Sunday 16 February 2014

Disappearing up the wrong end of my own telescope



One of the Amazon customer reviews for Pippa Goldschmidt's excellent debut novel complains that the book has too much astrophysics and far too much about lesbians. I thought it would be a bit of a wheeze to write my own review apparently agreeing with this, adding that I knew several young people who, having read The Falling Sky, went on to buy telescopes in order to look for lesbians. In the end I didn't, partly because that would have been sarcastic, and I'm trying not to be sarcastic. I even took a homeopathic remedy to try to cure my sarcasm. Wow, was I surprised at how well it worked! Sorry. Maybe, though, this is a case that warrants sarcasm. Imagine giving Julius Caesar two stars out of five because it had far too much about Romans in it. Leaving lesbians aside, it's slightly dismaying that something as important and beautiful as astrophysics should be seen as a bar to appreciating a book. But that's another blog or recycled TESS article.  Another reason not to have written such a review is that I'd have been reviewing a review rather than reviewing the book.
It is therefore with some reservations that I am blogging about a blog. Worse, I'm blogging about a blog that has blogged about my blog. Douglas Blane, a fellow TES Scotland contributor, or perhaps fellow ex-contributor, nurtures the sort of blog - wry, but sometimes achingly honest about his relationships with friends and family - that I could never match. But he can't do poems, so we're quits. Douglas recently picked up on a comment I made when I started writing web pieces for no financial reward. I described my blogging as a vanity project. No, says Douglas, "I have learned my lesson, fellow writers, and so should you. The world is full of people who want to write but don't. Soon after you stop writing you stop being a writer. Fallow is for fields, friends. Keep on writing." I felt better after that, until the next time I looked at the stats showing how many people had viewed my piece on music teaching. I like being read. I didn't even mind when a TESS reader described my fortnightly column as small talk, though I'd have liked it better if she'd omitted the adjectives "worthless" and "uninteresting". At least it was proof of readership. Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, though you do wonder if he'd ever been hit in the nadgers by a football. That might be worse.
I think I've come to the end of writing for the TESS. My detractor was right. It was small talk. Writing fortnightly for 21 years both obliged me to use the trivialities of life for inspiration and granted me the freedom to do so by building up a certain familiarity with the regular readership - and it would be false modesty not to acknowledge that there was a regular readership who knew I was a bald, fifty-something dad with poor hearing and an eccentric taste in cars. The important part was the Columbo moment 100 words from the end, just as I was about to exit the piece. Turning round, I'd make a tenuous link to education. That's my old friend Uncle Bob's description of what was going on, not mine. As an occasional contributor, I can't do this any longer and it's not working.
So the blog's exercise, like walking or cycling when I've got no particular place to go. But I know that part of me secretly hopes that, out on the exercise I meet someone along the way who looks pleased to have run into me.
That's it. No more blogs about blogs or writing about writing. Freed from having to do a Columbo moment, I can haver on about what ever takes my fancy. Now where's my telescope?

Monday 10 February 2014

Primary School



Carluke Primary School is now a bright, modern building. In the sixties it wasn't. It was a soot-stained sandstone edifice conceived in the days before electric lighting. This meant that ceilings had to be high to accommodate large windows. The knock-on effect was that the place was intimidating. Classrooms, their walls painted in an insipid institutional yellow, had wooden floors which bulged suspiciously when the rain got in. Large heating pipes ran round their sides. You could melt your crayons on them. If someone was sick or widdled on the floor, a gigantic janitor was summoned to sprinkle sawdust on the mess. This he would do without comment or facial movement.
The fierce-ish Mrs Glenmuir of primary seven doubled as the school nurse. With a permanent stoop and a voice wrecked by staffroom smoke, she was a woman of dark coloured clothing. She had a remedy for all ills. It was the same remedy: bicarbonate of soda and water, even for wasp stings, which it exacerbated.
Our street was in a rather undeveloped part of the town and was best reached by tramping over a dirt track. We had to wear wellington boots in winter, when the path turned to mud. This meant taking slippers to change into at school because, according to my mother (and I could almost hear the horror chord sequence when she told us) wellies were bad for your feet if you wore them indoors.
The predominant school smells were TCP, brick-red soap, melting crayons and feet. Bicarbonate of soda appeared to be odourless.
On a good day, the classrooms, brightly decorated with our pictures and posters, were pleasant enough places to be. The same could never be said of the toilets. The water closets were in an unlit cowshed of a building. Some of the cisterns were too large for the pans so it was a case of flush and run if an impromptu footwash was to be avoided. Urinals were roofless and unplumbed. When the wind blew the wrong way during a peeing up the wall contest it was advisable to approach the building wearing full wet weather gear. Some boys preferred to ignore the restrictions of the channelling round the walls and used all available floor space for their liquid waste disposal. One lad in particular had an incredible range and capacity. Swinging his willie with both hands like Luke Skywalker practising with his light sabre, he would produce an ornamental sine wave that sparkled in the sun. He was the first true piss artist I ever met. If you think that I'm being gratuitously vulgar then you weren't there.
Canteen facilities seemed to have been consciously designed to reinforce every negative stereotype of school meals. I developed gastric impotence, where the desire to please my teacher by clearing my plate led to a complete loss of appetite. The food wasn't cooked on the premises. BMC trucks, grey ones with extra windows at the driver's feet, brought it in stainless steel drums. If this still happened then these lorries would have to be subjected to the same stringent crash tests normally reserved for transporters of spent uranium fuel rods or anthrax samples.
Mince rolled grittily over the tongue. It was an Arthurian task to remove a spoon from any of the desserts apart from the runny pink custard. Mushy peas could have Artexed a troll's ceiling. Worst of all were the potatoes. Haloed in a semi-luminous fuzz, they tasted the way a wet dog smells. After a couple of weeks I was walking a mile home to get a decent midday meal. Packed lunches hadn't been invented then.
Its shortcomings with respect to the ends of the digestive tract aside, Carluke Primary was, for its time and for a pupil like me, a good enough place to be taught. After I accepted that I had to go there I was not exactly happy, walking towards school as if through snowdrifts whilst attached to my house by a large bungee rope and returning home as if attached to my house by the same bungee rope. Picture the be-shorted legs blurring and the grey-clad arms cycling as I made my escape. But I was learning to read and count.

Tuesday 4 February 2014

A musical interlude, part 2



Since I parted company with music in school when I got to third year I did not appreciate how the subject had changed until I helped my music teaching wife type out some worksheets. All styles of music were covered. Blues, rock and roll, jazz, reggae, folk and classical were discussed and their roots examined. Kathleen explained that appreciation started by looking at the pupil's own preferred type of music.
I was reminded of the way my English teachers helped to guide me from pulp science fiction to Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doubtless many of today's music teachers could have done the same for music. They would have to have begun with the chart music of the early seventies: Slade, T. Rex, Sweet, Status Quo and Roxy Music. These bands played the sort of fast, catchy numbers that I graduated to after eleven years of liking Junior Choice stalwarts such as My Brother (Terry Scott) and My Boomerang Won't Come Back (Charlie Drake). A friend beautifully described his move from children's favourites to pop music as "beginning to realise that Orinocco Womble was not the world's greatest living guitarist."
The first record I remember getting excited about was Alice Cooper's School's Out. This had cruelly been released to coincide with the beginning of the English school holidays, and hence the end of the Scottish ones. It played me in to secondary school and marked the beginning of adolescence. No more Lego, Action Men or Corgi Batmobiles (with rocket launchers and chain slashers). They were for primary kids. For Christmas, I wanted my own cassette recorder to make bootleg tapes of the heroes of glam rock.
A cassette recorder cost slightly more than my parents would normally have spent on a present for me. My mother tells me I made several noble speeches expressing understanding that they might not be able to get me one. In the end I think they would have taken out a second mortgage rather than suffer my attempts to bravely suppress aching disappointment.
My brother and I went to bed early on Christmas morning. We lay in our parallel twin beds speculating on what we were about to receive. Between us was my father’s alarm clock. Had its function been to wake us up it would have been totally superfluous. Rather, it was to ensure that we remained in bed until at least seven o’ clock. My Dad had taken us to the Watchnight service at church. I relished  the experience of doing an adult “stay up late” thing. I enjoyed it all the more for not having to wear the starchily-uncomfortable pink paisley pattern shirt with matching broad ribbed tie that was apparently the minimum standard of dress that God would allow in His house during non-festive visiting hours. Now the glad rags were draped over a chair, to be worn instead in the morning. The clock advanced grudgingly as I worked out the records I would bootleg off the Christmas edition of Top of The Pops if I got what I wanted. Elton John’s Crocodile Rock would be one. The lyrics seemed contain the lines “..ah whannabann on Fridee niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh / When Sooseh wohah dressooo tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh......” but I remembered dancing to it with a pretty classmate at the first year party.
I did get what I wanted. The cassette recorder was chocolate brown and grey, badged with the name of a now long-forgotten importer. It had three white keys, one each for fast forward, rewind and play, and a red record button. A cassette had been inserted in it ready to roll. With some trepidation that it might self destruct like Jim’s in Mission Impossible, I switched it on.  A voice instantly recognisable as my father’s, wishing me a happy Christmas, came from the speaker. My Mum, a Goon Show fan, chipped in with a Bluebottle impersonation. Later over the holiday period I would record both the Last Goon Show of All and my Uncle George (undoubtedly the most musically talented member of the family, as evidenced by his sending up of sectarian songs by playing them on the bicycle pump) accompanying the Ying Tong Song on his false teeth but these Milliganesque delights were sideshows to Radio Big G.
 The eponymous radio station consisted of top twenty hits recorded through a microphone. Of somewhat low fidelity, these songs were enhanced by my DJ-style introductions. Unfortunately, my voice had the “sch” impediment of the pre-pubescent, so I came over as a sort of falsetto Sean Connery with more slevvers. “That wasch Ballroom Blitsch by the Schweet, who have knocked Little Jimmy Oschmond off the top schpot.” To my shame, I not only binned these tapes many years ago, but pulled apart the casings first, lest some garbage-raker was tempted to find out what was on them. Save us from po-faced self-consciousness.