What kind of job is Pope?

Last week’s most unexpected story was the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Roman Catholic Church. When I say unexpected, I mean it. A number of sources - mostly traceable to the Ur-source, Wikipedia - reported that it’s the first time a pope has resigned in 600 years, but it’s actually rarer than that. In 1415 three popes (or "popes") resigned simultaneously, because none of them could convince the rest of Christendom of his legitimacy. The RCC seems to have decided in retrospect, I don’t know on what basis, that one of these three, Gregory XII, was the proper pope and shouldn’t have needed to resign after all, in spite of his having been elected by a mere handful of cardinals, but at the time it was one of those historical deadlocks like the Schleswig-Holstein question to which nobody knew the answer. (The history of Anti-Popes, from the same University of Wiki, is most entertaining, by the way).

But Papa Josef Ratzinger has no rivals to the title. There are about five popes currently heading small denominations (two papacies became vacant in 2011), but there is not currently an Anti-Pope in the running for top Catholic. The last undisputed pope to resign was poor old Celestine V, in 1294, and Dante put him, or someone who looks a lot like him, into the ‘limbo of the futile’ for his pains. Celestine’s immediate successor as pope showed his gratitude by imprisoning the old man and then not feeding him, but he was canonized almost as soon as he was cold, which was probably not as much consolation as a few buns might have been. Celestine’s only other Papal act was to proclaim the principle that popes can resign.

Anyway, we are witnessing a one-in-800-year event. The Italians have a saying ogni morte del’ Papa (every time a Pope dies) meaning once in a blue moon, but compared with resignations, popes’ deaths are as common as mayflies’ and blue moons as mundane as midday.

There are a lot of strange things about this story. One of the strangest is how quickly it has been normalized, as it dawned on everyone how apparently sane and sensible this astonishing decision actually is. The Pope is 85, in fragile health, and has reportedly been advised not to travel. In any other line of work, retirement at this juncture would be remarkable only for the fact that the soon-to-be-retiree had gone on for so very long already. Pope makes sensible announcement, shock, horror.

But it’s also curious to consider the line of work he is in. The Pope is not simply a priest and a religious leader, but also a head of state. An absolute head of state, for all that he’s elected, and you don’t get many of those any more. Vatican State is the last absolute monarchy left in Europe, and the only theocracy.

Citizenship in this micro-state is determined by religious affiliation, which is true of a few other states in the world. But simply being a Catholic does not in itself get you a Vatican City passport. You have to be a high-ranking member of the clerical hierarchy – and therefore, male. Vatican City is a state which has no native-born citizens, and citizenship rights are granted purely on the basis of occupation. It seems to have few female citizens, as far as I can tell: the language of the Vatican website, which notes that in certain circumstances, citizenship may be extended to employees’ spouses, is carefully gender neutral, but one somehow doubts the Vatican is an equal-opportunity employer. Of its 800-odd citizens, three-quarters are celibate male clerics and most of the rest are members of the in-house mercenary army, the Swiss Guards.  Lose your job, and you are quite likely to lose your passport with it. If you find yourself stateless as well as unemployed after a particularly hard day at the Holy Office, the Italian state is treaty-bound to take up the slack. Citizenship does not enfranchise you to vote for your absolute monarch, either: that’s done by Cardinals (so long as they’re under 80) who for the most part are not actually citizens of the state whose ruler they are electing.

By far the oddest thing of all is that this bizarre theocratic uni-gender statelet sits on numerous international bodies and commissions, and has voting rights on many of them (not the UN, though, in a rare example of someone being sensible). It uses its position to affect international agreements on laws which govern all of us – notably those which affect women’s lives - and to avoid jurisdiction in matters, such as banking transparency, which most normal states are supposed to abide by.

This is as strange as if Barclays Bank or Tescos had managed to get a few acres of land to hoist their flag over and managed to persuade everyone to agree they were states. But citizenship in BarclayCity or Tescopolis would not be available to the employees, not for shelf-stackers or counter staff or even for the regional managers, and certainly not for the depositors or the customers, even those with loyalty cards - but reserved for just a very few top members of the board, holders of some kind of super Clubcard. Then imagine that this ersatz statehood gave the bank or the supermarket a seat on the international organizations who make decisions about, lets say, tax laws, or town planning. 

In the meantime, a million Pope jokes have succeeded and combined with those about horsemeat in burgers, Chris Huhne and his marriage, and so on. My personal favourite is that when Ratzinger ceases to be Pope he will return to being known as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger: and Ex Benedict, in fact.

NB 'A Hard Day At The Holy Office' is the title of a novel which was published, I think, in the 1970s. I've never read it, or seen a copy, but based on the title alone I'd love to. 

Signs of life

Hmm, well it's been a thin year on the posting front. For various reasons, good, bad and indifferent. What's to say?

It's winter. Cold and most impressive (I'm still not used to it) dark. This is something I do find difficult after years under brighter skies. I mean, it isn't JUST the fact that between 4 pm and 8 am it is actually too dark to see without lights on - though it is certainly that - but even when it's light, it's dark. If you see what I mean. East Anglia is one of the sunnier parts of these Isles, and one of the less rainy locations, too, but most days have been dingy to say the least. On the other hand, you do get some good effects: a red sunrise the other morning and today, the thin sliver of bright gold moon low down in the eastern sky just before dawn.

So, today - not working at the moment - I made chocolate nut bon-bons with beech nuts and brandy, went to the allotment (I just went, I didn't do anything very useful there!), sketched out the story I'm going to tell tomorrow and did several other errands. At one point I was attached to a machine to have my heart monitored, just in case the chest pains and numb left arm I've been having were something nastier that just muscle problems. They aren't. I just seem to have a slightly dodgy neck bone which is making bits of me hurt elsewhere. It still hurts, but it's good to know it's no worse than that.

Tomorrow I take delivery of a pear tree, a cherry, two vines and 8 raspberry canes for the allotment. Yippee yiy yay!

I'm also doing a turn (singing and a story) tomorrow at a Victorian Christmas Evening, wearing a replica costume made for the 2012 Olympics. It is obviously based on the illustrations for Jane Eyre. So, to get an appropriate look for the night, I have for the first time ever bought myself a hair net and some hair pins.

Is there no end to the excitement in my life?

Watch this space...

Proof At Last!

Just a line to say that I finished the final proofs of Ghosts International: Troll and Other Stories today. Phewwee. Hurrah! It's expected to be out 20th July, barring conniptions.

The mountain quivered and brought forth a flea (half-remembered misquote from somewhere), meaning a lot of effort for a small (but perfectly formed) result.

In other news: B and I are working on a show in which I spin a web of tales connected with the sea, and B and I will sing some songs and shanties to explicate and illustrate the same. Tradition with a twist, something of that kind.

Taking a massive flight into imaginative brand development, we've come up with a name for the show which we think expresses something unique and marvellous about it.

Here it is: Stories and Songs of the Sea.

D'you like it?

We did consider Songs and Stories of the Sea, but the focus group decided it could be confusing.

All we've got to do now is come up with a name for ourselves. It's a bit of a short change to say Sarah Walker (with Barrie de Lara), as if he were a mere adjunct. So... maybe de Lara and Walker? With an ampersand: de Lara & Walker? Or de Lara/Walker? 

Now we know why I never went into marketing.

Gawain and the Green Knight

To Cambridge bouncing around in a very snug van (four in the back, no seats, some cushions, creaky bones) to the Cambridge Storytellers last week.

http://www.cambridgestorytellers.com/

And what did we do there?

We saw the fabulous Sarah Rundle there

http://www.sarahrundle.co.uk/

performing Gawain and the Green Knight: a medieval tale of fantasy, treachery, wild animals, noble deeds, beautiful ladies, indestructable monsters, a magic axe, complicated family relationships and much much more.

It was very good.

It was, as someone commented in the van on the way back, a performance. Elements of standup in it for example: when Gawain is faced with a decision, it appeared as a powerpoint presentation (bubble/diamond) across the stage.

When I say 'appeared', I mean, of course, 'didn't appear at all'.

Sarah told us about it and acted it out and made us imagine it in glorious technicolour. Well, largely green: there really was some glowing vivid green as a backdrop, but... we were also imagining all the other colours. Especially white (teeth) and red (blood), thanks to a terrifying sung passage about Mr Fox.

And this is the power of the spoken (sung, acted) word.

The pictures are better.

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.

Things autumnal

Ah November, season of damps cramps colds and most of the birthdays in my family. It was B's yesterday, and - apart from having to go to work to pay for it all - we had a pretty nice day and some great pizza and wine at Pizza Express - still our favourite place to eat in spite of my not winning their invent-a-pizza competition (I came second. To be fair, the winning one was delicious, but I could have done with the prize money).
It hasn't been very cold but it has been quite damp: not raining, but foggy and condensation-y all over. And most days have been dark, too, overcast and foggy all day, with a few stunningly beautiful exceptions.
We put our clocks back two weeks ago, making the mornings lighter - although that did not last for long - and the evenings set in an hour earlier. As I type, at ten past three in the afternoon, it is too dull indoors not to have the lights on and it feels the dark is closing in. On some days now, we go out in the morning twilight and come home in darkness. It feels very Northern (though I suppose it could equally feel Southern, only in 6 months time). It also feels as though we should be spending much more time asleep than we actually do. The instinct to hibernate has always been strong in me (I may be closer to our burrowing ancestors than most people you'll meet), but I notice that the cats are sleeping much more (even) than usual.
The other things this time of year brings include colds and coughs. It's our second autumn back in England and only the first cold for both of us, so we've done pretty well, but it was a goodie. I blame the students.
Seriously, I do. In every class there is at least one student, and often three or four out of 16, with a massive cold but no hanky or tissues, and no idea that a rhythmic snuffling every 5 seconds gets tiresome after the first few hours. I'm considering inventing swine flu/bird flu/elephant flu/cat flu rumours to encourage everyone to wear those hygienic masks popular in Japan. I've read that the masks are not actually that useful but I don't care - it gives something to catch the.. ahem.. effluvia.
Richard II was said to be a pretty useless king of England. Shakespeare portrays him as vacillating, self-pitying and feeble in the play of the same name. Richard's cousin Bolingbroke certainly thought so, and decided he would make a much better king himself. He got the crown and sent Richard off to Pontefract, where he may have been stabbed or may have been starved, but in any case rapidly became unfit for consideration due to being dead.
But Richard is supposed to have brought the handkerchief into use in England and for that alone he deserves a statue... possibly one placed in every language school in the country, where students can observe, mark and follow his example.
If they won't, I wonder whether Pontefract castle still has dungeons? Just a thought.

Singing in the Forum

Saturday was the 10th Birthday of the forum, a large glass-topped building from which you can look out on a much finer one; St Peter Mancroft's. The Forum houses Pizza Express, a cafe, the local BBC studios and even a library - see what you need to do to get people into a library? Offer them pizza and beer.
It's a good building and a really great library - three libraries in one, the kids library, the American USAF library, and the Central. (Norfolk Council seems determined not to close any libraries, which is to be applauded).
Anyway, the celebrations involved much fun - Guardspersons on stilts, two Gentlemen of the Press in 1930s trench coats, storytelling (not by me), kids painting a specially erected painting wall, barbershop singing, and in the midst of it, a Flash Mob.
Do you Flash much? I never have before. Suddenly a portly gentleman burst into song in the library. He was homed in upon by people from all quarters of the place - not angry hushing librarians (a dying breed it seems to me) but singers. Men, then altos, then sopranos, lead by the lovely Meg Turpin. Oh... I see... it's a choir then. Yes indeed, for it was Norwich Community Choir. We sang and then, still singing, processed onto the glass balcony over the painting and crafting below. People looked up startled and delighted. We sang an African song - no idea what it meant, but the feeling and the harmonies were lovely. Some people were in tears (and NOT because they were saddened music lovers). Then we processed singing down the stairs and dispersed. We had been instructed to 'recruit men' - a perennial shortage in choirs. I'd brought my own along, but he already sings with the UEA choir. Heyho.
It was fun. We didn't sing happy birthday dear forum... maybe we should have.