Never constituted to be a saint*

I finished reading Richard Holloway's Leaving Alexandria last week, but was overtaken by sunshine and the desire to be out of doors so that by the time I might have blogged about it I was too tired to make sense - and I feel that Richard himself might have approved of my priorities.

The book is subtitled A Memoir of Faith and Doubt, and while I was reading it I saw a tweet from an acquaintance opining that surely he'd talked enough about both these things. I disagreed - in 140 characters, natch - because it's obvious that both have been a presence for most of the author's life. If something matters, you talk about it, especially if your talking and your writing are fluent and persuasive.

I loved it. I loved the way it conjured up the childhood of the movies and the hills, and I was appalled at the thought of a boy of fifteen going to the school that would turn him out for ordination - or not - at the end of his studies there. Fifteen! Holloway is painfully honest about the guilt that the normal preoccupations of a teenage boy cost him; his description of his struggles with sex seems to hold at once the pity of the older man for his youthful self and the rawness of that self at the time.

The book was enlivened in another way by the familiarity of knowing not only the author but some of the people mentioned, being familiar with Old St Paul's both in the time when he was Rector there and again now, when I also know the house in which he and his curates lived and where that disastrous attempt at communal living took place. I found lights coming on in corners of my memory, of conversations illuminated decades after they took place. I laughed aloud at the thought of the matching donkey jackets, boots, trousers and bicycles, and was glad that the author too seemed to be laughing.

But it is in the defining of faith and doubt that this book makes its mark, and when it reaches the point at which Holloway resigns as Bishop of Edinburgh, he spells out the precise nature of his problem:

I felt glutted with the verbal promiscuity of religion and the absolute confidence with which it talked about what was beyond our knowing. The irony was that in one of Paul's great poems, God chose to empty himself of language and become a life. But along comes Christianity and turns it back into words, trillions of them, poured out incessantly in pulpit, book and on the airwaves, reducing the mystery of what is beyond all utterance to chatter.  (...) Religious language had ceased to be able to convey the mystery of the possibility of God for me because it confidently claimed to make present that which I experienced as absence; though it was an absence that sometimes feels like a presence ...

And then I am back in the words of another hero of mine, the poet R.S. Thomas, and realise that there is only one word more needed from me.

Amen.

* Leaving Alexandria, p.350
There is a great new review from Ruth here

Of plainsong, penitence and nightly fears and fantasies

We were practising plainsong this morning - a group from the congregation learning the Tonus Peregrinus and familiarising themselves with the twiddly endings of the second part of the psalm, which had a few interesting ligatures to confuse and delight. And as a result, I've been singing plainsong in my head ever since - not just the chants we were doing, but somehow, mysteriously, parts of Compline as well as whatever ideas flitted over my brain wedded to a succession of neumes.

We're doing a basic Prayer Book evensong for our contribution to the Holy Week services in the town, and so we're singing all the syllables and using traditional language - and I have to say it was fine, and that I was happy to do this and let it wash over me without a qualm. But what strikes me in these moments is how conscious of sin and unworthiness the church was, how insistent on human sinfulness and the need to repent, and how aware of frailty and vulnerability. This is backed up by the collection of spiritual readings that I tend to digest before bed - last night's homily from the early church was full of the need to contrast sinful me with the purity of Christ. And they were so afraid of the night - of nightly fears and fantasies, of all perils and dangers of the night. The nights must have been so very dark, and so full of the unknown and the feared, when life was short and surrounded by threat.

Are we so sure now that we've got it all licked? With our electric lights, our computers transmitting our late-night ramblings to anyone who cares to read them, our antibiotics and skilled surgeons? Is the universe really tamed, the night purged of fear? And sinfulness? Let's not even go there.

But if we waken at four to soundless dark, what do we think of? Unresting death? I can't think that Philip Larkin was alone in this. I shall continue to love Compline, to plainsong, above any other service of the church.  And now it's past midnight ...

Going back

A concert in memory of Kenneth Elliott had me back at Glasgow University last night. Oddly, I felt most at home actually in the Memorial Chapel, to the right of this picture of the Arts Quadrangle, although in my first year I seemed to spend an unconscionable amount of time queuing in the corner where the lights are, in the icy wind that seemed to whirl round the quad in October. The Latin lecture theatre - or Humanity, if you prefer - was right in the corner, and I have a feeling we accessed our English lectures somewhere nearby. Not that I ever queued for Latin, for the lecture in first year was at 9am and if you were foolish enough to arrive a minute after 9 the door was locked and you had to go through the prof's room and sit, isolated, in the window bay with a splendid view of Glasgow and the red face of the marked one. I was always on time.

There was a moment of consternation last night when I realised that the huge, freezing loos that used to lurk at the foot of the stairs up to the Arts quad (or the Science stairs for the chaps) had gone, replaced by offices. They always seemed to be open; I don't know what evening visitors do now. The staff toilets, however, where we were directed from the Chapel, were a far cry from the old provision.

But the chapel seemed less changed than other places. To be sure, there are new, back-damaging wooden chairs lower at the rear than at the front, linked so close that it was as well that we were sitting with old friends, but the choir stalls where we sat were the same - except that the choir wasn't singing from there last night but from the area round the communion table. There was an exhibition on the walls as part of the dubiously-named Lent Fest, but otherwise it was the same lofty, strangely godless but acoustically interesting space as ever - great for singing, difficult for speech. (Though I do think that someone who works in the Uni ought to be better able to project his voice than the chap who introduced the concert).

The Chapel Choir sang beautifully - some lovely sopranos - and much of the music was very familiar to me. So I noticed when there were ... deviations. Ah well.  Afterwards, we chatted outside with friends,  as we might have done had we been going for the bus to Broomhill - only we were heading for the midnight ferry.  No chance, then, of remaining in the past ...

An unseasonal soup recipe

Hmm. Posting this on a day when the sun is shining and it's warm enough to be outside in only one layer of clothing, the steaming soup in the photo seems inappropriate. But on Monday, when the rain was lashing down and I was on my own all morning, I raided the bottom of the fridge and found ... a microwaveable turnip. It had languished there, in its little bag, peeled and ready to pop in the micro, for over a week, forgotten. It had developed an unsightly rash of brown spots. It would have to go. Out of it came this soup, for once I'd peeled off a thin layer the spots had gone. It was joined by three small, bendy carrots and a bit of chorizo that had already been opened ... and this is the recipe:





One small turnip (or neep, or swede, or rutabaga - take your pick)
3 small carrots (or whatever)
one onion
about 3 inches of chorizo
a fat clove of garlic
5 cardamon pods, squashed
a good heaped teaspoon smoked paprika
pint and a half vegetable stock

Chop turnip into 1" cubes, the carrot(s) into bits. Slice onion, crush garlic.
Take casing off chorizo and chop into quartered thick slices. Brown vegetables and chorizo in a little butter in heavy soup pot, adding garlic later with the cardamom and paprika.
Add stock, and simmer for 30 minutes or so.
Blast with hand-held mixer - as you can see, I left the odd bit of chorizo un-zubbed.
Check seasoning and add salt if needed.

There will be the odd strand of turnip/cardamon pod, but the chorizo provides a pretty pink speckled effect and the taste was delicious.

Here endeth my first online recipe.

Confessions of a church cleaner

Water jug
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

I'm just back from the last stint for now of church cleaning. My partner-in-crime and I somehow let the first week of our duty pass without us, and for some reason we're only on for three weeks this time, so we've got off lightly ... but that's fine. What we both realised, however, if that we have a dislike of routine cleaning (that's the hoovering and dusting) and much prefer the more esoteric tasks - though the hoovering has been done, religiously, because that's what people notice. Apparently.

But what we really enjoy is the brass. Take the jug in the pic, taken four years ago when it hadn't been used in living memory. I've just finished polishing it, so it now gleams brassily - I think it looks like copper in the photo. We also did the holder for the Paschal Candle. Last week we did the brass lectern - that takes about 30 minutes if you do it properly - and the crucifix on the altar, and the altar candles. We washed the tiles in the sanctuary. I polished the bookstand ...

For two pins we'd have censed the church while we worked, but we were a bit pushed for time. The wood polish ran out, frustratingly, but I did the grubby pew ends where people's hands go and left the seats to be cleaned by ... well, bottoms, actually. I think some wood shampoo wouldn't go amiss - maybe after les travaux occasioned by the acquisition of a lottery grant?

But I mustn't get carried away. Right now if you breathe in Holy T you get paint flakes falling like dandruff on the carpet, and my cleaning days are over for another spell.

Besides, I don't clean my own house ...

Nothing new about teaching Scottish Literature, but.

I was irritated by something I overheard on Radio Scotland this morning - something that had already irritated me when it was first announced in January. I'm referring to Mike Russell's proclamation that Scottish Literature is to be a compulsory part of the school curriculum for Higher English students. Someone else repeated that in a half-heard chat this morning, and I fell to thinking of all the so-called new initiative implied.

I imagine the average punter would assume, since it's being trumpeted, that no English teachers until now have bothered with Scottish writers. Naw - it's all Shakespeare and Milton, innit? Well ... no. Actually Scottish writing has been an important part of the English curriculum from the start of my now-defunct career in teaching, even if, back in the late '60s, Folk Tales of the Borders and The Twa Corbies seemed to dominate. But in the last 20 years of my time in the classroom, I can't think of any year group that didn't enjoy Scottish writers ...

Like the S2 boys who were so taken with the poetry of Edwin Morgan that they wrote him a laboriously-composed letter and were delighted to get a reply ...
Like the S3 girl who loved Morgan's Strawberries so much that she did a solo talk for Standard Grade on it and then sent him a copy of her talk: again, she had a personal reply and was thrilled ...
Like the Higher students, year after year, who shared Chris Guthrie's horror as her crippled father demanded she come to him,  who later wept at the fate of Ewan ...
Like the S2 pupils who learned to appreciate effective metaphor from Norman MacCaig's Visiting Hour ...

...and I haven't even mentioned Robin Jenkins or Ian Crichton Smith or The Coming of the Wee Malkies or The Lament for a Lost Dinner Ticket, or how an S4 boy with quite severe learning problems suddenly understood metre after reading the opening line of one of Morgan's sonnets, with which I think I'll stop:

A shilpit dog fucks grimly by the close

Aye.

Dali's Christ

 © Culture and Sport Glasgow (Museums)

There are no nails

no bonds or blood to mar

perfection. Instead, the figure hangs

beautiful above the flat sea

watched – or ignored – by anachronistic fishermen,

brooding over the water yet

soaring out to embrace

the viewer in the small space

dwarfed by the cosmos that is

the final resting of the crucified.

The humanity is complete,

the only agony visible in the twist

of the arms, the taut sculpture

of tormented shoulders,

but this is God who leaves behind

the tawdry superscription that would

seek to limit him,

this is God who reaches out as

crucifix to dying lips

as benediction to the world

as light into the darkened sky –

stop. Look up. Can you not

feel the wind?

©C.M.M. 02/12

Written after my last visit to the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, when I saw the painting familiar to me for most of my life in a new setting - the fourth I've seen it in. I'm indebted to Glasgow Museums for permission to use the image.

Another for the suitcase

I've just finished Erin Kelly's novel The Poison Tree. If you follow the link to Amazon, you can watch a short video of the author talking about the story and the impulse behind it, so in a way all I need to say it that I found it gripping, well-written and alarmingly convincing.

It's set in 1997 London and ten years later in a house on the Suffolk coast, and it is only now, as I start to write this, that I remember the Prologue that I read a couple of weeks ago, and how it set up the tension and mystery that persists throughout that long hot summer (was it hot in Scotland? - must check) and resurfaces in the later time period. This is a coming-of-age story, but it is also the story, ultimately, of a woman who has everything to lose and the strength to protect what she loves.

There is murder at the heart of the story, but until it happened I was unable to predict who would die and how. I was sometimes unable to read it at bedtime - I try to avoid over-stimulation past midnight - but I knew I was drawn into the life in the big house beside the wood and the recklessly amoral life of Biba who befriends the narrator, Karen. Kelly manages to demolish the intervening years, no matter how many, to revive our own time of hedonism and irresponsibility, whether in the '90s or - as in my case - the '60s, though on reflection I recognise my own relief at not being stranded in a life of sex, drugs, rock & roll by simple virtue of living at home. The seductive nature of such freedom and its corrosive effect creep out of the heat and the haze of spliff-smoke, all of which vanish like smoke after the evening of murder and its results.

The Poison Tree ends in the dark, in the wind, in the cold. There will be life after the story ends - but Karen is no longer who she was, in more ways than one.

Great for the suitcase.

When two or three are gathered together ...

I have been attending the diocesan synod of Argyll and The Isles for some years now - since before I retired, come to think of it - and my memory of both it and the General Synod tends to involve an overwhelming desire to nod off after lunch. This could, of course, be blamed on the nature of our synod meetings: because people have to travel so arduously to come together in Oban, we have a two-day event - and the clergy have three days -  with a jolly dinner (left) after the pre-Synod day and the Synod Eucharist. (This year we all piled into a large bus in the rain and were swept out to the Bishop's palace by the shore to drink wine before returning to the Gathering Halls for dinner, but that's another story that might include my speculating on the effect on the neighbours if we'd all invaded the wrong house ...)

But to the Synod. This year, despite all the junketing, I didn't sleep at all at Synod. For a start, I had work to do; the entire meeting was held round tables on which were bowls of grapes and chocolates and bits of paper and a marker pen, and I was facilitating the discussion at one of them. I would never have believed the positive effect that this simple move had: instead of sitting in rows, able to communicate briefly and surreptitiously with at most two people, we were made to sit with people from all over the diocese and we were encouraged to talk with them, get to know them a bit, and - most importantly - come to trust them as we spoke.

By the time we came to the discussion of the Anglican Covenant, the knitting lady had laid aside her knitting and we were all leaning forward over the table. People became passionate but there was no hostility, and there were moments of sharing that seemed to belong to a real family. We could, it seemed, have gone on all afternoon, and found it hard to stop when we were called to order. It was alive, this church, and I could see that life on faces elsewhere in the room.

I don't yet know the outcome of our discussion. It will be assessed from written responses of the groups and then shared. I got the impression that we thought the Covenant un-Anglican, and that we felt very aware of our uniquely Scottish identity. But I had more than an impression of something else, something very closely tied to the presence that was in the midst of us as we gathered together.

And for me at Synod,  that was a first.

Importunate Witnesses

I invite you to share a few moments of my Saturday morning. It won't take long...

I am sitting in the study, working on various bits and pieces for the church, when the doorbell rings downstairs.
"That'll be my new phone!"
The childish excitement lasts only as far as the hall. There are two figures on the doorstep, one of whom has begun to pound the glass panel vigorously. I open the inner door, and then the storm door.
"Give me a chance - I was upstairs ..."
But a horrid recognition is dawning. The woman - about my age - who was pounding the door smiles. "You know me!"she proclaims triumphantly. And alas, I know her - or at least I know who she is. The man behind her, bulky, big leather jacket, stubbly head, is a stranger. There is a moment when I think they are trying to effect an entrance into my porch, but I hold the door firmly, lean out towards them.  A few words of small talk ... "How are you? How's retirement?" (The connection had links with the school, though not recently).
"I'm very busy. With church, you know."

That does it. "What do you think of Armageddon?"
I go for the light touch. "I try not to, much ..."

But they're off. Regardless of the fact that this woman (a) knows exactly who I am, (b) knows that I have a long-standing commitment to the Episcopal Church and (c) has been this way before, she pitches in as if I was somehow virgin ground, ripe for takeover. The man is worse - he very soon becomes aggressive, and actually has to be shushed by the woman. When they see that I don't intend to rise to their questions, she produces a pamphlet.
"Will you read this? It won't take long..." and the man adds "Surely you have an open mind?"

Now, I have been through all this stuff in the past. I thought that we'd been clocked as unlikely converts long ago. I was aware by this time of the rising bile, the wish to be clearer than politeness was letting me. In a small town, you don't really like to let rip at someone whose family you know; it's not like the city where you can - as my nephew advocates - merely shake your head at them and shut the door. But I've had enough. They haven't brought my new phone, and they've begun to tell me about the Bible.
"I'm afraid I think you believe some very odd things," I say, firmly. "And I'm not interested in learning any more about them."

And they go. But I suddenly see how awful this doorstepping actually is. I used to wonder if we should all do this sort of thing - if this wasn't perhaps a laudable exercise. But now I see it as calculated to put people off at best, to give them a complete scunner - for that's what this visitation did to me. If we can't live in such a way as to make it clear that there is an extra dimension in our lives, then I reckon we should give up. Or try harder. And I don't think we should presume to tell people they've got it all wrong.

Unless they're on the doorstep, that is.

Restoration, in more ways than one.

I've recently discovered Rose Tremain - I'm still in that lovely place when you realise that someone whose writing you enjoy has written loads of novels, all waiting out there for another foray - and I thought until a moment ago that I had reviewed The Road Home, which I read in the autumn. This is an entirely modern story, the story of an economic migrant from Eastern Europe whose experience of London gives a new perspective that I - mere country bumpkin that I have become - found not unfamiliar. I triumphed and suffered with Lev, and was eager to repeat the experience.

Restoration was an entirely different experience, except as regards the skill of the writer. Where I had felt sympathy for the Lev, the economic migrant, I began with nothing but distaste for the physically unattractive, bumptious, facetious Merivel, whose infatuation with King Charles II and irrepressible appetite for food, colour and sex seemed to make him a typically Restoration figure. But as I persisted with his story, Merivel's journey towards his own restoration took hold, and the book had won.

Merivel tells his own story, speaking as it were directly and self-consciously to the reader, and Tremain's language throughout is such that I could believe in the historicity of the characters - if there were anachronisms and anomalies I wasn't aware of them. The life of the Restoration period comes alive in all its colour and contradictions, and left me feeling once again how lucky I am to live now. Merivel's original calling is that of physician. As such he is aware of the dreadful variety of ailments that can carry people off, the threat of plague, the fragility of life. The cures he has access to are horrific, and as for childbirth ...

The Restoration of the title is historical, personal and metaphorical. It's a great book. I'm looking forward to the other title I got for Christmas, but I shall save it for a bit. Joy.

How the other half lives with liturgy ...

Last week I spent some time in interestingly erudite company thinking about Liturgy. I tend to feel, on these occasions, like the class idiot - the one who asks the questions no-one else does - but in fact this time I felt I had prepared rather more than usual by reading up on the background and rationale behind our 1982 liturgy, and I realise now that as a result of the two days of meetings I'm still thinking about what we do .

I can't begin to plunge into the detail, but things that stuck include:
The perils of over-specificity even in poetic images in liturgy.
The fact that clergy tend to have a different view on the above from laity simply because they repeat it with greater frequency.
The 1970 consecration prayer is much improved by removing some of the parenthesis and repetition of ideas and the archaic pronouns and verb forms.
I found myself objecting less vigorously than has become my wont when we used the 1970 liturgy on Sunday.
I enjoy the company of academics, while recognising how studiousness has never been my forte.
I don't want to sit any more exams, even to become officially a Lay Reader.
"And also with you" is as weak a response as it always seemed to be.
It's usually clergy who insist that a Service of The Word is an acceptable substitute for a Sunday communion service - usually when the Reserved Sacrament is involved - bearing in mind that this is a service they need never attend if they don't want to.
Once you start worrying about gender bias in liturgy you realise how useful the word "God" is. But "man" is still a no-no, whatever men say about mankind...

I'd better stop. But it's always fascinating to step out of my own worship zone and realise what other Episcopalians take - or do not take - for granted. Andrew's recent post touches on that, interestingly. It's hard work being part of a huge, sparsely-populated - let alone priested - diocese. But every time I step out of it I'm reinforced in one central idea.

 I wouldn't be anywhere else.

Carver, Tallis and ghosts

We don't go to concerts often these days - we're as likely to be performing as listening, to be honest, and the late-night return, involving as it tends to an hour's wait for the last ferry or the long drive over the Rest, puts us off, rather, especially in winter. But on Saturday we made an exception, and the resulting evening was one that we both considered well worth the trail. It also achieved an interesting bringing-together of various elements in my life, and I hope to be able to convey something of this.

The concert was in the Kelvingrove Art Galleries, and I found out about it on Facebook and booked it online. In that simple sentence you have the beginning and end of a loop: I spent many a wet winter Saturday afternoon in childhood looking at the animals and the armour in the Art Galleries, now a very different place: to my recall the animal displays were all round where we sat as an audience, forming a sort of ghostly backdrop.  And to get there we drove through Broomhill and Hyndland and over Gilmorehill. I found myself wishing I still had my parents living in Broomhill, remembering Hyndland for both my early childhood and the excitement of buying the tiny flat we lived in when we were first married, thinking of the strange thrill of being around the university on winter evenings, whether for pleasure or - occasionally - study. I reflected on how carelessly the young me had felt ownership of that whole area, without thought or fear, how I had walked the dark streets alone and heedless.

But the concert - ah, the concert. The Tallis Scholars were singing "our" music - Tallis, Allegri, Byrd, the incomparable Robert Carver. They sang it perfectly - the best choral singing we'd ever heard live. Of course we knew their excellence - we have several recordings, and that's why we went - but the live performance overwhelmed me with its wonderful creamy sound, the perfect intonation, the flawless phrasing, the ebb and flow and the heart-stopping wall of sound of the word "Jesus" when it came, over and over, throughout Carver's motet O Bone Jesu. For Allegri's Miserere, there was a group of singers - the ones whose part includes the magic high treble notes - somewhere in a gallery above us and to the left, so that when they sang I was suddenly aware of the vast emptiness of the rest of the building, lurking art-filled and ghostly while some thousand people gathered at its heart. So there we sat, packed, still and silent, raptly caught up in something beyond the human in the unforgettable shared experience that we would, in the end, all describe differently.

More memories, more ghosts. We too sang in the Art Galleries once, when we sang with The New Consort of Voices in the late 60s and early 70s. It was hard to get an audience for Byrd and Palestrina in those days, and the few people who listened did so as they drifted about the space during an afternoon organ/vocal recital. We tried to sing in the way that the Tallis Scholars do now, we sang the same music (from the same edition of Byrd, I noticed), and no-one took any notice except for Kenneth Elliott. We even sang Carver, so I feel I know the music from within. I don't get singing like that so often now, for we don't have enough contact with others who can do it - and it annoys me to think that I sing better now in what must be my vocal twilight than I did when I was young.

We fortified our bodies with a delightful early meal in Konaki. The whole evening was a delight. And I have to thank the very current medium of Facebook for unlocking it all.

Wrestling with Swedish hornets

I managed, for reasons associated with where I live, not to see the film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though I wish I had and still hope to. But at Christmas, I was given the book on the left. "You like detective stories, yes?" said Ewan. And yes, I do - right back to when I began with Edmund Crispin. So I began on my Christmas books with this one, thinking "fat book, get it read before I go on holiday". But I'd reckoned - as, I imagine, had Ewan - without the travails induced by reading the third book of a trilogy in which all the characters have appeared from the start - or so I imagine - and have, furthermore, Swedish names that stubbornly resist internal pronunciation and therefore memory.

That said, I ended up thoroughly enjoying The Girl who kicked the Hornets' Nest.  Perhaps there was an element of triumph in my enjoyment, but it meant that I ended up lugging the two-thirds finished tome all the way to Dubai in my cabin bag so that I could read it on the long flight.

Apart from the intricately worked-out plot that had me thumbing backwards to find out where the clues were laid (and to check out which Swedish name belonged to which plot element) I found myself revelling in the hacking that formed the backbone of the latter part of the story. (How sad is that?) I regretted my inadequate knowledge of Swedish geography and the lack of a map at the front of this book, and I marvelled at what Swedes seem to eat for breakfast. It was such an engrossing experience that I found myself bereft beneath the palm trees when I finished it in a late afternoon after a swim, and it was hard to start on another book - which I may also review - that evening.

Several people have offered to lend me the other two books - I shall be ready to start one in about a fortnight, the way my life is looking right now. And I want to see the movie ...

The tax man, the musician and the poet: a cautionary tale.

It couldn't last. All that laid-back, chilled cheerfulness induced by some out-of-season sun and warmth had to be dissipated, didn't it? So for pricking the bubble - in fact, for the prick of the year award - I nominate the tax-man. I suppose he mightn't like it if I named him, the almost-anonymous jobsworth who signed the letter to Mr B with a diagonal dash that bore no resemblance to the name typed beneath, and I actually don't know the gender as there is only an initial, but here's to you, AD, for raising a rant.

For a start, the letter dated 7 February comes in response to a written query dated 25 November which arrived in the tax offices on 28 November. Nothing unusual there - the workings of HMRC are glacial. The joyful tidings can be summarised in the opening of the second paragraph: I can confirm that you are still due to pay the amount as shown on the tax calculation that we sent you. They go on: You are obliged to obtain and retain all original documentary evidence of all allowances, reliefs, income, pay and tax, even if you are not required to complete a Tax Return, to allow you to check your liability and to allow you to inform HMRC of any income which has not been fully taxed. 

I hope you're paying attention. I hope you're doing this - are you?

The letter goes on, in impenetrable jargon, to tell him that he was issued a notice of coding blah blah for the year 2009-10 in January 2009. It's the following sentence that seems particularly impenetrable "HMRC have checked with your pension provider, SPPA Finance and HMRC agree that no error was made for which action can be taken." Quite apart from the weak punctuation that arouses doubt as to what the writer is actually saying, it looks to this non-accounting mind as if what they are saying is "We made a boob; your pension provider took it as being correct; it's not their (SSPA's) fault - because "they acted with reasonable care, based on the information they held at the time." The letter goes on: "You were notified of this decision on 2 November 2011 and that decision stands. I reiterate that your pension provider is not to be held accountable for the liability notified because it is your liability and remains due ..."


The letter goes on to make it clear that all these codes with which HMRC issue us have intrinsic meanings and that it's our duty to understand these and check them. "It is your responsibility to check (these) and to check your liability and you would then have had knowledge of any errors occurring and then would have been able to inform HMRC." Eh? Let's clarify the actual situation here. We have someone who has not filled in a tax return since PAYE was introduced, someone whose salary was publicly known and who never worked in a private capacity to earn extra money, someone who, furthermore, has been retired and in receipt of the same pension for the past seven years - and suddenly HMRC decide to send him a new tax code and get it wrong and it's his responsibility to check it? What precisely are these tax people paid to do?


The nastiest paragraph states "... you were fully aware that your tax affairs were not in order (as you have stated that you know that the incorrect PAYE tax code was being operated when compared against the notice of coding P2 dated 16 January 2009, yet you did not act to try to correct the issue. The evidence you have sent confirms that you were aware, (sic) of the situation, (sic) but did not act." Seeing that a different coding has been applied and automatically knowing that it's a mistake are two different things, surely?

Given that figures and taxation are part of a foreign country into which I have recently had to travel because of consultancy work, I know that these people blunder - but had they not done so quite so blatantly at the end of last year when they sent me two different codings within a week and then took a chunk off my pension as a result, I would not have assumed this. (I did not, by the way, ever recoup any money lost in the month when I was waiting for the repayment of this chunk).

Seems to me that the operatives at HMRC get things wrong rather too often for comfort and then send out these missives of hectoring and patronising jargon which threaten rather than apologise and assure us that they will take the money and there's not a thing we can do to stop them. We are expected to have a grasp of their arcane procedures, be we musicians or poets - even though their letters are so badly written that they could well do with the blethers' course in Plain English. Do the rest of us get off with blunders on such a regular and harmful fashion? Doctors, maybe? Dentists? (ouch)


From now on until I pop my clogs, I'm going to phone HMRC every time a bit of official paper arrives chez blethers, be it a tax coding or an allowance. I'm going to query every last thing. Join me. They asked for it.

Off the beach ...

Fort among the palms:al Bitnah
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Eight hours after arriving at Dubai airport, we set off on a trip to the Eastern Emirates. Yes, the shock of getting only 4 hours in bed made it feel a bit like Christmas morning, but I'm glad we did this first, on what turned out to be the coolest weather of our week, for we learned a great deal from our German guide and saw a very different side of life from the luxurious lazing of the rest of our holiday. The fort of Al Bitnah, one of the foremost heritage sites in the country, sat among palm trees far below where we stood, but the dusty colour of the stone and the brown hills were a far cry from the blue-green sea that dominated our view from the hotel, and the Al Hajar mountains were as high and as rocky as you could wish for (about 3,000' ; the name is Arabic for 'stone mountains'). It was there that we heard our second call to prayer that day - the first had echoed over the fish market in Diba al Fujeirah at midday - and the sound, mingling with the wind, was strangely enough a moving reminder of what united rather than divided us. You can hear a bit of it on the short clip that sits next to this photo on flickr - click through to find it. At another fort, Fujeirah, I saw four green parrots fly past.

It was on this trip that I found out that fewer than 20% of the population of Dubai are native emiratis - everyone else is a foreigner, and we heard English all over the place as the common means of communication. We realised even sooner, in the car that took us from the airport to the hotel, the dire working hours of many of them; our driver, from Nepal, often worked 18 hours a day. But out here at the foot of the mountains we saw a man herding goats among the palms, and you can see vegetables growing on the bottom left of the photo. And I learned the origin of the double rope that forms part of the Bedouin headgear: it was used to hobble a man's camel in the desert.

Camel in pickup, courtesy of Mr B

On the road back to Dubai, we were told that the fences along the side of the road were partly to restrain wandering camels - we saw some, grazing on bits of scrub - and partly to protect the desert from - wait for it - picnickers. Apparently the natives of Dubai like to return to their desert roots every now and then, so pile into their big 4x4s and head out of town, to park just off the road and fire up a barbeque. The story went that they aren't too careful with their rubbish, and it's easier to clean up after them if it's not scattered over acres of empty sand. Talking of camels: you may think of the ships of the desert and all that stuff, but did you know they tend to be flown in to the UAE from the Sudan? Or that they sometimes travel rather like sheepdogs, in the back of a pickup?

I fear I may be becoming a bore. I shall desist. I couldn't live there, for all sorts of reasons - forget the clothes restrictions: they have no home postal delivery, for heaven's sake. Imagine having to go for your mail and finding it full of Orvis catalogues ...

Why Dubai?

Why are you going there? they said. Dubai's a horrible place, someone else informed me. Never mind the oddity of telling someone that when they've just told you they've booked a holiday there - how sweeping a statement, and how ignorant of the possibilities that exist alongside the world's biggest shopping mall (we didn't even see it) and the enormous but rather inefficient airport. We went there, we stayed five nights which gave us four complete days, and I feel like a new woman.

I chose the picture on the left to sum up part of what was so good. The hotel had a lovely garden, full of pert birds that sang beautifully and were very tame, and there were comfortable loungers scattered throughout it. There were large, soft blue towels. When you had been on your lounger for a short while, a waiter - in a cricket hat and cream/fawn uniform, including trainers, would come over and offer to get you ... anything, really. We tended to opt for tea, green or peppermint.  We were easy pleased. And it was warm, warm like a perfect summer day in Scotland - hot, high sun, but a cool air which meant we could enjoy it for long enough to read, sleep, chat. I suppose it was about 24ºC in the first part of the afternoon. We both swam in the sea - though to be honest, it was so exhilaratingly bouncy that we tended to surf the waves rather than swim. The sea was also a bit Scottish summer - not warm, not the way it is when it's 40º on the beach - and had the same bracing effect. I loved it.

We were asked when we came home if we'd been able to wear swimsuits. Around the hotel, all we were asked in this Muslim country was that we wore a minimum of shirts and shorts - so we were spared the sight of fat men in semmits. On the beach, anything went, from the full cover-up of the black-clad women to the smallest bikinis and trunks.

What else did I love, other than the conditions that allowed me to relax so completely? One of the striking things about the hotel was the way the staff made a huge, international hotel feel like a bed and breakfast - because they were so friendly, so attentive, so ready to help, so smiling and cheerful even at the end of what must have been a long day. One of the waiters, a boy from Goa, told us that his name, Frezer, did indeed, somewhere in his family story,  have the Scottish connection that the sound if not the spelling suggested. I have to say I could get used to having someone anticipate my every whim - and even to being called "madame" at every turn. I guess that's what you pay for in the better hotel chains - the predictably good service and pleasant surroundings. The food was wonderful too - we never ate lunch as the breakfast buffet was amazing.

The hotel was right on a wonderful beach - Jumeirah Beach - and our balcony faced the sunset. In the pic on the right you can see the black shapes of the people who seemed to congregate there in the evening just to stand and watch as the sun dived towards the line of the Arabian Gulf. We walked along that beach in the mornings - it took about 90 minutes to walk to the end and back - collecting shells and watching sky-divers drifting down to land. It was spotlessly clean and felt somehow calm. I had wondered if I would be bored, but never got near boredom. I loved it.

Conspicuous consumption, a holiday like this? Well, no, not really. We could easily have gone much further upmarket on The Palm, for instance. Yes, it was an expensive four days, but it was a real holiday from greyness, cold, wet, winds, sinus infections, dark mornings and early nights, endless huvtaes. I will post more about things I saw and thought and learned, but this post is just to say it was worth every penny and I loved it.

Online Evening Prayer

I've just been to Evening Prayer - sharing with people from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen without even leaving my study. Google+ has opened up the possibility of online group video conferencing with its  'hangout' facility, and as far as I'm concerned gives a glimpse of how things might be much more accessible in our scattered diocese of Argyll and The Isles. The screenshot shows how it works - the liturgy on my main browser screen, shrunk to fit down the side of the new window that opens when you join a hangout, the participants down the side of the main picture which changes as different people speak. We were all wearing earphones, to cut down on interference, and for most of the service everyone other than the leader and one responder mutes their microphone so that there isn't the feedback of delayed sound coming through as everyone joins in the psalms and responses.

It all works amazingly effectively, even when we all unmute our microphones for the Magnificat and subsequent prayers and give rise to a disconcertingly Babelesque cacophony. As Kelvin remarked, rather like speaking in tongues.

What's not to like? It's free, it's useful, it only requires a decent connection and basic hardware. My earphone was a freebie on a tour of Pompeii and brings the necessary sense of intimate communication to the proceedings. I'm indebted to Kelvin for introducing me to the whole thing - watch this space!

Educational collaboration: a student's view

Every now and again there comes a comment on the blog that I wish could be seen by more people. Today I'm taking steps to make that happen. Last night a former pupil of mine left the following comment on my post about collaboration; with one stroke he allays the doubts I expressed and affirms the experience he had as a member of the class I describe. It seems one never gets over the positive effects of a bit of good consumer feedback!

This is what he had to say:

Duffy said...

Excellent post.
As someone who was a member of this class, I can honestly say that it was one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I had in secondary school - and for this very reason.
Helping the 'poorer' people in the class actually helped further *my* understanding of the topics at hand and we all really enjoyed listening and learning from each other - there was no patronising or arrogance, just fun. And yes, Ewan, we chose to do it; it seemed natural.
One of my greatest memories was doing 'Journey's End' - a play with an all male cast set in the trenches of WWI - and we had such fun! There were no inhibitions and everybody just 'went for it', which had a knock-on effect on other areas, such as our final S-Grade talks. We had the same level of confidence and enthusiasm, knowing that there was no judgment.
I remained in Mrs B's class for Higher, which was mixed, and I’m afraid to say it wasn't quite the same. The boys from the previous year (myself included) were thought of as loud-mouthed and over-confident, but for us speaking out and having good debates was what we knew – we’d been doing it since we were 12! We soon took the new members under our wing, but they never quite ‘got’ it and were fairly boring to be around as a result.
Collaborative and cooperative learning are now a huge part of my daily teaching and I always think about my time in English and hope my children are having as much fun as we had.

Seduced into education - again

I was seduced yesterday - my day taken over by the temptation to participate in an Education Think Tank at BETT. In London. No, I didn't actually go there - but having found the livestream online I lurked quietly for all of ten minutes before I found myself being drawn in. The first tweet gave me away, and from then on I might as well have been there. Seems that some of my experience is still relevant to the discussions that were taking place, and I found myself asking questions. One of them found a public response, and it is this that I want to explore now.

The question I asked, in a discussion on collaboration, was this: Does collaboration work to the advantage of all if there is inequality of ability? It might clarify where I was coming from if I sketch in what I had in mind as I asked. 

In the last ten years of my career, I made several discoveries about my own teaching. I volunteered to take an all-boys class for S2 in a year group with a preponderance of boys, thus freeing other colleagues who preferred mixed classes to get on with it. I've often cited this class as an example of the best experience I had as a teacher, and as an example of what can be achieved. In the end, I had the same class right to the end of S4. Three boys jumped ship at the end of S2 - they wanted to be in a class with girls. The others, who were all offered the possibility of reorganisation, stayed put. This gave a class of 28 boys, of whom five or so were expected to gain a Credit Grade 1 at the end of S4, and six of whom were classified as Foundation and destined to a grade 5 or 6. Completely mixed ability, then, but together from a stage when adolescent attitudes hadn't formed. 

I could wax boring about this class and the fascinating developments that took place over the year, but we're looking at collaboration here - collaboration between pupils. By the time we were in that first winter of Standard Grade, I could see that there were clear patterns springing up of collaboration among the boys. Most noticeable was the willingness of one of the very brightest in the class to sit down with possibly the poorest - intellectually, socially, in self-esteem - and quietly enable him to keep up with the rest of the class, pointing out how he could tackle a piece of writing, helping him to understand a bit of text that was causing bother, pairing him in Process Writing so that the limited subject-matter of the weaker student's writing was expanded and enhanced. He did all this quietly and unassumingly, and no-one raised an eyebrow. Other fruitful pairings grew up and flourished. When the results came out at the end of S4, no-one had a Foundation award. Fifteen had Credit passes, nine of them at level 1; the rest had 3 or 4. 

So it worked. But I used to look at what the more able boy put into this collaboration, and wonder what he was getting out of it. He'd certainly deepen his own understanding in the way I think we all do when we have to share our learning; he'd know he was doing something really important for another person; he'd feel a sense of achievement. But my job was to make sure his experience in the study of English was as enriching as possible. And I used to fret, slightly.

Now I'm not so sure. He's graduated from University and is doing well. He seemed to be happy with what he was doing, and he stayed with me for Higher English. Maybe what he learned from the process of collaboration was precious to him - I don't know. I'd love to have the chance to ask him. The other boy, who was a delight in that class, seems to have taken to a life of petty crime. His background was stacked against him, and I sometimes felt that the all-too-brief time of civilisation that he enjoyed during these three years was the only chance he ever had.

Maybe that's it. Maybe collaboration is the bedrock of civilised - and civilising - behaviour. And I haven't even started on the business of collaboration with one's colleagues in teaching. Guess that's for another post. Comments on a postcard, please .... you know what I mean...