Rattan and Tunnocks Teacake wrappers

 After days of being told we don’t care about the Prime Minister lying, being crass and insensitive about death during a pandemic and fiddling public money to refurbish his flat it turns out that we do care. We care even more that he is so cross about it that he looks like a rabid dog at Prine Ministers Questions..

“Hmm,” we think, “no one looks that cross unless they actually have something to hide.”

Then we find something we care about even more. Surprisingly, it’s not corruption, lying, cronyism or practises that boarder on fraud. No. We care about taste and interior design.

How dare they diss John Lewis? Most of us can only dream of John Lewis. Most people in rented accommodation (which, after all, is all the Downing Street flat is (without the need to pay rent) haven’t even managed to get a lick of paint on their windows for 20 years but each new Prime Minister gets a budget of £30,000 of tax payer money to redecorate how he (or his partner) likes. Just think how many council house windows could be painted for £30,000. But let’s not go there. This isn’t about that. Every Prime Minister has used that budget. SamCam famously put in an IKEA kitchen. Gordon Brown said that the whole building needed to be gutted. 

Now the Princess Sloan Ranger herself didn’t marry a sweaty man with more than fifty years under his flabby belt not to get the interior design of her dreams. By all accounts she stamped her foot and said, “How can I possibly entertain all my yummy mummy friends in a John Lewis lounge? I simply must have Lulu Lytle . I think you should sack the person that says we can’t spend more money!”

Even Boris thought that was a bit extreme, so he borrowed the extra money without telling anyone oh, yes, he’s paid it back now and so, apparently, we shouldn’t be too cross. But they forgot how interior design changes everything.

There is no greater signifier of social class. The very rich have a certain lampshade and after a while that design gets to John Lewis because the middle classes aspire to richness and eventually it gets to Peacocks, so everybody with disposable income can have it. Suddenly even the people who buy from John Lewis think it’s tacky and the very rich have moved on.

I’ve had a look at Soane Britain’s website (Lulu Lytle’s company) and I think we all need to be very afraid. As someone who lived through the Seventies, I can say that none of us want to go back to that. Big prints in earthy tones, tiger heads on the wall and pictures of blue women with moving waterfalls in the background should stay in the past. It’s no coincidence that when most people had a chance to decorate like that the trend didn’t last long. I have noticed that wicker is a strong feature in her designs. This was also popular in the Seventies. So much so that many of my primary school DT lessons involved soaking willow and bending back and forth through a frame to make a basket. I still have those skills so if you aspire to the kind of interior the Prime Minister bought for a lot more than £30,000 then I can help. I have a load of Tunnocks Teacakes wrappers saved too.

Let the bodies pile high

 It’s so difficult to know who to believe isn’t it? 

I mean, on one hand you have a lovable rogue, the tousle haired bumbling serial shagger, who bats off any suggestion of wrong-doing by answering a completely different question. 

“Prime Minister, did you promise James Dyson that his employees would be exempt from the extra tax that you promised would be part of your new Brexit arrangements?”

“I’d move heaven and earth to get ventilators.”

“Did he actually build you any though?”

“Did you want people to die.”

After all, the man has a perfect grasp on honesty and integrity. These are the words he used to describe his affair with Jennifer Arcuri (a woman only a few years older than his daughter, bizarrely named Lettuce), in his marital home, who he also gave government contracts to while he was Mayor of London. Unless he told his wife then I think we can be certain that honesty isn’t a word he understands.

Then, on the other hand, we have Dominic Cummings, who drove to Barnard Castle, while he had Covid to test his eyesight and sat in a rose garden to claim he had done nothing wrong. Honesty and integrity, being his modus operandi. If you’ve not read his blog then you are missing out. He even writes [pause]  where he wants you to believe he is thinking. 

Boris says that Cummings is a systemic leaker (They make tena pads for men too) and Cummings says that Boris is a liar.

It’s just so difficult to know who to believe.

It’s uncomfortable to believe that any Prime Minister would have said, during a pandemic, No more fucking lockdowns. Let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

It’s just such an inhumane response. However, it seems as though there are people other than Dom Cummings (I went with Dom because I’m never sure how to spell Dominic) who are saying it is true. People who do actually possess honesty and integrity. 

Now, those that are defending him are saying, “Oh well, yes, um, he did say that, sort of, um, he was frustrated. He didn’t want a third lockdown.”

None of us wanted a third lockdown. Leicester would have quite liked to not have had one huge lockdown. However, given the choice how many of us would have honestly argued to let bodies pile up in the streets? Apart from the pointlessness of it, it would also create a bigger public health issue. I know it was a long time ago but if there’s one thing we should have learnt from the Black Death it’s that piling bodies up in streets is not a good idea. 

By resisting the scientists who pressed for the lockdowns we have been caught in a worst of all worlds situation. Lockdowns have lasted longer and been more frequent than in countries where they went early and more people have died. If he had really believed that allowing the virus to sweep through the population, killing off a large percentage and leaving those left with herd immunity then he should have stuck to his guns. The devastation would have have been awful but at least it would have been quick. 

But, like I say, it’s difficult to know who to believe. Apparently, we, the public, don’t care. According to opinion column writers it’s not something we should get upset about. 

I think I might be H

 Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey. I’m a little worried that I might be H.

No comment.

Yes, it’s true. We are all hooked. It’s been a long time since a TV drama has united the nation to watch it all at the same time. Next Sunday, we should find out who the 4th man is and we are all going to be slightly disappointed. 

There are lots of theories flying around on the internet. 

There’s the woman whose husband was killed by the OCG because she has some dodgy money and kitchen tiles that spell out H. It seems a tenuous link but who knows. I’ve checked a pattern on my cushions and if you squint you can almost certainly make out an H. 

Jimmy Nesbit, apparently could be H after all. My last suggestion that he couldn’t because he was filming Bloodlands at the time has been scuppered because they were both filmed in Belfast. However, it does look like he might be dead, or a Spanish policeman.

Ian Buckles has always seemed an unlikely candidate to me. He just looks a bit lazy. He seems to be the person who genuinely would rather be playing golf, rather than using it as a nefarious cover for other interests. We know that there are golfing links because DCI ‘Dot’ Cotton was discovered to be the Caddy. This golfing link concerns me. Every year, I get golf equipment for my birthday but I’ve never played a round in my life.

Then there’s Pass Agg Pat. The theory around her is complicated, so keep up. It’s not that she’s just horrible and whispers too much it’s all to do with an anagram. Oh how I love an anagram theory. Lakewell told them to , “Look beyond the race claim to find H”. Coincidentally, or not, race claim is an anagram of Carmichael without the H. 

It could still be Ted. If it is then we will all be very upset. Even more upset than when he, having solved everything and walking out with his box of items removed from his desk to head for retirement, has a stroke in the lift (that’s my prediction. ) He’s been an obvious choice from the beginning but it’s not him is  it? That would be a complete reversal of character.

Both Ted Hastings and Patricia Carmichael are in the frame because they can’t spell. Defiantly. Def....defin...definitely. Oh no. I think I’m H. 

If I am then I’d like to apologise now. I didn’t mean to be a bent copper. I’m really no sure how it happened.

Slacker

I finished a book yesterday morning. Probably for the first time in my life I was ashamed of how long it took me. Nearly three weeks! 

Twenty seven days on one book. 

It’s wasn’t as though I didn’t read every day. It wasn’t as if it was difficult to read or long. It wasn’t as if I hated it. 

In fact, it was the opposite of that. I read it at every opportunity. I loved it from the very first word - from the dedication even. It was short and easy to read too. The problem was that I loved it too much. It is the perfect book. I’ve never read anything better. It was deep, wise and witty and I didn’t want it to end. I just read every word a million times. I read slowly.

If you read it, you might think differently but for me Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People is the best book I’ve ever read. I loved a man called Ove and Mum, my sister and I used My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologies and Britt-Marie was Here to help us through grief after Dad died (even buying industrial sized tubs of baking soda and cleaning everything). Now, he has written a study in anxiety that is better than any textbook on the subject. 

My shame at taking so long has been relieved though because after I’d finished it I felt hollow and empty, as if I had suddenly lost my best friend. To compensate I started and finished Tom Allen’s biography, lent to me by a friend. I was feeling guilty that I had kept it so long. Three weeks is a long time for me and as she lent it to me she told me that her husband had said he’d like to read it but she had reassured him that I wouldn’t have it for long. 

Earth Day

 I won’t do it. I refuse. I know, it’s really tempting. Those of us who love words are really struggling. We want to write about it but we mustn’t. 

He knew what he was doing. He also loves words. He knew that we’d want to write it. The words, being such nonsense but close enough to a well-known insult, to make us write them. He could see the newspaper headlines.

On Earth day, our Prime Minister chose to make a joke about ‘tree huggers’, firmly insulting the scientists and anyone who has half a brain cell, who believe that climate change is a real issue, that will make Coronavirus look like a walk in the park. He did it by not using the actual phrase but mixing his metaphors. Fluffy bunny brigade, is another insult he thought about using. 

He did say that it wasn’t just a problem for these people that he had made up but a problem for everyone. But then he made some incomprehensible noises and said the phrase again. If it weren’t impossible to believe, we might have thought that our Prime Minister was off his face on some new street drug. The other world leaders looked around and shook their heads. They looked embarrassed for us.

As I’ve started to write I’m wondering if it was such a bad thing. I think it was his way of letting his big business buddies know that he doesn’t take the problem seriously and so won’t be doing anything to affect their money making abilities but what if he knows that nobody ever reads climate change stuff? I don’t know why. Even I don’t read it and I’m interested. What if he knew that the only way to get people to know it was Earth Day was to make up an incomprehensible phrase that we’d all want to write about?

Now I’ve confused myself.

So, here goes. Bunny huggers of the world, it’s time to sit up and pay attention.

Get me a bunny!

Hope

 Yesterday, while I was distracted by balls, I forgot to write about an amazing thing that happened in America.

A man was found guilty of murder for kneeling on someone’s neck until they died. The person had pleaded for him to stop, saying that he couldn’t breathe and bystanders had tried to intervene and even called the Police. This was the weirdest thing because the man doing the killing was the Police and he had two buddies watching him.  I like to think that if that happened in England the bystanders would have pulled the policeman off him but this was America and the buddies had guns and a right, almost bordering on duty, to use them.

The policeman, Derek Chauvin’s eyes flitted wildly around the room as the verdicts were returned. His brain tried everything to try to process what had happened and failed. He didn’t cry. There was no emotion just incomprehension. 

In his mind, I’m sure, he still believes that he did nothing wrong. The man, in his mind, was a dangerous criminal on drugs. The world sees it differently. We see a man, George Floyd, targeted because of the colour of his skin and not believed when he told the police officer that he couldn’t breathe. The world knows that it was institutional racism that led to this poor man’s death. Derek Chauvin still doesn’t. Many of his colleagues still won’t. They will believe that he was made an example of to appease the growing loud voices of the people who don’t understand how ‘difficult black people are to police’. Our voices would like them to understand that black people are just people. 

I hope this case starts to change things. I hope it makes the police everywhere look at their policies. I hope it makes individual policemen stop and consider whether they are treating someone differently because of a perceived personality trait linked to their skin colour. I hope it makes them ban kneeling on people’s necks at any time. And I hope they ban guns and the freedom with which they use them.

As I type this list of hopes I am feeling more depressed because one police officer going to prison is not going to change the system or stop racism and it could entrench a feeling of them and us, which would make the situation even worse.

I hope I’m wrong.

Balls

 Something happened with football.

 Some rich kids tried to steal the ball and people got very cross and a little bit depressed and eventually the rich kids thought it might be better to share the ball after all.

The Prime Minister even had an opinion, despite appearing as clueless about football as I am. He said that only the rich kids in this country can use a game to launder their money. Oh, and the Russians but this has to be an option for all the rich kids not just the top 6. 

I’m sorry.

I don’t understand football. 

I don’t understand the passion and tribalism that comes out of kicking a spherical object around a field but I am glad that public opinion still counts for something.

I wonder if the same people could get as passionate about some other things, like inequality, poverty, corruption and climate change?

I’m guessing not as none of those things have balls. It’s funny how balls seem to matter more than anything else.

When did Sunday night telly get so stressful?

 1986.

That was the year Sunday night telly changed. 

Up until then it was a gentle slope from the end of the weekend into the start of the working week. It would be Ski Sunday, Pointless Views, Songs of Praise, the Antiques Roadshow, something about nature that we missed because it was bathtime followed by a gentle Play for Today. Then, in 1986, Denis Potter came along and flipped our world upside down with his Singing Detective. 

From that moment on Sunday night became a weekly shot of anticipatory anxiety. What happened last week? Can we remember? Oh gosh. We’ve been waiting all week. We watched the whole episode on the edge of our seat, fearful of the Russians. We were all terrified of the Russians in the Eighties. I’m pretty certain that we never found out the answer and it left us on a permanent cliffhanger (which is slightly worrying for those of us desperate to find out who H is)

I have a sneaking suspicion that this move to Sunday night anxiety was to combat work stress. From the Eighties onwards, work became a toxic environment where everyone had to work harder to keep their job. Unions had less power, we were all our own worst enemy - desperate to prove our worth by working harder and longer. And with that came the anticipatory anxiety. Would we actually make it through the week? Could we survive until the next weekend?

In recent years the Sunday night anxiety has got worse. Now we are set up for the anxiety with a weep at Call the Midwife. The program, that re-writes midwifery history to make it seem much more compassionate to tell the stories that everyone ignored at the time, leaves us feeling jittery and vulnerable. Then we get Line of Duty. There has never been a programme that we work so hard for. Who is H? Who is going to die? What’s a PIM? Was that James Nesbit? No. Yes. It was him but he can’t actually be in it because he was filming Bloodlands, which was the previous Sunday night anxiety drop. Every episode leaves us on a cliffhanger, which seems a perfectly appropriate way to start our week in these days of working in a ‘nearly’ post-pandemic world. Can we really survive until next week?

Medals, funerals and the BBC

 Every Sunday, when I was growing up, our family had a routine. 

It started with no one else getting up. I would wander the house on my own and read books. Sometimes, in better weather I’d get on my bike and go for a ride before anyone was up. As I got older, my parents capitalised on this and left some money out for me to go and get the Sunday papers. We had the Observer (for a longer weekend read) and the Sunday Mirror. I was allowed to use the change to buy myself a chocolate bar and so my Bounty for breakfast treat was established early. The paper reading coincided with listening to The Archers Omnibus, while mum fiddled about in the kitchen making the Sunday roast. She would make pastry for an apple pie, stuffed with cloves, so that we could pretend to clean our teeth like Tudors and tell our fortunes. 

“When will I marry? This year, next year, sometime, never. Who will I marry? Tinker, tailor, soldier sailor. What will I be? Lady, baby, gypsy, queen. What will I wear? Silk, satin, rags, tags. On a, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Where will we live? Big house, little house, pigsty, barn.”

Then my parents would be sleepy, which I assume was to do with the red wine, and we’d all sit down to watch a black and white film that they would snore through. 

Then a new and exciting programme appeared, that we watched and mimicked, even though the idea of skiing was not even a distant thought to people of our class in the seventies/eighties. We did enjoy the crashes though. My parents would wake up soon after and we’d have something on toast and share a bar of Dairy Milk while we watched Songs of Praise and Points of View.

We loved ‘Pointless Views’, as my Dad called. We loved hearing the ridiculous things that people complained about and Barry Took was a comedy genius.

“Dear Aunty Beeb,

I was watching Songs of Praise when a trailer for the Norwegian drama came on and they showed the person who turned out to be the murderer. What were the BBC thinking?”

Barry Took would apologise, with his tongue in his cheek and a twinkle in his eye while complaining about the price of beer in Norway.

I never thought I’d ever be someone who considered writing one of those letters but yesterday, after my long walk, they repeated the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh  and I watched it. 

I quite like a funeral. I like the solemn ceremony. I like the hymns (it’s like Songs of Praise). I like society to acknowledge grief. This was a beautiful funeral. The music was absolutely amazing and Huw Edwards did an amazing job sitting outside Windsor Castle. However, I found the zooming in on the faces of the grieving family to be uncomfortable. I thought about the editors code not to intrude on grief and shock and really felt that it had been broken. I’m assuming that if you agree to it being filmed then you’ve given away that right. This is why Princess Ann is the cleverest Royal because the brim of her hat was wide enough so she couldn’t be seen. If you went to a funeral then you wouldn’t be able to see the family’s faces during the eulogy because you would be behind them. No one needs to be judged on how upset they look at this time. If these hadn’t been Covid times then the cameraman would have zoomed into the Prime Minister, great uncle Bertie thrice removed or the Sultan of Sumatra, which would have been ok. Instead we were forced to intrude on grief that should have been allowed to be private.

I mentioned it to the Long Suffering Husband but he was distracted by something else. 

He was obsessed with medals. Everyone seemed to have a lot of medals, even Edward.

“Edward was never military,” he said, “Where did he get all those medals from?”

He was frantically googling to get the answer.he concluded that he’d been given them by his mum. 

“That’s fair enough. A royal version of the star chart,” I said. “If you want a medal then I’ll make you an MBE.......Master of Bin Emptying.”

I won’t be writing to Points of View and signing off ‘Angry of Maldon,’ because I think that whatever they did then someone would have complained and none of it really matters. The funeral is a public moment of grief. The more difficult moments will lie ahead for the family, when everyone thinks you go back to normal but you don’t. 

No time for logic

 I would just like to point out that this is absolutely no time for logic.

Whatever you do, don’t think about things logically. 

Here are ten things you mustn’t think.

1. If my child has been in the same classroom as their friend all day then surely it would be fine for them to sit in their bedroom and play Minecraft (other games are available but no one seems to have told the children)

2. If I can have my brows waxed then surely my child’s one year health check will be in person, rather than by zoom.

3. If I can be in a shop with a thousand strangers then it would be ok if one of them was my mother/sister/best friend.

4. If I am with my family (who have also had negative lateral flow tests) outside and the three year old turns blue from cold then it would be safer to go inside.

5. Now that I have to be back at work full time the bank will be open more than two days a week or two hours a day.

6. If Matt Hancock can work out how to make a shed load of money by giving a lucrative contract during a pandemic to his sister, taking 15% of the shares for himself and dividing  all the other shares between the rest of their family then it is not beyond him to sort out the pay inequalities within the NHS.

7. Why am I having the vaccine if Boris says that it’s only lockdown that has brought the case numbers/deaths down?

8. Surely the Queen could do what she liked? 

The Queen shared her favourite photo. 

9. No ninety something year old woman who has lost her husband of 73 years should have to sit alone at his funeral. 

10. The government have totally got this. We understand everything they tell us and have had all the inconsistencies clearly explained.

I’m sure there are lots more but I’m going for a long walk and am going to try not to have any logical thoughts or upset myself by watching a funeral that is probably going to make grief worse, rather than better . 

The legacy of the hover

 One of the conversations I had with my mum on one of our visits to ‘Clacton pier’, before she fell asleep and I was left looking at all the other patients, filled with life and hope and comparing them to mum’s lack of life and misplaced hope, was about mask wearing. The conversation keeps coming back to me because no one in the UK wore masks then.

“What do you think?” she asked as a little Asian man shuffled onto the ward, wearing a surgical mask. 

He wasn’t a doctor. If he had been, we’d have thought nothing. No one wants doctors breathing their germs into their patient’s open wounds.

“Do you think it helps?” she added.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I suppose it depends on what you are trying to protect against. I can’t imagine it’s very good for your own lung health to keep breathing in and out the same stale air but if you thought you were protecting other people I can understand it.”

“Isn’t it to protect themselves?”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said, “I always thought it was to protect other people. I remember having to wear them when you brought my sister home from hospital.”

“Do you remember that?” 

She seemed surprised but continued, “But they all wear them.”

“I suppose if they come from a country that had SARS then they might still be a bit scared. Who knows what an epidemic might make you scared of. Do you think you’d ever wear one?”

I asked but she was asleep and so I watched the Asian man chatting to his wife and working on the crossword puzzle together and listened to the business man on the phone say, “Yes, yes, sorry about the noise. I’m on Clacton Pier.”

With the messaging around this virus being so confused and frequently changing, who knows what behaviours we will cling onto or how long they might last. Will our grandchildren still wear masks in public without really knowing why? Will our great grandchildren still leap into bushes when someone passes them on the street? Will people, three generations down the line still be rushing to douse themselves in antibac whenever they touch something?

Music teachers are still posting on social media to ask whether singing is safe and the guidance has been that children should sing in school for ages now. The research concluded that singing was no less safe than speaking and it was actually more safe than shouting, in terms of droplet spread. It takes people a long time to catch up and when advice changes so frequently there will probably still be people who think you can catch it from stroking the neighbours cat (that suggestion lasted about 48 hours).

I recently had a conversation about whether it was possible to sit on fabric chairs in a shared space  because they couldn’t be wiped down after and I was suddenly reminded about how women of my mum’s generation were taught to hover to pee in public toilets. 

Most of them didn’t know why they were doing it. It was a hangover prom previous generations but my mum had asked and when she tried to persuade me to adopt the same practice I asked too.

“So you don’t catch Syphilis.”

Mum greeted the news with an accepting duty. Syphilis, being a disease of war, was very much present in the community still in the early fifties. By the time I was learning to pee in public bathrooms it was only a disease of prostitutes and so the practice seemed unnecessary. Also, I didn’t have the muscle strength for the hover.

Maybe that is my mum’s legacy. I think she taught me to question and then allowed me to refuse to so anyrgng I didn’t have the muscle strength for.

Big Day

 Sorry. Can’t stop long. It’s a big day.

Swimming, bookshops, libraries, the records office (except that is never open on a Monday) coffee with a friend and back to face to face flute teaching.

I’m very excited.

Too excited to put it into words.

And a little overwhelmed.

Maybe.

Legacy

 Do you ever worry about your legacy? 

It’s a question that they often ask people on Desert Island Discs. “And what do you thing your legacy will be?” they say to someone who has had a million books published, saved a whole continent from starvation or invented an artificial pancreas. Some of these people say that they don’t think of it. Others say that it’s why they’ve always worked so hard and others want to be remembered for something else entirely.

I’ve been thinking about legacy since Prince Philip died. Who would have thought that several days later Phil the inappropriate old Greek would suddenly become a funny, kind, intelligent, hardworking husband? If you had tried to predict the legacy in life you could get it really wrong. Jimmy Saville for example.

What about us normal people, who never do anything important in life? Would we have a legacy? Would it change in death? Does any of this matter? 

I need to stop thinking. Desert Island Discs isn’t calling.

Roy Plomley’s legacy was that people will be asked about their legacy

A word on discipline

 It's normal, during the Easter holidays, for an editor of the right wing press to get  one of his junior journalists to write a piece to take a pop at 'lazy teachers'.  They know that teachers will rise to it because they've got time and parents can always be relied upon to remember their awful teachers (everyone had one) and take the opportunity for revenge.  This year however, they know that the great unwashed are firmly on the side of the profession.  It's only been a few weeks since they were having to supervise their children's education from home, so in their eyes teachers are still saints.  However, an Easter holiday can't go by without upsetting teachers so this year it was left to the broadsheets and Gavin Williamson.

The story that came out was that old Gav has been persuaded that during lockdown kids have forgotten how to behave (definitely not my experience) and need strong discipline to keep them in control.  He has enjoyed pushing the conservative, kids in rows, teach from the front, knowledge of dead-white-men-only based learning theories. He loved using the term Cultural Capital to push his agenda (sending Bourdieu spinning in his grave) and has generally had a great time suggesting that the curriculum needs tweaking.

This curriculum tweaking is something every Education Secretary likes to do.  They are a bit like dogs pissing up a lamp post in that respect.  Mine! Mine!  There might have been a taller, bigger dog here before but it's still mine!

You may agree with him.  You may think that discipline in schools has gone to rack and ruin since they banned the cane.  You may prefer the idea that kids are seen and not heard and you might prefer the lower classes to be kept in their place.  I hope you don't because then we can't be friends.  I'm just warning you that if you are the kind of person that thinks keeping anyone 'in their place' is a good idea then it might be best if we don't speak.

The problem with a knowledge based curriculum is that it doesn't ever allow you to admit you are wrong or learn anything new.  I'm not against a bit of rote learning, to teach how to rote learn but it should never be all we teach children.  

They have taken Bourdieu's research and twisted it.  He noticed that economic, social, symbolic and cultural capital were all linked and that there were cultural elements that all the people in power shared.  He wasn't saying that if you teach the oiks about Mozart then they will suddenly have the economic and social power.  It's not being a member of a brass band rather than a symphony orchestra that keeps you poor.  A brass band gives you the same skills but in a way that is understandable and affordable to your frame of reference.  The 'what' of teaching isn't as important as the 'how'.

Anyway, I was distracted.  I was going to talk about discipline.

I have been working on a case from 1898. The headmaster of the National School was brought before the local court for caning a boy. The details of the punishment are horrific.  It wasn't unusual at the time for children to be canned.  Parents were actively encouraged to whip their children and they did.  The boy in question was solidly middle class.  He came from a well known and respected family of bakers. I doubt he was perfectly behaved.  His punishment came because he threw a stone, which hit the skirt of a teacher after school.  The headteacher appealed to the court not to make his job harder by upholding the case.  He said that he had received a circular from the Education Board urging him to stop stone throwing and that this was "the worst case of it he had seen in his professional duties and it merited a severe punishment."  To the fact that it was something that happened outside of school he said that he would not be "worth his salt if he had no influence outside of the school." The court agreed with him and he went unpunished.

Did this beating improve the lad?  Of course it didn't.  He didn't suddenly rise to the upper echelons of society or become filled with wealth and status.  In fact, him and his whole generation were felled by war.  The bakery eventually closed due to mechanisation and he lived a normal working life, working in a flour mill.

I could see the headteacher's point though.  If the Education Board had told him that stone throwing had to be stopped then surely it was his duty.  In my research of the man, he was clearly well respected.  He was the headteacher for 35 years, was the secretary of the bowling club, retired to a large house in the 'posh end' of town.  One of his daughters ran the girls school, a son joined the Navy, another daughter had a lavish wedding in 'a gown of satin broche with pearl trimming a a veil trimmed with orange blossoms' (I'm a little bit obsessed with newspaper descriptions of wedding outfits). This incident was early in his career and I liked to think it taught him something.  

It was just a one off, I told myself.  Some precious parents who thought their boy was too special to be disciplined (I don't really believe that I was just putting myself in the mind of a Tory education minister).  However, I've just discovered that this wasn't the last time a parent took him to court.  I've since found another case, which he didn't get away with.

Who am I kidding?  Of course he got away with it.  The court fined him and he went back to work to continue in exactly the way he had always done.  In his defence of that case he pointed out that "he had always obtained the discipline grant for the school" and that he did not want his grant to go down. "It seems to me, therefore that I am between the devil and the deep sea."

Is this really what we want to go back to?  Do we want sanctioned child abuse for the sake of a discipline grant?

Luckily for my teaching friends school canes are still available to buy on eBay

Tit wars

 I have two nest boxes in my garden. The one on the tall beech hedge by the kitchen window has been occupied for some time. A pair of blue tits have made it their forever home. It’s a good place to live, with a daily offering of 5 meal worms on the table, a selection of seeds, fat balls and insects on unsprayed plants and trees. There’s even a water slide for the kids to play on. The other nest box is behind the apple tree and it is, so far, unoccupied. There was early interest from several pairs of blue tits but it was rejected for reasons that I can only assume are to do with the neighbour behind using their gate too much. 

Yesterday’s sudden drop in temperature and flurries of snow brought a pair of great tits into the garden, looking for somewhere warmer to nest than the top of their tree. I was washing up when I saw Mr Great stick his head into the small round hole of Number 1 Tit Hollow. 

“Whoops! Sorry Mrs. Didn’t see you there. Didn’t mean to disturb. As you were. Nothing to see here,” he told Mrs Blue and flew off quickly.

Mrs Blue keeping a more careful lookout

Mr Blue came back with a beak full of old lady hair that someone had kindly left outside after emptying their hairbrush and popped inside for a little rest with the Mrs.

Mr and Mrs Great were checking the rest of the garden. They ate all 5 meal worms and picked the apple tree clean of ants. That’s when they noticed the rejected des-res. Number 2 Tit Hollow looked like a very attractive place to live. They flitted in and out, adding grass and bits of old lady hair. 

Mr Blue, fresh from his cuppa with the Mrs spotted Mr Great collecting ants from the bottom of the apple tree and thought, “I’m not having that!”

He dive bombed Mr Great, who despite his obvious size and strength advantage seemed shocked into retreat. Mrs Great wasn’t quite so keen on giving up her new home and so the Tit wars continued for the whole morning. 

I have no idea who won or whether the re-emergence of the sun in the afternoon persuaded Mr & Mrs Great that they didn’t need a cosy nest box after all. Maybe the banging gate put them off or maybe they’re self isolating at home, quietly hoping nobirdy notices them. 

Boris was on the telly again last night. He told us that he was sticking to his roadmap like glue so that the 12th of April phase of opening things was going to go ahead whatever. Then he had to confess that the scientists had told him that there was nothing in the data to suggest that this was the wrong decision (this time) and that he would be irreversibly putting a pint to his lips. I’m not going to worry about Boris downing a pint in one. He also warned us not to get too comfortable. It’s important to him that we stay scared. A scared population is so much easier to control. He told us about the third wave that’s sweeping Europe but failed to mention that it started here. He also said that he wasn’t going to give hostages to fortune.

So, on the 12th of April people will start mixing with alcohol again. Pub gardens will be the set for the human version of the tit wars, as people who have forgotten how to share a space have to learn to get along again. It’s all going to be so much fun, especially when they use Covid status certification to get nightclubs and football events up and running again. Then the tit wars will be phenomenal. 

Easter

 There’s a controversy brewing on Twitter. Apparently, Easter is a thing that needs to be argued over. Who knew?

There are people who are cross because a political party has embraced it and those who are furious that others aren’t even mentioning it.

Then Professor Alice Roberts tweeted. “Just a little reminder today. Dead people - don’t come back to life.”

This upset Christians everywhere who thought they were being mocked by a biological anthropologist humanist. I can’t believe that they were surprised by that. 

I read it as a warning to dead people. Dear dead people, whatever you do, don’t come back to life. After the year we’ve had, all waiting for the zombie apocalypse it seems perfectly reasonable request. 

If she was trying to upset Christians then she must have not realised that they know that. The point about the Christian resurrection story is hope over a human’s worst fear. The idea that when you die then it’s the end. However, the belief that Jesus was so special then for him, it wasn’t is the ultimate hope. 

Most people in the UK aren’t really Christian but they’re not really anything else either. We’re not prepared to nail out colours to any religion but also needing the comfort of the rituals and joint celebrations.

Are any of us really prepared to give up the annual chocolate coma, getting together to eat lamb and hope for better things to come? Especially this year.

Whether you are Christian or any other religion then I would like to wish you a happy day, full of hope and chocolate.

 

The Art of Quiet Protest

 I’m worried about the younger generation. This might be a sign of my advancing years but I actually have grave concerns. 

I’m worried that they’ve lost the art of quiet protest. 

The young Amazon driver who accidentally delivered a lifetime’s supply of coffee pods to me yesterday is an example of what worries me. 

She had left the humongous box on the doorstep and had reversed halfway down the drive before I opened the door. I looked at it and thought, “That’s odd, I don’t have a Nespresso machine.”

I took it in anyway because there was an outside chance that my son had ordered it.

Then I looked at the label and realised she had delivered to the wrong road. 

“I’ll just finish my paragraph,” I thought, “and then I’ll walk it round.”

Two sentences in and the doorbell rang again and a young anxious looking woman in a pink jumper, holding a black phone the size of my Nan’s purse blurted, “I’m sorry. I think the code was wrong.”

“Oh yes. Thank you for coming back. I was just about to walk it round there.”

“Oh thank you,” she said, her eyes looking a bit distant and glassy.

“They keep doing this. You see we don’t have to look at the actual addresses. We just scan the barcode and the SatNav tells us where to go. It’s a good thing really. It makes everything really easy but.... When I delivered another package to number 24 I realised that it was the wrong road......It’s....anyway..,thank you for that.”

“Are you okay,” I asked.

Why do I do this? One conversation with me can send someone who is functioning into some kind of mental health crisis. She wasn’t even ‘perfectly fine,.’ She was stressed and anxious. Her phone/SatNav/life controller had just pinged her a message to say that she was now late.

“You should tell them,” I said, “They need to know that they are asking too much for you to make up time because of their mistakes.”

“There’s no point,” she sniffed, “It won’t change.”

“But how can it if no one tells them?” I said.

She just shrugged. She wasn’t going to be the one to say anything.

This is what worries me. 

How have we got to a point where people can just put up with things that aren’t working for them because they’ve decided that’s just the way it has to be? 

Now, more than ever, it’s important to tell bosses when things aren’t working. People have kept themselves to themselves for a year and so no one really knows what anyone else is going through. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s enough to quietly explain that you need a toilet break. It’s enough to request a new office chair if you are having to work from home. It’s enough to explain that you are going stir crazy working from your bedroom floor in a house you share with dope smoking students. If young people aren’t going to join unions to fight their causes and want the freedoms that come from working independently then they have to act like the truly self employed and set their own boundaries. If someone is telling you when you can have a pee then you are not self employed. Self employed people work from home and charge companies extra for it. 

I might write to Amazon on her behalf. If she’s not going to do it then maybe I need to.

April Fool

 I’ve scoured the newspapers and I can’t find anything. No spaghetti trees, no alien landings, no ships driving (do ships drive?) sideways down the Suez Canal. No global pandemics. Someone didn’t eat a bat, who ate a pangolin in China. Princess Diana isn’t alive and well and being honoured by a blue plaque on the address she’s been hiding out in all these years. Prince Andrew isn’t going to sand trial for being creepy with young girls. Germany hasn’t decided the vaccine is unsafe for under sixties. Cher hasn’t adopted the worlds loneliest elephant. People aren’t walking round Tesco’s in full hazmat suits and goats aren’t being rescued from rooftops. Or are they? This year, the real news is so bizarre that the papers are struggling.

The best GMTV could come up with was ‘Dove Island’ only to discover that it’s  actually  something we would all like to watch. Most of us have been watching our own version ‘Pigeon Palace’ from our bedroom windows all year anyway.

The world is so broken that things that should be ridiculous are possible. If I believed in a god then I would really wonder what we’ve done wrong.

Many years ago, this wonderful creature came to live with us on April Fools day. 

He’s full of lumps and bumps, terribly grumpy but he is still the best prank ever played on us.