It appears that the 28-year old US actor Heath Ledger has died of a drugs overdose. I thought we had got beyond that even in Hollywood society and River Phoenix's death in 1993 at the age of 23 was the last of this kind and that they would go through rehab and managed to survive even if dimmed. Clearly that is not the case and there are still so many easily available drugs around that a movie star with a growing reputation could snuff himself out so early. I know Ledger has attracted most attention for 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005) for which he got an Oscar nomination, but I would also point you, if you are doing a deserved reviewing of his filmography look at '10 Things I Hate About You' (1999), a high school adaptation of 'The Taming of the Shrew' by William Shakespeare and probably the best of such adaptations (I am not counting 'Romeo + Juliet' (1996) as it is an interpretation as all the lines are Shakespeare's) and always gets good reviews for a whole range of viewers, in which Ledger plays the quiet but rugged hero of the movie really. A similar part but with him clearly centre stage is in 'A Knight's Tale' (2001) which I thoroughly enjoy. Paul Bettany as Geoffrey Chaucer is a treat but Ledger plays the hero's part very well and again it is enjoyable, possibly not high culture, but certainly a cut above a lot of stuff that comes out of Hollywood. It is sad that the cineam going public has been robbed of a rising star that whilst attractive, had a lot more than the good looking boy actors and it is likely that he would have developed into a real draw for any movie he appeared in. Why he had to throw that away for some hours' buzz, I guess we never know if we do not live in that kind of environment. However, I do know we are going to be poorer without him.
P.P. Since I produced this posting it has come to light that Ledger died accidentally from a bad combination of prescription tablets. I am glad that it was not as a result of narcotics use, but it is still a shame that he was in such a situation that he had a need for such a range of medicines and the cause of his death does not alter the loss to cinema that it has resulted in.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
The Goths and the Bus Discrimination
It is interesting given what I have been saying recently about Gothic culture and how on the fringes there is some overlap with aspects of sexual fetishes as both aspects came together in a news story today. Dani Graves, a 25-year old male Goth and his fiancee Tasha Maltby, a 19-year old Goth and a student tried to board a bus in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. They were wearing Goth clothing (not that incredibly unusual, though Goths are rarer than they once were, token ones even appear on popular soap operas so few people can be ignorant of them) and crucially Dani was holding a leash connected to Tasha's collar.
Now, this is not an overly common thing among Goths, though it is not unknown. As I have noted before, Goths, though often quite shy people, like to surprise and even shock mundane society. They are also more open about their feelings, especially their passions, whether they are dark or light in tone. They often wear clothing that has sexual overtones, for example leather and corsets. Collars were an element of punk culture of the late 1970s too. The collar and leash use comes from a sexual fetish, dominance & submission, in that one partner has ownership or control of the other and treats them unequally like a possession or a pet. Typically this is done with full consent between two partners. In some relationships one is always the dominant and the other the submissive, sometimes people switch. It may be combined with bondage or sado-masochism. As I have noted before such fetishes, once the realm of secret clubs and the bedroom have been straying more opening into public, being used by the media, especially in advertising and by movie makers. You can go to fetish clubs and see this and just typing such phrases into any search engine will provide you with a range of images and stories to keep you occupied for the next day and night. However, it remains still very edgy in mundane society, especially a small town in Yorkshire, it is hardly central London or Manchester.
The reason why this has got into the newspapers and the radio (and it is interesting to see the response of the 'Daily Mail' seem as the epitome of Conservative, Middle England attitudes, they seem not to know who to censure on this, though it did say 'they live on benefits in a council house' as if they were being subsidised by the state and should have this stopped), is that Dani and Tasha were barred from getting on a bus by the driver who said, 'we don't let freaks and dogs like you on.' Now it is an interesting question to ask whether they were barred for being Goths or fetishists, I guess it was mix of the two, it was outside the driver's understanding and he could not accept it in his sight. Goths are renowned for their non-violence, so it is not that he could have felt threatened. The bus company have come out with some feeble excuse that it was unsafe for Tasha to be leashed, but they never raise that when toddlers wearing reins come on the bus or even real dogs.
Now, this is not an overly common thing among Goths, though it is not unknown. As I have noted before, Goths, though often quite shy people, like to surprise and even shock mundane society. They are also more open about their feelings, especially their passions, whether they are dark or light in tone. They often wear clothing that has sexual overtones, for example leather and corsets. Collars were an element of punk culture of the late 1970s too. The collar and leash use comes from a sexual fetish, dominance & submission, in that one partner has ownership or control of the other and treats them unequally like a possession or a pet. Typically this is done with full consent between two partners. In some relationships one is always the dominant and the other the submissive, sometimes people switch. It may be combined with bondage or sado-masochism. As I have noted before such fetishes, once the realm of secret clubs and the bedroom have been straying more opening into public, being used by the media, especially in advertising and by movie makers. You can go to fetish clubs and see this and just typing such phrases into any search engine will provide you with a range of images and stories to keep you occupied for the next day and night. However, it remains still very edgy in mundane society, especially a small town in Yorkshire, it is hardly central London or Manchester.
The reason why this has got into the newspapers and the radio (and it is interesting to see the response of the 'Daily Mail' seem as the epitome of Conservative, Middle England attitudes, they seem not to know who to censure on this, though it did say 'they live on benefits in a council house' as if they were being subsidised by the state and should have this stopped), is that Dani and Tasha were barred from getting on a bus by the driver who said, 'we don't let freaks and dogs like you on.' Now it is an interesting question to ask whether they were barred for being Goths or fetishists, I guess it was mix of the two, it was outside the driver's understanding and he could not accept it in his sight. Goths are renowned for their non-violence, so it is not that he could have felt threatened. The bus company have come out with some feeble excuse that it was unsafe for Tasha to be leashed, but they never raise that when toddlers wearing reins come on the bus or even real dogs.
Tasha described herself as 'I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life'. She sees the collar and leash as part of her culture and a free choice that was not harming anyone. I agree with her whole heartedly on those grounds. It is a choice and clearly was consensual. Dani was shoved back by the driver who was actually off duty at the time and natually he has made a complaint against the driver. As Tasha noted it was certainly discrimination, though I would not go as far as her to say it 'almost like a hate crime' but it does signal a slippery slope which does lead to hate crime very easily. I remember Mark Thomas, the comedian-cum-political activist talking about a campaigner for Goth Rights who came on a demonstration he organised. Maybe such a campaign will have to swing into action to protect the right to be a Goth and not be discriminated against for how we dress and what we believe (if I substituted Christian/Muslim/woman for Goth, I think few would argue with me). Wave the black-on-black flag and stand up and say 'I am Goth and proud; Goth Rights Now!'
Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Rooksmoor's Guide to Attending Weddings
As regular readers will know, this blog is very much about downloading things from my brain into a more reliable storage space than my memory. To some degree, I have realised it is part of maintaining my identity in the way that I keep a diary and photos of people I have known. As my memory worsens, if you took those things away from me, it would be like erasing me as I am. I could start again but I would be a different person. To some degree this betrays an arrogance, that the identity of me at the moment is worthwhile maintaining in any form, given that many people and identities are wiped out forever on a second-by-second basis. All I can claim in defence is that I am rather attached to my current self and would be rather lost without it.
So, anyway, this brought me to the realisation that one topic I had not covered that was at the centre of every summer for me 1991-2001 is going to weddings. In that period I attended 16 weddings and was invited to 4 more, if I remember correctly, that I could not make it to, one each in Scotland (I was living in London), Germany, Malta and South Africa among them, and given, as I outline below, my income was low, I could not afford the flights to any of these, let alone the accommodation. In terms of presents I set a limit of £30 (€40.20; US$58.50 - the £ is currently sliding against the € and US$ despite financial difficulties especially in the USA) per each one but as much on travelling there as it took (I had no car), which meant I could spend £250+ per summer, at a time when my rent was £300 per month and I earnt £792 (€1069; US1544) per month before tax. The amount I spent on presents did not rise but of course the travel costs did.
In most cultures weddings are big events. A friend of mine attended one in Korea where there was a hall holding about 400 people and the bride changed clothes into 7 different costumes and the groom into 4; the wedding lasted all day. They had traditional Korean and more typically Western rituals as part of the whole process. A French wedding friends of mine attended similarly went on for 12 hours by the time they left. There was a procession around a local lake and lots of bad singing, plus at least two meals. The British tend to do a lot less at weddings, though one I went to had 14 pages to the order of service, two priests and holy communion for Catholics and Anglicans, prayers in English and Latin, lots of hand shaking and the service lasted 90 minutes, wearying for the nine under-5s there, two of whom only spoke German. They do spend a lot of money but it does not really go on anything that obvious to the guests. In the UK like the USA weddings have become an industry (this seems less the case elsewhere in Europe, but if I am wrong let me know) and in my town there seem to be regular wedding fairs advertising the whole range of things from the venue (things took off when in the early 2000s, I think, places like stately homes began to be licenced to have the actual ceremonies at them rather than just the reception), to catering, flowers, dresses, catering, table settings, thank-you scrolls, petals to be spread, hot air balloon to leave in, band/DJ and so on. When I started this long run of wedding attendance (and I had been to a few before, but just family ones) in the UK it was on average £8000 that was spent on weddings, ten years later it was £14,000 (€18,900; US$27,300), now some of that was due to inflation, though that had been a few percent in that time, but a lot of it was the increasing range of items to include. The scale in some cases has grown, the largest one I attended had 143 guests and I was so far from where the speeches were being given that I could not hear what was being said, and the laughter rippled back along the three huge tables of guests as we realised we were supposed to be laughing.
So that is the shape of weddings in the UK today, big unwieldy things which are a minefield in terms of social behaviour. One wedding in Essex and one in Hampshire, I was only invited to the reception as at the time I had the shortest distance to come of all the guests many of whom were coming from abroad. However, it turned out I was the only guest not invited to the ceremony (being single I am often an odd number to fit in) and so on both occasions it looked like I had either deliberately avoided the ceremony or was just negligent and turned up late. If you are going to have some guests only coming for one part, make it a decent number. Us poor guests will have enough to face without such further embarrassment.
Culture can be a big challenge and I have seen this handled well and have seen it handled badly. At a wedding in Coventry there was an Indian and a German getting married and the bulk of their friends were British. In most cases the three groups of guests had no common language. However, the groups were of equal size and large enough that they could function without difficulty or with people sitting on their own with no-one to talk to. The worst handling of cultural issues was at a Scottish wedding in Surrey. The bride's family were Scottish and the groom's English. The whole theme was very Scottish with Scottish music and dancing and all the bride's guests in traditional Scottish garb. The English were not permitted to dress this way as it was seen as fake and so we came in usual wedding clothes, smart suits and dresses. This, however, prevented us from taking part in the Scottish activities, we were not permitted to dance and so on. This even included the groom's family, who embarrassingly were forced to sit on the side. The whole event looked like simply the bride's family absorbing the groom (who was in Scottish clothing) rather than two families coming together. It really soured the event. I went with some other (English) men and gatecrashed another wedding in the same hotel and ironically we actually got a warmer welcome there than we had at the wedding we had been invited to. The organisers (and the bride and groom are usually too busy, so the family members) should really work hard to ensure that no guests feel isolated. People are being thrown together from different backgrounds, so you should at least try to have a reasonable sized group of each.
This element links to another thing, which is, I wish the bride and groom would actually discuss their wedding arrangements. I know that often it is organised by the bride and her mother and female relatives and simply imposed on the groom and the men, but it can be terribly embarrassing when one side does not know what the other side is going to do. I think in the Scottish case this was deliberate spurning, but at a Wiltshire wedding, the bride launched into a speech outlining the wonderful characteristics of the groom in her speech (it is unusual in the UK to have the bride speak, but she had been in amateur dramatics) and then he came up and he had just formal things to say (the groom usually thanks all the people who organised things) and tried to add impromptu compliments to his wife and it came off very badly because he is not good at improvisation and you could feel the whole hall squirming in embarrassment. Not a good situation to put your husband in. They should have talked it over in advance, especially given how well organised the rest of the event was.
Food. Now, weddings can be tiring and hot, sometimes boring. However, people do not get that hungry. They expect food as part of the process (they usually expect free drinks and one of the biggest complaints is when they have to pay at the bar), but people hosting the wedding go far too far. People do not want to sit down to the equivalent of a Christmas dinner in June. However, the caterers advise them (not surprisingly, they are trying to make a profit) to have so many alternatives and so many courses that you get overloaded and it seems a waste. When I was earning only £792 per month, my intention was always to eat at least as much in value as I had spent on the present (which meant occasionally sneaking out chunks of Stilton cheese wrapped in tissues). Generally it is not difficult to do. At a Kent wedding I attended, we had snacks and then sat down to the lunch at 3pm. This lasted over 90 minutes, so we rose from a three-course meal, plus cake, at around 5.30pm. At 7pm the buffet dinner was wheeled in, with mounds of drumsticks as deep as my forearm. No-one could face it. It is not the done thing to run off with food even from a buffet, women are in a better position as they can put it in their handbags but for men you just have to keep going back and eating as much as you can. Wedding organisers (and in the UK, it is still not typical to employ someone to do this, it is usually family members) should realise people cannot eat loads more than usual and in fact often less than they normally would. Have a nice show, but do not overdo it. Have a cake people actually like to eat (a white iced sponge cake was the best wedding cake I ever ate) rather than the heavy fruit, marzipan and icing fortress that is traditional and that few people want more than a nibble of. The most extreme case was a wedding cake topped with a icing replica of the church which the couple kept in their house for years afterwards.
Picking up people at weddings. In my period of greatest wedding attendance I was on the look out for a girlfriend and thought that weddings would be a good place. However, they were just a source of humiliation on that front. Do not believe the movies about getting to kiss the bride's sisters or friends or whoever, it just does not happen, and it is only years later that I realise I was working under an entirely false assumption. Those women who are looking for a partner do not come to weddings alone. Even if they just get a blind date or a friend they come with a man. This does not mean they are not single before or after the wedding, but for the wedding they are with someone. Thus, the women who are on their own at weddings either want to be single (often very aggressively as their backs are put up by the uber-romance of their friend's/relative's wedding) or lack the social skills to find a partner. The number of women I met at weddings that it was clear that even in their 20s and 30s they had no intention of leaving the parental home, was quite surprising. Weddings tend to bring such women out. So, do not bother trying to find dates at a wedding (now funerals are somewhat different, but you should not go beyond 'can I call you?' stage otherwise it seems offensive, but it can be a good starting point). Instead if you are a man, get drunk (or stoned or both; at the Kent wedding I had to load four stoned people into a taxi, having extricated them from various bushes around the hotel so they could catch the last train. Most left at least one item of clothing or their wallet/purse behind), dance madly and eat as much as you can stomach.
Bores at weddings. I have probably now become one of these so it is good I no longer get invited. Partly this goes back to the point about getting groups of guests to interact. Generally people are grouped by age or profession. I tended to get put on tables with other business people and then when I did that volunteering at a primary school sometimes got moved to the table for teachers. In both cases I was patronised by people far more successful than me. I generally in response came out with outrageous suggestions (my favourite one is to suggest that the state starts giving hard drugs police have seized to elderly people for free to make them happy and reduce the burden on the health service; back in the 1990s when there was a glut of butter in Europe the government began dishing it out to old people). A common attitude that people told me at length was that because I was not some wealthy businessman with a huge car that I was somehow a burden on the state. Another common one was that because I was single I had no idea how to wash and clean things (my flat was always immaculate as I do not want to live in squalor and had no-one else bar me messing it up) and must live in a pile of disused pizza boxes. Someone in Kent actually said to me 'oh, you can't know anything about cleaning'.
The worst one of all for patronising attitudes, though came at a wedding in Worcestershire. I had had to travel from London by train at great expense, changing twice and using three different railway companies to get there. I had to leave the wedding before the speeches had even started so that I could catch a bus cross-country to Birmingham (about 35 miles; 56km away) because no train would get me back there to get my connection to get home (I could not afford the hotel charges to stay). A man at my table who had driven from Surrey in his huge car was interested that I had come by train and lectured me throughout the afternoon about how much better it must be now that British Rail had been privatised and broken into separate companies. I told him how complex the journey had been and how much cheaper and easier it would have been with a single company (the connections did not match up, a train would arrive 20 minutes before I arrived to catch it and then there would be no other for 2 hours) and it did not penetrate his brain at all, he so believed in the wonders of Thatcherist privatisation that he literally did not hear anything contrary to that even when I had to leave mid-way through dessert to ever stand a chance of getting home.
I suppose one key issue here is that there is an assumption that you advance in life roughly at the same speed as your friends. By the mid-1990s it was clear that I was well out of step and this is why other guests had so much trouble with me. My income was a third or a quarter of what theirs was. I had no wife not even a partner and I had no young children. I did not work in a profession and I never went on holiday even. They envisaged me as a reckless young (rapidly ageing man) who in some undetermined way was using up their taxes and lived in squalor and so they felt they had to tell me the error of my ways. Of course, I did not like how I was living and constantly tried to change my standing (once I almost got one woman to come to a wedding with me, but at the last moment she changed her mind) and get a better job (applying for on average 125 per year). I might have mixed with an odd crowd as by the 21st century, 95% of my friends were married and I have now only had the second divorce out of that lot in 2007. I mixed increasingly with my brother's friends who for some reason were less attracted to marriage, settling down and getting on, though none of them was starving or doing badly.
Having been 'promoted' to the teachers' table, where the discussion was just alien to me, and my knowledge on general education issues was scoffed at as irrelevant, I tended simply to get ignored. The best guest I was ever put next to, was at a wedding in Berkshire. For some reason I was on a table of gays (who stereotypically were great dancers and loved the disco, demanding 80s stuff the DJ had not played in years) and one lone father. The father was constantly busy talking to people especially the bride's sister who he had been brought by, but who had already moved on to someone else. His daughter who was three sat next to me and proceeded to count everyone's buttons. For her it was a novel experience as she never wore dresses and she enjoyed spinning around in the one she had on. We had fun rhyming things like 'ham' and 'lamb' and she would disappear off to appear between the bride and groom and then back under the tables. I almost choked when she picked up a roll in one hand and a circular pat of butter in the other and proceeded to bite from each in turn, feeling herself looking very grown up. She went back for more butter. It was the first time I had not felt patronised at a wedding.
One final thing before I go, this depends on your own status, but generally, if you are single, the wedding will be the last time you ever see the couple. This has happened to me on so many occasions. The last view I remember of my school friend at his wedding was him standing to speak in a small village in Worcestershire as I rushed out the door (profiteroles in hand) to catch the bus, 11 years ago.
To summarise, weddings seem no less common than in the past, no matter what social class you inhabit. I generally enjoy them because they are usually happy events. However, these days I think I would be more careful, the potential for expense and humiliation are very high as a guest. It is almost like going back to a school reunion, unless you match or have exceeded the achievements of not only the hosts but the other guests, then it is going to be embarrassing. Go to get drunk, go for free food but do not go to find a date. Try to ensure there is at least a small group roughly like yourself (you will band together in defence against the rest) and that you are on the same table as them. So much planning goes into weddings, but little thought seems to be given to the people dragged along to attend it. I guess they are not the focus of the event, but at least people could give some thought to not putting them in awkward situations and the fact that they cannot consume vast quantities of food. Fortunately most people I know (including the gays) are now married, so this will not be a challenge I have to face. However, I hope that some of my pretty extensive experience in this field may help you out.
So, anyway, this brought me to the realisation that one topic I had not covered that was at the centre of every summer for me 1991-2001 is going to weddings. In that period I attended 16 weddings and was invited to 4 more, if I remember correctly, that I could not make it to, one each in Scotland (I was living in London), Germany, Malta and South Africa among them, and given, as I outline below, my income was low, I could not afford the flights to any of these, let alone the accommodation. In terms of presents I set a limit of £30 (€40.20; US$58.50 - the £ is currently sliding against the € and US$ despite financial difficulties especially in the USA) per each one but as much on travelling there as it took (I had no car), which meant I could spend £250+ per summer, at a time when my rent was £300 per month and I earnt £792 (€1069; US1544) per month before tax. The amount I spent on presents did not rise but of course the travel costs did.
In most cultures weddings are big events. A friend of mine attended one in Korea where there was a hall holding about 400 people and the bride changed clothes into 7 different costumes and the groom into 4; the wedding lasted all day. They had traditional Korean and more typically Western rituals as part of the whole process. A French wedding friends of mine attended similarly went on for 12 hours by the time they left. There was a procession around a local lake and lots of bad singing, plus at least two meals. The British tend to do a lot less at weddings, though one I went to had 14 pages to the order of service, two priests and holy communion for Catholics and Anglicans, prayers in English and Latin, lots of hand shaking and the service lasted 90 minutes, wearying for the nine under-5s there, two of whom only spoke German. They do spend a lot of money but it does not really go on anything that obvious to the guests. In the UK like the USA weddings have become an industry (this seems less the case elsewhere in Europe, but if I am wrong let me know) and in my town there seem to be regular wedding fairs advertising the whole range of things from the venue (things took off when in the early 2000s, I think, places like stately homes began to be licenced to have the actual ceremonies at them rather than just the reception), to catering, flowers, dresses, catering, table settings, thank-you scrolls, petals to be spread, hot air balloon to leave in, band/DJ and so on. When I started this long run of wedding attendance (and I had been to a few before, but just family ones) in the UK it was on average £8000 that was spent on weddings, ten years later it was £14,000 (€18,900; US$27,300), now some of that was due to inflation, though that had been a few percent in that time, but a lot of it was the increasing range of items to include. The scale in some cases has grown, the largest one I attended had 143 guests and I was so far from where the speeches were being given that I could not hear what was being said, and the laughter rippled back along the three huge tables of guests as we realised we were supposed to be laughing.
So that is the shape of weddings in the UK today, big unwieldy things which are a minefield in terms of social behaviour. One wedding in Essex and one in Hampshire, I was only invited to the reception as at the time I had the shortest distance to come of all the guests many of whom were coming from abroad. However, it turned out I was the only guest not invited to the ceremony (being single I am often an odd number to fit in) and so on both occasions it looked like I had either deliberately avoided the ceremony or was just negligent and turned up late. If you are going to have some guests only coming for one part, make it a decent number. Us poor guests will have enough to face without such further embarrassment.
Culture can be a big challenge and I have seen this handled well and have seen it handled badly. At a wedding in Coventry there was an Indian and a German getting married and the bulk of their friends were British. In most cases the three groups of guests had no common language. However, the groups were of equal size and large enough that they could function without difficulty or with people sitting on their own with no-one to talk to. The worst handling of cultural issues was at a Scottish wedding in Surrey. The bride's family were Scottish and the groom's English. The whole theme was very Scottish with Scottish music and dancing and all the bride's guests in traditional Scottish garb. The English were not permitted to dress this way as it was seen as fake and so we came in usual wedding clothes, smart suits and dresses. This, however, prevented us from taking part in the Scottish activities, we were not permitted to dance and so on. This even included the groom's family, who embarrassingly were forced to sit on the side. The whole event looked like simply the bride's family absorbing the groom (who was in Scottish clothing) rather than two families coming together. It really soured the event. I went with some other (English) men and gatecrashed another wedding in the same hotel and ironically we actually got a warmer welcome there than we had at the wedding we had been invited to. The organisers (and the bride and groom are usually too busy, so the family members) should really work hard to ensure that no guests feel isolated. People are being thrown together from different backgrounds, so you should at least try to have a reasonable sized group of each.
This element links to another thing, which is, I wish the bride and groom would actually discuss their wedding arrangements. I know that often it is organised by the bride and her mother and female relatives and simply imposed on the groom and the men, but it can be terribly embarrassing when one side does not know what the other side is going to do. I think in the Scottish case this was deliberate spurning, but at a Wiltshire wedding, the bride launched into a speech outlining the wonderful characteristics of the groom in her speech (it is unusual in the UK to have the bride speak, but she had been in amateur dramatics) and then he came up and he had just formal things to say (the groom usually thanks all the people who organised things) and tried to add impromptu compliments to his wife and it came off very badly because he is not good at improvisation and you could feel the whole hall squirming in embarrassment. Not a good situation to put your husband in. They should have talked it over in advance, especially given how well organised the rest of the event was.
Food. Now, weddings can be tiring and hot, sometimes boring. However, people do not get that hungry. They expect food as part of the process (they usually expect free drinks and one of the biggest complaints is when they have to pay at the bar), but people hosting the wedding go far too far. People do not want to sit down to the equivalent of a Christmas dinner in June. However, the caterers advise them (not surprisingly, they are trying to make a profit) to have so many alternatives and so many courses that you get overloaded and it seems a waste. When I was earning only £792 per month, my intention was always to eat at least as much in value as I had spent on the present (which meant occasionally sneaking out chunks of Stilton cheese wrapped in tissues). Generally it is not difficult to do. At a Kent wedding I attended, we had snacks and then sat down to the lunch at 3pm. This lasted over 90 minutes, so we rose from a three-course meal, plus cake, at around 5.30pm. At 7pm the buffet dinner was wheeled in, with mounds of drumsticks as deep as my forearm. No-one could face it. It is not the done thing to run off with food even from a buffet, women are in a better position as they can put it in their handbags but for men you just have to keep going back and eating as much as you can. Wedding organisers (and in the UK, it is still not typical to employ someone to do this, it is usually family members) should realise people cannot eat loads more than usual and in fact often less than they normally would. Have a nice show, but do not overdo it. Have a cake people actually like to eat (a white iced sponge cake was the best wedding cake I ever ate) rather than the heavy fruit, marzipan and icing fortress that is traditional and that few people want more than a nibble of. The most extreme case was a wedding cake topped with a icing replica of the church which the couple kept in their house for years afterwards.
Picking up people at weddings. In my period of greatest wedding attendance I was on the look out for a girlfriend and thought that weddings would be a good place. However, they were just a source of humiliation on that front. Do not believe the movies about getting to kiss the bride's sisters or friends or whoever, it just does not happen, and it is only years later that I realise I was working under an entirely false assumption. Those women who are looking for a partner do not come to weddings alone. Even if they just get a blind date or a friend they come with a man. This does not mean they are not single before or after the wedding, but for the wedding they are with someone. Thus, the women who are on their own at weddings either want to be single (often very aggressively as their backs are put up by the uber-romance of their friend's/relative's wedding) or lack the social skills to find a partner. The number of women I met at weddings that it was clear that even in their 20s and 30s they had no intention of leaving the parental home, was quite surprising. Weddings tend to bring such women out. So, do not bother trying to find dates at a wedding (now funerals are somewhat different, but you should not go beyond 'can I call you?' stage otherwise it seems offensive, but it can be a good starting point). Instead if you are a man, get drunk (or stoned or both; at the Kent wedding I had to load four stoned people into a taxi, having extricated them from various bushes around the hotel so they could catch the last train. Most left at least one item of clothing or their wallet/purse behind), dance madly and eat as much as you can stomach.
Bores at weddings. I have probably now become one of these so it is good I no longer get invited. Partly this goes back to the point about getting groups of guests to interact. Generally people are grouped by age or profession. I tended to get put on tables with other business people and then when I did that volunteering at a primary school sometimes got moved to the table for teachers. In both cases I was patronised by people far more successful than me. I generally in response came out with outrageous suggestions (my favourite one is to suggest that the state starts giving hard drugs police have seized to elderly people for free to make them happy and reduce the burden on the health service; back in the 1990s when there was a glut of butter in Europe the government began dishing it out to old people). A common attitude that people told me at length was that because I was not some wealthy businessman with a huge car that I was somehow a burden on the state. Another common one was that because I was single I had no idea how to wash and clean things (my flat was always immaculate as I do not want to live in squalor and had no-one else bar me messing it up) and must live in a pile of disused pizza boxes. Someone in Kent actually said to me 'oh, you can't know anything about cleaning'.
The worst one of all for patronising attitudes, though came at a wedding in Worcestershire. I had had to travel from London by train at great expense, changing twice and using three different railway companies to get there. I had to leave the wedding before the speeches had even started so that I could catch a bus cross-country to Birmingham (about 35 miles; 56km away) because no train would get me back there to get my connection to get home (I could not afford the hotel charges to stay). A man at my table who had driven from Surrey in his huge car was interested that I had come by train and lectured me throughout the afternoon about how much better it must be now that British Rail had been privatised and broken into separate companies. I told him how complex the journey had been and how much cheaper and easier it would have been with a single company (the connections did not match up, a train would arrive 20 minutes before I arrived to catch it and then there would be no other for 2 hours) and it did not penetrate his brain at all, he so believed in the wonders of Thatcherist privatisation that he literally did not hear anything contrary to that even when I had to leave mid-way through dessert to ever stand a chance of getting home.
I suppose one key issue here is that there is an assumption that you advance in life roughly at the same speed as your friends. By the mid-1990s it was clear that I was well out of step and this is why other guests had so much trouble with me. My income was a third or a quarter of what theirs was. I had no wife not even a partner and I had no young children. I did not work in a profession and I never went on holiday even. They envisaged me as a reckless young (rapidly ageing man) who in some undetermined way was using up their taxes and lived in squalor and so they felt they had to tell me the error of my ways. Of course, I did not like how I was living and constantly tried to change my standing (once I almost got one woman to come to a wedding with me, but at the last moment she changed her mind) and get a better job (applying for on average 125 per year). I might have mixed with an odd crowd as by the 21st century, 95% of my friends were married and I have now only had the second divorce out of that lot in 2007. I mixed increasingly with my brother's friends who for some reason were less attracted to marriage, settling down and getting on, though none of them was starving or doing badly.
Having been 'promoted' to the teachers' table, where the discussion was just alien to me, and my knowledge on general education issues was scoffed at as irrelevant, I tended simply to get ignored. The best guest I was ever put next to, was at a wedding in Berkshire. For some reason I was on a table of gays (who stereotypically were great dancers and loved the disco, demanding 80s stuff the DJ had not played in years) and one lone father. The father was constantly busy talking to people especially the bride's sister who he had been brought by, but who had already moved on to someone else. His daughter who was three sat next to me and proceeded to count everyone's buttons. For her it was a novel experience as she never wore dresses and she enjoyed spinning around in the one she had on. We had fun rhyming things like 'ham' and 'lamb' and she would disappear off to appear between the bride and groom and then back under the tables. I almost choked when she picked up a roll in one hand and a circular pat of butter in the other and proceeded to bite from each in turn, feeling herself looking very grown up. She went back for more butter. It was the first time I had not felt patronised at a wedding.
One final thing before I go, this depends on your own status, but generally, if you are single, the wedding will be the last time you ever see the couple. This has happened to me on so many occasions. The last view I remember of my school friend at his wedding was him standing to speak in a small village in Worcestershire as I rushed out the door (profiteroles in hand) to catch the bus, 11 years ago.
To summarise, weddings seem no less common than in the past, no matter what social class you inhabit. I generally enjoy them because they are usually happy events. However, these days I think I would be more careful, the potential for expense and humiliation are very high as a guest. It is almost like going back to a school reunion, unless you match or have exceeded the achievements of not only the hosts but the other guests, then it is going to be embarrassing. Go to get drunk, go for free food but do not go to find a date. Try to ensure there is at least a small group roughly like yourself (you will band together in defence against the rest) and that you are on the same table as them. So much planning goes into weddings, but little thought seems to be given to the people dragged along to attend it. I guess they are not the focus of the event, but at least people could give some thought to not putting them in awkward situations and the fact that they cannot consume vast quantities of food. Fortunately most people I know (including the gays) are now married, so this will not be a challenge I have to face. However, I hope that some of my pretty extensive experience in this field may help you out.
Monday, 21 January 2008
Was 'Uninvited' the Covert Crossover Goth Hit of 2007?
Despite the fact, that somewhere in the bags of CDs and even cassettes (remember them?) that lurk in corners of my house because I have moved so often there is a copy of 'Jagged Little Pill' by Alanis Morisette (1995) and the builders working opposite the last house I lived in played it repeatedly (I will say nothing bad about builders, but their musical tastes were a little suprising), somehow I had not managed to encounter the track, 'Uninvited' which was released by Morisette in 1998. It was on her fourth album, 'Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie' (1998) which seems to have been far less successful than its predecessor. Maybe it was too long coming and Alanis's window had closed. Maybe I did encounter single and perhaps it just made no lasting impression. She gets a lot of radio coverage still, but this one does not seem to crop up wherever I drive. Thus, when I heard the cover by The Freemasons released in 2007, it was as if I was coming to the track for the first time. It was sung by Bailey Tzuke, probably haunted by the fact that everyone says she is daughter of 1970s ballard singer-songwriter Judie Tzuke (who had a wonderful voice and amazing big hair and may still have, but I have not heard or seen her since a greatest hits collection in the late 1980s). Her voice is similarly suited for wistful tracks as her mother's was, though maybe with maturity (she is only 20) it will gain Judie's strength.
The Freemasons' original cover version was cut down to 3.08 minutes, perfect for radio and yet so edited that it seems to be a natural length. Despite the electro/house backbeat, it is a ballard with the woman concerned analysing the romantic interest of the 'uninvited' person and gradually her feelings towards them, (I assume it is a him), altering from suspicion to consideration. It is nice that it does not move to consummation, but in the space of three minutes with quite a lot of lyrics for a house track, has shown a development in a relationship. The reason that I view it as a crossover Goth hit, is that aside from one track from Evanesence, in the UK nothing from the Goth scene has managed to peak into the mainstream charts even now they have mutated with the impact of downloads allowing album tracks and oldies to come back into the ratings. It managed to reach Number 8 in the UK charts.
Why do I view it as a Goth track? Well, a number of reasons. Goth music tends to be put in the rock category but there is a clear electro/house/dance sub-category of it anyway. Soaring, passionate, female-voiced lyrics with a tendency for introspection but also strength is a basis of a lot of Goth music. This song has that. In addition, the supernatural is a bread-and-butter theme in Goth songs and the 'uninvited' reminds you of a haunting or even vampires who supposedly cannot enter a house uninvited. The lyrics (see below) give a sense of someone from a different culture speaking about love and the 'love like mine before' suggests a timeless or enduring nature of whoever she is addressing, again fitting the ghost/vampire explanation. The words 'stoic' and 'unworthy' hint at the literate language used by Goths with Victorian overtones. Goth songs also are about love and passion in both a physical and a mental/emotional way and this tune emphasises the latter. The story is unresolved by the end of the song, allowing the listener to write their own, probably positive ending, but not doing all the work for you. So, on these bases whether Morisette or the Freemasons envisaged it, they have created a good Goth song that I am pleased to hear and we could do more with.
Like anyone would be
I am flattered by your fascination with me
And like any hot-blooded woman
I have simply wanted an object to crave
But you, you're not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
Must be strangely exciting
To watch the stoic squirm
Must be somewhat heartening
To watch shepherd meet shepherd
But you you're not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
Like any uncharted territory
I must seem greatly intriguing
You speak of my love like
You have experienced love like mine before
But this is not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
I don't think you unworthy
I need a moment to deliberate
The Freemasons' original cover version was cut down to 3.08 minutes, perfect for radio and yet so edited that it seems to be a natural length. Despite the electro/house backbeat, it is a ballard with the woman concerned analysing the romantic interest of the 'uninvited' person and gradually her feelings towards them, (I assume it is a him), altering from suspicion to consideration. It is nice that it does not move to consummation, but in the space of three minutes with quite a lot of lyrics for a house track, has shown a development in a relationship. The reason that I view it as a crossover Goth hit, is that aside from one track from Evanesence, in the UK nothing from the Goth scene has managed to peak into the mainstream charts even now they have mutated with the impact of downloads allowing album tracks and oldies to come back into the ratings. It managed to reach Number 8 in the UK charts.
Why do I view it as a Goth track? Well, a number of reasons. Goth music tends to be put in the rock category but there is a clear electro/house/dance sub-category of it anyway. Soaring, passionate, female-voiced lyrics with a tendency for introspection but also strength is a basis of a lot of Goth music. This song has that. In addition, the supernatural is a bread-and-butter theme in Goth songs and the 'uninvited' reminds you of a haunting or even vampires who supposedly cannot enter a house uninvited. The lyrics (see below) give a sense of someone from a different culture speaking about love and the 'love like mine before' suggests a timeless or enduring nature of whoever she is addressing, again fitting the ghost/vampire explanation. The words 'stoic' and 'unworthy' hint at the literate language used by Goths with Victorian overtones. Goth songs also are about love and passion in both a physical and a mental/emotional way and this tune emphasises the latter. The story is unresolved by the end of the song, allowing the listener to write their own, probably positive ending, but not doing all the work for you. So, on these bases whether Morisette or the Freemasons envisaged it, they have created a good Goth song that I am pleased to hear and we could do more with.
Like anyone would be
I am flattered by your fascination with me
And like any hot-blooded woman
I have simply wanted an object to crave
But you, you're not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
Must be strangely exciting
To watch the stoic squirm
Must be somewhat heartening
To watch shepherd meet shepherd
But you you're not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
Like any uncharted territory
I must seem greatly intriguing
You speak of my love like
You have experienced love like mine before
But this is not allowed
You're uninvited
An unfortunate slight
I don't think you unworthy
I need a moment to deliberate
Charity Begins At School 2: Some Additional Points
Further to my post of last week, I came across some more interesting figures on private schools and the damage they are doing to education in the UK. This comes from the BBC News website where they point out that whilst private schools take 7% of pupils, they employ 14% of the teachers in the UK, so are 'creaming off' the best teachers from the education system that 93% of the population will go through. These teachers have been trained by the state and increasingly have been given generous bursaries for subjects like mathematics and modern languages. The staff to student ratio in private schools is 1 teacher: 9 pupils, in the state sector it is apparently 1 teacher: 18 pupils, though in fact that usually translates into 1:30 in most classes. In addition more male teachers (and more of them who have more than one degree qualification, i.e. an MA/MSc or a PhD) go into private schools, which you may argue allows women to progress better in the state sector (female teachers earn 7%-22% less than men if they teach in the private sector, depending on the subject area they teach), but at a time when the lack of positive male role models for boys in schools is a clear problem, it might be healthier to keep more of them in the state sector.
Apparently parents who send their children to private schools are complaining they pay twice, once in taxes to the state school system they do not use and once again to the schools directly, so they seem to be expecting some rebate. On the same basis I expect a rebate for the nuclear weapons I do not use or the health care system in Scotland or troops sent to Iraq, none of which I have use for. The arrogance of these parents is stunning, but possibly not surprising.
The only solution I see to the parasitic nature of private schools is to close them down. You need to wipe out their charitable status immediately as they are profit-making businesses. You need to stop them recruiting any more pupils and feed the money saved from the end of their tax breaks improving state schools. With parents who have previously exempted themselves from caring about their local communities by sending their children private, actually now having to pay attention to local state schools we can expect an improvement in the support and resources they receive, though unfortunately in the already prosperous parts of the UK. Scrap private schools now and help the future of the UK and its people.
Apparently parents who send their children to private schools are complaining they pay twice, once in taxes to the state school system they do not use and once again to the schools directly, so they seem to be expecting some rebate. On the same basis I expect a rebate for the nuclear weapons I do not use or the health care system in Scotland or troops sent to Iraq, none of which I have use for. The arrogance of these parents is stunning, but possibly not surprising.
The only solution I see to the parasitic nature of private schools is to close them down. You need to wipe out their charitable status immediately as they are profit-making businesses. You need to stop them recruiting any more pupils and feed the money saved from the end of their tax breaks improving state schools. With parents who have previously exempted themselves from caring about their local communities by sending their children private, actually now having to pay attention to local state schools we can expect an improvement in the support and resources they receive, though unfortunately in the already prosperous parts of the UK. Scrap private schools now and help the future of the UK and its people.
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Countering the View that We All Have the Potential to Learn Everything
At this time of year when people are trying to carry out new year's resolutions you often see advertisments for foreign language courses saying something like 'in just x months you can be speaking y confidently'. The implication is that anyone who buys the course will be able to develop a reasonable grasp of the language. My experiences suggests that that is not at all the case and everyone should tread a little carefully before parting with their money. I have just abandoned my evening classes in Chinese which I have been doing since September. My company has increasing links with various parts of China and it seemed sensible that I learn the language so I could be polite to visitors and not be completely lost if the company sends me out there. I find it challenging to learn alone so signed up for a face-to-face class with an enthusiastic teacher and students. A couple of them were older than me but most were in their 20s and I should have realised I was going to be facing problems when all the older students left throughout the early weeks. However, I will always give things ago and not abandon them quickly.
The reason I have abandoned the course is that a week before the exam my grades have slipped very badly. At first I was getting over 70% which I thought was reasonable given this was a beginners' course. Even when I did the listening comprehension with flu I scored 64%. However, I realise this was just a 'honeymoon period' and this week I was unable to scrape more than 5% in two written exercises (despite having spent hours over last weekend revising this particular aspect) and only got 48% for the oral part (40% is the pass mark). It is clear that I have the capacity for a few words and phrases of Chinese but nothing more. The teacher of course, in line with the usual attitude that if you try hard enough you can succeed. No, that is not true, each of us has mental and physical capacities which we cannot exceed and these deteriorate rapidly after we turn 30. I remember reading a comment in which a man said (bizarrely) that you know when you are still young when if someone wiped out your family you could go to a remote monastery, train in martial arts and come back and avenge them. By the time you pass 30 you are the one who stands on the sidelines as some hero comes in and does the avenging. Unfortunately for me that is what is likely to happen in my company environment now that I know I will never have even a child's grasp of Chinese.
I am not a person to give up easily, but as I look back on my life, it is not so much with a sense of shame, as with growing humility (and maybe a more realistic outlook on my abilities). When my father was at school in the 1950s, if a child was no good at something s/he was told outright. Being educated in the more woolly 1970s there was a step away from that, I think partly with the general move in the UK of schools away from the so-called 11-Plus exam which segregated children for life by ability at the age of 11 (ability was not the only factor, the number of children who got to the higher class 'grammar schools' depended on how many places there were in the district so in one area with many grammar schools you could get in with a much lower mark than you would need in an area with only one grammar school. Given that these schools were often single-sex, there was often also an imbalance for boys and girls) towards the comprehensive school system (which covers the bulk of the country, bar Kent and Buckinghamshire, but is now under attack from more school selection processes). As a result we were all told that we could all achieve anything we wanted. Having that lesson pressed into us from the age of 5 through to even 21 at university, it is difficult to shake, but my life has proven that it was a lie.
So what have I signed up to, to find that I was incapable of getting anywhere:
Aikido, I studied this for 12 years at 4 different clubs each with a different approach because I moved around the country. I saw people achieving black belts after 3 years and for my 12 years of effort what was I? A yellow belt, the one just off the bottom and I have the suspicion that one club just gave that to me because I turned up every week and they felt sorry for me.
Canoeing, I tried canoeing and embarrassment there was quicker as they would not permit me to join the club as I did so badly in the lessons. Again it was portrayed as a sport that all can do and after 6 weeks of almost drowning as I could not lift my head from the water one week and legs covered with bruises it was deemed that I was too much of a hazard (I almost ran over a scuba diver training in the same location) which did not help.
Fencing, I thought well, if I cannot do the intricacies of Aikido maybe something a little more straightforward would be better. I did fencing for 2 years and had reached the level of ability when a woman 20 years older than me could hit me in the same precise spot 6 times out of 10 (causing a very painful bruise on that spot). Again, even people older than me passed me into competing in competitions. Again the sport had suggested that it could be done by anyone with average fitness and I was not seeking to be world champion or even just district champion, but as with Aikido it became apparent that I could not attain a level good enough to function effectively at the club (this is effectively what happened in Chinese, I was so below the ability of the other students that I could not do conversation or pair work exercises with them).
Go, you can see an Oriental theme developing here. I have always been interested by games from around the world, but despite reading about them, generally I am poor at them (the 6-year old son of my housemate is almost at the level he can beat me at chess; he develops his structures too slowly, otherwise he would win, given how easily he puts pins and forks on my pieces). I thought Go would be an interesting, elegant game. One trouble was that in the club most of the members were of high level, one was also a Master (the level below the better-known Grandmaster rank) in chess already and the other players competed at national level. However, you would think that this meant some of them would be good teachers, especially as at least one of them worked for a local university. One week (by fluke it seems) I almost defeated the head of the club, so I was confident that for once I was actually improving. I had been playing at the club for 2 years by then. When I commented to another of the skilled players that I felt that I was actually improving, he said I was deluded, it was just that they had stopped beating me so comprehensively so that I continued to come and pay my club fee, and that in fact I was not better then than when I had first started. Of course, I left.
So, physically and mentally it is clear that I should be very suspicious when anyone advertises anything as being something that anyone can learn. I know that it is in their interests not to be honest about the fact that most people will get nowhere as they need members/students and the money they bring. There are people out there who can do these things. As I have said, I have seen people in a matter of months get to a national level. However, I think these people are rare. I have known people who can grasp languages quickly. In the 1980s I met a (British) man who spoke every language in Eastern Europe and said his Hungarian was poor but them demonstrated his knowledge of poetry rhythms in that language, something the bulk of us could not do even in our own language let alone one were are 'poor' at. He went off to lecture in China. In the 1990s I knew for a time a man (again British which counters my point made in an earlier posting that the British cannot do languages, but maybe these exceptions prove the rule) who taught himself Korean. He bought one of these book-and-CD (in those days it might have still been cassette) kits through the post and proceeded to teach himself Korean. It was interesting that when he got to the cassette for Part 4 (the final section of the course) he found it was identical to the cassette for Part 3 and it was clear that the company had been sending out the wrong cassette for quite a while but clearly no-one had ever got to the final stage to find out the error. He ended up keeping his diary in Korean and the last I heard he had moved to Seoul, had married and had two daughters.
So, there are people out there who can achieve these things, but I think they are a tiny fraction of the UK population. Whilst I would never want to dim the dreams of young people, and I know from friends that poor performance at school does not bar you from success or from picking up subjects later (one issue about sending children to school so early in the UK and making them choose which pathways they want to take at 14 or even 11, is that some people have no idea of their strengths at that age and only find them when they become adults) and the UK is good for adult learning, I do think we need to present a realistic picture of people's abilities to them. It is not healthy to keep saying to people, in a very American way 'you can achieve anything you want to achieve', just look at the USA to see how that is not the case even in the 'Land of Opportunity'.
In particular as is becoming apparent to me, abilities do deteriorate quickly and even if it is accurate to say to a 20-year old that they can achieve big things if they try, this is no longer true at 40, let alone 50 or 60. By the time you reach stage you have to be given the attitude of a woman I worked with who joined a gymnastics club in her mid-20s and they told her bluntly that she would never achieve anything more than she had achieved as a child doing gymnastics. That principle should be emblazoned on every club or course brochure.
Why is it important to have a realistic appreciation of our capabilities and the level they have deteriorated to? It is because 'humility' and 'humiliation' come from the same source. I have learnt that humility this week, that I cannot achieve what a 20-year old student can achieve, but it comes at the price of humiliation and I feel completely useless this week. That is one reason why I blog, to cast off the bits of lead from my life and also hopefully this will be a warning to myself when I am tempted to sign up to a course promising me a new skill.
The reason I have abandoned the course is that a week before the exam my grades have slipped very badly. At first I was getting over 70% which I thought was reasonable given this was a beginners' course. Even when I did the listening comprehension with flu I scored 64%. However, I realise this was just a 'honeymoon period' and this week I was unable to scrape more than 5% in two written exercises (despite having spent hours over last weekend revising this particular aspect) and only got 48% for the oral part (40% is the pass mark). It is clear that I have the capacity for a few words and phrases of Chinese but nothing more. The teacher of course, in line with the usual attitude that if you try hard enough you can succeed. No, that is not true, each of us has mental and physical capacities which we cannot exceed and these deteriorate rapidly after we turn 30. I remember reading a comment in which a man said (bizarrely) that you know when you are still young when if someone wiped out your family you could go to a remote monastery, train in martial arts and come back and avenge them. By the time you pass 30 you are the one who stands on the sidelines as some hero comes in and does the avenging. Unfortunately for me that is what is likely to happen in my company environment now that I know I will never have even a child's grasp of Chinese.
I am not a person to give up easily, but as I look back on my life, it is not so much with a sense of shame, as with growing humility (and maybe a more realistic outlook on my abilities). When my father was at school in the 1950s, if a child was no good at something s/he was told outright. Being educated in the more woolly 1970s there was a step away from that, I think partly with the general move in the UK of schools away from the so-called 11-Plus exam which segregated children for life by ability at the age of 11 (ability was not the only factor, the number of children who got to the higher class 'grammar schools' depended on how many places there were in the district so in one area with many grammar schools you could get in with a much lower mark than you would need in an area with only one grammar school. Given that these schools were often single-sex, there was often also an imbalance for boys and girls) towards the comprehensive school system (which covers the bulk of the country, bar Kent and Buckinghamshire, but is now under attack from more school selection processes). As a result we were all told that we could all achieve anything we wanted. Having that lesson pressed into us from the age of 5 through to even 21 at university, it is difficult to shake, but my life has proven that it was a lie.
So what have I signed up to, to find that I was incapable of getting anywhere:
Aikido, I studied this for 12 years at 4 different clubs each with a different approach because I moved around the country. I saw people achieving black belts after 3 years and for my 12 years of effort what was I? A yellow belt, the one just off the bottom and I have the suspicion that one club just gave that to me because I turned up every week and they felt sorry for me.
Canoeing, I tried canoeing and embarrassment there was quicker as they would not permit me to join the club as I did so badly in the lessons. Again it was portrayed as a sport that all can do and after 6 weeks of almost drowning as I could not lift my head from the water one week and legs covered with bruises it was deemed that I was too much of a hazard (I almost ran over a scuba diver training in the same location) which did not help.
Fencing, I thought well, if I cannot do the intricacies of Aikido maybe something a little more straightforward would be better. I did fencing for 2 years and had reached the level of ability when a woman 20 years older than me could hit me in the same precise spot 6 times out of 10 (causing a very painful bruise on that spot). Again, even people older than me passed me into competing in competitions. Again the sport had suggested that it could be done by anyone with average fitness and I was not seeking to be world champion or even just district champion, but as with Aikido it became apparent that I could not attain a level good enough to function effectively at the club (this is effectively what happened in Chinese, I was so below the ability of the other students that I could not do conversation or pair work exercises with them).
Go, you can see an Oriental theme developing here. I have always been interested by games from around the world, but despite reading about them, generally I am poor at them (the 6-year old son of my housemate is almost at the level he can beat me at chess; he develops his structures too slowly, otherwise he would win, given how easily he puts pins and forks on my pieces). I thought Go would be an interesting, elegant game. One trouble was that in the club most of the members were of high level, one was also a Master (the level below the better-known Grandmaster rank) in chess already and the other players competed at national level. However, you would think that this meant some of them would be good teachers, especially as at least one of them worked for a local university. One week (by fluke it seems) I almost defeated the head of the club, so I was confident that for once I was actually improving. I had been playing at the club for 2 years by then. When I commented to another of the skilled players that I felt that I was actually improving, he said I was deluded, it was just that they had stopped beating me so comprehensively so that I continued to come and pay my club fee, and that in fact I was not better then than when I had first started. Of course, I left.
So, physically and mentally it is clear that I should be very suspicious when anyone advertises anything as being something that anyone can learn. I know that it is in their interests not to be honest about the fact that most people will get nowhere as they need members/students and the money they bring. There are people out there who can do these things. As I have said, I have seen people in a matter of months get to a national level. However, I think these people are rare. I have known people who can grasp languages quickly. In the 1980s I met a (British) man who spoke every language in Eastern Europe and said his Hungarian was poor but them demonstrated his knowledge of poetry rhythms in that language, something the bulk of us could not do even in our own language let alone one were are 'poor' at. He went off to lecture in China. In the 1990s I knew for a time a man (again British which counters my point made in an earlier posting that the British cannot do languages, but maybe these exceptions prove the rule) who taught himself Korean. He bought one of these book-and-CD (in those days it might have still been cassette) kits through the post and proceeded to teach himself Korean. It was interesting that when he got to the cassette for Part 4 (the final section of the course) he found it was identical to the cassette for Part 3 and it was clear that the company had been sending out the wrong cassette for quite a while but clearly no-one had ever got to the final stage to find out the error. He ended up keeping his diary in Korean and the last I heard he had moved to Seoul, had married and had two daughters.
So, there are people out there who can achieve these things, but I think they are a tiny fraction of the UK population. Whilst I would never want to dim the dreams of young people, and I know from friends that poor performance at school does not bar you from success or from picking up subjects later (one issue about sending children to school so early in the UK and making them choose which pathways they want to take at 14 or even 11, is that some people have no idea of their strengths at that age and only find them when they become adults) and the UK is good for adult learning, I do think we need to present a realistic picture of people's abilities to them. It is not healthy to keep saying to people, in a very American way 'you can achieve anything you want to achieve', just look at the USA to see how that is not the case even in the 'Land of Opportunity'.
In particular as is becoming apparent to me, abilities do deteriorate quickly and even if it is accurate to say to a 20-year old that they can achieve big things if they try, this is no longer true at 40, let alone 50 or 60. By the time you reach stage you have to be given the attitude of a woman I worked with who joined a gymnastics club in her mid-20s and they told her bluntly that she would never achieve anything more than she had achieved as a child doing gymnastics. That principle should be emblazoned on every club or course brochure.
Why is it important to have a realistic appreciation of our capabilities and the level they have deteriorated to? It is because 'humility' and 'humiliation' come from the same source. I have learnt that humility this week, that I cannot achieve what a 20-year old student can achieve, but it comes at the price of humiliation and I feel completely useless this week. That is one reason why I blog, to cast off the bits of lead from my life and also hopefully this will be a warning to myself when I am tempted to sign up to a course promising me a new skill.
Saturday, 19 January 2008
The Normality of Violence in UK Schools
One thing about having a housemate who has a 6-year old child is that you get exposed to some of the goings-on in schools today, away from the distortions of the media. Back in the early 2000s I used to volunteer to read in schools to show children that men actually read (seven of us men used to go from our work once per week as all the staff and governors at the school next to the works were female and schoolboys, many of whom had no fathers at home, saw reading just as something that girls and women did), so was aware at least of the happenings in one school, but nowadays I am dependent for any information on UK education for the various media and other sources such as the child in the house. This latter source is revealing quite startling developments in UK education.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
As I have said before, I live in a prosperous suburb where people are obssessed by consumption of cars, electrical goods, houses, etc. I have lived in very much poorer areas, notably in East London and Coventry. The crime rate is not very high, even burglaries seem lower than you would expect maybe because it abuts a very wealthy area with presumably much better pickings. I am giving this context to show that it is not a part of the UK where muggings are daily occurrences and there are drive-by shootings on the weekend. A couple of times a year a young person gets stabbed and once per year a middle-aged person gets kicked to death, but that seems typical of most medium-sized towns I pass through as I drive around the UK and pick up local news. What startled me was revelations about how normalised violence in schools seems to have become even in a prosperous area such as my neighbourhood. The boy in question last month was involved in a gang of seven boys who surrounded a girl in a classroom and proceeded to kick her. The cause seems to have been one of the boys, a very charismatic ringleader it seems, being embarrassed because his parents were friendly with the girl's parents and she was often at his house, something a 6-year old regards as uncool. (The whole incident alarmingly resembled a gang rape). This month, my housemate's son decided for seemingly no reason to start biting another boy he was arguing with about switching off a computer. He sunk his teeth in so deep that marks were still visible hours later.
In the UK the age of criminal responsibility is 10 years old. Which means that if this boy keeps up such behaviour for another four summers he will soon be off to youth court on charges of assault or ABH (Acutual Bodily Harm) and presumably some kind of detention. Now these incidents happened in a school, in fact a Christian faith school and you do ask what were the teachers doing in terms of monitoring what was happening. The school seems to be so fearful of being sued by one parent or another that it appears to be unwilling to admit any responsibility for anything and accuses parents who try to find out what has happened of improper interference. Surely the school has some responsibility for what happens on its grounds? Can someone with legal knowledge tell me if 'loco parentis' has been removed from teachers? This washing of their hands of such incidents (and I assume there are many more going on given this is just one boy from one class, though he may be exceptional, from the previous incident there seem to be at least six others who behave the same). Primary schools usually have their 'golden rules' emblazoned everywhere around the school, but from what I gather this school does not under some assumption that Christian children do not need such explicit rules about not bullying. Even adult Christians need the word of the Bible interpreted for them often, let alone 6-year olds.
Putting aside the school and its unwillingness to face responsibility, what about the behaviour of the child. Surely someone should be communicating that such violent behaviour is not appropriate anywhere let alone in the school. The child had no explanation for why he did it, so it seems that he regards biting deeply as part of the normal arsenal of things he can use when another child annoys him. I know in London bites by humans on people exceeded bites by dogs on people back in the 1990s, so maybe many people consider it somehow 'normal'. Even if in the school they choose not to refer to normal behaviour in society, or the risks in coming years of police action, as a faith school do they not say something about God watching and noting such behaviour?
What is alarming for UK society as a whole is, if there seems to be no way to stop violence which goes beyond horse play or pushing and pinching, among children in their second year at school (and when did it change to the fact that UK children now start school a year earlier than we did, i.e. at 4 rather than 5? - clearly this is related to the Blair/Brown governments' obsession with targets for pre-school and school-aged children, the teachers have to get them in early to get through it all), then what hope is for when they are teenagers and begin to see carrying a knife as normal. This is clearly where the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor (who was only 10 when he was murdered by other boys) stem from. This is clearly going to be a problem facing the whole UK, wealthy suburbs are not going to exempt. Even religious schools though they are much lauded by the government seem impotent and parents seem to be unable to communicate a sense of how severe such behaviour is. It is alarming at how normal events which should be seen as frightening and unacceptable seem to have become even in a school that seems well-funded and without other major problems.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
