Never Seconds trends on Twitter

I love it. The power of Twitter, that is. I can't be said to love the council for whom I used to work and in whose area I live, nor the idiocy that had them ban a blog about school dinners, nor the illiteracy of the hapless employee who was chosen to write Argyll & Bute's public statement about their reasons for such an action. And I fear, from the relative silence of the council's Twitter stream, that they will currently be buckling under the strain of the incoming flak - I've had to delete the column as it updates too rapidly for me to read at the moment. The blog in question has attracted 2543350 hits and the stat counter shows a new hit every second. You can go and look for yourself while I ramble happily here.

When I ran a school newspaper in an Argyll & Bute school, they did a feature on school meals. We didn't actually think this was out of line - that's not a royal 'we', despite the Jubilee season, it's my pupil editors with my approval - but rather something that would appeal to anyone who'd ever eaten school dinners. As as result, my articulate and wonderful editors - and gosh, haven't they done well in later life? - were hauled over the coals and told that a school meals supervisor had left her job ... Did that really happen? I don't remember being brought into the fray, as the pupils in question assured me there was no need, in another example of fortitude under fire and independence of thought and other worthy attributes that I was proud to help foster.

I've had my ups and downs over social media this week, but today's outpouring shows, perhaps, why people fear it so much. Yes, there is the odd numpty who uses a trending hashtag to post nonsense (usually sexual) on Twitter, but it was easy to filter them out of my screenshot and most of what I've seen reflects the mainstream view: that banning a pupil from taking photos of the food she has paid for and is about to eat is high-handed, authoritarian nonsense. Of course, they will justify it by saying they've banned mobile phones in schools or making some other similarly thoughtful response. People tend to want to ban anything that might expose their workings to public scrutiny - and nowadays, that's virtually impossible. The workings need, then, to be such that the organisation or individual is proud to have them on display - and that, chums, includes the food we feed our children. Martha, whose blog has caused all the furore, seems to rate most of her more recent meals pretty highly - do the council know something she (and we) don't?

I loved my time as teacher editor of The Pupils' View. I'm proud of what my former pupils have achieved, just as I was proud of them at the time. But right now I'm glad I don't teach any more, glad I don't work for Argyll & Bute council, glad I'm not answerable to anyone on this subject. I suspect I'd be too full of rage this morning to work effectively. But if I were still involved, I'd have the satisfaction of knowing that my MP, the Minister for Education, was on my side. How? Because I'd have read it on Twitter.

Footnote: and - again on Twitter - I learn that the Chief Executive of Argyll and Bute Council has reversed the decision to ban the blog. Cheers!

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.

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.

Change of face?

Goodness. That was exciting - and quite disconcerting. For a full 24 hours it seems I have been someone else, though it took a remark on the phone and ABF's comment on the previous post to alert me to the fact that I seemed to have turned into a Russian vocal ensemble, all without my noticing. How alarming. 

The explanation was annoyingly simple. I'd been setting up a new blog for my pal Jurij (he's not said if he likes it yet, so it may simply be strangled at birth) and had foolishly taken no steps to dissociate my own identity from it. Blogger didn't do this to me before - I already run two blogs, and to my knowledge I never appear as frankenstina - but the new Blogger is disturbingly more akin to Wordpress in its complexity (and no doubt in its flexibility) and strange things are happening. F'rinstance, the box I'm currently posting in doesn't look the way it always has - to the extent that I'm wondering if this post is going to arrive on the wrong blog. 

If it doesn't, and if I've reverted to my former persona, then all is well. But note to self: don't set up new blogs in the middle of a telephone conference. And don't work on them after midnight.

Simples!

New blog on the block

There's a new blogger on the Pisky scene. The Revd Andrew Swift arrives in Dunoon this week, and it's high time his aptly named blog, Dances with Midges, appeared on pisky blogrolls. Please pay him a visit and encourage him as he prepares to move to the very heart of midgeland.

Strange interests

Regular readers of this blog will recall that, just over a week ago, I wrote a post about my own experiences of punishment and boredom in my own school days. I illustrated it with a photo of the belt/tawse/strap with which I was issued at the start of my teaching career in Glasgow. Quite apart from the comments which the post itself aroused, I'm fascinated by the traffic to the blog and to the photo itself on flickr. At the time of writing, the photo has been specifically viewed 70 times in the past week, and a trawl through the details of my stats shows that several links came from a search for belting which may be thoroughly educational in intent or may not.

Interesting, don'tcha think?

Typecast?

When I was small - three or threabouts - I was devoted to a pair of blue dungarees and to the idea of "mending things". My mother dreamed of me as the first female mechanic - until I turned into an arty-farty type who wrote poems and fancied muscians.

So I'm fascinated with the results of typing the url of both this blog and my poetry blog into Typealizer - a link I found on Kenny's blog

I turned out to be the mechanic. "The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment, are masters of responding spontaneously to challenges that arise . They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts. The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters."



I have to admit that the demands of this moment meant that I felt obliged to edit the above quote, not for content but for punctuation, which in the original was lamentable. I'm not sure that I see myself entirely in the description offered, but I was interested that the two blogs produced the same ISTP type. I was more interested in the diagrams showing the different areas of brain activity which, according to the analysis, would be involved in writing each blog. In the clips above, the first diagram is the one for blethers, while the second is for the poetry over at frankenstina.

And it's odd that blethers shows no sign of spirituality, rhythm and harmony. Maybe I should be looking for a change of lifestyle - anyone seen my spanner?

Blogging off

I'm blogging off for a few days - though if my hosts in deepest Herefordshire have indeed acquired internet access and will allow me, I may succumb to temptation. But in a way, it's refreshing not to be tied to the computer - I shan't be taking it with me. Besides, my laptop is now quite elderly (four in August) and throws little cardiac episodes if taken away from home. I know I really want a new one, but not so brutally.

I go with a strange commission: to photograph the Tardis loo in All Saints' Church in the centre of Hereford - the one with the cafe at the back - and if possible to find out about it. Should make for an interesting conversation-piece.

A bientot, mes amis ...

Alien identity

I've just realised that I've turned into an alien when I post comments on Wordpress blogs! Because I was one of the contributors to Love blooms bright, the Advent blog run by Kimberly, my name now links back to that rather than to blethers. And what's more, I appear in my wordpress/flickr persona of goforchris. Talk about split personality!

As I now seem to be the only blogger still using the name blethers for my blog - the other one has apparently ceased publishing - I'm keen not to have this confusion. If anyone out there has a shortcut to being plain chris/mrs blethers without rendering myself congenitally unable to post on the wordpress blog, I'd be happy to hear from them.

The rest is silence ...

(Spurred on by Groanin’ Jock – this is my last post…) and ab - the end is nigh)

The premise:

If the blogosphere were coming to an end 24 hours from now, what would your final post be? Would you go out with a bang, or as softly as a whisper? Would you say “goodbye and good riddance” and give us the virtual finger? This is your chance to make your mark on the blogosphere.



The post:

I started this blog 18 months ago, because I had the time, because I thought I might have something to say, and because I could. Now, I’m totally addicted – not just to the writing, but to the ability to make friends here and on the other side of the Pond. I think I write more slick prose than I did – and so turn out what are in effect blog posts for the local paper with alarming ease. (People are beginning to talk about them). I am aware that what I write will be read by at least some people whose own writing I admire – so I don’t want to let them, or myself, down.

And I find that I’m better known as an English teacher now than I ever was when I was stuck in a classroom. I’m grateful to the people who comment approvingly about the ideas I post, and enjoy the thought of the lessons I enjoyed being used elsewhere.

Finally, of course, there are the friends who never bother to phone to find if I’m still alive, because they know exactly what I’ve been up to and what I think about it. So maybe it’s a conversational death-knell, but golly, it’s been fun. I shall have to go back to playing Medal of Honor and write more poems - though how will you know? If I don’t meet you in this life, readers of mine, there’s always the hereafter...

The blogosphere is dead – long live the blogosphere!

Note: Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…

Holy snipers

A visit to my old classroom (strangely unaltered after almost two years - see left) prompted a range of emotions and a chain of reflection. It was great to feel so at home in school, even as I rejoiced in the ability to walk out of it again after a couple of hours; it was good to catch up with former colleagues and to catch pupils waving in a friendly manner across the playground as I went in.

Now, of course, much of my contact with the world of education is online. I find that the blogs I read fall for the most part into two categories: educational and church-orientated. On one side the posts and the comments are largely supportive, appreciative, gentle, careful of one another's egos, putting forward helpful and often innovative ideas for all to share. On the other side the posts are often self-aware, sometimes outrageous, often critical, and the comments snippy, defensive, brittle, caustic. You might think it obvious which group is which, but to avoid confusion I should point out that the latter group are the church folk, and the professionals at that. I find the contrast between expectation and reality interesting. Could it in fact be the burden of that very expectation that causes such hard carapaces?

And a final thought about school and church. When I was in the Infant class, we all had to say the Lord's Prayer every morning, standing beside our desks, eyes closed, hands piously clasped before us. The girl immediately behind me always muttered something different - a rapid, distracting mutter. One day I asked her what she was saying. "The teddy-bear's picnic" - quick as a flash. I thought this wonderfully rebellious. Later, much later, I realised that she was Jewish. At the time I was merely aware of a gulf between us, the gulf between my ignorance and her defensiveness. I remembered this today when I heard a rebel in my own congregation muttering her "Teddy-bear's picnic" - the Grey Book liturgy, to which she clings and which this morning had been abandoned in favour of an out-of-synch indulgence in the Blue Book.

Trouble is - we're supposed to be a unity. We don't half make it difficult for ourselves.