horribly biased and should be de-funded.
• Those with a left-leaning politic understand that if all broadcasters are run like a business then unheard stories don’t get told.
• Most of the work was done on the right leaning public by describing the BBC as a left-wing blob.
• Left wing voters now need to be convinced that it’s time for Aunty Beeb to make her own way in the world.
• Time to get the BBC to ban socialist National Treasures. Gary Lineker to get the sports lovers, Attenborough for the nature nuts
• Get everyone angry. Stop funding untold stories.

I wouldn’t recommend it but like you, I’m not going to stop going away in March or getting angry on Gary Lineker’s behalf that something he could say on Twitter last month is something that will get him sacked this month. 

Pirates of the Clan

 The Long Suffering Husband wants to travel more. He took early retirement to make the most of life and then my brain broke and Covid happened, leaving him hugely disappointed. However, not being one to let a little anxiety stop me I find myself in Seville for a long weekend. 

It’s raining. Of course it is. We always have contrary weather but even rain can’t quite drown out the beauty of this city. There are oranges on trees (and a windfall in my handbag for interesting photos), gold encrusted churches, palaces, gardens with parakeets in trees, tiled frescos and tapas bars everywhere. 

Me and my Orange looking at a church

When we first got off the bus my eyesight failed me. 

“I’m not sure about that KKK bloke walking over there,” I pointed to a tall chap walking past the corner of a coffee shop. The LSH was quick to point out my mistake

“It’s like the swan you saw in Japan,” he reminded me.

But then I saw a poster and some sweets in a shop window. 

“I wasn’t wrong. There are everywhere!”

The LSH used his new-found googling skills and informed me that it’s something to do with the church. Most things in Seville seem to be.

We were walking towards the mushrooms when we saw a parade. I love a parade when I’m in a foreign country, so I started to film.

If you watch the video you can hear me say, “Look, Pirates!”

It turns out that I was wrong again. The LSH had seen it on a travel programme. They are, supposedly practising for Easter. They carry this sparkly platform on their heads (blindfold) to show.their devotion to the priests who dress up in the white hoods. 

I haven’t checked his facts so you can’t trust anything you’ve read here and you might just as well agree with me that we saw the Pirates of the Clan.

Masters of Manipulation

 Boris is back from his latest holiday, just in time for Wilf to dress up as a pooping dragon, to say that he will ‘have difficulty’ voting for the latest Brexit deal. Possibly because he will be on another trip but more likely to continue to create chaos that he and his mates love so much.

“Oh stop it, you complete F**weasel!”

Lately, I’ve been shouting at the radio, using many words that I intend to publish in my forthcoming book - Twatter: a creative guide to swearing.

These master manipulators just incite my potty-mouth.

Isabel Oakeshott and her boyfriend Richard Tice are another pair that unleash a string of foul-mouthed expletives. She popped up on my radio the other morning to defend releasing all of Matt Hancock’s pandemic WhatsApp messages. She was given them to write his Pandemic Diaries book (famous people hardly ever write their own). “If anyone thinks I’m motivated by the money they’re mad,” she said.

“We’re all mad then, you reprehensible c**womble!”

She’s manipulating us. And we love it. 

The messages are released to be drip-fed to us to suit an agenda. They are designed to make us angry and to talk about it. We are supposed to laugh at the stupidity of Matt Hancock and believe that government decisions are made by private messages between colleagues. If the enquiry finds that they were then they should be in serious trouble but who of us hasn’t sent a gif or a message to a friend about work? 

By the evening, during teacher’s strikes when schools were positively in the news with their cute World Book Day pictures, another one of them was on the radio.

I prefer not to dress up to celebrate books but pictures are cute and great publicity for schools

 This time talking about a message where the Single-brain-cell-wide-mouth-frog that was the Education Secretary had said that teachers ‘didn’t want to work.’ I don’t know which rich pollock it was but I’m fairly certain it was one of those that whipped us up over migrants, boats, sovereignty, buses and the NHS before.

“Oh, please. Stop baiting us, you mendacious w**stain.”

I don’t understand why they want us to be angry. I’d love to know why they work so hard to create chaos, fear and fury. What do they get out of it? Surely people work better and harder when they are happy. 

The truth is that managing a pandemic was hard and we can never know what would have happened if they had chosen another path. We are in a period of recovery and if I know anything about anything it’s that all you should do after a trauma is wait, be quiet, listen and reflect. A bit of light yoga, some gentle breathing, take your vitamins and whatever you do don’t rake over the what-ifs.

Meanwhile, we are being distracted from this recovery by truth twisting c**puffins, drip feeding us WhatsApp messages to make us angry.