I've never signed up to a political party, no matter what the colour, or the provocation, but I've envied the conviction of those who do and rather admired them too. All that earnest discussion, the personal involvement with the issues, the stuffing of propaganda through letterboxes.... A different and rather grown-up world .... at least so I'd always thought. Now I find I'm feeling rather superior.
Like thousands of others I've successfully ignored the political process where possible and simply swept in to give whoever the benefit of my opinion on polling day, depending on how the rest of my life was going. I mean, yes, sure, I've had the debates about the rights and wrongs and shouted at biased radio presenters (despite my best efforts, I still can't call them journalists, I'm afraid) on Radio 4 during the most recent several years ... and actually find that (even local) elections, the physical act of marking the ballot paper in the wobbly booth, still gives me a buzz, but that's been the extent of it. And I don't see the joining situation changing any time soon, though the nonsense currently being talked about the coalition is enough to motivate me to join that if it were possible.
The fact is that our last government did its best to bankrupt the country, for selfishly idealogical reasons and we've known that for quite a few years now, just as we've known that it'd be up to the next lot to sort the mess out. We didn't know what would happen and how recovery would be achieved, but we've known that.
We've also known for the past year, if not before, that coalition means compromise - in other words, two parties that disagree on fundamental issues would need to put the country, the country's future and by definition, our future first, putting their ideology on hold to do so. It follows that statements made prior to the election by subsequent partners in a coalition could not be expected to hold after the fact and to believe otherwise is at best phenomenally naive and at worst incredibly, childishly unrealistic.
Both parties have 'reneged' on manifesto pledges, of necessity. Quelle surprise!
Both lots of supporters have been disappointed. One lot, however, has finally proved themselves to be unworthy of a say in the solution to present difficulties because like small children prevented from doing exactly what they want, they're having tantrums up and down the country. Their solution is as grown up as my 5 year old, sent to her room for refusing to eat something, shouting Im never going to eat tea again! as her brother and I sat downstairs, hands over our mouths to hide the snorts of laughter. Their solution is to say We'll show you, the party we've loved and nurtured and slaved for, for the decades since we were last in power. We're not going to vote for you in our local elections. So there! and It's your fault, Nick. You alone did it!
Talk about walking straight into the jaws of the commentators hovering, like sharks, around the coalition, waiting for blood to trigger their feeding frenzy. Who's side are you on? The ex-government? The smuggies in the media? It's called cuttting off your noses.... Not only that, but how bloody ungrateful, naive, disloyal and just plain flakey can you be?? Yep, I'm talking about you, Lib Dem voters and party activists, up and down the country.... Are you ashamed? You should be.
As for the bust and descredited liars or fools from the previous administration, who come slithering out of their holes to snipe and bitch about the furtherance of policies they instigated, in an unattractive, misguided attempt to score petty political points. Can they possibly believe it's in the National interest? Give me a break....
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
It's all falling apart...
Forgive the title of this post, but I've had an idea. How about I use this place as somewhere to rant about people who annoy me? After all, it would be following the trend I've set already. OK, I've done it already - and about people I don't know, which makes me as bad as 'a friend' who seems to be critical of everybody and particularly those she's never met!
On the other hand it's not about the people who annoy me, but their behaviour. (See, I'm learning).
Bear with me if I'm repeating myself, but I'm thinking out loud really and this is an update on a couple of weeks ago. The blog I joined at the end of January has now developed factions, two of them, with a couple of contributors desperately trying to straddle the divide.
The woman who set the thing up, amid protestations about how she was only the Administrator by default and how she'd happily give anyone who wanted, the power to do almost anything and anyway hand over to someone else once things were up and running, is of course a total control freak. She seems to have had fights with most of the regulars including the person who'd offered her own blog as a place of succour before Lawnder started. Any opportunity she can find to post or comment using some sort of mock-modest promotion of herself is leapt on with alacrity. Any pages written by anyone with any sort of imagination have been 'edited' and polluted by her humourless, ignorant additions. She forms alliances at random and apparently will miss no opportunity to snipe at anyone who's disagreed with her. Ok, I put my hand up, but I'm also one of the ones who's voted with her feet and set up my alternative environment.
From however many people we started with. we're down to less than 10 regular contributors and breakaways are starting. I wonder how much longer it can stumble on.....
On the other hand it's not about the people who annoy me, but their behaviour. (See, I'm learning).
Bear with me if I'm repeating myself, but I'm thinking out loud really and this is an update on a couple of weeks ago. The blog I joined at the end of January has now developed factions, two of them, with a couple of contributors desperately trying to straddle the divide.
The woman who set the thing up, amid protestations about how she was only the Administrator by default and how she'd happily give anyone who wanted, the power to do almost anything and anyway hand over to someone else once things were up and running, is of course a total control freak. She seems to have had fights with most of the regulars including the person who'd offered her own blog as a place of succour before Lawnder started. Any opportunity she can find to post or comment using some sort of mock-modest promotion of herself is leapt on with alacrity. Any pages written by anyone with any sort of imagination have been 'edited' and polluted by her humourless, ignorant additions. She forms alliances at random and apparently will miss no opportunity to snipe at anyone who's disagreed with her. Ok, I put my hand up, but I'm also one of the ones who's voted with her feet and set up my alternative environment.
From however many people we started with. we're down to less than 10 regular contributors and breakaways are starting. I wonder how much longer it can stumble on.....
Monday, 21 February 2011
Writing feedback
When it's my turn to read out in class my word count goes up immeasurably. The adrenalin gets words on paper, like nothing else, which I'm told is good and I certainly need some sort of spur. (I'm ignoring the downsides we all know about: the immensity of the challenge - competition, from other aspirant and existing published authors, the length of time it's going to take, the sheer debilitating, lonely hard work but...).
The Book had trotted along quite happily in the beginning, with all the cheerful naivity of a 10 week old puppy. Despite my nerves on the day, goodness knows how many terms ago, the first piece I read out went down better than I'd expected for a newby. People were kind and supportive.
I know, in fact have known for a long time, the rough outline, nothing new, though I've been struggling with how to throw in a few unexpected twists because I don't want it to be too predictable, but hey, I've got shelves groaning with paperbacks by authors whose first novels went straight to a car boot sale.
Anyway, having an outline is all very fine, but after the honeymoon period it started to get serious. The story begins at a point some time after the event and that part virtually wrote itself. Then I needed to put in some back story. One thing the class has drummed into me is that flashback is BAD and it took me a while to work out the difference between that and back story. I'm still not sure I've got it right, but that's what I've been struggling with - how to explain what had happened before to make the heroine (huh! at the moment, she's so pathetic she irritates me and I've got to get her going forward so she won't do the same to anyone else) the wreck she is and bring her up to the point where I started and from where she can actually get going with her life, so the interesting stuff can begin.
Last summer, sitting under a sun umbrella in my tiny garden with the laptop and a jug of water, had been productive. I'd got more than 20,000 words. But (with the change in the weather?) I've been stuck since the autumn - well, since early autumn.
Last week I thought I'd turned a corner. The words flowed, she was dealing with new circumstances and I couldn't understand why TB had been dragging in recent months. I knew I need to bring in some of the other characters, so I did, but I worry about overwriting, so I cut corners, though I didn't realise it at the time. I list them and ..... well, that's pretty much it. The piece I read out last Friday is a descriptive list of the people who pop in an out.
While I was reading I heard my voice getting faster and faster from, maybe, halfway through, so perhaps my brain was pre-empting what came next. When I finished there was one of those silences while the class struggled to come up with something positive ... and it was obviously hard. In the end, bless them, they managed it and they were brilliant. The list of faults grew longer and longer, but after the initial excrutiating pause it was a relief. The thing is that what they said was absolutely right and as soon as they did, I could see it. Light bulb time. What I'd written was OK...ish, but needed to be interspersed in the text in a natural way. I was telling them rather than showing them - or do I mean leading them? Whatever, I could see instantly that what I'd written was a description, what I wanted them to know, rather than interesting prose and more importantly, they showed how I could put it right. Oh, and they made nice comments about the overall style of writing too, so that's the positive. Always end on a high note.
The ironic thing was that in the first half of the class we learnt about writing synopses and - though what I'd read out had been much too detailed - that was almost what I'd written.
Anyway, that's the thing about class feedback. Terrifying certainly, but it never fails to be constructive and supportive and I doubt if I'd still be writing without it.
The Book had trotted along quite happily in the beginning, with all the cheerful naivity of a 10 week old puppy. Despite my nerves on the day, goodness knows how many terms ago, the first piece I read out went down better than I'd expected for a newby. People were kind and supportive.
I know, in fact have known for a long time, the rough outline, nothing new, though I've been struggling with how to throw in a few unexpected twists because I don't want it to be too predictable, but hey, I've got shelves groaning with paperbacks by authors whose first novels went straight to a car boot sale.
Anyway, having an outline is all very fine, but after the honeymoon period it started to get serious. The story begins at a point some time after the event and that part virtually wrote itself. Then I needed to put in some back story. One thing the class has drummed into me is that flashback is BAD and it took me a while to work out the difference between that and back story. I'm still not sure I've got it right, but that's what I've been struggling with - how to explain what had happened before to make the heroine (huh! at the moment, she's so pathetic she irritates me and I've got to get her going forward so she won't do the same to anyone else) the wreck she is and bring her up to the point where I started and from where she can actually get going with her life, so the interesting stuff can begin.
Last summer, sitting under a sun umbrella in my tiny garden with the laptop and a jug of water, had been productive. I'd got more than 20,000 words. But (with the change in the weather?) I've been stuck since the autumn - well, since early autumn.
Last week I thought I'd turned a corner. The words flowed, she was dealing with new circumstances and I couldn't understand why TB had been dragging in recent months. I knew I need to bring in some of the other characters, so I did, but I worry about overwriting, so I cut corners, though I didn't realise it at the time. I list them and ..... well, that's pretty much it. The piece I read out last Friday is a descriptive list of the people who pop in an out.
While I was reading I heard my voice getting faster and faster from, maybe, halfway through, so perhaps my brain was pre-empting what came next. When I finished there was one of those silences while the class struggled to come up with something positive ... and it was obviously hard. In the end, bless them, they managed it and they were brilliant. The list of faults grew longer and longer, but after the initial excrutiating pause it was a relief. The thing is that what they said was absolutely right and as soon as they did, I could see it. Light bulb time. What I'd written was OK...ish, but needed to be interspersed in the text in a natural way. I was telling them rather than showing them - or do I mean leading them? Whatever, I could see instantly that what I'd written was a description, what I wanted them to know, rather than interesting prose and more importantly, they showed how I could put it right. Oh, and they made nice comments about the overall style of writing too, so that's the positive. Always end on a high note.
The ironic thing was that in the first half of the class we learnt about writing synopses and - though what I'd read out had been much too detailed - that was almost what I'd written.
Anyway, that's the thing about class feedback. Terrifying certainly, but it never fails to be constructive and supportive and I doubt if I'd still be writing without it.
Has this blog has turned me into a ranter?
Looking back at a couple of things I've written, I'm not proud of it. Where has that grumpy, whining cow come from?
It might be to do with needing the oomph to write anything at all - something that pisses me off. Perhaps this as my alter ego bursting out. Perhaps it's the time of year.
Still, a little more restraint might be good.
It might be to do with needing the oomph to write anything at all - something that pisses me off. Perhaps this as my alter ego bursting out. Perhaps it's the time of year.
Still, a little more restraint might be good.
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Is it rational to dislike a stranger?
I caught a bit of Ed Milliband's speech to the Welsh Labour conference on the radio yesterday . The excerpts stunned me so I searched the Internet for the full text and found it on the New Statesman's website. Now I don't know the man, so this is obvously a subjective judgement, but it left me both pitying and despising him for the comprehensive deceit of it all....
Then, when I cooled down, I felt slightly guilty about my reaction and I started thinking about how I could feel so strongly about someone I've never spoken to. I mean, the man's just a baby. Perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt?. Perhaps he believes what he said?
Then I thought, he's a politician. He's probably never had a proper job - and if he doesn't know what he's doing by putting himself out there, he's surrounded by people who do. Just as he, or those around him, knew what he was doing when he set out to take away the job he knew meant more to his older brother than any other. Sibling revenge for goodness knows what, of the most public sort. Perhaps that sort of blind ignorance is what a politician needs. So I'm glad I don't know him because it frees me to think how blind, ignorant, patronising and smug he appears. How sad.
I got started on this train of thought because of another blog I contribute to. A personal thing, involving normal people.
It was born from the wreckage of the (still) ongoing situation concerning a well-known ex-drama-now-soap and the reason I finally started this blog. By the time comments on one particular page of TA blog got into the 600s a group of regular contributors started tossing ideas around about an alternative place to meet. While the rest of us were still talking about characters and places, one person offered the use of a blog she'd had already got and no longer used. We'd barely started signing on there and discussing whether our host would really want her blog invaded, when another person took the initiative and registered Lawnder Hall on Wordpress. Well, yes, a bit previous, but so far, so good and someone needs to be proactive about these things or nothing will happen.
Lawnder was set up to be a democratic alternative to TA and its blog, anyone could contribute, there'd be no moderation or censorship and we'd take it one day at a time and mistakes would be apologised for. And LH has grown .... and grown .... and grown since 27th Jan this year. .... at least in physical size. Contributor numbers on the other hand rose at first, then dropped back and have now stablised on about a dozen hardcore regular contributors.
The thing that makes LH relevant on this post is that, more interesting even than the blog itself, is the personal dimension: the struggle each person has between RL and the fiction, who prefers which and who is more able to switch between the two and the effect those things have on the whole.
The thing is, everything is driven entirely by what we see written on the page, or an email in front of us and our subjective interpretation of it. None of us has ever met. About four weeks ago we were all strangers. Not any more and yet.... We all make judgements and some of us feel we know and like each other, based on nothing but a few squiggles on a page. Others seem to have done their best to alienate anyone that disagrees with them. But how real is any of it? Some characters burst onto the page in full colour - good or bad. Others release information gradually, throwing up surprises on the way. At the moment it seems that one dominant personality is heading for disaster, but that could change. At the moment LH resembles nothing so much as a swooping flock of starlings: it varies in size, with hundreds of individual elements, but is in constant motion and making ever changing patterns. It fascinates me, this judging by nothing more than a few words.
Are those judgements rational? No.... but it's interesting, very human, changeable and normal .... and incredibly easy.
Then, when I cooled down, I felt slightly guilty about my reaction and I started thinking about how I could feel so strongly about someone I've never spoken to. I mean, the man's just a baby. Perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt?. Perhaps he believes what he said?
Then I thought, he's a politician. He's probably never had a proper job - and if he doesn't know what he's doing by putting himself out there, he's surrounded by people who do. Just as he, or those around him, knew what he was doing when he set out to take away the job he knew meant more to his older brother than any other. Sibling revenge for goodness knows what, of the most public sort. Perhaps that sort of blind ignorance is what a politician needs. So I'm glad I don't know him because it frees me to think how blind, ignorant, patronising and smug he appears. How sad.
I got started on this train of thought because of another blog I contribute to. A personal thing, involving normal people.
It was born from the wreckage of the (still) ongoing situation concerning a well-known ex-drama-now-soap and the reason I finally started this blog. By the time comments on one particular page of TA blog got into the 600s a group of regular contributors started tossing ideas around about an alternative place to meet. While the rest of us were still talking about characters and places, one person offered the use of a blog she'd had already got and no longer used. We'd barely started signing on there and discussing whether our host would really want her blog invaded, when another person took the initiative and registered Lawnder Hall on Wordpress. Well, yes, a bit previous, but so far, so good and someone needs to be proactive about these things or nothing will happen.
Lawnder was set up to be a democratic alternative to TA and its blog, anyone could contribute, there'd be no moderation or censorship and we'd take it one day at a time and mistakes would be apologised for. And LH has grown .... and grown .... and grown since 27th Jan this year. .... at least in physical size. Contributor numbers on the other hand rose at first, then dropped back and have now stablised on about a dozen hardcore regular contributors.
The thing that makes LH relevant on this post is that, more interesting even than the blog itself, is the personal dimension: the struggle each person has between RL and the fiction, who prefers which and who is more able to switch between the two and the effect those things have on the whole.
The thing is, everything is driven entirely by what we see written on the page, or an email in front of us and our subjective interpretation of it. None of us has ever met. About four weeks ago we were all strangers. Not any more and yet.... We all make judgements and some of us feel we know and like each other, based on nothing but a few squiggles on a page. Others seem to have done their best to alienate anyone that disagrees with them. But how real is any of it? Some characters burst onto the page in full colour - good or bad. Others release information gradually, throwing up surprises on the way. At the moment it seems that one dominant personality is heading for disaster, but that could change. At the moment LH resembles nothing so much as a swooping flock of starlings: it varies in size, with hundreds of individual elements, but is in constant motion and making ever changing patterns. It fascinates me, this judging by nothing more than a few words.
Are those judgements rational? No.... but it's interesting, very human, changeable and normal .... and incredibly easy.
Friday, 11 February 2011
A few degrees can make so much difference!
We're well past the shortest day and into the New Year and though February can be a grim month, I think the realisation of both those things right now is a bit of a yipee moment.
In theory, I don't mind winter. It's a time I get a lot done in my clients' gardens - putting in new structures, dividing and moving things around and a lot of tidying up, not forgetting weeding out the little thugs that never seem to stop reproducing, before spreading loads and loads of well rotted horshe (as my mother's cousin, a retired military man accustomed to minding his language, called it). And long hard winters decimate the nasties, we're told (though I'll bet they're as efficient as the good ones at finding places to lurk until it's safe to come out and start munching on the best plants in the spring).
Also, there's something masochistically gratifying about working outside when sensible people are snuggled up against their radiators with furry boots and big, soft jumpers on.
And the light - it's multi-mooded. Winter light gives the monochrome landscape an edge you don't get in Summer with lines softened and smudged by colour. When the ground is frost-silvered and hills cast low, narrow shadows, the bare trunks of trees stand serenely like self-confident nudes, oblivious to the cold.
That's the theory. In reality, by now, I'm sick to death of all the layers I have to put on to do the slightest thing outside. When I'm working it's worse - the spares I have to load into the car: armfuls of leggings, jackets, tops, scarves and hats, socks, gardening gloves and spare boots. Then, just as I'm getting stuck into the middle of a mud desert, my mobile rings. If it can make itself heard through the layers, for some reason I'm compelled to track it down. In cold, wet wind I've got leggings on. The theory is that you put your hand through the slit over your hip, designed to match up with the trouser pocket underneath. If the phone's in a pocket down the leg of my combats, there isn't a hope. If I were a contortionist, I'd not be able to bend enough in all that clothing. I stab my fork grumpily into the ground and strip off unco-operative wet gloves, slimey with mud and I begin to search for it, groping with the other hand among the layers of fabric round my neck for my specs, so I can see the name on the screen. Usually the last phase is purely academic and the caller long gone....
I don't know if we're suffering global warming, or if we are, whether it's natural or man-made. To my unscientific mind there are arguments on either side and I'm a bit like the tennis ball in a particularly aggressive match, being bounced from one side to the other, whether I like it or not. Either way, it's taken us too long to notice that we're doing our best to make things worse.
What I do know is that this winter reminds me of the old days. Walking the dogs this morning it was nearly warm. I decided to go up, rather than across the gentle hills that back this town to the East. No rain, but the light was dull and remnants of a more spiteful wind whisped round my ears as we walked higher than we have in a while. Despite that it was bliss to leave my hat and gloves behind and there was extra happiness in the dogs as they bounced from one fresh scent to the next.
We're still weeks from Spring and just a couple of days ago the ground was unforgiving and hard, sharply ridged with frozen ripples of mud left over from when the heifers thundered around in their last games before being shut up for the winter. It was bitter and I risked turning my ankles at every step. The Gremlin's enthusiastic pounces on molehills had become much more wary after a couple of head-on collisions with rocks masquerading as freshly turned earth.
Before that, in the weeks before Christmas, the hills had been covered in snow. Proper snow, lying inches thick on the ground and on every branch and twig. Beautiful. The first morning it was powdery, crunchy under foot. There's something about snow makes the dogs excited and even the DD forgot her dignity and danced, pausing only to chomp mouthfuls of dog ice-cream. The Gremlin quickly picked up snowballs on her legs, so much so that her front legs fused together in just a few yards and when she ran, being a go-for-it sort of character, somersaulted over and over, but kept trying. I skied my feet along to make a path for her, because she made it clear that being carried wasn't in the plan, but even so she kept striking out gamely on her own, scrambling and rolling out across virgin territory.
I've only known snow like this once before in the 28 years I've lived in the South West. Usually it lasts here, at best, for a couple of days and tracks wear through to muddy grass by the first afternoon. This time it lay in such a thick carpet that for once the sledgers and boarders had a good week. Dog walkers were joined on the hill by hundreds of people that probably never set foot up there from one year to the next - and in fact might have thought twice about what they were doing in December if they'd known about the piles of poo of all kinds lying in wait under all the innocent whiteness.
It all reminds me of the Winters of childhood, when scientists taught that another ice age was on the way. People just put snow chains on their cars and got on with it. Farmers hitched up snow blowers and cleared the lanes so the milk would get through and life went on, pretty much as normal ...except schools allowed girls to wear trousers to school.
Whether this is a normal chain of events or not, it's noticeable that - having promised drought, heatwaves, warmer winters during the hardest one since records began, for the second year running - the Global Warming lot has renamed itself the Climate Change lobby.
Whatever is going on and whatever the weather throws up, this year and in the future, we have no choice but to look forward and I like the gardeners' saying - every disaster should be looked at as an opportunity...
In theory, I don't mind winter. It's a time I get a lot done in my clients' gardens - putting in new structures, dividing and moving things around and a lot of tidying up, not forgetting weeding out the little thugs that never seem to stop reproducing, before spreading loads and loads of well rotted horshe (as my mother's cousin, a retired military man accustomed to minding his language, called it). And long hard winters decimate the nasties, we're told (though I'll bet they're as efficient as the good ones at finding places to lurk until it's safe to come out and start munching on the best plants in the spring).
Also, there's something masochistically gratifying about working outside when sensible people are snuggled up against their radiators with furry boots and big, soft jumpers on.
And the light - it's multi-mooded. Winter light gives the monochrome landscape an edge you don't get in Summer with lines softened and smudged by colour. When the ground is frost-silvered and hills cast low, narrow shadows, the bare trunks of trees stand serenely like self-confident nudes, oblivious to the cold.
That's the theory. In reality, by now, I'm sick to death of all the layers I have to put on to do the slightest thing outside. When I'm working it's worse - the spares I have to load into the car: armfuls of leggings, jackets, tops, scarves and hats, socks, gardening gloves and spare boots. Then, just as I'm getting stuck into the middle of a mud desert, my mobile rings. If it can make itself heard through the layers, for some reason I'm compelled to track it down. In cold, wet wind I've got leggings on. The theory is that you put your hand through the slit over your hip, designed to match up with the trouser pocket underneath. If the phone's in a pocket down the leg of my combats, there isn't a hope. If I were a contortionist, I'd not be able to bend enough in all that clothing. I stab my fork grumpily into the ground and strip off unco-operative wet gloves, slimey with mud and I begin to search for it, groping with the other hand among the layers of fabric round my neck for my specs, so I can see the name on the screen. Usually the last phase is purely academic and the caller long gone....
I don't know if we're suffering global warming, or if we are, whether it's natural or man-made. To my unscientific mind there are arguments on either side and I'm a bit like the tennis ball in a particularly aggressive match, being bounced from one side to the other, whether I like it or not. Either way, it's taken us too long to notice that we're doing our best to make things worse.
What I do know is that this winter reminds me of the old days. Walking the dogs this morning it was nearly warm. I decided to go up, rather than across the gentle hills that back this town to the East. No rain, but the light was dull and remnants of a more spiteful wind whisped round my ears as we walked higher than we have in a while. Despite that it was bliss to leave my hat and gloves behind and there was extra happiness in the dogs as they bounced from one fresh scent to the next.
We're still weeks from Spring and just a couple of days ago the ground was unforgiving and hard, sharply ridged with frozen ripples of mud left over from when the heifers thundered around in their last games before being shut up for the winter. It was bitter and I risked turning my ankles at every step. The Gremlin's enthusiastic pounces on molehills had become much more wary after a couple of head-on collisions with rocks masquerading as freshly turned earth.
Before that, in the weeks before Christmas, the hills had been covered in snow. Proper snow, lying inches thick on the ground and on every branch and twig. Beautiful. The first morning it was powdery, crunchy under foot. There's something about snow makes the dogs excited and even the DD forgot her dignity and danced, pausing only to chomp mouthfuls of dog ice-cream. The Gremlin quickly picked up snowballs on her legs, so much so that her front legs fused together in just a few yards and when she ran, being a go-for-it sort of character, somersaulted over and over, but kept trying. I skied my feet along to make a path for her, because she made it clear that being carried wasn't in the plan, but even so she kept striking out gamely on her own, scrambling and rolling out across virgin territory.
I've only known snow like this once before in the 28 years I've lived in the South West. Usually it lasts here, at best, for a couple of days and tracks wear through to muddy grass by the first afternoon. This time it lay in such a thick carpet that for once the sledgers and boarders had a good week. Dog walkers were joined on the hill by hundreds of people that probably never set foot up there from one year to the next - and in fact might have thought twice about what they were doing in December if they'd known about the piles of poo of all kinds lying in wait under all the innocent whiteness.
It all reminds me of the Winters of childhood, when scientists taught that another ice age was on the way. People just put snow chains on their cars and got on with it. Farmers hitched up snow blowers and cleared the lanes so the milk would get through and life went on, pretty much as normal ...except schools allowed girls to wear trousers to school.
Whether this is a normal chain of events or not, it's noticeable that - having promised drought, heatwaves, warmer winters during the hardest one since records began, for the second year running - the Global Warming lot has renamed itself the Climate Change lobby.
Whatever is going on and whatever the weather throws up, this year and in the future, we have no choice but to look forward and I like the gardeners' saying - every disaster should be looked at as an opportunity...
Monday, 31 January 2011
Is there an elephant in the lecture halll?
I'm not a teacher. Thank goodness - I know my limitations. However, I watched, nudged, worried for and applauded my two children as they found their way through from primary school to degree and I've a surprising number of friends, both in and recently retired from, the teaching profession to have arrived at some conclusions about the furore around the proposed increase in university tuition fees.
Yesterday there were more student demonstrations against an increase in university fees in London and Manchester and apparently without any major incidents of violence or destruction this time. Possibly a result of police identification of the worst trouble-makers, or the use of a new phone app that gives updates on kettling locations, the weather, inertia from some of the original protestors now the bill has passed its first hurdle in the House of Commons 'so what's the point' ..... or a combination of some of the above.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with protesting. I've been on a few marches, including the one protesting against the invasion of Iraq, but I do feel it's unfortunate that the participants seem unable to see the irony of throwing missiles at and damaging the property of the very people that they would expect to pay for their degrees if they don't themselves.
This isn't intended either as a rant against whether the fees increase is fair or not, nor do I think that kids aren't as clever as they used to be. I do think they've been short-changed by the people in charge, who seem to have been far more interested in manipulating facts about standards, rather than giving them the chance to learn things. The thing is, there's just a chance that the whole thing - the increase in tuition fees and the resulting protests - has been completely unnecessary.
Thankfully, my kids are past that stage, so don't need to take on such large debts, but it's frustrating to think that just maybe, this doesn't need to be happening to anybody.
We fell on our feet with education almost from the start, despite our domestic implosion ... and I mean fell. It was luck, largely down to where we were living, in a village in Somerset.
After a brief foray into a private primary school, I took my son out when it became obvious that one of the staff had close to psychotic tendencies (well, certainly the woman was a bully - responsible in less than a year for crushing the bubbling enthusiasm he'd started out with) and lucky us, there was a brilliant village primary about 300 yards from our front gate. The school had two perfect Heads in succession - the sort of vocational teachers who 'got' the kids and had their respect, while having fun too - who between them managed to restore a large proportion of the son's confidence, stayed long enough for my two to get through and were skillful enough to manipulate the increasingly bizarre curriculum so son and daughter came tumbling out the other end having enjoyed themselves, made lots of friends close by and learned something. Triple bonus. As I say, lucky us.
We were also lucky that the next town has three very good senior schools and though neither child was exceptional, they're bright and both were lucky enough to be accepted to private school .... despite our dire financial state with the soon to be HsW nowhere to be seen, no house of our own and no parent with a sensible income. Call me unrealistic to spend what we had on school, when there were alternatives - or snobbish, or narrow-minded, or any of the other derogatory terms you like - but it was what I knew best and as a newly single parent my instinct was that, in the light of our changed circumstances, they needed to be safe and secure and with the best facilities I could get for them. I never regretted it for a second and I'm still really chuffed that we achieved it between us.
How did we do it? God bless whoever thought up Assisted Places. My daughter squeaked in, two years after her brother, in the last year before the Labour government, with apalling lack of insight into who would be affected by abolishing it, did just that, as one of their first actions. [Thinks .... perhaps that was why my enthusiasm for what promised to be a fresh start for the country, crashed and burned - the realisation that all the old blinkered class war stuff was still alive and well, despite TB's efforts to bury it]. Yes, I know, they had the philosophical cleft stick of an instinctive loathing of private education, whilst knowing that if it was done away with, the state system would fall over under the strain of those extra kids, but....
We still had to pay, but a fraction of the cost and the three of us were living with my mother by this time, the HtW having climbed into a bottle. The aunts, single and with no children of their own and another good friend helped and we managed.... though it was a weird time for secondary education: League tables, course work that could be re-done with teacher input, emphasis on analysis with fewer and fewer facts to analyse and rampant grade inflation to disguise what was going on.
I'm not sure which came first, though it seems likely that both came at once. At the same time our blessed leader, T Blair, was preaching that 50% of the kids in the country had the right and should go to university, the Labour party introduced the first chunk of means tested fees. No thought was given to what would happen to all those underqualified graduates in the work place.
There was a lot of justification - how kids from poorer backgrounds were being deprived of their God-given right to further education and the old bollocks about how posh kids, yet again, were getting all the breaks and sauntering into the top universities in disproportionate numbers ... which seemed odd even then, if you think of the people who'd succeeded through their own endeavours and good brains .... Melvyn Bragg for one, but a quick search of the Internet will unearth hundreds of others.
Not only odd, but aggravating in the extreme when the change was passed into law with the help of Scottish MPs, who'd previously refused to instigate a similar system in their own patch, by the same people who'd benefitted not only by having free tuition themselves but, in many cases, being given grants as well.
So, posh-ish but impoverished (and please note, there's a huge difference between posh and rich, though obviously some people manage to pull off the double), I saw it from both sides. I had the university discussion with my kids. We had the conversations about finances. I explained that we just didn't have the money, but if they wanted it enough, got jobs to help with living expenses and faced that they'd come out with debts, then OK.
What interested me at the time was that the Government seemed to have no idea what they were about, but with hindsight, it was one of the first acts of what came to be recognised as spin (or fraud, in old money). It was all about being seen as the government to promote 'Education, Education, Education' (TB) but they had a problem. Increasing numbers of kids were coming out of the school system with higher exam marks, but less and less actual learning. The problem was that at that time universities were more autonomous and slower to react to change and they were knocking back applicants with no real ability to qualify for the next stage. So thousands of kids with 'good' A level results were applying enthusiastically for universities that had no intention of offering them a place. Hence TB's decree that more kids should be able to go to university.
The solution? Well, you have to admit that it was quite clever: encourage the universities (were they were bribed with massive funding?) to add new courses such as media studies, gymnastics and nursing, to give the less able student a chance to qualify for entry. ... And bingo, numbers rose. Unfortunately the original plan proved to be more successful than anyone's wildest dreams and finances began to creak under the strain long ago.
At the end of the nineties did more than half my kids' school mates want to go? No chance! .... and whilst having to pay was a further drawback (so much for making it more inclusive), many of them had had quite different plans anyway. Some carried on as they'd originally intended - setting up their own businesses, going onto the farm, going into local industry, or the local authority, whatever, but many of the others found themselves being swept along in the slipstream of the genuinely bright and the thing took on a momentum of it's own. University was the thing to do and became more so as the ubiquitous youth drinking culture combined with readily available social media to boast about it on.
So here we are with overstretched universities needing more and more money to try to keep on top of things ..... and something has to give. In the short term, the people who want to go, have to pay.
At least perhaps some sort of natural justice might take place now, in that, hopefully, kids who'd previously thought they needed a degree to work in the local sports centre will do the maths (if they've managed somehow to acquire the skills) and work out that starting on a minimum wage, with very little prospect of earning decent money in the foreseeable future, hardly seems worth the 3 years of partying they'd been looking forward to while they accrued massive, unserviceable debts and decide, after all, not to go.
The question is, if it happens at all, how long will it take for reality to hit, for the universities to start noticing the drop in numbers on peripheral courses, reinstate 'hard' degrees in the sciences and language studies and get themselves back into a viable financial state, turning out well-rounded, well-educated assets to the community and - dare I say it - future government?
The added bonus of this could be that funding might then be available for setting up credible apprenticeship schemes for those vital, unacademic but practical people who'd rather be doing, than filling their heads with facts that they'll never need again. Most of us recognise that a lack of apptitude in one area is nearly always compensated for by a superior skill in creative, athletic or hands-on ability, but it's odd how the balance between the complimentary skills still remains unacknowledged by the powers that be.
Will the elephant currently stalking the classroom ever be acknowledged, or is the question simply too naive to bother answering?
Yesterday there were more student demonstrations against an increase in university fees in London and Manchester and apparently without any major incidents of violence or destruction this time. Possibly a result of police identification of the worst trouble-makers, or the use of a new phone app that gives updates on kettling locations, the weather, inertia from some of the original protestors now the bill has passed its first hurdle in the House of Commons 'so what's the point' ..... or a combination of some of the above.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with protesting. I've been on a few marches, including the one protesting against the invasion of Iraq, but I do feel it's unfortunate that the participants seem unable to see the irony of throwing missiles at and damaging the property of the very people that they would expect to pay for their degrees if they don't themselves.
This isn't intended either as a rant against whether the fees increase is fair or not, nor do I think that kids aren't as clever as they used to be. I do think they've been short-changed by the people in charge, who seem to have been far more interested in manipulating facts about standards, rather than giving them the chance to learn things. The thing is, there's just a chance that the whole thing - the increase in tuition fees and the resulting protests - has been completely unnecessary.
Thankfully, my kids are past that stage, so don't need to take on such large debts, but it's frustrating to think that just maybe, this doesn't need to be happening to anybody.
We fell on our feet with education almost from the start, despite our domestic implosion ... and I mean fell. It was luck, largely down to where we were living, in a village in Somerset.
After a brief foray into a private primary school, I took my son out when it became obvious that one of the staff had close to psychotic tendencies (well, certainly the woman was a bully - responsible in less than a year for crushing the bubbling enthusiasm he'd started out with) and lucky us, there was a brilliant village primary about 300 yards from our front gate. The school had two perfect Heads in succession - the sort of vocational teachers who 'got' the kids and had their respect, while having fun too - who between them managed to restore a large proportion of the son's confidence, stayed long enough for my two to get through and were skillful enough to manipulate the increasingly bizarre curriculum so son and daughter came tumbling out the other end having enjoyed themselves, made lots of friends close by and learned something. Triple bonus. As I say, lucky us.
We were also lucky that the next town has three very good senior schools and though neither child was exceptional, they're bright and both were lucky enough to be accepted to private school .... despite our dire financial state with the soon to be HsW nowhere to be seen, no house of our own and no parent with a sensible income. Call me unrealistic to spend what we had on school, when there were alternatives - or snobbish, or narrow-minded, or any of the other derogatory terms you like - but it was what I knew best and as a newly single parent my instinct was that, in the light of our changed circumstances, they needed to be safe and secure and with the best facilities I could get for them. I never regretted it for a second and I'm still really chuffed that we achieved it between us.
How did we do it? God bless whoever thought up Assisted Places. My daughter squeaked in, two years after her brother, in the last year before the Labour government, with apalling lack of insight into who would be affected by abolishing it, did just that, as one of their first actions. [Thinks .... perhaps that was why my enthusiasm for what promised to be a fresh start for the country, crashed and burned - the realisation that all the old blinkered class war stuff was still alive and well, despite TB's efforts to bury it]. Yes, I know, they had the philosophical cleft stick of an instinctive loathing of private education, whilst knowing that if it was done away with, the state system would fall over under the strain of those extra kids, but....
We still had to pay, but a fraction of the cost and the three of us were living with my mother by this time, the HtW having climbed into a bottle. The aunts, single and with no children of their own and another good friend helped and we managed.... though it was a weird time for secondary education: League tables, course work that could be re-done with teacher input, emphasis on analysis with fewer and fewer facts to analyse and rampant grade inflation to disguise what was going on.
I'm not sure which came first, though it seems likely that both came at once. At the same time our blessed leader, T Blair, was preaching that 50% of the kids in the country had the right and should go to university, the Labour party introduced the first chunk of means tested fees. No thought was given to what would happen to all those underqualified graduates in the work place.
There was a lot of justification - how kids from poorer backgrounds were being deprived of their God-given right to further education and the old bollocks about how posh kids, yet again, were getting all the breaks and sauntering into the top universities in disproportionate numbers ... which seemed odd even then, if you think of the people who'd succeeded through their own endeavours and good brains .... Melvyn Bragg for one, but a quick search of the Internet will unearth hundreds of others.
Not only odd, but aggravating in the extreme when the change was passed into law with the help of Scottish MPs, who'd previously refused to instigate a similar system in their own patch, by the same people who'd benefitted not only by having free tuition themselves but, in many cases, being given grants as well.
So, posh-ish but impoverished (and please note, there's a huge difference between posh and rich, though obviously some people manage to pull off the double), I saw it from both sides. I had the university discussion with my kids. We had the conversations about finances. I explained that we just didn't have the money, but if they wanted it enough, got jobs to help with living expenses and faced that they'd come out with debts, then OK.
What interested me at the time was that the Government seemed to have no idea what they were about, but with hindsight, it was one of the first acts of what came to be recognised as spin (or fraud, in old money). It was all about being seen as the government to promote 'Education, Education, Education' (TB) but they had a problem. Increasing numbers of kids were coming out of the school system with higher exam marks, but less and less actual learning. The problem was that at that time universities were more autonomous and slower to react to change and they were knocking back applicants with no real ability to qualify for the next stage. So thousands of kids with 'good' A level results were applying enthusiastically for universities that had no intention of offering them a place. Hence TB's decree that more kids should be able to go to university.
The solution? Well, you have to admit that it was quite clever: encourage the universities (were they were bribed with massive funding?) to add new courses such as media studies, gymnastics and nursing, to give the less able student a chance to qualify for entry. ... And bingo, numbers rose. Unfortunately the original plan proved to be more successful than anyone's wildest dreams and finances began to creak under the strain long ago.
At the end of the nineties did more than half my kids' school mates want to go? No chance! .... and whilst having to pay was a further drawback (so much for making it more inclusive), many of them had had quite different plans anyway. Some carried on as they'd originally intended - setting up their own businesses, going onto the farm, going into local industry, or the local authority, whatever, but many of the others found themselves being swept along in the slipstream of the genuinely bright and the thing took on a momentum of it's own. University was the thing to do and became more so as the ubiquitous youth drinking culture combined with readily available social media to boast about it on.
So here we are with overstretched universities needing more and more money to try to keep on top of things ..... and something has to give. In the short term, the people who want to go, have to pay.
At least perhaps some sort of natural justice might take place now, in that, hopefully, kids who'd previously thought they needed a degree to work in the local sports centre will do the maths (if they've managed somehow to acquire the skills) and work out that starting on a minimum wage, with very little prospect of earning decent money in the foreseeable future, hardly seems worth the 3 years of partying they'd been looking forward to while they accrued massive, unserviceable debts and decide, after all, not to go.
The question is, if it happens at all, how long will it take for reality to hit, for the universities to start noticing the drop in numbers on peripheral courses, reinstate 'hard' degrees in the sciences and language studies and get themselves back into a viable financial state, turning out well-rounded, well-educated assets to the community and - dare I say it - future government?
The added bonus of this could be that funding might then be available for setting up credible apprenticeship schemes for those vital, unacademic but practical people who'd rather be doing, than filling their heads with facts that they'll never need again. Most of us recognise that a lack of apptitude in one area is nearly always compensated for by a superior skill in creative, athletic or hands-on ability, but it's odd how the balance between the complimentary skills still remains unacknowledged by the powers that be.
Will the elephant currently stalking the classroom ever be acknowledged, or is the question simply too naive to bother answering?
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