Although it is not the middle of January, I am contemplating broken resolutions.
I realise that middle of January is a little optimistic for me, but we literary folk can take a few justifiable spins with the truth. I determined, before I went on holiday to Mallorca that I would use Meic Stephens’ ‘A Most Peculiar People’ a book of quotations by and about the Welsh and Wales as the inspiration for a series of short stories. I would open the book at random, point the finger and use the quotation indicated as the starting point for my literary creations. I would be in Mallorca for eight days; therefore I could produce at least six stories.
It has been two weeks since our thirty minute flight home (how strange it is still to say things like that) and I have finally finished the sixth story on the beach today. Frailty, thy name is writing resolutions!
One of the many problems about being a teacher (or indeed having been a teacher) is that tenses make very little difference to your professional status: once a teacher; always a teacher. Some things might fade and change, but there is always the possibility of an instant reversion to type when considering a piece of work. You can see this most clearly when a doting parent (who is also a friend) presses an example of their offspring’s artistic, literary or scientific achievement upon someone who is not a blood relative and waits for confirmation that their scion is indeed “very advanced.” I have learned that “very advanced” is in the same category of meaningless utterances such as “we are striving to make everyone above average” – something I have always blamed That Woman for saying; even if she didn’t, it expresses an aspect of her cracked dogma and she probably thought it anyway.)
With some of my colleagues who have been placed in this invidious position I have watched with wry amusement as their normal professional mode assesses the work placed in front of them and produces a result which is accurate but not acceptable to any self respecting parent of an exceptional child, so a form of words is used which is nicely ambiguous enough to satisfy both parties.
So when it comes to your own productions of creative writing, when you are an English teacher, it is very difficult to step outside of ‘coursework mode’ and not assess the work as a possible inclusion in a GCSE folder. With that in mind, I find it difficult to place my efforts at anything beyond, “Clear A*; some excellent expression; a few wayward spellings, but should not detract from some fairly professional writing; will make an excellent AS student.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but I suppose that I am looking for something more than that. And I suppose that something more can come if I regard my efforts as a first draft and I take some time to revise and redraft and . . . but then, you see, I’m living on the beach by the sea and the sun is shining and . . . It’s not difficult to fill in the gaps!
I have been wondering about fireworks.
This is the time of the Festa Major of Castelldefels and the one thing that you can guarantee about any festival in Spain is that there will be fireworks. My camera has a special setting for taking pictures of fireworks and, although I have seen many firework displays I have taken only a few photographs. This is not because I have forgotten the camera as the more cynical among you might have thought, but rather because, when a firework display starts that you can pick me out because I am one of the few adults staring at the sky in open mouthed childish amazement like, in fact, a kid.
In the way that I do, I have tried to work out just why fireworks are so appealing. You will note that I have taken my fascination to be the normal response. Any one who is not fascinated is abnormal and therefore outside the scope of this analysis.
So the umpteen reasons for liking fireworks are:
1. They are attractive and, as we know, black is the perfect colour for showing off the bright and the glittering. The aesthetic is never accepted as a compelling reason for anything; take for example my collecting British First Day Covers (There’s an admission for you!) I was once asked by a philatelist why I collected them and my response of; “I think they are very attractive!” didn’t seem to impress him much.
2. They are an exhilarating total waste of public money; unjustifiable and criminal with so many other worthy things needing limited cash.
3. They are unique: no two fireworks can possibly be exactly the same.
4. They are brief. I don’t just mean the individual fireworks but the show as well. An hour’s worth of decent fireworks is the equivalent of the GNP of a medium sized African country.
5. They create a sense of wonder in a world that is rapidly losing the ability to be awed by anything apart from the salaries of kickball players – equivalent to the GNP of the African Continent.
6. They make you look up and out: which is a good perspective.
7. They remind the spectators of the brevity of human existence.
8. They are the ultimate existential experience: they explode in a showy display and fade to nothingness. They exist for the moment and nothing more.
9. They are a visual confutation of the Expanding Universe Theory.
10. They demonstrate, “the rest is silence.”
I could go on but you might think that I was over buttering the cake, or whatever the accurate culinary metaphor actually is.
Talking of the kitchen I thoroughly recommend a dish I had as part of a menu Del dia recently. It was basically spinach but served with pine nuts, chopped onion, sultanas, a touch of chilli and chickpeas – delicious; it can be served as a vegetable or as a dish by itself.
Never let it be said that I don’t eat and learn.
I realise that middle of January is a little optimistic for me, but we literary folk can take a few justifiable spins with the truth. I determined, before I went on holiday to Mallorca that I would use Meic Stephens’ ‘A Most Peculiar People’ a book of quotations by and about the Welsh and Wales as the inspiration for a series of short stories. I would open the book at random, point the finger and use the quotation indicated as the starting point for my literary creations. I would be in Mallorca for eight days; therefore I could produce at least six stories.
It has been two weeks since our thirty minute flight home (how strange it is still to say things like that) and I have finally finished the sixth story on the beach today. Frailty, thy name is writing resolutions!
One of the many problems about being a teacher (or indeed having been a teacher) is that tenses make very little difference to your professional status: once a teacher; always a teacher. Some things might fade and change, but there is always the possibility of an instant reversion to type when considering a piece of work. You can see this most clearly when a doting parent (who is also a friend) presses an example of their offspring’s artistic, literary or scientific achievement upon someone who is not a blood relative and waits for confirmation that their scion is indeed “very advanced.” I have learned that “very advanced” is in the same category of meaningless utterances such as “we are striving to make everyone above average” – something I have always blamed That Woman for saying; even if she didn’t, it expresses an aspect of her cracked dogma and she probably thought it anyway.)
With some of my colleagues who have been placed in this invidious position I have watched with wry amusement as their normal professional mode assesses the work placed in front of them and produces a result which is accurate but not acceptable to any self respecting parent of an exceptional child, so a form of words is used which is nicely ambiguous enough to satisfy both parties.
So when it comes to your own productions of creative writing, when you are an English teacher, it is very difficult to step outside of ‘coursework mode’ and not assess the work as a possible inclusion in a GCSE folder. With that in mind, I find it difficult to place my efforts at anything beyond, “Clear A*; some excellent expression; a few wayward spellings, but should not detract from some fairly professional writing; will make an excellent AS student.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but I suppose that I am looking for something more than that. And I suppose that something more can come if I regard my efforts as a first draft and I take some time to revise and redraft and . . . but then, you see, I’m living on the beach by the sea and the sun is shining and . . . It’s not difficult to fill in the gaps!
I have been wondering about fireworks.
This is the time of the Festa Major of Castelldefels and the one thing that you can guarantee about any festival in Spain is that there will be fireworks. My camera has a special setting for taking pictures of fireworks and, although I have seen many firework displays I have taken only a few photographs. This is not because I have forgotten the camera as the more cynical among you might have thought, but rather because, when a firework display starts that you can pick me out because I am one of the few adults staring at the sky in open mouthed childish amazement like, in fact, a kid.
In the way that I do, I have tried to work out just why fireworks are so appealing. You will note that I have taken my fascination to be the normal response. Any one who is not fascinated is abnormal and therefore outside the scope of this analysis.
So the umpteen reasons for liking fireworks are:
1. They are attractive and, as we know, black is the perfect colour for showing off the bright and the glittering. The aesthetic is never accepted as a compelling reason for anything; take for example my collecting British First Day Covers (There’s an admission for you!) I was once asked by a philatelist why I collected them and my response of; “I think they are very attractive!” didn’t seem to impress him much.
2. They are an exhilarating total waste of public money; unjustifiable and criminal with so many other worthy things needing limited cash.
3. They are unique: no two fireworks can possibly be exactly the same.
4. They are brief. I don’t just mean the individual fireworks but the show as well. An hour’s worth of decent fireworks is the equivalent of the GNP of a medium sized African country.
5. They create a sense of wonder in a world that is rapidly losing the ability to be awed by anything apart from the salaries of kickball players – equivalent to the GNP of the African Continent.
6. They make you look up and out: which is a good perspective.
7. They remind the spectators of the brevity of human existence.
8. They are the ultimate existential experience: they explode in a showy display and fade to nothingness. They exist for the moment and nothing more.
9. They are a visual confutation of the Expanding Universe Theory.
10. They demonstrate, “the rest is silence.”
I could go on but you might think that I was over buttering the cake, or whatever the accurate culinary metaphor actually is.
Talking of the kitchen I thoroughly recommend a dish I had as part of a menu Del dia recently. It was basically spinach but served with pine nuts, chopped onion, sultanas, a touch of chilli and chickpeas – delicious; it can be served as a vegetable or as a dish by itself.
Never let it be said that I don’t eat and learn.
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