I have lovely friends and relations. I knew that already, but it's been brought home to me in lots of ways lately.
Early on in the process of discovering I have cancer, finding out what kind (breast), what stage (2) and what can be done about it (lots), I decided I was going to be upfront about telling people what it was. This is partly because there is still fear and stigma about cancer, and the fear certainly can work to prevent people getting diagnosis and treatment in a timely fashion.
I'm not surprised there is fear about cancer. It is a common cause of death, it is not always treatable, the treatment can be horribly debilitating and scary even when successful, and death from cancer can painful and wearying in a way that many other illnesses are not. I lost both my parents to causes which, while terrible - heart attack, stroke - were enviably quick (enviable for the person dying, that is, though shocking and traumatising for the bereaved). On the other hand, in the last couple of years I have seen good friends fight long losing battles against cancer which were incredibly wearing and painful to themselves and to their loved ones, as well as being bound to end one way only, as the cancers had reached stage 4 before they were even diagnosed.
So fear is pretty natural, and I have it myself. Stigma I don't understand at all, but that's another thing.
Anyway, I have cancer, but it doesn't have me, and I'm lucky. There is a lot that can be done for it, there is a tremendous amount of ingenuity, skill and support which goes into helping people with it, and the doctors are using the word 'curable' to me at every turn. Also I live in the UK and the NHS is underfunded and overburdened and under paid, but it's still world class and paid for from taxation rather than at the point of need. So why not tell everyone? After all, I'm going to have to explain to people why I've suddenly, for the first time since 1985, changed my hairstyle, why I might not be available for some of the things I do, why I might need to arrange cover for the classes I teach.
Telling folk does mean the people I tell are going to react to the information in their own ways. Everyone has their own take on it and that's fine. Some express fear for me - which is OK: it is scary - and some express bafflement (one dear person said "I don't know how to react to this" - to which the reply has to be "That's OK. I don't know how to react either") but all express concern and love. Someone sent jonquils, bless them, which make the whole house smell fantastic.
My friends and my family are great!
And... then there are also the odd responses.
A friend messages me with a link to a natural "cure for cancer": mistletoe. They ask me whether I've considered this as a treatment.
I reply with thanks, but at the moment (what with the doctors saying how it's curable and all) I'm going with the treatments the specialists tell me can cure my cancer, which is after all an extremely common and very thoroughly researched one. Friend replies saying "no doubt you have researched it and drawn your own conclusions."
Well, actually, do you know, I haven't researched it, very much.
Indeed, in the initial stages of my diagnosis (when I knew that I had breast cancer, but before I had seen the specialist to know whether it was operable or treatable or what kind of prognosis I might have) I was proud of not googling anything, because I knew that: -
a) what I found might not help me, and certainly wouldn't help me as much as the specialists would
b) what I found might quite likely be the worst case scenarios, which my imagination would no doubt fasten on
and mainly...
c) there would be a hell of a lot of dodgy and unsubstantiated claims popping up, from the silly-but-mild claims that something which kills cancer cells in a test tube will also kill them in your actual living body, to the frankly mad, bad and dangerous. Many of them - and mistletoe certainly falls into this category - are basically advertising by people who would like to sell you something.
"Research" is a curious word under the circumstances. Googling something may be the start of research (finding out what others have written, though only if it's online) but what comes up on the University of Google is ungraded for nonsense, charlatanry and source validity.
Research in the medical sense is rather more difficult. I don't have medical training, and I'm not, at 53, going to retrain as a scientific researcher all of a sudden, even now that I have a serious interest in an ailment and a first-hand experience of it that many researchers won't have. Also, we have a scientific profession (largely trained and funded at public expense), universities, hospitals and doctors by the hundreds all beavering away precisely so that when we are ill we do not have to chuck everything and become our own medical specialists.
While I generally agree with the idea that we take responsibility for things like keeping healthy (by for example not smoking, not drinking to excess, and trying to keep the weight down and to get out and about every day), I'm not about to reinvent medicine or come up with my own cures any time soon. I wouldn't be much good at it. I have other skills.
But among those skills are these. I can read, I can understand some serious scientific articles, and I have learnt from various sources (Ben Goldacre's wonderful Bad Science blog and books stand out) to have a certain degree of caution in interpreting evidence. I also have (and teach) approaches to assessing the reliability of sources, and a little bit about research project design validity.
It doesn't mean something from a respected source can't be flawed - the Lancet published the totally discredited and fraudulent article that started the MMR panic, for example, though they publicly withdrew it later - but at least the requirements of reputation encourage good sources to take validity seriously.
So, just for kicks, in the spirit of "research" (for a given value of research) I googled "mistletoe treatment for cancer". Millions of hits. The first one that comes from a reputable source is the BMJ - oh goody! Even better, it's a meta-analysis: a study of all the studies done that have been published. And it's by Edzard Ernst, a highly respected and very interesting man, who having been trained in homeopathy as well as conventional medicine has done more than most to test and to point out the nonsense that many 'alternative' treatments claim.
It's here:
http://www.bmj.com/content/333/7582/1282
Short summary - lots of proprietary mistletoe treatments available commercially in Europe and hundreds of thousands of websites promoting them. It's big business, worth millions of pounds, and in some countries insurance will pay for it.
And it doesn't work. The study is a meta-analysis, looking at the results and the set-up of all the different research that has been published. It rates them on findings (negative effect, no effect, positive effect), strength of result, and also on the experimental design. Bad design includes things like not double blinding, or poorly defined outcomes, or very small sample sizes which increases the chances that any changes are just random.
Here's what Ernst found about mistletoe as a cure for cancer: Where the research was badly designed, it got better results. When the research was better designed they got slight, no or negative results. This is to be read in conjunction with the fact that it is anyway harder to publish research which has slight or no or negative results: a lot of studies are started and just disappear from view, essentially because negative results make dull reading, and for worse reasons, like companies that sponsor the research deciding to only publish studies that make their products look good. (Amazingly, there is no central register that tracks what research is being done so people can catch companies dropping studies which disappoint them). So the chances are that there have been more studies which the meta-analysis did not find because the results were too disappointing to publish.
And it isn't safe. Mistletoe treatments have resulted in a large number of serious adverse reactions, including ulceration and kidney failure. In the lab, mistletoe actually enhances the growth of some cancer cells (at least turmeric seems to kill them in the test tube, if not in real bodies! Besides which, turmeric is delicious in curries).
So, 20 seconds' "research" (googling) and 5 minutes reading the results gives me a strong sense that mistletoe, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of websites promoting it, will not be any use for what ails me, and might well be bad. I have cancer already: why would I want to risk kidney failure on something that does not work? (Not that there aren't adverse effects for the treatment I'll be getting. Unlike the commercial websites, though, the doctors have been entirely upfront about these, almost to the point of putting me off, and are doing tests to understand how far I'm likely to be susceptible to some of them so the effects can be mitigated).
I sent my friend the link to the BMJ, with thanks.
Oh, but I do so understand where this friend (like me a storyteller) is coming from!
It would be wonderful to imagine I could go into nature, out into the woods, to discover for myself the secret oak grove, where the healer (with a golden sickle, perhaps?) dispenses mysterious and magical mistletoe that will cure me. In imagination the white berries glow in the darkness of the sacred grove like little full moons. The healer will pluck one berry and give it to me, a little kiss of health from the wild wood.
It becomes a pilgrimage, a ritual journey that is a far cry from getting the 11 bus to the hospital (which is how I get to my healers), and also a long, long way from the actually existing version of "mistletoe as a cure for cancer", which would be a case of me sitting at home at the computer buying some expensive pills off the internet.
Even better, with "research" I could kid myself that I had become that healer.
It would be lovely if it were true. It would be just like a story.
It isn't.
Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label autobiography. Show all posts
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Thursday, 6 February 2014
The New News: Hair today and bald tomorrow
Thirteen days ago some highly skilled people injected me with a
combination of drugs that made me unconscious and kept me like that while other
highly skilled people cut me open in two places, put their hands inside the cuts, and took pieces out of my body. Some of the bits they took out were
located by earlier injecting me with radioactive material, and then using a
small geiger counter, ticking away like an insane watch, to trace what they
were looking for: the sentinel lymph gland in my armpit.
Then, while the
surgeon was rummaging in my breast for the original lump, some other highly skilled people with
astonishingly advanced equipment studied the gland to see whether this cancer I’ve got had
spread. It had, and so they concluded the operation by removing all thirteen
lymph glands from my armpit. Then they sewed up both the cuts they had made, and I was awake and back home by 8 that same evening.
“I am fearfully and wonderfully made” says the psalmist. Yes, the fearfulness
quotient is increased when one has cancer, and knowing that it had spread as
far as my lymph glands ratchets up the fearfulness considerably. The lymph
appears to be a kind of distribution network for the body, with the lymph
glands as the central sorting office from which unpleasant parcels of tumour
cells can be dispatched to all locations. If it has reached there, where else
has it got to?
So, two days ago, more radioactive material was pumped into my arm and a
few hours later (I made a flying visit to the Norfolk Community History Club in the meantime) I lay fully clothed but with empty pockets on a gurney
while a flat screen in a box hanging from a gantry clanked and crunkled its way
very very slowly from my head to my toes. It started off about a centimetre above my
nose, so close that the cross-hairs on the black screen blurred out of focus,
and made adjustments (clunk) and shifts (crunkle) as it edged along to keep the
same distance throughout. The point of this was to scan my bones, which the
radioactive material would show up, in order to find out whether any cancer
cells had set up shop there.
Now, bone cancer is easily the most frightening possibility I’ve had to
contemplate so far, in this little vortex of “how bad can it get?” that we have
been living in since December. Bone cancer is pretty fucking bad. So it’s
extremely pleasing to report that the scan shows I don’t have it. (It shows
I’ve got arthritic knees, but that I knew already). Hurrah.
(Amazing how one’s perspective changes: in October 2013 I’d have been
horrified to be told I had cancer: by February 2014 I’m delighted not to have a
worse one).
This pleasing news was delivered to me yesterday by Mr Pain, the wonderfully-named
surgeon who did the lymph and breast cancer removal. He’s wrongly named, too,
because not only are the scars extremely neat and unobtrusive, I’ve had
surprisingly little pain and my arm is fine (there’s sometimes loss of movement
after lymph removal, but not for me).
Since then he’s been looking at the bits he cut out, or talking to the people who
have, and the news is not so bad. 3 out of 13 lymph glands had cancer cells, and I
still have to have a CT scan to check that those busy little distribution centres
haven’t distributed them anywhere else. The cancer itself was about the size of the
top joint of my thumb: it was medium aggressive, and responsive to oestrogen,
which means, as I’d already been told, I’ll have to take an oestrogen blocker - but that it should help.
First though I’m going to have to have chemotherapy, starting quite soon.
It’s going to make me feel like crap, I’m probably going to lose my hair, and we can’t go to New York in March as we planned, dammit. But
it has a good chance of killing off the remaining cancer cells lurking about
the place. After that I’ll have radiation on my breasts, and an oestrogen blocker
to take for the rest of my days.
But - and this is important - we’re still in the territory signposted “curable”.
But - and this is important - we’re still in the territory signposted “curable”.
So quite soon, probably before the end of this month, I’m going to cut all my hair off and shave my head.
My hair is, at this present moment, waist length, last cut by someone other than myself in September 1985, when Sarah Peters trimmed my fringe for me before a job interview, and it will be strange to be without it. I was last bald in 1960, when I was a few months old, and I suspect my nut on my shoulders will look like a pea balanced on a drum, but there it is. It may regrow some day, though it will quite likely come through white this time.
My hair is, at this present moment, waist length, last cut by someone other than myself in September 1985, when Sarah Peters trimmed my fringe for me before a job interview, and it will be strange to be without it. I was last bald in 1960, when I was a few months old, and I suspect my nut on my shoulders will look like a pea balanced on a drum, but there it is. It may regrow some day, though it will quite likely come through white this time.
Oddly enough, shaving my head has been a fantasy of mine
for some years. I intend to keep my hair, plait it, and sew it into hats and
things.
I may also get a tattoo on my scalp, just for kicks.
Gotta do something.
Gotta do something.
Monday, 13 January 2014
Better
A better day today.
Still no sleep - haven't had a proper night's sleep since last Tuesday, and last night had no sleep at all. This hasn't been anything directly connected with this cancer thang, but to other stuff going on. A crisis, to which I reacted badly.
OK, so I went to the allotment and saw - not what I had feared I'd see, which was a disaster area - but quite a lot needs doing.
Some of it looked kind of fun.
There were also some rewards: treats. Picked sprouts, and pulled some gorgeous fat carrots. Then came home with booty after chatting to the old chap with the blue blue eyes (I can't remember his name).
I like the allotment when it's just a big larder, essentially, the weeds are not growing much, and all we have to do is walk up and get stuff. I'm more a forager than a grower.
But we stocked the larder: hard work last spring and summer got us this.
Then... something else I'd been dreading, easing back into the novel. And I quite enjoyed it.
I tend to beat myself up a bit with writing as duty, especially at the moment when it's my job. BUT oh Lord when it's pleasurable it's really really pleasure. Lots of ideas, suddenly. Too many, of course, to pursue, but the last 4 days I've had none except dark ones unrelated to writing or researching.
It's said that Iris Murdoch and another writer whose name escapes me once got into a conversation about how much they enjoyed writing. Murdoch said 'Oh yes - but you must never tell anyone.'
Perhaps I should think of it as my guilty secret hedonistic pleasure, rather than my guilty undischarged responsibility...
Still no sleep - haven't had a proper night's sleep since last Tuesday, and last night had no sleep at all. This hasn't been anything directly connected with this cancer thang, but to other stuff going on. A crisis, to which I reacted badly.
OK, so I went to the allotment and saw - not what I had feared I'd see, which was a disaster area - but quite a lot needs doing.
Some of it looked kind of fun.
There were also some rewards: treats. Picked sprouts, and pulled some gorgeous fat carrots. Then came home with booty after chatting to the old chap with the blue blue eyes (I can't remember his name).
I like the allotment when it's just a big larder, essentially, the weeds are not growing much, and all we have to do is walk up and get stuff. I'm more a forager than a grower.
But we stocked the larder: hard work last spring and summer got us this.
Then... something else I'd been dreading, easing back into the novel. And I quite enjoyed it.
I tend to beat myself up a bit with writing as duty, especially at the moment when it's my job. BUT oh Lord when it's pleasurable it's really really pleasure. Lots of ideas, suddenly. Too many, of course, to pursue, but the last 4 days I've had none except dark ones unrelated to writing or researching.
It's said that Iris Murdoch and another writer whose name escapes me once got into a conversation about how much they enjoyed writing. Murdoch said 'Oh yes - but you must never tell anyone.'
Perhaps I should think of it as my guilty secret hedonistic pleasure, rather than my guilty undischarged responsibility...
Friday, 10 January 2014
Choices, choices
I have a life-threatening illness.
It is currently curable, they think. With an operation, maybe with more than one. With radiotherapy. Maybe, if needed, chemotherapy. Curable. It may not even affect my life expectancy.
But if it went untreated it would certainly kill me, in time.
So at times when life does not seem worth living, instead of knowing what I would have to do in order to cease, I know that all I have to do is refrain from doing things.
Don't go to hospital. Don't let them operate. Wait. Do what I'm good at: lie low, give no trouble, wait.
And things will happen, of their own accord, and I will not need to trouble myself - before long, will need to trouble nobody.
It is currently curable, they think. With an operation, maybe with more than one. With radiotherapy. Maybe, if needed, chemotherapy. Curable. It may not even affect my life expectancy.
But if it went untreated it would certainly kill me, in time.
So at times when life does not seem worth living, instead of knowing what I would have to do in order to cease, I know that all I have to do is refrain from doing things.
Don't go to hospital. Don't let them operate. Wait. Do what I'm good at: lie low, give no trouble, wait.
And things will happen, of their own accord, and I will not need to trouble myself - before long, will need to trouble nobody.
Wednesday, 1 January 2014
My news in 2013
So, the news with which I ended 2013 is that I have breast cancer. It is operable, and both the consultant and the support worker made great stress of the word curable.
In a couple of weeks the surgeon will remove a small chunk of me - a cancer and some surrounding tissue - and also a bit of lymph gland from my armpit. I imagine they grab the lymph first, as this gets whisked away to the laboratory while I'm still unconscious. If they find anything dodgy there they can then take all the lymph glands away in the same operation, which is convenient all round. They may later come back and take the lymph away in a later operation, after they've had time to have a really good look.
The next thing is to give me some radiation - locally applied - to make sure any spare cancer cells that may be lurking get knocked out.
If that doesn't work, there is chemotherapy, which will make me feel considerably crappier, but still a good deal better than cancer would, in the long run.
As the cancer is what is described as 'oestrogen fed', I then have to take an oestrogen blocker for probably the rest of my life. This will be a novelty, as I've taken very little medicine in my 53 years, and nothing day after day since my 20s when I was briefly on the pill. I daresay I can get used to it, and (having spent since November when I first noticed the lump wondering about different possible futures) am relieved that I may have time to.
Before Christmas, I went in for some samples of tissue to be taken from the lump which I had become aware of, and from the other lump I hadn't known about which the screening had identified, and the slightly suspicious lymph glands showing up, like knots in wood grain, on the ultrasound.
The sampling is done with a small spring-loaded gun type device which shoots into you, snatches a little core of flesh, and withdraws it through a shaft not much larger than a needle. It's like being punched hard by an incredibly dense and tiny fist, but means all you're left with is a small puncture wound and a bit of bruising. The consultant clicked it a few times first to get me used to the sound so I wouldn't flinch when it was actually being used - obviously, if you flinch, you're going to have worse bruising. I didn't and had only very tiny bruises.
This is all a part with the extraordinary amount of inventiveness and ingenuity that has gone into trying to stop people dying of cancer. About 250 years of treating breast cancer and finding out what works and what doesn't, from Fanny Burney walking alone to her mastectomy with no anaesthetic and hearing the surgeon's saw grate on her own ribs, to this.
In amongst the ingenuity, the language used is interesting. The support worker, Valerie, talking about possible effects, referred throughout to "ladies" - "some ladies find that this or that". Not being a lady myself, makes me wonder what I'm doing there. Conscious efforts are made to include one's partner, and B had the pleasure of hearing himself referred to as "hubby".
Certain phrases recur I suppose as formulae for getting us all through the social transactions involved. The surgeon read me a form in which he explains what he's going to do, and what he might have to do (for instance, if he needs to take all the lymph instead of a bit), and what effects it might have, and then hands it to me to take away, read and sign, with the words "My gift to you". About 15 minutes later, the support worker, piling information into a big file in case I fancy a bit of light reading, said the same thing.
Both concluded by saying "Well done" to us both several times. Buoyed on this wave of congratulation we made our way to our bus before I wondered what exactly it was we'd done well - possibly, well done for not breaking down? Or refusing to countenance treatment? Or refrained from punching the surgeon?
Or perhaps it was just a signal that the interviews were over and we had leave to depart, without using words such as 'goodbye' or 'that's your lot', which might, under the circumstances, make people nervous.
So 2013 ends as it began, with a visit to hospital. Last January it was B who had a scare, which turned out to be nothing. Come to think, the last few Januaries have involved visits to hospitals, though always for other people.
This time it's for me, and I'm glad and grateful we have such good hospitals, and the NHS in general - there for us when we need it... still.
In a couple of weeks the surgeon will remove a small chunk of me - a cancer and some surrounding tissue - and also a bit of lymph gland from my armpit. I imagine they grab the lymph first, as this gets whisked away to the laboratory while I'm still unconscious. If they find anything dodgy there they can then take all the lymph glands away in the same operation, which is convenient all round. They may later come back and take the lymph away in a later operation, after they've had time to have a really good look.
The next thing is to give me some radiation - locally applied - to make sure any spare cancer cells that may be lurking get knocked out.
If that doesn't work, there is chemotherapy, which will make me feel considerably crappier, but still a good deal better than cancer would, in the long run.
As the cancer is what is described as 'oestrogen fed', I then have to take an oestrogen blocker for probably the rest of my life. This will be a novelty, as I've taken very little medicine in my 53 years, and nothing day after day since my 20s when I was briefly on the pill. I daresay I can get used to it, and (having spent since November when I first noticed the lump wondering about different possible futures) am relieved that I may have time to.
Before Christmas, I went in for some samples of tissue to be taken from the lump which I had become aware of, and from the other lump I hadn't known about which the screening had identified, and the slightly suspicious lymph glands showing up, like knots in wood grain, on the ultrasound.
The sampling is done with a small spring-loaded gun type device which shoots into you, snatches a little core of flesh, and withdraws it through a shaft not much larger than a needle. It's like being punched hard by an incredibly dense and tiny fist, but means all you're left with is a small puncture wound and a bit of bruising. The consultant clicked it a few times first to get me used to the sound so I wouldn't flinch when it was actually being used - obviously, if you flinch, you're going to have worse bruising. I didn't and had only very tiny bruises.
This is all a part with the extraordinary amount of inventiveness and ingenuity that has gone into trying to stop people dying of cancer. About 250 years of treating breast cancer and finding out what works and what doesn't, from Fanny Burney walking alone to her mastectomy with no anaesthetic and hearing the surgeon's saw grate on her own ribs, to this.
In amongst the ingenuity, the language used is interesting. The support worker, Valerie, talking about possible effects, referred throughout to "ladies" - "some ladies find that this or that". Not being a lady myself, makes me wonder what I'm doing there. Conscious efforts are made to include one's partner, and B had the pleasure of hearing himself referred to as "hubby".
Certain phrases recur I suppose as formulae for getting us all through the social transactions involved. The surgeon read me a form in which he explains what he's going to do, and what he might have to do (for instance, if he needs to take all the lymph instead of a bit), and what effects it might have, and then hands it to me to take away, read and sign, with the words "My gift to you". About 15 minutes later, the support worker, piling information into a big file in case I fancy a bit of light reading, said the same thing.
Both concluded by saying "Well done" to us both several times. Buoyed on this wave of congratulation we made our way to our bus before I wondered what exactly it was we'd done well - possibly, well done for not breaking down? Or refusing to countenance treatment? Or refrained from punching the surgeon?
Or perhaps it was just a signal that the interviews were over and we had leave to depart, without using words such as 'goodbye' or 'that's your lot', which might, under the circumstances, make people nervous.
So 2013 ends as it began, with a visit to hospital. Last January it was B who had a scare, which turned out to be nothing. Come to think, the last few Januaries have involved visits to hospitals, though always for other people.
This time it's for me, and I'm glad and grateful we have such good hospitals, and the NHS in general - there for us when we need it... still.
Thursday, 26 September 2013
26th September or How They Met My Mother
My mother, Marian, was born on this day in 1921.
She was born at home, during the day, in an upstairs bedroom in Army Road, Clapham, according to Uncle Eddie, who took me for a walk around Clapham in about the year 2000. I think the road has been renamed but the house is still there. Later on they moved around the corner to the house my Mum remembered.
Auntie Mary is still alive and fabulous in South Africa. In 2001 she told me about how she met my mother. This is the story:
The midwife came in and turned the dining table upside down on the carpet. She put Mary (who was three and a half) and Eddie (who was about 18 months old) on the table top with some slices of bread and butter and told them "This carpet is the sea and this table is a boat. If you get off the boat you'll fall into the sea and drown, so stay where you are." Then she went upstairs.
It worked. Mary and Eddie stayed on their boat floating in their imaginary sea, eating their bread and butter rations, while upstairs the baby was coming into the world. Later on, their big sister Gladys, aged 8, came home from school and looked after them until they were allowed upstairs to see their new sister.
My family has always been susceptible to the power of stories.
She was born at home, during the day, in an upstairs bedroom in Army Road, Clapham, according to Uncle Eddie, who took me for a walk around Clapham in about the year 2000. I think the road has been renamed but the house is still there. Later on they moved around the corner to the house my Mum remembered.
Auntie Mary is still alive and fabulous in South Africa. In 2001 she told me about how she met my mother. This is the story:
The midwife came in and turned the dining table upside down on the carpet. She put Mary (who was three and a half) and Eddie (who was about 18 months old) on the table top with some slices of bread and butter and told them "This carpet is the sea and this table is a boat. If you get off the boat you'll fall into the sea and drown, so stay where you are." Then she went upstairs.
It worked. Mary and Eddie stayed on their boat floating in their imaginary sea, eating their bread and butter rations, while upstairs the baby was coming into the world. Later on, their big sister Gladys, aged 8, came home from school and looked after them until they were allowed upstairs to see their new sister.
My family has always been susceptible to the power of stories.
Friday, 30 December 2011
All About Me-ve
There isn't much I want to write about just now, for reasons I may return to. Now, normally when I've got nothing to write about I don't write - years can pass this way - but I thought I might finish the year with some sort of trivia thing. All the papers do it, don't they?
I borrowed these questions from an auto-interview by/with the wonderful Efler blogger 'Lathophobic Aphasia', written by someone with a better turn of phrase and more of a gift for creative grumbling than most of the people you meet in the staffroom. No apologies for borrowing, though, as Mr Aphasia himself borrowed the questions from an interview that EFL demi-god Jeremy Harmer did with Professor Deborah Cameron, another bright light of the ELT industry. And jolly good questions they are too. Borrow them yourself. Maybe we can make it into a meme.
What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Creative, disorganised, passionate.
What is your greatest achievement?
You ain't seen nothing yet.
What’s your favourite smell?
The sea, windfall apples lying on winter mud (smelt that on Moushold Heath this morning), cut grass, a clean cat, rain in the desert, burning seasoned oak, mangoes, coffee.
What is your favourite taste?
Liquorice, mint, pineapple.
What’s your favourite piece of music?
Umm, don't know. I'm ignorant about music. I'm most comfortable with baroque type things - they have a pattern that I can just about manage to get my head around, and they resolve. Bach and Handel kinda thang: I haven't evolved as far as Romanticism. At one time in my life I went a fair bit to opera with someone who knew a lot about them (that was in Italy) and I remember the first one I went to which I enjoyed all the way through without a minute's boredom or inattention. It was Cosi Fan Tutte - nothing but the best, eh?
What book would you like everyone to read?
Just one? Impossible.
Books I tend to recommend to people I like: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall ditto, Mary Renault's historical fiction, The Once and Future King (TH White), Middlemarch
What website would you like everyone to visit?
Not a clue.
What is your favourite sound?
Cat purring. Wood fire crackling. Rain outside. The sea.
If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?
Cat in a comfortable home, or small wild cat in a well-protected jungle. But then, I love to swim, so maybe otter or seal or one of the catlike prehistoric critters that went back into the water and became seals or whales or something. Or a Lake Van cat - they swim.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
'Spare' is a bit of an odd concept for me... as indeed is 'time' - perhaps that's why I have trouble getting things done. I don't have a telly, but when I watch dvds (or, rarely, when I watch TV away from home) I feel a need to fidget. In the last few years I've started to deploy this in making things - beads or jewellery, and lately, patchwork. If I watch enough films this year I will finish a patchwork quilt bedspread.
How many languages do you speak and why?
Well, I'm still struggling with English after 51 years. I learnt Italian quite well - I lived there for 6 years, though after 4 I no longer felt I was improving - after the age of 28 and with a history as a 'failed language learner'. It remains the only foreign language I ever got really confident and contented in, although I doubt I ever spoke it perfectly at my best. I'm fairly rusty now, though I still read it with pleasure, and recently have dreamt in it. I can read French and Spanish, but can't claim to speak either. French feels like a failure as I spent years being taught it without actually learning it, and now my 'default language', if I'm not speaking English, is Italian. I learned Anglo Saxon (or Old English if you prefer) per force at University for a year and was frustrated that I could not translate the poems well enough to do them justice: I felt they were wonderful but was not good enough - or indeed keen enough and hard-working enough - to make my versions adequate. I lived in Thailand three years without really getting to grips with Thai, but last week I watched a Thai film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives, and was surprised how much I could catch - but it's at the level of words rather than sentences and meanings. Same with Arabic.
What do you like most/least about your job?
I like the students who make this enormous courageous leap to living and studying in a different language and culture, and who make many small leaps of courage in order to communicate and approach each other and me. I like feeling that they are becoming ever more able to express more of their own meanings. I like getting to know people who do or will do such amazing and interesting things in life and who come from such varied and interesting countries: in what other profession would I meet Kurdish agriculturalists and Laotian ministers (who went to school in a cave and speaks Russian as a second language) and lawyers from the Ivory Coast. I like the strange and varied people who work in EFL too.
I dislike the insecurity of zero hours contracts, the tedium of meetings, and the odium of the occasional embittered colleague one meets who seems to dislike students on principle.
What would heaven be like if you were in charge?
Bliss. Warm sea, flying, music. Everyone I love around.
When and where are you happiest?
Lathophobic A's answer is pretty good: 'in a warm bed on a cold morning when I needn’t get up'. But also sitting in a tree, or on a hillside in summer. Riding a motorbike alone in Thai mountains. Sitting on the bottom stair in my nightie to listen to The Hobbit on my Dad's radio when I was 8. Writing something yesterday that seemed like it was working.
Something you are never without.
Something to read or to write on/with.
What is your most appealing habit?
Not sure I have any appealing habits.
And your least appealing habit?
Gloom.
What is the trait you most dislike in others?
Dropping litter and crap in beautiful places. Seriously. You go somewhere lovely - or even somewhere just passably pleasant - and defile it?
What is your most treasured possession?
Hmmm. My brain, I suppose. I would struggle to save the laptop and my mum's ring, and her diaries.
If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?
Three, please, and they need not be supernatural at all - just very good technology indeed. I want
a time machine
a cloak of invisibility
and
a Babel fish.
This last was Douglas Adams' invention - a fish that swims in your ear enabling you to understand all languages in the universe and be understood. It would make my job obsolete, of course. But think of the evesdropping! Think of the history! You could settle all arguments about when people first started using language, for a start... and so much more.
What words or phrases do you overuse?
Like most Brits I swear a lot.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
An income I could rely on.
How would you like to be remembered?
I don't expect to be remembered by anyone, unless I write and publish something really good.
What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?
Can't play anything. I've enjoyed singing in choirs and want to do more of it, and better. Most perhaps was a piece of music Barrie wrote (and I wrote some of the words for) and Stephen arranged for the Al Ain Choral Society, in which we both sang: Blue Carol. Listening... see above.
What did you dream of being when you were younger?
Writer. Trying to stop dreaming and work on it instead.
What were you like as a student at school?
Space case, then later on enveloped in impenetrable gloom enlivened with sarcasm. I stuttered, could not choose between two words of apparently equal meaning (would say 'tan' or 'kin' instead of tin or can) and could not concentrate on anything.
How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?
I was very influenced by TH White's book 'The Once and Future King'. There's a point in which Merlin says that the one thing that never fails is to learn something - and then goes off into a long speech about the different things there are to learn and how many lifetimes it would take you to learn them all.
But learning is quite difficult to do, so a lot of the time I just read. Which feels similar, but is not quite the same.
If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...
writer sooner.
Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?
Richard Holmes, the biographer. You could sit in his seminars and feel your brain expanding gently under his influence.
Something that few people know about you.
I can't drive a car - never have learned - but I can ride a motorbike.
If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?
All over the place! Specially if I get my cloak of invisibility and my babel fish too.
What’s your best learning memory from school?
Walking in the park after midnight thinking that I understood 'Middlemarch'.
Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?
Exceeding messy. It hampers me.
What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?
Sit by the fire with a warm cat and a good book.
A poem you know by heart.
Afterwards, by Thomas Hardy. This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin. Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll
What would you like to learn to do next?
Write!
What question would you have liked me to ask you?
‘Can I publish your next book for a large sum of money? And can you do a sequel, please? And, how about film rights...’
What would have been your answer?
Yikes! But yes, by all means.
I borrowed these questions from an auto-interview by/with the wonderful Efler blogger 'Lathophobic Aphasia', written by someone with a better turn of phrase and more of a gift for creative grumbling than most of the people you meet in the staffroom. No apologies for borrowing, though, as Mr Aphasia himself borrowed the questions from an interview that EFL demi-god Jeremy Harmer did with Professor Deborah Cameron, another bright light of the ELT industry. And jolly good questions they are too. Borrow them yourself. Maybe we can make it into a meme.
What three adjectives would you use to describe yourself?
Creative, disorganised, passionate.
What is your greatest achievement?
You ain't seen nothing yet.
What’s your favourite smell?
The sea, windfall apples lying on winter mud (smelt that on Moushold Heath this morning), cut grass, a clean cat, rain in the desert, burning seasoned oak, mangoes, coffee.
What is your favourite taste?
Liquorice, mint, pineapple.
What’s your favourite piece of music?
Umm, don't know. I'm ignorant about music. I'm most comfortable with baroque type things - they have a pattern that I can just about manage to get my head around, and they resolve. Bach and Handel kinda thang: I haven't evolved as far as Romanticism. At one time in my life I went a fair bit to opera with someone who knew a lot about them (that was in Italy) and I remember the first one I went to which I enjoyed all the way through without a minute's boredom or inattention. It was Cosi Fan Tutte - nothing but the best, eh?
What book would you like everyone to read?
Just one? Impossible.
Books I tend to recommend to people I like: Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall ditto, Mary Renault's historical fiction, The Once and Future King (TH White), Middlemarch
What website would you like everyone to visit?
Not a clue.
What is your favourite sound?
Cat purring. Wood fire crackling. Rain outside. The sea.
If you were an animal, what animal do you think you would be?
Cat in a comfortable home, or small wild cat in a well-protected jungle. But then, I love to swim, so maybe otter or seal or one of the catlike prehistoric critters that went back into the water and became seals or whales or something. Or a Lake Van cat - they swim.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
'Spare' is a bit of an odd concept for me... as indeed is 'time' - perhaps that's why I have trouble getting things done. I don't have a telly, but when I watch dvds (or, rarely, when I watch TV away from home) I feel a need to fidget. In the last few years I've started to deploy this in making things - beads or jewellery, and lately, patchwork. If I watch enough films this year I will finish a patchwork quilt bedspread.
How many languages do you speak and why?
Well, I'm still struggling with English after 51 years. I learnt Italian quite well - I lived there for 6 years, though after 4 I no longer felt I was improving - after the age of 28 and with a history as a 'failed language learner'. It remains the only foreign language I ever got really confident and contented in, although I doubt I ever spoke it perfectly at my best. I'm fairly rusty now, though I still read it with pleasure, and recently have dreamt in it. I can read French and Spanish, but can't claim to speak either. French feels like a failure as I spent years being taught it without actually learning it, and now my 'default language', if I'm not speaking English, is Italian. I learned Anglo Saxon (or Old English if you prefer) per force at University for a year and was frustrated that I could not translate the poems well enough to do them justice: I felt they were wonderful but was not good enough - or indeed keen enough and hard-working enough - to make my versions adequate. I lived in Thailand three years without really getting to grips with Thai, but last week I watched a Thai film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives, and was surprised how much I could catch - but it's at the level of words rather than sentences and meanings. Same with Arabic.
What do you like most/least about your job?
I like the students who make this enormous courageous leap to living and studying in a different language and culture, and who make many small leaps of courage in order to communicate and approach each other and me. I like feeling that they are becoming ever more able to express more of their own meanings. I like getting to know people who do or will do such amazing and interesting things in life and who come from such varied and interesting countries: in what other profession would I meet Kurdish agriculturalists and Laotian ministers (who went to school in a cave and speaks Russian as a second language) and lawyers from the Ivory Coast. I like the strange and varied people who work in EFL too.
I dislike the insecurity of zero hours contracts, the tedium of meetings, and the odium of the occasional embittered colleague one meets who seems to dislike students on principle.
What would heaven be like if you were in charge?
Bliss. Warm sea, flying, music. Everyone I love around.
When and where are you happiest?
Lathophobic A's answer is pretty good: 'in a warm bed on a cold morning when I needn’t get up'. But also sitting in a tree, or on a hillside in summer. Riding a motorbike alone in Thai mountains. Sitting on the bottom stair in my nightie to listen to The Hobbit on my Dad's radio when I was 8. Writing something yesterday that seemed like it was working.
Something you are never without.
Something to read or to write on/with.
What is your most appealing habit?
Not sure I have any appealing habits.
And your least appealing habit?
Gloom.
What is the trait you most dislike in others?
Dropping litter and crap in beautiful places. Seriously. You go somewhere lovely - or even somewhere just passably pleasant - and defile it?
What is your most treasured possession?
Hmmm. My brain, I suppose. I would struggle to save the laptop and my mum's ring, and her diaries.
If you could have a supernatural power, what would it be?
Three, please, and they need not be supernatural at all - just very good technology indeed. I want
a time machine
a cloak of invisibility
and
a Babel fish.
This last was Douglas Adams' invention - a fish that swims in your ear enabling you to understand all languages in the universe and be understood. It would make my job obsolete, of course. But think of the evesdropping! Think of the history! You could settle all arguments about when people first started using language, for a start... and so much more.
What words or phrases do you overuse?
Like most Brits I swear a lot.
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
An income I could rely on.
How would you like to be remembered?
I don't expect to be remembered by anyone, unless I write and publish something really good.
What music do you enjoy listening to/playing most?
Can't play anything. I've enjoyed singing in choirs and want to do more of it, and better. Most perhaps was a piece of music Barrie wrote (and I wrote some of the words for) and Stephen arranged for the Al Ain Choral Society, in which we both sang: Blue Carol. Listening... see above.
What did you dream of being when you were younger?
Writer. Trying to stop dreaming and work on it instead.
What were you like as a student at school?
Space case, then later on enveloped in impenetrable gloom enlivened with sarcasm. I stuttered, could not choose between two words of apparently equal meaning (would say 'tan' or 'kin' instead of tin or can) and could not concentrate on anything.
How do you cheer yourself up when you are feeling down?
I was very influenced by TH White's book 'The Once and Future King'. There's a point in which Merlin says that the one thing that never fails is to learn something - and then goes off into a long speech about the different things there are to learn and how many lifetimes it would take you to learn them all.
But learning is quite difficult to do, so a lot of the time I just read. Which feels similar, but is not quite the same.
If I hadn’t been a teacher, I would probably have been a...
writer sooner.
Who has been the best teacher you have ever had?
Richard Holmes, the biographer. You could sit in his seminars and feel your brain expanding gently under his influence.
Something that few people know about you.
I can't drive a car - never have learned - but I can ride a motorbike.
If you could travel back in time where would you go and why?
All over the place! Specially if I get my cloak of invisibility and my babel fish too.
What’s your best learning memory from school?
Walking in the park after midnight thinking that I understood 'Middlemarch'.
Are you a tidy desk or a messy desk person?
Exceeding messy. It hampers me.
What’s your favourite thing to do when it rains?
Sit by the fire with a warm cat and a good book.
A poem you know by heart.
Afterwards, by Thomas Hardy. This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin. Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll
What would you like to learn to do next?
Write!
What question would you have liked me to ask you?
‘Can I publish your next book for a large sum of money? And can you do a sequel, please? And, how about film rights...’
What would have been your answer?
Yikes! But yes, by all means.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Atmospheric Conditions
It was 6 pm and 48 degrees, but we had finally managed to get to the pool. It was packed, pool and loungers. Tuesday is a night when the sauna is women only, so all the hairy muscular little guys who spend a happy evening hanging out in the eternal triangle between sauna, steam room and "plung" pool had per force to hang out in the olympic (well nearly) sized pool. They were two or three to a lane - some of them just hanging out, but enough of them were doing showy splashy lengths up and down to make us think twice about getting in ourselves. The length markers are quite close together and we both hate colliding with others or being jostled.
We both behaved characteristically. I flopped onto the nearest available lounger like a beached whale and started to read, or at least look at, my book. It was Boris Johnson's collected bits, purloined from the library and not bad: he has a good turn of phrase and some decent enough instincts, at least in journalism, but a bit of a tendency to grandstand. It was not quite absorbing enough to prevent me flapping my ears at the possible international flirtation going on amongst the loungers to my left. Barrie, instead, paced the poolside, poised like a hawk (if hawks wear swimming trunks, which I rather doubt) to leap in as soon as a lane was free.
I must have nodded off - no surprises there, as I was exceeding knackered. When I surfaced, Barrie was submerged. It was full night now, and two small, smooth clouds gleamed low down in the sky. Gradually, though, the sky to the west began to be overcast as a continuous blanket of cloud pulled across from the direction of Oman.
Suddenly there was thunder, a long, low, distant rumble, but I had not seen any lightening. What happened next, though, was that the air began to cool and rush about - gusts blowing this way and that. People were getting out of the pool, and the kiddie pool began to empty. It was still hot, though, and some of the gusts of wind were warmer than others - warmer, and grittier. The cloud continued to draw across the sky, which told us that the wind high up was steadily blowing from the wet, whereas the wind and ground level was coming from all sides. I had grit in my eyes, and the taste of it between my teeth.
Barrie got out and came and sat beside me under a towel. Everyone else had disappeared. We kept wondering whether it had started to rain, or was starting to rain, as from time to time we each thought we had felt a drop - but every time we could not be sure it wasn't just a spray from the pool.
The lightening came, and we counted for the thunder, which was sharper, and much closer. I kept saying "Rain. Come on, rain". All week I had been wanting half an hour's rain to settle the dust and relieve the endless heat. Over the wall in the date orchard the palm trees were thrashing about. Barrie counted the next one lightening strike off and declared the storm was 8 kilometres away - about half the distance it had been, and closing fast.
Suddenly a huge wave of pinky-yellow rose behind the trees in front of us, like a mammoth lifting its head, and moving closer and to the right. It was a cloud of dust, or sand, picked up from the dry wadi that lies beyond the hotel's irrigated gardens, and which extends right down to the border. It loomed and moved, fast, against the direction the little gusts of wind were mainly coming from, and like a thing with a mind of its own: I'm going this way; you do what you like. Its yellowy pinkness was partly from the colour of the sands and partly from the neon lights around the hotel reflecting off its dusty flanks.
Then the rain started, spots and spits and then a proper stream and downpour of rain. Although we were sitting under the awning, we were wet. And cold enough to shiver: the temperature had dropped about 15 degrees. Lovely rain, the smell of wet earth. Even the hotel lawn, which is as denatured as astroturf, smelled suddenly of grass.
Then I swam. I'm not quite foolhardy enough to swim in a thunderstorm, but after the rain had passed over and headed away to Sarooj, it was time. The water was cool and filled with shards of palm leaf and large, bemused beetles like black volkswagens. As I got out I could see a bright star just under the edge of the cloud... almost impossibly bright, so that I thought it was a plane heading directly towards me, but after ten minutes it was still where it was.
As we drove away, the car temperature gauge said 38 degrees. It was twenty past eight in the evening.
There was no rain in Falaaj Hazaa, where we live.
It was still hot.
We both behaved characteristically. I flopped onto the nearest available lounger like a beached whale and started to read, or at least look at, my book. It was Boris Johnson's collected bits, purloined from the library and not bad: he has a good turn of phrase and some decent enough instincts, at least in journalism, but a bit of a tendency to grandstand. It was not quite absorbing enough to prevent me flapping my ears at the possible international flirtation going on amongst the loungers to my left. Barrie, instead, paced the poolside, poised like a hawk (if hawks wear swimming trunks, which I rather doubt) to leap in as soon as a lane was free.
I must have nodded off - no surprises there, as I was exceeding knackered. When I surfaced, Barrie was submerged. It was full night now, and two small, smooth clouds gleamed low down in the sky. Gradually, though, the sky to the west began to be overcast as a continuous blanket of cloud pulled across from the direction of Oman.
Suddenly there was thunder, a long, low, distant rumble, but I had not seen any lightening. What happened next, though, was that the air began to cool and rush about - gusts blowing this way and that. People were getting out of the pool, and the kiddie pool began to empty. It was still hot, though, and some of the gusts of wind were warmer than others - warmer, and grittier. The cloud continued to draw across the sky, which told us that the wind high up was steadily blowing from the wet, whereas the wind and ground level was coming from all sides. I had grit in my eyes, and the taste of it between my teeth.
Barrie got out and came and sat beside me under a towel. Everyone else had disappeared. We kept wondering whether it had started to rain, or was starting to rain, as from time to time we each thought we had felt a drop - but every time we could not be sure it wasn't just a spray from the pool.
The lightening came, and we counted for the thunder, which was sharper, and much closer. I kept saying "Rain. Come on, rain". All week I had been wanting half an hour's rain to settle the dust and relieve the endless heat. Over the wall in the date orchard the palm trees were thrashing about. Barrie counted the next one lightening strike off and declared the storm was 8 kilometres away - about half the distance it had been, and closing fast.
Suddenly a huge wave of pinky-yellow rose behind the trees in front of us, like a mammoth lifting its head, and moving closer and to the right. It was a cloud of dust, or sand, picked up from the dry wadi that lies beyond the hotel's irrigated gardens, and which extends right down to the border. It loomed and moved, fast, against the direction the little gusts of wind were mainly coming from, and like a thing with a mind of its own: I'm going this way; you do what you like. Its yellowy pinkness was partly from the colour of the sands and partly from the neon lights around the hotel reflecting off its dusty flanks.
Then the rain started, spots and spits and then a proper stream and downpour of rain. Although we were sitting under the awning, we were wet. And cold enough to shiver: the temperature had dropped about 15 degrees. Lovely rain, the smell of wet earth. Even the hotel lawn, which is as denatured as astroturf, smelled suddenly of grass.
Then I swam. I'm not quite foolhardy enough to swim in a thunderstorm, but after the rain had passed over and headed away to Sarooj, it was time. The water was cool and filled with shards of palm leaf and large, bemused beetles like black volkswagens. As I got out I could see a bright star just under the edge of the cloud... almost impossibly bright, so that I thought it was a plane heading directly towards me, but after ten minutes it was still where it was.
As we drove away, the car temperature gauge said 38 degrees. It was twenty past eight in the evening.
There was no rain in Falaaj Hazaa, where we live.
It was still hot.
Monday, 17 May 2010
A Mistake
When I was but a sproggette, I was good at reading. I enjoyed it, too, partly because we were a bookish family (my father's study, lined with books and dark red curtains, is in many ways my ideal room) and heavily into words, read to and rhymed at and recited over from the earliest ages.
Plus of course every Sunday we got together in a large building with many of our neighbours and spent an hour or so repeating responses, listening to readings, singing hymns, hearing sermons and reciting prayers - some of which were in Latin (my father's missal was bilingual: Latin and German).
Being able to read, and then reading a lot, and then reading about reading and writing about what I had been reading seemed to be pretty important things to do. Everybody I met seemed to agree on that.
Eventually I fetched up at university, only negatively by choice - the careers advice at my school consisted of what university might accept us to do what subject-and naturally I chose to read my "best" subject at school: English. I really enjoyed it, and through reading, discovered
Philosophy, Politics, Criticism and such like exciting stuff.
All that time, as I did my BA and then my first Masters Degree, it seemed as if there was nothing so important, nothing so valuable as to read and to read well, to discuss what had been read with others who had read the same, to fine tune one's critical apparatus, to read what others had written about what you and they had read .... and there would be no end to it, but that was fine, that was what CULTURE consisted in, that was the cutting edge of what it's all about, and we were on it.
And now, 30 years later, it has become apparent that I was completely wrong.
The cutting edge, the place where our culture is making itself, is science, much of which is expressed in a language that I and most of my literary chums can barely read: maths.
I feel a bit of a twit now - though I'm still glad I read most of those books (if I had my time over again, as Woody Allen said, I probably wouldn't read The Magus).
Not that there's anything wrong with being able to read stuff and understand it, but never again will I be able to confuse reading a lot with the cutting edge of culture.
Plus of course every Sunday we got together in a large building with many of our neighbours and spent an hour or so repeating responses, listening to readings, singing hymns, hearing sermons and reciting prayers - some of which were in Latin (my father's missal was bilingual: Latin and German).
Being able to read, and then reading a lot, and then reading about reading and writing about what I had been reading seemed to be pretty important things to do. Everybody I met seemed to agree on that.
Eventually I fetched up at university, only negatively by choice - the careers advice at my school consisted of what university might accept us to do what subject-and naturally I chose to read my "best" subject at school: English. I really enjoyed it, and through reading, discovered
Philosophy, Politics, Criticism and such like exciting stuff.
All that time, as I did my BA and then my first Masters Degree, it seemed as if there was nothing so important, nothing so valuable as to read and to read well, to discuss what had been read with others who had read the same, to fine tune one's critical apparatus, to read what others had written about what you and they had read .... and there would be no end to it, but that was fine, that was what CULTURE consisted in, that was the cutting edge of what it's all about, and we were on it.
And now, 30 years later, it has become apparent that I was completely wrong.
The cutting edge, the place where our culture is making itself, is science, much of which is expressed in a language that I and most of my literary chums can barely read: maths.
I feel a bit of a twit now - though I'm still glad I read most of those books (if I had my time over again, as Woody Allen said, I probably wouldn't read The Magus).
Not that there's anything wrong with being able to read stuff and understand it, but never again will I be able to confuse reading a lot with the cutting edge of culture.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
On a Thursday about fifty years ago, in Perivale in the county of Middlesex, a woman was lying in hospital reading a book by a former show girl about her affair with a famous writer. She was waiting for the doctor to induce delivery of her second child. The baby, already more than a week overdue, showed no sign of wanting to budge.
Eventually the doctors' efforts succeeded, ("they broke the waters" she used to reminisce "but nothing happened") but by the time the child emerged at last it was after midnight on Friday the 13th of May. The child's father was fast asleep after a long day's teaching few miles away in Ealing.
There was an outbreak of jaundice in the hospital at the time so the baby had to sleep in a bathroom instead of the baby ward, and mother and child remained in hospital for a week. When the father visited, he later recalled, he noticed that another new father in the waiting room had brought his wife a hula hoop - a fashionable toy in 1960, but perhaps not ideal for a woman who had just given birth.
The parents had already chosen a name for the baby: Thomas. They hadn't bargained for a daughter, but that's what they got. So for about 10 days she was described as "our little girl" while alternative names were canvassed - Thomasine, Charlotte (the father's first name was Charles though everyone called him by his second name, Stephen, and its abbreviation). They settled on Sarah, which alliterated nicely with her brother's name, Simon. She already had cousins, Desmond and Dena, with similar chiming names.
It was odd that they didn't decide to name her after a saint (there is actually a Saint Sara, who is black, mythical, and dear to the Romany -but they did not know that at the time). They did at least give her the classic Roman Catholic girl's name Mary as a second choice.
Well, that was my Mum and my Dad. The book she was reading was Sheilah Graham's account of her love affair with F Scott Fitzgerald (which I should get around to reading one day) and the baby of course was me.
Never knowingly puctual...
Eventually the doctors' efforts succeeded, ("they broke the waters" she used to reminisce "but nothing happened") but by the time the child emerged at last it was after midnight on Friday the 13th of May. The child's father was fast asleep after a long day's teaching few miles away in Ealing.
There was an outbreak of jaundice in the hospital at the time so the baby had to sleep in a bathroom instead of the baby ward, and mother and child remained in hospital for a week. When the father visited, he later recalled, he noticed that another new father in the waiting room had brought his wife a hula hoop - a fashionable toy in 1960, but perhaps not ideal for a woman who had just given birth.
The parents had already chosen a name for the baby: Thomas. They hadn't bargained for a daughter, but that's what they got. So for about 10 days she was described as "our little girl" while alternative names were canvassed - Thomasine, Charlotte (the father's first name was Charles though everyone called him by his second name, Stephen, and its abbreviation). They settled on Sarah, which alliterated nicely with her brother's name, Simon. She already had cousins, Desmond and Dena, with similar chiming names.
It was odd that they didn't decide to name her after a saint (there is actually a Saint Sara, who is black, mythical, and dear to the Romany -but they did not know that at the time). They did at least give her the classic Roman Catholic girl's name Mary as a second choice.
Well, that was my Mum and my Dad. The book she was reading was Sheilah Graham's account of her love affair with F Scott Fitzgerald (which I should get around to reading one day) and the baby of course was me.
Never knowingly puctual...
Monday, 10 May 2010
A Job Well Done
I follow a wonderfully-named blog called "lathophobic aphasia" http://giaklamata.blogspot.com/
by a chap with a lot of EFL under his belt and an excellent take on the joys and sorrows of the English teacher's life. He's been talking recently about "learner English" aka comic learner errors, a subject beloved of all EFLers.
As it happens I've been marking and reviewing writing exams. Here are a few of the delights I've stumbled upon (the topic was whether old people should be cared for by their families or in special homes).
I think tace car for the old People it well be like wine you take care for your sealdrenor your babey.
Thay need more care for food ho thiy eat and take abath and sleap also and if thay sike not soud yo bo you well thake him far the housebetal.
In my opening the beast please to be old people fine is home with family.
Another thing meny some of the people desn’t like niers, you wan’t help you one in you family.
I conclusion I hop every one to do what the beast for old people in my opeining everyone do this with any pearse.
Alson, the children meby bess in oyr live our withe them family so the will not tok care with bernts.
Meade the havi some desses and the should get madecen but the forget takeit then they will be very secia and ne one the new.
And I listen all people put the old man in the sameplaces.
Some people now put your mother and father of you old people on the special hospital and no need old people on your house.
In conctusion…
The interesting thing to note is that it's usually pretty clear what they are trying to say - in fact, if you read it aloud and allow for L1 interference (my students are Gulf Arabic speakers) and pronunciation confusions (p/b for instance), indifference to vowels in spelling, plus inadequate spacing between words, you can understand almost everything here - though I drew a blank on part of the second sentence - soud is presumable should, but yo bo I do' 'no'.
So the students are, in spite of appearences, getting somewhere. The problems are
a) knowing where to start in helping them
b) overcoming the horrors that the "surface errors" inspire in any teacher and most native speakers.
Anyway, reading these scripts made me feel fairly secia, but I try not to get mad(ecen). Definitely not soud yo bo, bro!
In conctusion, (but certainly not in my opening) I’m going home.
It’s the beast place for me.
I’ll check there are no old people on my house, especially not the mother and father of you old people, who must be ancient.
I’m planning to do something tonight that will be like wine.
A LOT like wine.
by a chap with a lot of EFL under his belt and an excellent take on the joys and sorrows of the English teacher's life. He's been talking recently about "learner English" aka comic learner errors, a subject beloved of all EFLers.
As it happens I've been marking and reviewing writing exams. Here are a few of the delights I've stumbled upon (the topic was whether old people should be cared for by their families or in special homes).
I think tace car for the old People it well be like wine you take care for your sealdrenor your babey.
Thay need more care for food ho thiy eat and take abath and sleap also and if thay sike not soud yo bo you well thake him far the housebetal.
In my opening the beast please to be old people fine is home with family.
Another thing meny some of the people desn’t like niers, you wan’t help you one in you family.
I conclusion I hop every one to do what the beast for old people in my opeining everyone do this with any pearse.
Alson, the children meby bess in oyr live our withe them family so the will not tok care with bernts.
Meade the havi some desses and the should get madecen but the forget takeit then they will be very secia and ne one the new.
And I listen all people put the old man in the sameplaces.
Some people now put your mother and father of you old people on the special hospital and no need old people on your house.
In conctusion…
The interesting thing to note is that it's usually pretty clear what they are trying to say - in fact, if you read it aloud and allow for L1 interference (my students are Gulf Arabic speakers) and pronunciation confusions (p/b for instance), indifference to vowels in spelling, plus inadequate spacing between words, you can understand almost everything here - though I drew a blank on part of the second sentence - soud is presumable should, but yo bo I do' 'no'.
So the students are, in spite of appearences, getting somewhere. The problems are
a) knowing where to start in helping them
b) overcoming the horrors that the "surface errors" inspire in any teacher and most native speakers.
Anyway, reading these scripts made me feel fairly secia, but I try not to get mad(ecen). Definitely not soud yo bo, bro!
In conctusion, (but certainly not in my opening) I’m going home.
It’s the beast place for me.
I’ll check there are no old people on my house, especially not the mother and father of you old people, who must be ancient.
I’m planning to do something tonight that will be like wine.
A LOT like wine.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
Sexual Abuse
I blogged below about the sexual abuse which, it turns out, went on for many years at the school where my 3 brothers went and where my father taught from 1948 until his death in 1974. The school, Saint Benedict's, is run by the Benedictine monks of Ealing Abbey, which was also our parish church. One of the convicted abusers, David Pearce, was a priest at the Abbey. The other, John Maestri, was the maths teacher, and a family friend.
Since writing about it I have heard credible accounts from a close friend and ex-pupil at St Ben's of abuse by Maestri and by another monk, Fr Lawrence Soper, who is currently in Rome. Other allegations that I have heard indirectly name two other monks at the Abbey - one still alive, and in fact one of the trustees of the school, and the other now dead.
The deceased monk was head of the junior school when we were small - and I remember that my mother told me my elder two brothers did not start at the school at the age of five, as they could have done, because my father did not want them around this monk. I always assumed it was because that monk was heavy-handed with the cane, but now I wonder.
Well, Pearce was finally brought to justice after 30 years of complaints against him. In the last few years he was put on a restricted ministry and supposed to have no access to children (officially, according to the Abbey, the "protect him against false accusations"). Nevertheless, he was still able to find a minor to abuse. He was jailed for 8 years, after the court heard the testimony of some of his victims.
Fine, but on Friday his appeal to have his sentence reduced was heard, and it succeeded. He's now down to 5 years. The really extraordinary thing was the statement of the judge, as reported in the Times, that Pearce's activities should not be "elevated to the status of a crime". In which case, why on earth is sexual abuse of minors prosecuted at all?
What the judge seems to mean is that Pearce manipulated, groomed, emotionally blackmailed, groped, fondled and snogged boys in his care, and for whom he was headmaster, priest, and possibly also their confessor. He did not penetrate them, so it's not serious. Possibly also the judge thinks that as they were boys (some as young as 11) it doesn't matter so much. Well, we all know what boys are like, don't we?
In the words of Private Eye "this justice should be seen to be done."
Since writing about it I have heard credible accounts from a close friend and ex-pupil at St Ben's of abuse by Maestri and by another monk, Fr Lawrence Soper, who is currently in Rome. Other allegations that I have heard indirectly name two other monks at the Abbey - one still alive, and in fact one of the trustees of the school, and the other now dead.
The deceased monk was head of the junior school when we were small - and I remember that my mother told me my elder two brothers did not start at the school at the age of five, as they could have done, because my father did not want them around this monk. I always assumed it was because that monk was heavy-handed with the cane, but now I wonder.
Well, Pearce was finally brought to justice after 30 years of complaints against him. In the last few years he was put on a restricted ministry and supposed to have no access to children (officially, according to the Abbey, the "protect him against false accusations"). Nevertheless, he was still able to find a minor to abuse. He was jailed for 8 years, after the court heard the testimony of some of his victims.
Fine, but on Friday his appeal to have his sentence reduced was heard, and it succeeded. He's now down to 5 years. The really extraordinary thing was the statement of the judge, as reported in the Times, that Pearce's activities should not be "elevated to the status of a crime". In which case, why on earth is sexual abuse of minors prosecuted at all?
What the judge seems to mean is that Pearce manipulated, groomed, emotionally blackmailed, groped, fondled and snogged boys in his care, and for whom he was headmaster, priest, and possibly also their confessor. He did not penetrate them, so it's not serious. Possibly also the judge thinks that as they were boys (some as young as 11) it doesn't matter so much. Well, we all know what boys are like, don't we?
In the words of Private Eye "this justice should be seen to be done."
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Beads and bead-related...
Beading is currently my new craze... not sure whether it's the scent of the glue or what, but I find making paper beads quite addictive. It's getting too hot to go our much so indoor activities are more appealling. Plus, I had a rush of blood to the head, accompanied by a rush of money from the pocket, at the Global Village this year, and bought lots of beads and semi precious stones to work into jewellery.
Then a friend who is an absolute beading fiend, found all these amazing shops in Dragonmart...
For those who don't know the Plague Pits of Mammon -- sorry, I mean Dubai -- Dragonmart is an enormous wobbly warehouse on the outskirts (insofar as Dubai, which has no centre, can be said to have outskirts.
Dragonmart is different from the average Mall in that it is entirely Chinese, mainly tiny little stalls and shops with names like Modern Appliance Trading Co (which sells, as you'd expect from the name, frilly baskets). Basically it is a cross between a souk, a Shanghai slum and the very biggest mound of tat you have ever seen or imagined in your life multiplied by ten.
Wander round there for five minutes and you wonder just how deep the Chinese tat mines can possibly be. Lots of shops sell beading suplies and what the jewellery trade rather bafflingly calls findings (the bits of wire, catches, spacer beads, etc that you string your beads on or use to stop them falling off the chain. I plundered.
Making paper beads, though, requires very little equipment - just toothpicks, glue, something to stick the toothpick into (I was using half a potato at first, but I've since acquired an old piece of polystyrene which does very well), scissors and paper. Thin magazine paper is good, but I've also had some fun with wrapping paper. I get pretty stuck on experimenting with shapes and colours. So far I've made two necklaces and a pair of earrings from paper beads and have dozens of beads in various stages of completion on the go.
Then a friend who is an absolute beading fiend, found all these amazing shops in Dragonmart...
For those who don't know the Plague Pits of Mammon -- sorry, I mean Dubai -- Dragonmart is an enormous wobbly warehouse on the outskirts (insofar as Dubai, which has no centre, can be said to have outskirts.
Dragonmart is different from the average Mall in that it is entirely Chinese, mainly tiny little stalls and shops with names like Modern Appliance Trading Co (which sells, as you'd expect from the name, frilly baskets). Basically it is a cross between a souk, a Shanghai slum and the very biggest mound of tat you have ever seen or imagined in your life multiplied by ten.
Wander round there for five minutes and you wonder just how deep the Chinese tat mines can possibly be. Lots of shops sell beading suplies and what the jewellery trade rather bafflingly calls findings (the bits of wire, catches, spacer beads, etc that you string your beads on or use to stop them falling off the chain. I plundered.
Making paper beads, though, requires very little equipment - just toothpicks, glue, something to stick the toothpick into (I was using half a potato at first, but I've since acquired an old piece of polystyrene which does very well), scissors and paper. Thin magazine paper is good, but I've also had some fun with wrapping paper. I get pretty stuck on experimenting with shapes and colours. So far I've made two necklaces and a pair of earrings from paper beads and have dozens of beads in various stages of completion on the go.
Sunday, 14 March 2010
In theory...
Recently I exchanged a number of emails with my supervisor and the Human Resources person where I work, which resulted in a deeply philosophical conundrum.
The background to this is that I am leaving in June as I don't want to renew my contract here, but have accrued 16 days of leave that I am due.
First, I wanted to know what would happen about that leave I'm owed.
Instant and very clear answer from HR. I will be paid in lieu. Great.
Next I wanted to know if I could take a single day of that leave during the semester. There is one working day coming up when (for that day only) I have no teaching. I also won't be required for exams or for marking sessions. Could I take that single day off?
The HR person said "Certainly, if your supervisor approves it."
The Supervisor said "It's unprecendented and it can't be done."
I said "OK, but HR seem to think differently."
Supervisor replied "HR was talking theoretically about institution policy. Honestly I've asked "higher" and "higher" says it can't be permitted."
I thought of emailing Supe to elucidate the difference between a theoretical policy of yes which always in practice comes in as a no, and an actual and admitted policy of no... but I decided not to.
Just as well.
I'm pretty sure Supe doesn't see there is one.
(It occurs to me to hope that the payment in lieu will not merely be a theoretical one...)
The background to this is that I am leaving in June as I don't want to renew my contract here, but have accrued 16 days of leave that I am due.
First, I wanted to know what would happen about that leave I'm owed.
Instant and very clear answer from HR. I will be paid in lieu. Great.
Next I wanted to know if I could take a single day of that leave during the semester. There is one working day coming up when (for that day only) I have no teaching. I also won't be required for exams or for marking sessions. Could I take that single day off?
The HR person said "Certainly, if your supervisor approves it."
The Supervisor said "It's unprecendented and it can't be done."
I said "OK, but HR seem to think differently."
Supervisor replied "HR was talking theoretically about institution policy. Honestly I've asked "higher" and "higher" says it can't be permitted."
I thought of emailing Supe to elucidate the difference between a theoretical policy of yes which always in practice comes in as a no, and an actual and admitted policy of no... but I decided not to.
Just as well.
I'm pretty sure Supe doesn't see there is one.
(It occurs to me to hope that the payment in lieu will not merely be a theoretical one...)
Saturday, 6 March 2010
A roof over my head
Been very quiet for a while. Partly work and then holiday in England, during which I was offline for a massive 12 days (and saw the sun once, for half of a morning). Then back at work and job hunting - ah dear. I may just have possibly ever so very slightly mistimed my resignation, as the job market is pretty poor at the moment in my target areas and lots of people I would like to work for not hiring. Hey ho... Will be attending the job fair at TESOL Arabia next weekend and hope there will be a couple of possibles.
In the meantime, work on the tiny hovel in England has restarted and moved into phase ... what is it now? Phase 97? 324? I've lost track. Anyway, after the stripping of the carpets and the cleaning which was more like archaology, and tearing out the hideous fireplace, and putting in the woodburner, and new windows, and new doors, and a new boiler, and central heating, and underpinning the walls... we're now getting a new swing-a-rat kitchen and swing-an-undersized gerbil bathroom, yippee yiy yay!
Naturally as things get replaced or improved new defects occur - I was alarmed by a leaky roof blackened with mould, and news that the roof over the bathroom (a flat roof cobbled together in the 80s) was in a bad way. So we're getting a sedum roof put in (aka a living roof or a green roof), which I've thought was a great idea ever since I heard of them. Basically the roof is planted with a dense carpet of small plants that don't need that much care, so that instead of yet more tarmac - bad for runoff and flooding - there is at least something busy photosynthesising away. It won't reverse global warming, but it is quite a nice thing. Pity I can't grow veg on it (not strong enough for any depth of soil - the roof I mean, not me) as our garden space is the size of a tablecloth.
So it looks likely that come July I'll be back in the UK and jobhunting at a bad time, but I will have a niceish house to do it in. Count blessings... ONE.
In the meantime, work on the tiny hovel in England has restarted and moved into phase ... what is it now? Phase 97? 324? I've lost track. Anyway, after the stripping of the carpets and the cleaning which was more like archaology, and tearing out the hideous fireplace, and putting in the woodburner, and new windows, and new doors, and a new boiler, and central heating, and underpinning the walls... we're now getting a new swing-a-rat kitchen and swing-an-undersized gerbil bathroom, yippee yiy yay!
Naturally as things get replaced or improved new defects occur - I was alarmed by a leaky roof blackened with mould, and news that the roof over the bathroom (a flat roof cobbled together in the 80s) was in a bad way. So we're getting a sedum roof put in (aka a living roof or a green roof), which I've thought was a great idea ever since I heard of them. Basically the roof is planted with a dense carpet of small plants that don't need that much care, so that instead of yet more tarmac - bad for runoff and flooding - there is at least something busy photosynthesising away. It won't reverse global warming, but it is quite a nice thing. Pity I can't grow veg on it (not strong enough for any depth of soil - the roof I mean, not me) as our garden space is the size of a tablecloth.
So it looks likely that come July I'll be back in the UK and jobhunting at a bad time, but I will have a niceish house to do it in. Count blessings... ONE.
Monday, 28 December 2009
Gruesome
I grew up a Roman Catholic, in a London parish attached to Ealing Abbey, a Benedictine foundation. The Abbey also runs a school, run and taught by monks and lay teachers, where all 3 of my brothers went, and where my father taught History, Classics and advised on careers.
In recent years one of the monks (a former head of the junior school) was accused of sexually abusing boys, suspended from serving, and investigated by the police. Dom David Pearce was found guilty and jailed for 8 years. The Charity Commission has investigated and criticised the Abbey for its handling of the case - you can find the report here:
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/investigations/inquiryreports/benedicts.asp
I remember Father David well - and remember that my brothers and their friends disliked him greatly. Perhaps now I have some idea why that was!
What makes it more appalling and baffling is that he continued to abuse after he was suspended and under police investigation. I can't imagine what he was thinking (was he mad? was he addicted? did he think he was immune?)
It also seems pretty clear that the Abbey did not do enough to protect young people in their care, and that they need to sort themselves out. The Abbot apparently apologised during Mass to the parishioners, but I wonder whether lessons have actually been learned.
A personal sideline on the story - and a terrible warning, if you like - is that David Pearce had himself been a pupil at St Benedicts. He left the 6th Form intending to become a dentist, but my father, who was his careers advisor, made the following note about him: "priest?"
For years after my father's death, my mother mentioned that as an example of my Dad's wonderful insight....
Arrghhhh!
Of course if Pearce had gone on to become a dentist and abused young lads from that position of trust, the profession of dentistry would have been horribly tarnished instead.
In recent years one of the monks (a former head of the junior school) was accused of sexually abusing boys, suspended from serving, and investigated by the police. Dom David Pearce was found guilty and jailed for 8 years. The Charity Commission has investigated and criticised the Abbey for its handling of the case - you can find the report here:
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/investigations/inquiryreports/benedicts.asp
I remember Father David well - and remember that my brothers and their friends disliked him greatly. Perhaps now I have some idea why that was!
What makes it more appalling and baffling is that he continued to abuse after he was suspended and under police investigation. I can't imagine what he was thinking (was he mad? was he addicted? did he think he was immune?)
It also seems pretty clear that the Abbey did not do enough to protect young people in their care, and that they need to sort themselves out. The Abbot apparently apologised during Mass to the parishioners, but I wonder whether lessons have actually been learned.
A personal sideline on the story - and a terrible warning, if you like - is that David Pearce had himself been a pupil at St Benedicts. He left the 6th Form intending to become a dentist, but my father, who was his careers advisor, made the following note about him: "priest?"
For years after my father's death, my mother mentioned that as an example of my Dad's wonderful insight....
Arrghhhh!
Of course if Pearce had gone on to become a dentist and abused young lads from that position of trust, the profession of dentistry would have been horribly tarnished instead.
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