Collective Nouns

I wonder what the collective noun for a group of collective nouns is?

These are the kind of questions that keep me awake at night. They seem so important at 3am but on waking I realise that you don't need a collective noun for collective nouns because they don't hang out together. They don't go around in gangs, hanging on street corners and terrifying old ladies, like a gang of teenagers might. They don't lurk under the watering cans of unsuspectiting gardeners waiting to induce nausea when they are accidentally touched, as a cornucopia of slugs might. They don't sit on the fence annoying the dog, as a kit of pigeons might. They don't sit on top of the school chimney waiting to steal the music teachers voice, as a murder of crows might. They don't lurk in the pond, waiting to get themselves mangled by the lawnmower when they venture out, as a knot of toads do. They don't wait in classrooms eager to bash things in a semi musical way as a raft of otters, a cete of badgers, a dray of squirrels or an skulk of foxes might.

Oh wait. They do. They lurk in my head at 3am, making me useless for the next day. A flamboyance of flamingos, a bloat of hippos, a murmation of starlings, a parliament of owls, a pandemonium of parrots, an audience of squid.

Why do squid need an audience? I thought they were quite shy, squiting their inky blackness to hide behind.

A shiver of sharks, a seething of eels,  a rhumba of rattlesnakes, an implausibility of gnus........STOP.

I'm sure normal people don't do this. No wonder I'm so tired!

I've got it. It's an exhaustion of collective nouns.

Become a performer and move furniture

The Mercury theatre in Colchester is fabulous. We, in Essex, are unknowingly culturally deprived but the Mercury works tirelessly to redress the balance.

Usually, no one comes to Essex. Why would they when London is just down the road? We can go to them. My daughter, working on a local paper in Slough, has interviewed Theresa May, Liz Kendall, Michael Parkinson and most importantly Flora from the Bake Off in her first three months. I think that if she were working on the Essex Chronicle she could wait three years to interview anyone famous other than Joey Essex. 

The Mercury's Made in Colchester initiative is just brilliant. They have top performers and top creatives making new theatre, which they debut before it goes on tour. Ticket prices are more than affordable at £10 -£12 a seat and the theatre is friendly and comfortable. 

Yesterday we went to see The Smallest Show on Earth, which is a new musical based on the music of Irvin Berlin and I can highly recommend it. In fact, I insist that you go and see it.

Irving Berlin wrote some cracking tunes, which were performed so brilliantly by this exceptionally strong cast. The band were, "so good you just didn't notice them," my daughter said. I was horrified. How could you have not noticed that flute playing? What a tone!

The story was funny and captivating; written by Thom Southerland and Paul Alexander, both very experienced writers. It was made even more appealing for us, set in Sloughbourgh (pronounced Sluffburrah), as we had our resident Slough expert with us. 

 Liza Goddard and an evil man from Corrie (Brian Capron) were the named stars.  Their performances were good , although there was a wobble in their duet, which the band helped them keep together. They were outshone by some other cast members, which is often the case as fame and talent are not always synonymous.

Haydn Oakley took the part of the husband and was amazing, as usual. We saw him in the Book if Morman in the West End and in The Mercury's production of Betty Blue Eyes (I've been singing Pig no Pig from it ever since the David Cameron story broke last week - there really is a song for every occasion). 

Christina Bennington, as the daughter has a fabulous voice and I think is someone to watch. Sam O'Rourke played the hapless boy so well that there were genuine "ahhs" from the audience when he got his uniform and even more when he got the girl. 

Although he didn't feature much, Leo Andrew had one of those gorgeous Welsh male choir voices that sounds like chocolate. His first character, Uncle Simon, died of a heart attack in the first scene and the Long Suffering Husband was fearful that he wouldn't make it to the end of his performance as Fred. This was partly due to his wonderful portrayal of a wheezy old cinema concierge but also because of the choreography. 

I'm not an expert on dance and often find myself thinking that I don't quite understand it. This choreography was extremely lively and had me admiring the performers even more. Singing like that while kicking and twisting and jiving must require a strong set of heart and 

lungs. I often say that I should get T-shirts printed with the slogan, "Like moving furniture? Become a musician!" 

This was something that these singer-dancers knew all about. The dances were all cleverly designed to move the furniture around the stage. This all looked effortless but I couldn't help thinking that to get the balance between getting a staircase that you'd be happy to dance up which could also be easily be moved by two people might be a challenge for any set designer.

The absolute star of the show was Matthew Crowe as the Sloughborough Songbird. This part of the show alone is more than worth the ticket price. 

The LSH said at the end, "At first I thought it was a bit old fashioned and the dancing was a bit weird but I really enjoyed myself - it might be the best one I've seen." High praise indeed.

Clothes make the man; women can wear what they like.

My son's school has a new headmaster who likes suits.  I should rephrase that because there are no such things as schools anymore; they're academies and headmasters are principals but I'm an old grumpy woman and so I'm not going to.

When I was in the sixth form we had a new headmaster, a Dr of Maths, who stayed in his office and didn't talk to anyone and he also liked suits.  He thought we were scruffy.  Some of us were but we were finding out our own style, wearing what we felt comfortable in and suits wouldn't have made us smarter anyway.

Dr Maths (I don't actually remember his name but it was probably something like Smith) decided to impose a dress code on the sixth form.  No longer were we to wear jeans or t-shirts, have coloured hair, painted nails and the boys were not allowed earrings.  I remember discussions.  I remember everyone getting upset but I don't remember anything changing.  That was in 1984, when people did wear suits to work; when men wore ties and jackets without making everyone worry that they were about to attend a funeral, so I was quite surprised to find history repeating itself. However, we were a militant lot.  No one was going to tell us what to do. Students (and parents are much more fearful and likely to tow the line these days.

One of my friends was sent home for dying her hair black.  She came back the next day with bright green hair, as a result of trying to bleach it back to blond.  "See," we said, "you should have left her alone."  She was one of the cleverest girls in the school and black hair wasn't going to stop her fulfilling her potential and her Mohawk looked much better in green anyway.  I wasn't brave with my outfits.  I would wear tailored trousers and had a pair of red low stilettos, with a matching scarf and  gloves.  I thought I looked amazing until I walked past a group of younger students.  One of them said, "God, I hate that girl, with her matching accessories, she really thinks she's it!" and another girl, whose voice I recognised agreed adding a few other more accurate comments on my awful character. Sisterly love was never very strong in our family.

I remember my form and maths teacher (who was a bit of a hero of mine) discussing the issues with us.  She  pointed out that any dress code was sexist as it defined men and women.  In those days, the girls were meant to wear skirts or dresses and boys were supposed to wear suit and tie. Now, nobody would dream of telling a woman she wasn't allowed to wear trousers, although wearing a skirt with leggings does apparently exclude a female journalist from walking around a building site with an MP. This means that women have more choice in what they wear. Men are still to embrace the skirt as a fashion choice and although they don't know what they're missing, especially in warm weather, when it's nice to have a bit of a breeze around your nethers, it has naturally diminished their choices.

Psychology has a lot to say on this subject.

We know that how you dress can affect how other people rate your performance.  In an interesting study  by Joel Wapnick, Jola Kovacs Mazza & Alice-Ann Darrow (Journal of Research in Music Education, winter 1998, vol 46 no 4, p510-521)  how someone dressed did significantly change how their performance was valued.  People were asked to rate people on attractiveness, the way they used the stage and what they wore, others were shown a video with sound of the performance and a third group were asked to rate an audio version of the performance.  They found that those who scored highly on stage presence and dress also scored significantly better on the ratings of their performance where the video was also shown.  Attractiveness also had a slight effect, which is a shame for any ugly musician.

But it's not a simple cause and effect.

Many businesses (especially American Companies) are adopting casual dress codes.  Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Linkdn and many others recommend their employees dress casually, as is enables them to be more creative.  Employees like this freedom.  In a 1998 survey by USA Today, 64% of respondents said they work more efficiently in casual dress.  When asked about this casual way of dressing for work employees cite many benefits (such as comfort, increased camaraderie and better work environments), while only 4% perceived any negative impact.

When people are allowed to make their own choices about what they wear for work many will wear certain things that they believe make them more productive.  I have a brown cardigan that I often wear when writing and I think it makes me write better (I'm not wearing it now, which explains a lot) and means that I can even write in my PJs.  As long as I slip my comfy cardi over the top I'm ready to work.

It is all to do with what associations people have with the outfit.

Hajo Adam and Adam D Galinsky wrote a paper called Enclothed Cognition (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, July 2012, Vol 48(4), p918-925), where they asked participants to take part in the Stroop test.  The Stroop test is the one where you are shown things like this and asked to state the colour the word is written in.

BLUE   GREEN  RED  YELLOW

It's a test that shows how well someone is able to direct their attention, as we tend to process the written word quicker than we process the colour.  In this experiment, the Adams noticed that if they asked people to wear a white coat they performed better on the test but only if they told them that it was a doctor's coat.  If they told them it was a painter's coat they didn't perform any better.

When I go to work I dress like a teacher.  I wear a dress or a pair of trousers and a top.  Children are always very interested in my shoes and often make comments on my outfit,  "Ooh, I like your top," they say.  I don't think my lessons are any better than they would be if I was in my PJs.  When I teach privately at home I wear jeans, a sloppy cardigan and slippers and my pupils don't tend to comment.
It doesn't matter how much effort you put into your outfit, how someone sees it will probably depend on how they think of you.  The naughty kids will get told off for short skirts or loose ties when the clever, polite ones will get away with it.  My daughter was told that her bright red dyed hair was beautiful when others were sent home for a similar hairstyle choice.  Last week, I wore a blouse that had buttons down the back.  A child laughed, "For a moment I thought you had your top on back to front but then I realised it was meant to be like that."  I joined in with the laughter and then another child said, "Oh, I thought so too but I didn't like to say," and I realised that they all saw me as a batty old woman who might not be able to dress herself properly anymore.

It could be an interesting few months.  I hope that sixth form students still have a little bit of fight in them.

Cold Calling

I seem to have got myself on a list for cold callers who are trying to sell things to really old people, which is odd because I'm not old and I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Service.

I started to wonder if I was getting paranoid.  Every time I picked up the phone someone wanted to sell me a stair lift, walk in bath or and end of life care plan. Yesterday, a woman, who was trying to discuss whether my pension was going to last as long as I dared to keep living suddenly heard my voice and said, "I don't think this information is right.  Are you retired? No? Oh, are you about to retire? Nineteen years, you say, oh dear.  I'm really sorry."

Today, I feel I need to apologise to the young man from The Will Centre.  I know that cold calling isn't an easy job and hysterically laughing people don't make it any easier.   I wouldn't have been eligible for the product because I am not having problems paying for my care but I promise you don't need to send someone to have me sectioned. My hysteria was caused, in part, because cold callers have been so disappointed about my age and health lately that I was already on the defensive.

"Hello Madam.  How are you feeling today?"
"Err.....I'm fine,"
 Actually, I wasn't.  I had a bit of a headache and my second toe on my left foot was  numb but I didn't think he wanted to know that.
He sighed, "Oh, I'm Will from the Will Centre."

A sigh?  Really?  How dreadful.  You feel fine.  You might not need a will if you are not going to die soon.

I could feel it.  I was going to laugh.  You can't laugh when someone is calling you about your imminent death can you?

Will continued to talk.

 Surely, you'd change your name if you were called Will and working at the Will Centre call centre? Poor Will, unable to sell wills to people who are feeling fine.  No wonder he sighed.

 I put my hand over my mouth and tried to listen.

"Do you know that there are people who can't continue to pay for their care and end up leaving nothing to their children?"

 Tears were rolling down my cheeks and my shoulders were shaking but I managed a squeaky, "yes," I was imagining how sinister it was to ring people up try and sell them a will if they were feeling really ill.

"You do?  What do you know?"

I was being interrogated by a young lad who was pissed off that I wasn't about to die, who thought I was spending my children's inheritance on a home help.

Too late.  I laughed.  I couldn't stop laughing.

He bravely continued with his script for a while.  Each time he asked me a question I managed through the laughter to say I was really sorry.  There was no getting away from it I was properly hysterical. It was beginning to hurt.

I could tell that Will was confused.  "

"What's so funny?" he asked, "this is no laughing matter."

Words weren't easy for me by this stage.  I could chuckle, chortle, roar, cackle and guffaw but actual words had left me.

"Please tell me what I've said, that's so funny," he pleaded. Poor Will, was getting paranoid now.

I managed, "How are you?.....Wills..." between the heaving gasps, as I tried to catch my breath and calm down.

"I'm not trying to sell you a will," he protested.

Oh dear, that was it.  I was off again.

Laughter is contagious and Will had been infected.  He didn't know why and it wasn't helping him do his job.  He felt as though he was the butt of the joke but still couldn't help himself.

"Well,  ha ha,  I'll leave you to get on with the rest...he he he.... of  your.....ho ho ......day."   Then he snorted.  Properly snorted like a pig and nearly choked as he gasped air in to regain some control.

I can just imagine him trying to explain himself to the rest of the office.  "What was that about?" they will ask and all he will be able to do is wipe the tears from his eyes and shrug his shoulders.

The Trouble with Women

I can see that it's time for me to have another feminist rant. I've been avoiding it for a while so forgive me if I don't manage to rant in a calm, reasoned, succinct way.

The press is all over it.
 Now.
Only now.

They are claiming a sexist row has erupted in the Labour Party because Jeremy Corbyn has failed to put any women in the top power four positions in the cabinet. He is quoted in the Independent as saying that those roles were, "defined in the 19th century to reflect an era before women or workers even had the vote". This makes him look like a complete dinosaur, which is probably unfair. The other side of the press are rejoicing the new Shadow Cabinet, which has more women than men by number; a situation that has never occurred before. This is being used as a, "Shut up women. What are you complaining about?" story.

People are a bit confused about this. They are sure they've seen lots of women in politics. They are almost certain that there were more women than men. There were women everywhere. This is due to a particularly interesting psychological phenomena that I like to call, 'women shine brighter,' but the psychology world calls The Gender Perception Gap. There have been studies where people are put in a room full of people and asked to say how many there are of each sex. The men always over estimate the numbers of women. In fact if a room is 17% women , men believe it to be a 50:50 balance and it only takes 33% of women in a room for men to feel outnumbered. I'm not sure how women rate the balance but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's not a similar result. 

And this is the point of my rant. Gender equality will never happen if we keep pitching men against women.  

Men and women are not separate species. We do not need to compete for the same space. We are designed to live together.

It is important to note inequalities and ask questions about why they happened. If we are unaware of them we can never change them. Unfortunately, anyone who does this gets drawn into a battle: men vs women. If a woman notices it she is a harridan. A good example of this was an article by Suzanne Moore in the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/12/jeremy-corbyn-not-one-female-voice, where she observed that in the hall where the leadership vote was announced no one heard a single woman's voice. The comments on the article and the abuse she received on Twitter were predictable. She wasn't wrong to observe that all the excellent female candidates lost to duller, less competent men and that there seems to be a natural bias to vote for a man, which is something society needs to address if we are ever going to get equality.   However, if you read the comments you would think she had just recommended androcide. Men threatened all sorts of violence and women were cross that she had the temerity to question their right to vote for a man. 

I was concerned about the way the female candidates were being viewed from a very early stage in the Labour leadership campaign. Not only were they assessed on their partner but they were also lumped together and referred to as the girls. When Tessa Jowell was beaten in the election to run for London Mayor by Sadiq Khan (who The Daily Mail has described as lacklustre) I started to worry about whether the brilliant Stella Creasy or Angela Eagle could hold the deputy vote. I had no idea who their male opponents were but I didn't think that was going to matter.  Although, now he has been elected I do remember Tom Watson as the man who called Gove a pipsqueak in the commons, which was very funny.

Jeremy Corbyn isn't to blame for any of this. People voted for him because they were excited by a Labour Party that cared about equality more than an individual's right to accumulate wealth.  Many people who might have voted for a woman switched to him because of what he was saying (or rather what people said he was saying because Corbyn doesn't talk to the press). However, if Jeremy had never been on the ballot paper I suspect that Andy Burnham would be the leader of the party now. 

I have been ranting on this topic all weekend. As we drove back from, yet another, university open day the Long Suffering Husband was listening to a sports radio channel. The presenter introduced his female co-presenter as a 'bench-wench.' She laughed, so he said it again and again and again. I exploded, "See! This is why women can never be elected to positions of power. Even she's not taking herself seriously. This is disgusting."

My son, who had rejected this University because there were no ovens in the student accommodation and he couldn't go anywhere were he couldn't make cake, agreed with me but tried to calm me down by saying that it was only a football programme. 

The Long Suffering Husband, who was still chuckling at the rhyme of bench-wench, decided to live life on the edge. 

"You know what the problem with women is?" he asked rhetorically.

I bit my lip.

"Margaret Thatcher."

He looked smug. There was silence in the car, as my son mouthed WTF in slow motion. I could feel the pressure building. 
My son was thinking, "She's gonna blow. I've always wanted to see a volcano erupt but I didn't want to be stuck in a car with it when it happened."
The LSH was oblivious. "You know what I mean?" He persisted. "We've had a woman Prime Minister and..."

I was quite calm.

"You know the trouble with men?" I interrupted "Hitler! No wonder no one has ever let a man lead them ever again. Oh, wait, they have. How silly of me. It must be my stupid woman's brain that stopped me making that connection. Maybe I need to get back to the kitchen."

It's very quiet after a volcano erupts.

Please don't tell him but the LSH might have a point.  Women seem to need other women to be perfect and please all people.  Helen Mirren made an observation that she gets angry when she sees men with their arm draped over the shoulder of their partner because to her it implies ownership. How dare she?  She can't say that.  There might be some people who like having an arm draped across their shoulder.  There might be men who are genuinely unable to hold themselves up in a pub without the aid of their shorter woman, who have no intention of owning her.   Female voices from Twitter, the Daily Mail and Loose Women exploded.  Finally, they had something serious to discuss; a woman who had said something that not everyone would agree with. This surely has to be more important that poverty, pay inequality, child care, sex trafficking, female genital mutilation and certainly more important than having a government that represents all sections of society.

Catch Phrase

Going back to school after a long summer holiday I worry that I'll have forgotten how to do it.  Will I remember how to teach small children?   When I woke this morning I was concerned that not only had I forgotten how to teach I also wasn't in the best physical condition to do so.

Today, though, I've been 'perfectly fine'.  I was 'perfectly fine' all day and I can't recommend standing in front of a class of 30 small children for pain relief highly enough. I realised that as I winced my way along  the corridor towards the staffroom, saying, "Yeah, perfectly fine," to anyone who enquired that it's become a bit of a catchphrase.

This isn't my only catchphrase, though.

I was embarrassed the other day when a friend was ranting about people who use the word 'awesome'.  I agree that people over use the word but I use it in one of my catchphrases.  I tell children before they perform, "Don't forget to be awesome."  I stole this from cool and trendy YouTubers but I think it works.  Awesome is a pretty big thing to try to be.

Over the Summer I asked some of my pupils to perform in the High Street and another of my catchphrases appeared.  "There's no rest for the talented," I said.

When they were a little shy I used another catchphrase.  "Be bold be strong be wrong." I know that sounds like a silly catchphrase but how can you ever get better if you are scared to be wrong?

When my daughter was studying her A levels, one of her teachers joked with me about some of the pupils in her music class.  She said, "You can't polish a turd."
"Yes but you can sprinkle glitter on it,"  I replied.
 This is very useful advice if you work in a Primary School.

The Bristol Stool Chart doesn't contain any glittery versions but as I often say (in my final catchphrase of this blog), "There's not much that can't be improved with cake."

Cake seen on Pintrest

Just Singing

X-Factor has started and I find myself in a permenantly irritated state. 

1. It means it's the end of Summer, will soon be Christmas and I'm not ready to start looking at Christmas Carols yet.

2. It is difficult not to be irritated about the extraordinary levels of patronisation. We know these people have been auditioned. We know that the panel has instructions on whether to be laugh at the vocalist or be shocked at how good they are. We know that because there's nothing in between, except for Ollie Murrs friend.

3. X-factor is the only programme that makes me regret not drinking alcohol. It would be so much more bearable if you played a drinking game with a shot for every cliche. "What I like about you is that you just don't know how good you are." Shot! "You really made that your own." Shot! "Brave song choice. It's not easy to sing Whitney." Shot! "I didn't like it. I loved it." Hic! It suddenly becomes a programme you can watch without wanting to kill someone.

4. Once the 'auditions' are over there will be several ways of proving that these singers, who we know are good from their first performances, can't actually sing after all. The backing track could be too loud, the sound production will be terrible because it's ITV, they might make them sing a song in an inappropriate key or 'battle' with another singer. They will pump strep bacteria into the dressing rooms and be surprised that singing with a sore throat doesn't sound as 

good. 

5. Everyone will have an opinion, as if they could do so much better themselves. I've heard lots of people sing and most aren't even good enough to be in the 'laughed at' category (including me)

6. X-factor helps to promote the belief that you are born a singer or not. I am actually going to throw something at the TV the next time someone says, "I started singing last year." They didn't! They have been training their voice all their life and last year they decided to sing in front of people.

7. X-factor makes my job harder. 

But none of this matters because it's just singing. Singing isn't important. Most schools have ditched hymn practice and singing hymns in assembly. Primary schools with music teachers, who teach children how to sing with good technique are rarer than hen's teeth. You know it won't matter, though, because these multi-million pound industries will survive with people who never opened their mouth in song until the day before they auditioned. Even in the school where I work (as a hen's tooth), which values singing, the time we are able to do it has been squeezed into lunchtimes and after school clubs. When discussing our brilliant class assemblies teachers can be heard to say, "Every child does something. Even if it is only to stand up and sing a couple of songs." I blame X-factor as I fight back the temptation to shout, "ONLY?"

Get a grip woman. Breathe. It's only singing.

The Sussex Thing

My theory that every University has a 'thing' that you can discover on an open day visit was tested again when we visited Sussex. In previous visits we had noticed that the 'thing' for Bangor was tea,  toast for Essex, buses for Nottingham and sports in Surrey.

At first, we thought Sussex was missing a thing. 

I confess that I wasn't expecting to like it. Another parent had told me that they thought it was 'scuzzy' and a long way from town. The Long Suffering Husband walked around saying, "I'm not sure, there's something missing," which it turns out was a lake.

Once we started talking to people and the 'thing'started to become clear, however, my son loved it.

Sussex university's toast is cycling.

They are bonkers about bikes. 

Being in the only constituency controlled by the Green Party, situated in a National Park (the South Downs) and a 10 minute cycle ride (or 25 minutes on the bus) to Brighton, bikes are a very attractive option. Everyone told us how obsessed they had become with cycling since joining this University. They could all mend a puncture and fix a chain.

And as my son told the LSH, "Who needs a lake when you are only ten minuites by bike from the sea?"

There was a 'thing' that no one mentioned. A quite sinister 'thing'. A 'thing' you could hear wherever you went. A 'thing' you silently marvelled at but were too stunned to mention. 

There are evil looking seagulls the size of small dogs.

Recently, there have been reports of seagull attacks in the press. Two pet dogs and a tortoise have been killed, a small child lost a finger, a pensioner was knocked over and even David Cameron has called for a big conversation about seagulls. He loves a big conversation! However, Sussex University are taking the opposite approach. 

Don't mention the Seagulls.