If it was in a documentary, no one would believe that it hadn't been staged. If it was in a film, the audience would think it contrived. But this happened in real life - a car drove past me, registration number C7 GAR and the driver was puffing away on a large cigar. I can only wonder how much he paid for the number plate and how annoyed he was that he couldn't have C1.
I imagine he is the sort of person who would have attended the 'Bank of the Year Awards 2008', as documented here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/nov/27/banking-awards-ceremony
...as if this story were not ridiculous enough, The Guardian has had one of its Grauniad moments, leading it to have to end the article thus:
· This article was amended on Thursday November 27 2008. Matthew Barrett, the former chairman of Barclays, is 63, not 92. This has been corrected.
I'm not sure why I find this funny - maybe it's in part because I can't help but wonder how it happened - I mean, sure, '9' looks like '6' if it's upside down but how does that explain the '2' instead of a '3' and, if they were upside down, he would have been 29 (or E9) - and why would it be upside down in the first place? Am I over-analysing?
But, to return to my original subject, it was N's third birthday last week and she was duly presented with gifts, which included a set of choppable faux fruit and vegetables (made in sections and attached with velcro thus enabling a plastic faux knife to faux chop them up). Last night, she was preparing a faux meal and thrust an item at me. "It's a sausage!" she said proudly.
1) Renew.
The momentum, clearly, has gone. The muse has departed. The drive has, er, driven away. It has been many, many, many excuse-free days without posts to this blog and only many, many days since I completed the second draft of my epic monkey poem. In short, I have not been writing and, for that, I apologise to myself.
(If you've missed me then thanks for caring but, and I say this without a shred of mean-spiritedness, you must appreciate that I am writing mainly for myself and so it is to myself that I must mainly apologise for withholding.)
But 25 November seems a good date for renewal (and I have, incidentally, just renewed my library book (The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie, since you ask - the sort of book that makes you realise you are in the hands of a master from the first sentence (although, with my lousy joke hat on, I could say that his book was in my hands))). Am I wantonly displaying my IT-strewn career history by my use of multiple nested parentheses? And poor man's humour...
So, here is the blog reborn. Having thought long and pondered hard about applying for Faber & Faber's writing course, I decided to let the deadline approach and go by since, to be honest to myself and my current level of motivation, I did not feel that I would dedicate enough time to it in order to justify shelling out the course fee. Yes, I know that simply paying the course fee would probably generate a fairly large handful of motivation - but if that was what it would take, then I would be doing it for all the wrong reasons. Maybe next year - I can't imagine this course will be a one-off. If I can keep writing without financial guilt or (should I be so lucky!) an agent's nagging, then I might consider myself worthy - in which case, all I've have to do is to convince them to let me on the course, which is probably as oversubscribed as an excellent non-denominational state primary school. Hang on, that can't be right - nothing is as oversubscribed as an excellent non-denominational state primary school - although at least Faber & Faber probably don't use your postcode to determine whether they look at your application or not.
2) Rebuild.
I can't even begin to blog about state education. Oh all right then, if you insist. Can anyone (please!) explain to me the need for faith schools? Here are a selection of wrong answers:
a) The parents want them. WRONG!
The parents probably also want the state to provide a brand new Mercedes for their offspring on their seventeenth birthdays - unreasonable parental wanting is hardly justification. Parents want high-quality education for their children - but is religious segregation necessary for children to fully grasp mathematics, geography, physics (I could go on)? The majority of parents couldn't give two hoots about faith-based learning - they just want their children to do well. And children do well if their their parents encourage them to value education and if the teaching isn't being constantly interrupted by children who don't value education.
And any parent who values education will be prepared to pretend to be god-fearing and/or go to church on a regular basis in order to get their child into a school where the other parents are like minded. This has nothing whatsoever to do with faith and, unfortunately, excludes parents who have enough dignity not to pretend to be religious.
b) Multi-culturalism doesn't work and different cultures need to be kept apart to keep them distinct and prevent assimilation. WRONG!
That is a wonderful theory if you are hoping for social unrest and war (or the rapture). Even Yoda knew that 'Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate and hate leads to war' and, if George Lucas could get that point across in a CHILDREN'S film, it shouldn't be impossible for sensible adults. Children need to see that children of other faiths are still just kids who live in the same town and whose parents happen to believe in a different deity (or deities) but who otherwise share pretty much all the same values. Comparative religion teaching and multi-faith schools are the way to restore social cohesion, not the creation of new ghettoes.
(Obviously, the Americans will think we're insane since they don't believe in mixing faith with politics or education. Believe it or not, we seem to enjoy mixing them into quite a froth over here.)
c) Their results are better so they should be left alone. WRONG!
See earlier points as to why their results are better. These are the children that should be in the other state schools in order to bring them all up to a high standard. Faith schools act as a free(ish) private education for those pushy enough to get their kids in while not rich enough to go for properly private education (or trying to save the money for the skiing holidays). They take away another layer of bright kids leaving the non-denominational schools to mop up whoever is left.
Let me just say that I believe that the non-denominational state schools do a fantastic (and very difficult and chronically underpaid) job. But am I a bad person for feeling uncomfortable at the idea of N sharing a class of thirty with at least fifteen children who do not speak English very well? Should she be in a room where at least two (and possibly three) classes are running simultaneously? If the faith schools were shut down and the pupils assimilated in with everyone else, those who need help with language could be taught more easily separately and then mixed in with others when their language was up to it. Would that be a bad thing? Feel free to discuss and tell me I'm wrong.
In short, we need to rebuild the state education sector to something like the way it was before Tony Blair decided to let the religious get their grubby little hands on it. Church attendance used to be declining - is it on the way back up due to parents' desperate attempts to get their children into the best school? Is this a reason to go to church? Will this level of fakery help its practitioners in the afterlife? (Feel free to discuss and tell me I'm going to hell.)
3) Recycle.
To be honest, I thought 'recycle' sounded good after 'renew, rebuild' - but I didn't really have anything to say about recycling apart from the fact that I just took the recycling out before writing this. I don't think I'm recycling any of my writing but feel free to discuss and tell me that you've heard it all before.
4) And finally.
In the last post, I mentioned that I would come back to talk about Halloween. I didn't think it would take this long for me to get around to writing again but there it is. N was dressed in a black witch's hat (Asda - 40p) and a black vampire's cloak (Asda - 40p) with the collar turned down so it didn't look so scary. Both items were liberally coated with luminous star and moon stickers (Smyths - £1.99 - but we used the leftovers from decorating her ceiling so these can sort of be counted as free).
She stalked the mean streets of St Albans with her friend L and L's brother T, collecting sweets from neighbours with wild abandon. Actually, N tended to hide behind her mother and doesn't eat sweets but managed to amass a reasonable collection of chocolates.
Last week, N turned three and, finally, her extended birthday celebration is now over, the flat is festooned with gifts and cards and I'm trying not to get fairy cake crumbs into the keyboard.
P.S. There's a new Mr Grasshead about. Watch this space.
Dear readers, I have been letting you down, depriving you of your fix, withholding my wordy pearls of wisdom - it has been many days since my last confession. But I have been busy, I have not merely been relaxing and enjoying the closing hundred pages of Catch 22.
My main excuse has been that every waking writing moment has been taken up creating my first work for N: a rambling, sprawling, bedraggled piece of rhyming couplet doggerel in which the story and writing style are probably perfect for different age-groups - the unkindest mismatch of all since it renders the whole piece useless. I plough on regardless as it approaches four thousand words and no pictures. On the subject of pictures, the competition to illustrate this picture book is still open - I assume that you are all beavering away eagerly, conjuring up a bright, colourful, intricate yet child-like, doodle of a monkey swinging around a room. Hurry - the competition closes soon.
My secondary excuse has been that last week was half-term and so I was deprived of my three morning writing windows. In their place, I took N to the Natural History Museum where we, along with about a billion children, saw the dinosaur exhibit, the mammal hall, the birds and a surprising floor dealing with the power inside the earth, which included a simulation Japanese convenience store earthquake experience. It was mostly surprising as I didn't know that side of the museum even existed.
N enjoyed the little animatronic dinosaurs ("why have they got red around their mouths?" she asked - "maybe they've been eating strawberries," I replied - does a two, going on three, year old need to know a truer answer?) but found the roaring, staring, swivelling, snarling T Rex a bit much. "Maybe I'll like him when I'm bigger," she says, optimistically. "Maybe I'll like this place more when it's not full to bursting with ADHD children," I thought. To be fair, the museum is clearly doing its job very well by attracting such vast hordes and manages the crowds spectacularly - queues move quickly and staff are friendly. What more could one want if one is stupid/unlucky enough to (have to) go on during half term week?
The museum, though, was knocked into a cocked hat by what we did the next day. Mister Maker (see www.mistermaker.com) is currently in semi-hiatus and so we can no longer watch it every day. The episodes which are being broadcast are repeats. So N has taken to watching little clips on the website or on www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies. It is a wonderful, enthusiastic, inspiring, happy, bright programme - one of the best children's programmes I can remember - and all the more so for not featuring anyone wearing a cuddly/latex costume/mask. So, imagine my joy on discovering that Mister Maker himself, in person, was appearing at our local Asda (for those of you reading this in the USA, please go and vote NOW, and then read on to discover that Asda is owned by Walmart) and that we had about fifteen minutes to get there.
It was him - not just a lookalike in the same jacket and waistcoat. I shook his hand, he drew a picture for N of Sid The Spider (although N says, "He's called Sid but I changed his name to Sidney"), and I took a photo of him with N. The actor who plays the part (who I believe is called Phil Gallagher) comes across as a genuinely friendly, decent, person who actually enjoys working with children. I wish him every success and luck with his career although I don't think he'll be the next Doctor Who as he's probably too similar in age/appearance/hyperactive approach to David Tennant. A real red letter day, made even more exciting by the fact that I bought N's Halloween costume there for 80p.
I'll come back to Halloween next time I write (unless I forget) since I need to move on. In these troubled times for the BBC, we should spare a thought for whether their creative departments will feel sufficiently motivated to properly promote the next reality/entertainment/rubbish programme. To ease their burden, here is a photograph which I grant them free and perpetual licence to use as they see fit.
(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about due to intellectual limitations or living in a nation unencumbered with a television programme called 'Strictly Come Dancing', this is a joke. Email me if you need more explanation...)
And, on the subject of intellectual limitations, here is a photograph of a tree which looks a bit like a brain. I document it here as the council has been sending tree people around, reducing magnificent trees to paltry stumps with little or no warning. In case the brain-tree is about to suffer such a fate, I felt that its beauty should be recorded for future generations.
