For my father the whole practical benefit of my education was demonstrated one Christmas when, using my trusty compass I constructed a six pointed star for the top of the tree.
This geometric wonder elicited a damned-with-faint-praise encomium on the value for money that Cardiff High School had provided for my family.
After a number of years the star became an essential part of my family’s cynical post modernist take on the shallow commercial promise that Christmas became. I might add that the grotesque parody of a tree that was topped with the increasingly tatty star only added to the general contempt that we felt for the festival.
If it wasn’t for my mother’s cooking and the increasingly hasty wrapping of excellent presents we might have given up the festival altogether.
My painstaking achievement of a cardboard star rose to mind this morning as the week of Carnival dawned in school. The promise of a funny hat (essential garb for day one of the Carnival week) was not fulfilled by Toni and I searched high and low in a fruitless search for a hat which I could (somehow) have made funny.
In the event I reached school with no hysterical headgear and therefore had to set about making something with which to pacify my class.
Minutes later with the help of a large sheet of black sugar paper and origami skills a dead Japanese slug would have been ashamed of I had produced something which could perch on my head.
Triangular in conception and reminiscent of the headgear of our greatest admirals in Britain’s Golden Age of Maritime Achievement and bedecked with lines of silver and gold this wonderful head covering also sported a yellow cardboard feather on one side with the worlds most badly drawn daffodil in similar yellow cardboard on the other. The band of golden boarder paper added that final touch of elegant distinction to a masterpiece of crafted paper sartorial style.
The kids were stunned which is just as well as it is very difficult to maintain academic respectability while looking like a poor man’s Robin Hood! Luckily the kids also had absurd headwear including one girl who had a white hat with a toy hippo wearing a bell. You can always trust kids to freak you out!
We had our first rehearsal for the detail of what we want the kids to do as our contribution to the parade in Carnival. The kids responded well to impromptu direction and a somewhat hackneyed storyline involving kings, queens, knights and dragons. The only problem, as the eight year old ‘court ladies’ pointed out was “We don’t do anything but stand around and then fall over.” Fair point! So I have decided that their actions will be in bandaging the knights as they creep back to court “bloody but unbowed.” All this to the music of The Grand March from ‘Aïda’ – never let it be said that we lack the intellectual courage to go for cheap emotional overkill.
With the crowd waving their sea horse flags!
Don’t ask!
This geometric wonder elicited a damned-with-faint-praise encomium on the value for money that Cardiff High School had provided for my family.
After a number of years the star became an essential part of my family’s cynical post modernist take on the shallow commercial promise that Christmas became. I might add that the grotesque parody of a tree that was topped with the increasingly tatty star only added to the general contempt that we felt for the festival.
If it wasn’t for my mother’s cooking and the increasingly hasty wrapping of excellent presents we might have given up the festival altogether.
My painstaking achievement of a cardboard star rose to mind this morning as the week of Carnival dawned in school. The promise of a funny hat (essential garb for day one of the Carnival week) was not fulfilled by Toni and I searched high and low in a fruitless search for a hat which I could (somehow) have made funny.
In the event I reached school with no hysterical headgear and therefore had to set about making something with which to pacify my class.
Minutes later with the help of a large sheet of black sugar paper and origami skills a dead Japanese slug would have been ashamed of I had produced something which could perch on my head.
Triangular in conception and reminiscent of the headgear of our greatest admirals in Britain’s Golden Age of Maritime Achievement and bedecked with lines of silver and gold this wonderful head covering also sported a yellow cardboard feather on one side with the worlds most badly drawn daffodil in similar yellow cardboard on the other. The band of golden boarder paper added that final touch of elegant distinction to a masterpiece of crafted paper sartorial style.
The kids were stunned which is just as well as it is very difficult to maintain academic respectability while looking like a poor man’s Robin Hood! Luckily the kids also had absurd headwear including one girl who had a white hat with a toy hippo wearing a bell. You can always trust kids to freak you out!
We had our first rehearsal for the detail of what we want the kids to do as our contribution to the parade in Carnival. The kids responded well to impromptu direction and a somewhat hackneyed storyline involving kings, queens, knights and dragons. The only problem, as the eight year old ‘court ladies’ pointed out was “We don’t do anything but stand around and then fall over.” Fair point! So I have decided that their actions will be in bandaging the knights as they creep back to court “bloody but unbowed.” All this to the music of The Grand March from ‘Aïda’ – never let it be said that we lack the intellectual courage to go for cheap emotional overkill.
With the crowd waving their sea horse flags!
Don’t ask!
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