Lilies of the field?

I'm a great one for a bit of symbolism, and tend to become inordinately excited when I'm surprised by something beautiful. I knew that last year I'd dumped the crocus bulbs under the hedge, to make room for something else in their pot, and I knew that I'd seen some insipid yellow flowers through the kitchen window, but I had no idea that today's sun would bring out the delicate mixture of colours in the picture. There there were, in all their fragile beauty, producing a huge swelling of delight as I came home from church in the early afternoon.

And the symbolism? Well we'd just had our new bishop, Kevin, celebrating the Eucharist in our church, three weeks after his consecration. The congregation was about double the size it had been a couple  of years ago; the children were so ... uninhibited ... that I'd had to bellow the intercessions, and we'd had a jolly lunch party afterwards. And yet we all know how fragile our economy is, how easily the building could become too much to keep going, how people can die or drop away. There seems no sensible reason why we're there, why we keep going, why people put so much into making sure the beauty of the liturgy is there, week in week out.

But today it all came together. The sun shone, Cowal looked beautiful, the crocuses were in full bloom, and we had our new bishop in his church on the hill. And I thought of the lilies of the field, and how little I'd cared for these flowers that were so pleasing me today. And like all the best symbolism, there lay behind the coming together a greater truth, one that shatters or slips away in the moment when I try to express it, so I won't try any more. Let the picture be enough.

Out of the dark ...

It's amazing how a sudden change in the weather can make such a difference to life. Perhaps I should qualify that. When I lived in the city - and it's 37 years since I did - the weather was a backdrop, no more. I noticed if it wasn't raining, and can recall the peculiar smell of sun-warmed dust mingled with privet flowers in the late summer, but I have no recollection of prolonged gloom or subsequent depression on my part. Even in Dunoon, when I was at work, the main drawback of awful weather was the trail from the carpark to the main entrance - you could be soaked before you knew it - but I often felt how cheerful the yellow-painted English corridor was on a dark morning, and enjoyed the obvious delight my classes took in my similarly-painted classroom. It didn't really cross my mind to care about the weather - I was too busy, and didn't get out much except at weekends.

Now, however, it's different. This is the first winter I haven't gone abroad at all, and it's had an effect. The past week has been distinguished by a complete absence of sun - the rain hasn't fallen every day, but it's been dark. Some days it felt as if we were stuck on the edge of a huge ocean, as we could see nothing of the other side of the firth. Everyone you met mentioned it. It was hellish.

And then came today. The morning was like all the others - grey, misty, a hint of drizzle in a slight breeze. Until suddenly the wind got up and the clouds rolled back. The photo above was taken about 5pm, and shows the high tide completely covering the beach below the shore road at Toward. We walked along here, and out the Ardyne, and I felt like a new person. A squadron of oystercatchers flew overhead on some important mission; their cousins shared a field with the sheep and a scattering of  curlews. The waves were brown and green in the low sunlight, and it was almost unbearably bright, as if we'd been in a cave for a week. The light reminded us, oddly, of the shore south of Monterey in California at the same time of year, though there were no tales of mountain lions to terrify.

And then the sun set and it was dark again. But the effect remained - and with it the thought that, as Larkin said, "It will be spring soon, it will be spring soon."

Notes on a letter from the past.

I've just been posting another of my father's wartime letters on Letters from the Past. In this one, he is rejoicing at the confirmation that my mother was expecting their first child: me. Obviously, it is fascinating for me, and much of this letter is taken up with the news rather than the progress of the war and service life. But I am especially struck by the fact that at this time I seem to have been going under the name Caroline Mary - a sort of working title with the same initials as the name I ended up with - Christine Margaret.

I shall be fascinated to discover if the change to the name occurs before the birth - and how, for heaven's sake, did they know that it was a girl? Dr Kate Harrower was well known as an outstanding practitioner, but this knowledge was surely well beyond her powers. And how old-fashioned and wonderful the insistence on my mother stopping work - the fiercely feminist Dr H was obviously having none of this!

On a sadder note, the Willie Skinner referred to in this letter was, I think, a close friend of my mother's younger brother. She used to become emotional at the mention of his death even when I was an adult - a real underlining of the agelessness of the young who die in war. As my father rarely mentioned the serious business of war, but chose in my youth to dwell on the humorous moments - as when he emerged naked from the Mediterranean to find Churchill and Monty standing on the beach - I had to remind myself frequently that war meant death and misery. This was one of the few deaths to touch our family personally.

Bubbling away

Time for confession. I've become addicted to a game. And it's on my iPad - so I don't even have to visit the study to play it. Bubbles is described as a hybrid puzzle-shooter game combining elements of puzzle, shooter, strategy and action games. I'm glad it apparently involves all these apparently thoughtful things that might keep my aged brain functioning, for it's up there on a par with Tetris in my addiction stakes.

Apart from the danger of repetitive strain injury (I play with the middle finger of my right hand, if you're interested) there's the problem of seeing life as a series of bubbles to be burst. I realised I had it bad when I looked up from losing a game (I don't actually know how you win it) and visualised the black jacket of someone talking on the television suddenly disintegrating as a black bubble hit it.

I've recently found Tetris on Facebook, which may go some way to weaning me off Bubbles, but the lure is strong. Anyone got something else I can waste my time with?

Recycling gay marriage

Sometimes I can't help myself. It happened this morning. At least I didn't reach for the phone - but I did send a mail. What was it that so disrupted my peaceful breakfast? A phone-in on the radio. Call Kaye -without the eponymous Kaye - was looking at the proposed English legislation that will allow gay couples to be married in a religious ceremony. Apparently the Scottish government won't be following. The punters were asked to air their opinions. And afterwards, they could have their say about recycling.

Usually I turn off at this point. I find phone-ins an irritant I can do without. But this morning I let it get under my skin, and that was that. I don't intend to rehearse the whole sorry tale - none of it was new. But two things stuck out and drove me to action. The first was typified by the woman who took the "it's a sin and we don't believe in it" attitude; the second by the man who said, politely and less concisely than I am about to, that Christians are nutters and should be allowed to do what they liked because no-one outside cared.

Trouble is, the dogmatic attitude of the woman made the man's attitude perfectly understandable. It was when the presenter said that there hadn't been much coming in from Christians by way of support for the idea that I could bear it no longer. I didn't say much - just that this Christian felt ashamed of belonging to a church that felt bound to ideas formulated when it was assumed that people suffering from epilepsy were possessed by demons. It's annoying, though - I wanted to say so much more, but went for the soundbite. The good news is that as far as that bit of the programme was concerned, I had the last word.

Now ... recycling, anyone?

Class wars in Doyle

AS I start this post, I notice that the photo accompanying the one about +Kevin's consecration has vanished. I hope it's a temporary affliction - Flickr has been a tad flaky these last couple of days. Today, however, I am considering a much more resilient medium - my mother's ancient copy of Conan Doyle's The White Company. If you're not familiar with this mediaeval story, take a look at the chapter headings and you'll get a flavour of the tone of this, the original story about Sir Nigel Loring to which Sir Nigel was a prequel. (Did they talk of prequels in the late eighteenth century? I think not)

The left-hand page bears this dedication: To the hope of the future, the reunion of the English-speaking races, this little chronicle of our common ancestry is inscribed.
South Norwood, September 29, 1891.

This last information, incidentally, is particularly interesting to me now because of the fact that members of the greater Blethers clan now live in South Norwood; I try to picture Conan Doyle among the older houses there, perhaps using the same railway station that we frequent on our visits.
I'm not going to tell the story. You can buy it on Amazon if you're interested. And I've already gone on about how I read this stuff before I was ten, no doubt becoming in the process the finicky dinosaur I now seem to be. But what struck me most powerfully in this latest reading of it was the dreadful injustice of the class system of the time - the lordship of the Norman rulers, the haughty king who didn't deign to speak English, the automatic assumption that the squire of gentle birth would ultimately earn his spurs and his knighthood while the brave archer who saved everyone's bacon time and time again would marry the innkeeper woman who had looked after his feather bed and stagger about in his old age (about 50) and chase the pretty girls while the aged Lord Chandos would ride to battle in his late 60s and die gloriously.

Even worse was my realisation that in my childhood I accepted this hook, line and habergeon (go on - look it up). When the Jacks, the poverty-stricken country French, storm the castle of Villefranche in an episode that I used to be too scared to read in bed at night, they are described as bestial and sub-human, and their assault on our noble heroes seems shocking and an affront to the natural order of things. But did I notice, all these years ago, how Doyle sets the framework for the episode? The wife of the Seneschal of Villefranche describes how ugly the people are, how she "cannot bear it" and so "my trusty Raoul goes ever before me with a cudgel to drive them from my path" - to which her chaplain murmurs "Yet they have souls, fair lady, they have souls!" He is quickly slapped down, because the Seneschal has heard "that you have said to them that their souls are as good as ours". It were better, he goes on, if the priest were to stick to saying Mass.

I fear that as a nine-year-old I probably skipped through this bit to get to the awful moment when the body of the squire is dangled outside his friend's window in the dark. But I'm really glad I've re-read it, seen more of what was implied, realised that it's not just a tale of derring-do. I probably won't read it again.

Life, as they say, is too short.

'Tis done ... we have a Bishop!

Don't they look jolly? The chaps in the gold hats are the current bishops of the SEC; the others are either retired or from overseas - but the one in the centre, the one with the biggest smile, is Bishop Kevin, the new bishop of Argyll and The Isles. I managed to get this, among a clutch of snatched-and-blurred pics, by leaping in an unladylike fashion onto a pew in the cathedral as they finished the photo-call; you can just see the official photographer in the bottom left.

But enough of the technical stuff. On a day when the wind threatened to lift the roof and the rain battered down on the alarmingly glass roof of the choir, an unfeasibly large number packed the cathedral to see Bishop Kevin consecrated and Bishop Mark give up the burden of looking after us - it's been a long haul, and he's been brilliant. There was a considerable invasion of Edinburgh folk, obviously loathe to let +Kevin go, and a selection of luminaries from other parts of the province, all interested by the Argyll weather and the possibility that gaiters might be worn (they weren't). Kilts there were, however, and some tartan trews, and tweed - not to mention the odd fleecy jumper.

The Right Reverend David Conner, Dean of Windsor, preached a sermon that drew heavily on Philip Larkin's poem Church Going. Written 60 years ago, it gives a picture of the poet - and Larkin himself took part in a TV film that showed him, bicycle and all - visiting a church, going in only when he is "sure there's nothing going on". Larkin, said the Dean, was like the Greeks in the Gospel of the day who wanted "to see Jesus". Although Larkin said he was "bored, uninformed", he nevertheless often found himself "tending to this cross of ground" because of what it held, what it had held over the ages, and this was a commonly-found attitude of the majority of people nowadays, who still have this hunger without really knowing what it is they seek. Bishop Kevin's role was to be a leader in mission, relentless in his prayerful quest to show the love of Christ in the world so that those who seek find not barriers and impenetrable theology but rather the answer to the need they might not fully understand, the "hunger ... to be more serious".

"Reach out, my friend," he said in conclusion, "reach out, but dig deep."

The digging will soon begin, but for this weekend, it seemed, the celebrations were paramount. And after a service lasting over two hours, the hungry horde scuttled along the road like so many Mary Poppinses under their billowing brollies and descended on the purvey in the Argyll Gathering halls. When we left, five hours after arriving, the rain was still falling steadily. We surfed home through the gathering gloom, crashing through the potholes that seemed to have multiplied since the morning. At least we didn't crash the car. Summer consecrations must be more dangerous - we drove into a ditch after the last one.

Wild things

This wild and wooly day happened to coincide with a fairly long-standing arrangement to visit Edinburgh, so having chipped the ice from the windscreen this morning we set off in the sunshine across the calm Firth of Clyde to do just that. The journey took us just over two hours, door to door, and we arrived in time for coffee. Yeah, yeah - we'd heard the weather forecast; we knew it wouldn't last ...

We leave Newhaven as the wind begins to drive rain in our faces. We've enjoyed a lovely lunch, hugged our grandchildren, heard the new drum kit. It's 3.30pm and we reckon we'd better head for home. We are not even past the city boundary when we learn that Western Ferries have gone off - Cal Mac don't seem to have been running since mid-morning. The traffic is already nose to tail as we edge out onto the M8 and towards Glasgow.

In the four mile traffic jam before the Kingston Bridge we decide we're driving home over the Rest and Be Thankful, via the Erskine Bridge because we've ended up in the wrong lane to go along Great Western Road. By now, the motorway is flooded in the low-lying bits, and great gouts of water fly up from under wheels and crash onto our roof. Every so often a gust hits us with the force of a giant fist. We have heard the same news bulletins till we could repeat them verbatim, but we keep Radio Scotland on for the traffic updates as we whizz over the Erskine Bridge in a lull and on towards Loch Lomond. And it is as we embark on the lochside road that I realise we are listening to Get it On. Now, I have only just clocked this programme, thanks to Ewan, and it strikes me it might while away the drive if we make a request. I entrust this task to my pal Di, in the back seat with her iPhone. Ask for "I remember you", I instruct - they're looking for songs that should never be covered, and it's sure to come into that category.

And so it is, best beloved, that forty minutes later, after we have braved the dark battering of the Rest and the long run down Glen Croe, as we hurtle through Strachur, we hear a message for "Di and Chris, driving home" and find ourselves singing along with Frank Ifield at the top of our voices. What fun. The miles have sped by and we're as jolly as a school trip on speed. We don't even care that it's taken us four and a half hours to get home.

Pity Mr B (driving) has to spoil it all. He announces that he feels like the coach driver - on a Saga outing.

Ah well.

Enjoying an old 'tec

In keeping with my current preoccupation, I've dipped back into my childhood years again with this excellent Penguin Classic, The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham. I'm sorry about the blurred illustration - it's the one I found on Amazon which is identical to my own copy, and I was delighted to be able to slip it into my reticule for a flight to London last week. I've remarked before on how wonderfully practical these older Penguins are, with their small bulk and small print - have we all become averse to reading something that looks densely-packed on the page?

I first read my parents' hardback copy of this book in my early teens, and although I haven't read it since, the sense of menace lingered over the years. It's a wonderfully-written 'tec novel; the language is sophisticated and delightful and never misses a beat. I knew I would love it afresh on the first page - "The fog had crept into the taxi where it stood panting in a traffic jam" - and this Eliot-like fog is the "smoke" of the title. As a novel, it obeys the classic unities of place and time for over three quarters of its length, taking place over two days in a restricted area of London in a dense post-war fog.

The tension throughout is maintained by that fog, and by the sense that the forces of evil are somehow connected to even the most innocent-seeming protagonist in the story. And although I began to remember just as the denouement came into sight, the need to pursue the plot to its conclusion was as powerful as I can recall experiencing. This is one of Allingham's later stories involving Albert Campion, and all the better for it - though I may find myself scouring Amazon for one of the earlier ones.

If you haven't tried any of these stories, this is a good place to start. I envy you.

A fascinating letter

The letter I've just been posting on Letters from the Past  is full of interest. My father must have been underemployed on duty that night, or simply more than usually fascinated by the current news. I've managed to find the speech of Churchill's that he comments on - I'm so impressed by what you can find online these days - and have linked to it; and the opinions he shares on Churchill, and on left-wing journalists, were quite at odds with what he calls my mother's "liberal sympathies" - though I never remember my father expressing political views in my hearing when I was of an age to take any notice of them.

There are also some insights into rationing and food - I realise with increasing clarity just how big a part food played in alleviating the tedium of service at home. It is worth noting, however, in the light of his penultimate paragraph, that he never, ever, became "really fat"!

Hats from the past

It's amazing how one - or at least I - can become obsessed with a subject. I've always known this - at least from the period of Ancient Rome, closely preceded by Alpine climbs and climbers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both of which dominated my early secondary school career. Right now, of course, it's Letters from the past, the Desert War (no letters - all destroyed) and the last months of WW2 as seen through the letters of my father.

This morning it felt as if my obsession was spreading. For reasons I shall not go into*, I found myself in church, at the start of the service, standing with the small children who have so miraculously appeared in our congregation. They, and I, were wearing strange hats, kindly handed out by Andrew. As if by magic (no, I know it isn't - he reads blogs) he gave me a hat just like the one in the photo on the left, which shows my father sitting in the door of his bivvy somewhere in the Western Desert, probably in 1942. It felt absolutely right to jam the RAF forage cap on the side of my head, not just because I'd been uploading this photo the other day but also because when I was a small child I used to play for hours wearing father's forage cap. (There was also a proper, hard, peaked cap, but I didn't like it as my head was too small and it tended to birl round on the top of my pigtails as if it had a life of its own).

Maybe it's a sign of age that the past suddenly becomes precious - but I wonder what that formidable intellect with whose words I am working would make of all this.

*Oh, all right then. Andrew was introducing the theme of "calling" by getting people to assign roles to hats. If you get me.

Walking in the air

Walking in the air
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

The photo accompanying this post shows how magical this afternoon was. After a morning swathed in dank fog, we set out from the still-foggy coast to climb through the forest above Blairmore - and came out into the last of the light as the sun set. The whole of the Firth of Clyde, as far as we could see in all directions, was swathed in fog, with the Inverkip Power Station chimney half its usual size and the hills above Gourock cut down to mere bumps. It felt like being in an aircraft - or, as Rob pointed out, like The Day After Tomorrow.
You can see the rest of my (phone) photos of the view by clicking on the one here.

Stringent

My current preoccupation with Letters from the Past means I have less time - and fewer thoughts - to post on this blog, but after a flurry of suggestions from Ewan about how I could enrich its content I found myself examining my attitude to what I'm doing there.

For widening my remit, so to speak, sent me hunting for such things as photos, references to the RAF base from which the letters were written, links to other sites. I became aware of the huge numbers of photos and memories now preserved online, and I was seized by the need to tie my contribution to a larger picture. But in a sense, the letters I'm reproducing have something more relevant to my own field of interest, something that makes them stand alone. The writing in them is wonderfully clear, succinct and evocative of my father's voice - the last of which is, of course, of more personal interest. Today's entry , for example, describes the weather as being "stringently cold". I've never come across that particular use of "stringent", and it's perfect.

These were, of course, the letters of one highly-educated scholar of English to another. I can only imagine the pleasure his references gave when the letters arrived in war-grim Glasgow. And it is this kind of feature that brings me to realise that the real interest, for me, lies in the letters themselves.

There is a whole box of them.

A blog from World War 2

For the past week I've been reading through a box of letters written by my father to my mother in 1945. Having spent a month or so in Glasgow on the first home leave in three years, he was posted to an RAF base in deepest Essex. From there he at first expected to be sent to Northern Europe - he was a cipher officer - but as the weeks went by he settled into a life of excruciating boredom, in which the hight points were the many letters he received from home and the weekly attempt at making a phone call to his wife.

During that period he must have written on average three letters per week, in tiny handwriting on miserable paper. Often delivery was held up, so that whole bundles of letters would arrive together - though this seems to have been more of a problem with letters from Essex. When it came to the Sunday evening phone call, he might have to book a slot 3 hours in advance, and then have to endure a bad line or an interrupted connection - a far cry from the instant communication we take for granted now. Nine months of these letters survive, with gaps; they end when he left for home to attend the birth of his first child: me.

The letters fall into three sections - the personal, obviously, much of which I have edited out; the literary, mainly dealing with the books he devoured as his main source of entertainment; and the political, as he comments on the progress of the war, the likelihood of demobilisation and the attitudes of his fellow-officers. Every now and again there is the casual mention of something huge, historically speaking, but they are fascinating primarily as an insight into our recent past.

You can find the letters, as well as photos from the desert war, on the blog Letters from the past.

Waste of parents?

I'm currently working on a fascinating project to put online a great collection of letters from my father written during 1945 and therefore covering the end of the war with Germany and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan - and I'll put up a link just as soon as I get started on the text. But in preparation for starting I've been reading these letters, and I've been learning.

Two things leap to mind. The first is of interest, probably, only to me: I was going to be called Caroline Mary. The initials are the same - but I can't so far find out when I became the me that I know instead. The other, however, is more profound. I was wondering why I knew so little about my own parents, so little about what they thought about the big things. I realised that in fact it was because I hadn't asked the right questions - especially of my father, who died when I was 32. Ok, you say - you were an adult. What stopped you asking the questions?

And the answer is, I think, that I didn't know what questions to ask. I also lacked the confidence to ask them. I don't think I became that confident questioner until ... well, until now, I suppose. I simply didn't know enough. They were my parents, and that was enough - a kind of force-field prevented my straying too far, and I didn't know the way anyway. So that feeling that keeps coming over me - the idea that we waste our parents, the resources that they represent - is something I have to recognise and, to quote Larkin, clothe as destiny. Maybe we are all destined to "waste" our parents; to dismiss their recollections as old hat or irrelevant, to assume that we know it all without recourse to their wisdom. Maybe the force-field is omnipresent between the generations, and maybe it is inevitable and even necessary.

So I forgive myself my thoughtlessness, and will attempt to make amends to myself now. And while I'm at it, I shall keep on growing up.

Maybe.

Voyage into 3D

I've come over all industrious in the last couple of days - started work on a new blog to make use of fascinating family archive material from World War 2 - but before I lose sight of it, I must record our recent outing to the movies. This is something we tend to do on average once a year - a post-Christmas treat involving the empty cinema (everyone else being back at work/school), a morning screening and a large and leisurely lunch afterwards. Because I believe that a big screen and superb sound effects merit a big movie and special features that wouldn't be the same on the telly, we didn't see the apparently excellent The King's Speech - we shall, but probably on DVD - but went to a 3D screening of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader - the third in the Narnia films.

Of the books, this was perhaps one I didn't particularly enjoy, but boy, did it make a good movie! There we sat, in our shades (modern 3D involves not red and green lenses, but things that look like pale sunglasses), captivated by the effects as Eustace the dragon swept at us out of the screen and the green fog (see picture) threatened to engulf us all. The moral transformation of said Eustace - which might well have seemed nauseating - was wonderfully acted, and Aslan (Liam Neeson) as ever sent shivers up the spine. It was a great outing - and the threatened sick-making effect of the 3D wasn't in evidence, despite the problem of getting the specs to balance comfortably over the ones already on my nose.

Magic, in fact.

Moving swiftly on: parenting and education

Considering my own childhood - and I realise it must seem odd to many - led me inexorably to think about my own role as a parent trying to encourage children to learn, do homework and so on. I was about to say that by comparison with my own parents' involvement, I was a complete failure - but then I thought about the outcome for both sons and decided that was a tad sweeping. So what do I remember?

The Word Tin. Son no.1 used to produce this, when he was in P1, with a look of doom. We had to pick words out of a tobacco tin (where on earth did I lay my hands on this item?) and he had to recognise them. At the time he was four and a half and it was torture. Later, there was more amusement to be had in thinking up outrageous sentences with which he could demonstrate the meaning of words. And that, I have to admit, is all I can remember from the Primary school years. I have very little recollection of what - if anything - I did to help no. 2 son. He used a thing called the word-maker, and progressed to a sentence-maker, but I didn't seem to do anything. Could this be because by then I'd gone back to work?

When your children attend the secondary school in which both parents teach, the experience is somewhat different from the norm. I was certainly involved in helping both sons with English - rescuing one from having to do North and South for Higher by spending a whole Easter holiday studying the Larkin set texts so that he could use them in the exam a month later actually involved me in the most God-awful scene with his class teacher, who happened to be my boss. I did a bit of Standard-grade Latin with both of them. And when no.1 son became editor of the school magazine, he recruited me as the Editor-in-chief because it was more convenient for him - and look where that got us.

Actually it got me into what I see as the most important single piece of education I ever undertook. I don't know how many evenings I spent in the school while both sons in turn ran the magazine, teaching myself to do desktop publishing (Adobe Pagemaker) when they left and the boy who knew how to do it let us down, sharing hilarious pressure with successive generations of student journalists when the photocopier jammed/ran out of ink/got too hot, going off with them to competitions in Edinburgh and to the Scottish Parliament, sitting in on interviews with Frank Pignatelli, then Director of Education for Strathclyde, and John Smith, leader of the Labour party. Pupils who were shy learned to use the phone, to contact advertisers, to sell advertising; others learned touch-typing without ever taking Business Studies, coaxed ancient Macintosh Classics to work years after they should have recycled, learned to use the scanner and the value of white space on the page.

Did this make up for the fact that we had television on every night? That there was a small telly in the older son's bedroom, linked to the ZX Spectrum but also to an aerial? That they both had radios and listened to music incessantly, from an early age? That we allowed an 11 year old to have a modem and a year's subscription to BT's precursor of the internet (what on earth was it called?) so that he would come and beg: "Can I go online now?" before he was in secondary school? At the time I felt I was failing, when I'd find one of them sweating over something for the magazine the night before some important exam, but now I'm less sure.

But there's so much more to think about in this early exposure to the medium I'm using now that I think I'd better leave it to another post. It's a long way from the Word Tin ...

The parental role in education

The radio was on this morning, wittering away in the background, when I caught a few sentences and realised that Call Kay was inviting us to consider the role of parents in their children's education. I didn't listen for long, lest I be tempted to contribute (I have phoned this programme twice in the past - don't want to get a name for myself) but it started a train of memories. Hence the photo. It was taken - by me, as I'm not in it - in Paris. I was 14 at the time, my sister 11. I know this because I can recall my mother telling some French waiter that we were "onze et quatorze" - and so right in the age range that I can remember most vividly when it comes to thinking about school, homework and study.

The chat on the radio today was looking at the perceived failure of state schools adequately to prepare their students for the competition to enter the top universities, and asking how much parental pressure/support/coercion was needed to supplement the work of the school. As a teacher, a parent and - a long time ago - a child, I think I have quite a rounded picture of this - but in this post, I'd like to share the part my home played in ensuring that I succeeded in what I set out to do.

By the time I was ten, we lived in a Victorian terraced house in the West End of Glasgow, with four bedrooms and two public, as well as a large kitchen, a wash-house and a lined loft. Loads of room into which one could vanish - but in winter it was cold, and we tended to live between the dining-room and the kitchen. That meant piano practice was less assiduous than it might have been, but was generally done before the evening meal - perhaps on the premise that food would replace the heat lost during practice. Dinner was over by 6pm - both parents were teachers, both home at the same time as us. For the next three hours, my sister and I sat at the dining room table and did homework - and there was always a great deal of this. (We were at a grant-aided selective school, and we could be asked to leave if we didn't work). Until about 7pm, we weren't allowed to make a noise. In fact, I got hell once for throwing a pencil down on the table, as my father had fallen asleep in his chair and I woke him.  Once his post-prandial kip was over, however, we had two hours in which both our parents took a hand in our struggles.

Father was always deeply critical of the teaching in the English department of our school, so we had a great deal of incredibly thorough input on texts we were studying. That went without saying. What was more remarkable, I thought, was that he would also work out from first principles what was going on in the Physics problems I had such trouble with - sums involving moment, I recall with horrifying clarity. My mother, meanwhile, would sit down with my tiny, battered copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars or, later, Virgil's Aeneid (Book 2) and, as she put it, "break the back of it" before I set to work on my preparation for the next day's terrifying oral translation session round the class. She also pushed us to work at French, which I personally hated because of the accent involved, and made several visits at parents' evenings to ask why we had so little written homework in French (lazy teacher; fluent as married to French woman but no fire in his chubby belly). That holiday in Paris, by the way, was by way of encouraging me at the end of S2 - I can still remember the chagrin when the lift man in our hotel corrected my pronunciation of "quatrième".

All this must have taken an enormous amount of dedication and energy on the part of two people who had already taught for a whole day - or even the half day done by my mother, who would then have had to shop (no car, so limited to what she could carry each time) and deal with our sizeable and dusty-corner-ridden house. There was no thought that my sister and I should do housework, other than during a holiday. But perhaps the biggest single contributing factor was the absence of a television. Despite my sense of deprivation at never having seen Quatermass or Emergency: Ward 10 my father refused to have a set until I had graduated (I lived at home when I was at Uni). He said I'd become an addict and that would be the end.

How right he was. I'll return to this subject - I want to think about my own deficiencies when it came to fulfilling the parental role - but for now, I'll indulge my latest addiction. Another go at Bubbles HD before I head out?

Catharsis in Walford

Another week in the Square begins; Ronnie (right) is still holding the baby and the Moons are about to bury the dead infant that they believe is their own. And in the real world actress Samantha Womack is apparently giving up the role of Ronnie because the reactions of people to her in the street have been ruining her life, and media arguments continue about the veracity and poor taste of the story-line. Apparently the BBC, bowing to pressure, are to cut short the story of the changeling baby in the spring.

What nonsense all this is. The most unexpected people suddenly stop watching the programme, or write letters or post their ire on websites. People are upset to find this sort of thing in their living-rooms, and Mumsnet is raging. What's going on?

Classically, the purpose of drama - and particularly of tragedy - is catharsis: the purging of pity and terror. You watch the drama unfold, you become involved, you suspend disbelief, you weep, rage, gasp, feel fear and relief - and by the end, if it's been well done, you feel wrung out, devoid of all emotion. Judged by this set of criteria, EastEnders has got it about right, I'd say - except that people have forgotten the rules.

A few weeks ago I watched Patrick Stewart as Macbeth, in a strangely bleak production of Shakespeare's tragedy. For anyone who has forgotten the plot, Macbeth, a soldier, acts on the urgings of some strange women and murders his king. He then becomes king, but fears his best pal Banquo may suspect, so has him bumped off. He is more than somewhat annoyed that the inept thugs who do this for him fail to murder Banquo's wee boy. Later he has the wife and children of one of his former friends horribly murdered in their house as the children are getting ready for bed. That last bit is particularly horrid. I wasn't aware of cries of horror and demands that the play should never be put on again.

Or what about Hamlet, whom Shakespeare has plotting to murder his uncle for the whole length of a long play? In the course of trying to find the perfect moment, Hamlet bumps off the father of his girlfriend without knowing or caring who he is, sends his two best chums from school to certain death in a foreign country and acts in a totally unsuitable way towards his silly mother. Do people write angry letters about the portrayal of life with a step-father?

Course they don't. It's only a play, silly. So why do they think EastEnders is any different? Ronnie has been an unstable character for years - of course she's not going to get to be happy and fulfilled. Nor is she going to accept her lot if there's a chance of doing the dirty on someone else - we know this; we've been prepared for it. No-one would leave an hours-old baby in its cot in the care of its grandpa? Well yes, they would. People are wary of passing around a newborn - there's a sort of mystique, a fragility that binds a new baby to its mother, and if the mother is suddenly taken ill it's an alarming prospect for even the most gung-ho stranger to look after this tiny infant. And it was Hogmanay, and they were all drinking and Alfie is good-hearted but inept and Charlie has never been the most savvy of men.

If I were an EastEnders producer, I'd be thinking I'd succeeded here. Everyone's talking about it, it's on the news programmes and radio chat shows and in the serious Sundays as well as the red-tops. What more could they ask? So people seem to think it has to fulfil a public service role and show bereaved Ronnie behaving well and bravely - where's the mileage in that? This way, the story has legs. Jessie Wallace gets to act her socks off. It's not real life, whatever people have come to assume. It's a play. Fiction. Drama. Either watch it, or hit the remote.

THE END

On lecterns, and cold hands

Eagle lectern
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Brass eagles don't usually leap into the mind when the weather is cold - monkeys are much more likely. However, today I want to consider a brass eagle like this one, a lectern in a chilly church on an icy Sunday. Specifically, and not to detract from this magnificent specimen in the Cathedral of The Isles, I want to consider the lectern in Holy Trinity, Dunoon, and its effect on me this icy morning.

Today was my turn to preach. Having read the gospel (it was a lay-led service), I propped my notes on the lectionary as usual - and found that they wouldn't stay put unless I held on a bit. (The lectionary at this early point in the year lies a bit lop-sided when open at the right page). I tend to hang on to the wing-tips anyway, as it anchors the hands in a decorous sort of fashion.

Halfway through I had a vision. It was not an angelic vision, nor was it helpful. I pictured myself as in a heat-imager: starting off quite red and glowing, in my good wool coat to the ankles and the fur-lined boots. Within moments, my hands are blue, then black. The glowing red is drained out of my shape, passing instead to the eagle. By the end of the sermon, my frozen body retreats and the eagle, glowing like the Phoenix, takes off and soars down the church.

There you are. I told you it wasn't helpful. But I must try to do something different with my hands next time.

Or wear gloves ...