less frequent posts

New posts will now appear intermittently and irregularly. My original plan, to post weekly, has already been amended, and I shall now blog occasionally instead of trying to keep to a certain frequency.

the art of slow travel

'Only poor people travel by bus.' Even if those words aren't actually spoken, that is the subtext of so many conversations about transport in Britain. Buses are for people who can't afford cars, for old people, who at least don't have to pay to travel on them, and for those who live out in the sticks. Conveniently, many bus travellers are in all three categories. Buses are infrequent, unreliable and squalid. A neighbour recently surprised me by implying that taking a bus journey would be equivalent to walking around in a black plastic bin bag.

Well, I often travel by bus, not because I'm poor, because I'm no poorer than most, or because I live out in the sticks, as I live on the edge of a small town within thirty miles of London, or because I'm old and don't have to pay, although I am and I don't. My poor sight made me give up driving forty-odd years ago, and I don't want to rely entirely on lifts, so I find short-distance bus travel convenient. The bus service in my area isn't marvellous but it isn't bad either, if I plan my journeys. Most of the buses turn up at more or less the expected times, the drivers are generally efficient and courteous, and the buses themselves, although they vary in standards of cleanliness and comfort according to the company and the season, are generally tolerable over short distances.

Sometimes people talk to each other at bus stops and on buses. The conversations may be predominantly phatic, but at least there is occasionally a sense of community. There is always the risk of encountering someone boorish, aggressive, over-familiar or loudly garrulous, or who takes up more than half the seat, but I enjoy the brief, polite conversations, whether on matters of parish pump, national or global importance, with people I half-know. It certainly beats standing in a tube while avoiding eye contact with utter strangers, but that is hardly a fair comparison.

Any road up, as a friend from the north used to say when leaving the B-road of chat to get back on to the A-road of relevance, this week I had one of my more extensive, intensive and interesting bus travel experiences. Partly as a joke and partly as an encouraging challenge, over a year ago I suggested to a friend who had had major surgery that, when he felt strong enough, we and our wives should see how far we could get by public service bus in a day, spend the next day sightseeing and return by bus the following day. This later crystallised into a plan, researched in detail on t'internet, to travel from the Chilterns to the Cotswolds. So it was that on Monday, taking only essential luggage, we travelled from Chesham to High Wycombe, changed for Aylesbury, where we had coffee, changed for Oxford, where we had lunch, changed for Swindon, where we spent only a few minutes, and changed for Cirencester, our destination (the locals just call it 'Ciren'). We stayed in a small hotel on the edge of town and spent Tuesday looking around, visiting the huge, ancient parish church, the outstanding Corinium Museum, recently placed in the top thirty out of thirty-four thousand entrants in Europe, and in the afternoon taking yet another bus to Bibury, a small village of great beauty. On Wednesday we came back via Cheltenham, Oxford and Wycombe. As the crow flies, Chesham and Cirencester are not very far apart; by car the journey would have taken only two or three hours, far less than the time we spent in transit. But that was and is not the point. We enjoyed the slow pace, the varied scenery, the changing accents. All the buses, from several different companies, including big ones such as Arriva and small ones such as Red Rose, departed and arrived within a few minutes of the scheduled times. Some were more comfortable, less noisy and less crowded than others, but every driver was unfailingly courteous. In short, the system worked, and we are already thinking about our next trip.

ripeness isn't all

King Lear may be a play about literal, metaphorical and symbolic loss of vision, yet Edgar wasn't talking about cataracts but about life and death (it's just as well he didn't get on to football). I have often heard that cataracts have to 'ripen' before they can be removed, but that no longer seems to be the case. The leaflet I was given on my last visit to my optometrist made that clear, but whether either of my cataracts, for I have one on each eye, is 'ripe' is unimportant now. What matters is that at a recent hospital visit the consultant ophthalmologist, aware that my sight had rapidly deteriorated recently, to the extent that it caused problems daily, offered me day surgery. I could have had both eyes 'done', but because of the poor vision in my left eye, a result of the 'lazy eye' I was born with, and despite two operations when I was nine and thirteen, I decided to leave the left eye cataract alone, although it is more extensive than the one on the right eye, and have my 'good' eye 'done'. This will happen in August.

Whenever the topic of cataracts comes up - and the frequency increases with age - the standard response is for somebody to trot out an example of successful surgery, either their own or a friend's or relative's, and say how safe, painless and easy it all was, and how everything has been so much better since. And of course it usually is, but not always. My mother was registered partially sighted after (I do not say because of) unsuccessful operations on both eyes. It was hardly reassuring, but at least honest, when a ninety-four-year-old patient at the clinic I attended announced to everybody, without being asked, that 'they' had made a complete mess of her cataract removal years ago.

Before deciding to go ahead with the operation I had been offered, I asked about the success rate and the risks. The consultant told me that there is a 1 in 100 risk that I shall need a further operation and a 1 in 1000 risk that I shall lose all vision in that eye. The latter would affect my life drastically, to the extend that I could no longer read. I would be able to get about, with difficulty, recognising people but severely limited in my daily life. (I had been practising by covering my right eye for short periods when watching television or walking about the house.) Whatever happens will affect both of us, and it was a joint decision, but I thought the risk small enough to take, especially as I shall almost certainly need to have the cataract removed sooner or later, and when I am older and perhaps in poorer health there could be additional problems. There is every chance that before the new football season is a month old I shall be able to read the names and numbers on players' shirts and on the screens at the Emirates, to read without having to shield my right eye from glare, and to manage without having to ask Sue to read scores and captions on television. The tiny but unignorable risk is that I may stumble closer to unlikely empathy with Samson and Milton, despite my lack of resemblance on either count.

coming back

It's been three weeks since the last post,because I've been in Italy, where many of the impressions I'd received over the last few years were confirmed and a few were removed or modified. Some things were as expected: the food and wine, the beauty of the language, the general friendliness of the people, and the high design quality of many everyday objects. But we were in Puglia, the heel of Italy's foot, which is a far cry in many ways from the affluent areas of the north. The blocks of flats were as depressing as many I've seen in eastern Europe, and although the beaches were clean and beautiful, the interior was unprepossessing, with light industry punctuating the olive trees. I could see many parallels with Cornwall, but their decision to name their equivalent to the Lizard Point 'Land's End' confused me.

All the same, there was a definite air of 'this isn't your standard Italy' which I found rather refreshing. But it was a book by an Italian journalist, Beppe Severghini, that did most to change my perception, not just of Puglia but of the country as a whole. In La Bella Figura he convinced me that he really did offer 'an insider's guide to the Italian mind', and what I'd picked up at Waterstone's as a light, perhaps frothy take on my hosts before I got to grips with Karen Armstrong's A History of God proved to be a witty, informative study of the national psyche. Clive James is the nearest equivalent I can think of.

I'd hoped to speak as much Italian as possible. Well, I suppose I did, but it wasn't very much, beyond the usual basic transactions, because I was with English friends as part of a larger group. My passive understanding had improved, and I sometimes made sense of the World Cup commentaries, but I still found the irregular verbs difficult, especially the past participles. On the credit side, I found new words easy to remember, so in the unlikely event of my meeting someone who wants to high-five me or discuss vacuum-packed olives I shall be ready. My best linguistic experience was on the plane home. A party of nineteen 9-to-13-year-olds en route to Edinburgh via Gatwick was accompanied by a teacher who sat beside me. We talked for the whole flight, more in Italian than in English, but still, while Sue read in peace. I was impressed by the children's readiness and ability to converse with other passengers, but when we landed and heard that Italy had been eliminated I was interested to hear Anita, who admittedly was not a fan, say that she thought it was just as well, because instead of 'bread and circuses' Italy would have to confront its serious political and economic problems.

And now we await England v Germany, not that I shall be able to watch it live, as I shall be watching my three grandsons perform in an outdoor theatrical production. Despite the 'Hard Times' the BBC World Service keeps on mentioning, I still hope we stuff them.

world cup

As I may have said before, the World Cup (so sure of itself that it doesn't, unlike other sports, need to specify which) knocks spots off the Olympic Games, for me, in terms of enjoyment. A month of almost daily footy easily eclipses a month of most of the sports I have heard of, some I haven't and a few events I'm really interested in. The white van men and plenty of private motorists and householders have done their quadrennial patriotic thing, we are being told how many pints of beer, pizzas and packets of crisps are likely to be consumed in the next few weeks, and my newspaper's World Cup booklet arrived this morning, with the promise of a chart in tomorrow's sister paper. I haven't bought a sticker booklet, hoping in vain that one of my grandsons might do so and save me the teasing, but on the whole I think I've displayed my little-boy-who-never-grew-up side quite successfully. 'Saddo,' comments my wife, but she smiles approvingly and adds, 'Actually I think it's quite fun.' Since she will watch at least as much as I shall, and is sufficiently devoted to football to scan websites far more often than I do, there will be no rows over the use of the remote, except possibly when Switzerland v Honduras has to fight for attention against Wimbledon, so we shall be a football couple, as we are throughout the domestic season.

Neither of us is particularly sanguine about the possibility of forty-four 'years of hurt' being ended by Stevie G, or whoever is captain that day, lifting the non-cup, but that doesn't matter. The pleasure of watching two good footballing nations such as Portugal and Brazil vying for supremacy must not be underestimated. The fact that Theo Walcott wasn't chosen for the final squad of twenty-three doesn't bother me, as I don't feel that he justified selection. Besides, now he and Arshavin can take a rest and be fresh for next season. I think Capello is a good manager, but just how good remains to be seen as England's already less than frightening squad is affected by injuries, doubts over fitness and inexperience in key positions. There are the usual fears and concerns: security, fans' behaviour, unsold or exorbitantly priced tickets, and the rumoured sanitizing of the routes to the stadiums/stadia by the removal of all that might present the wrong image, but despite these reservations I'm looking forward to enjoying myself, especially as South Africa is in a very favourable time zone for British viewers to see at least the evening matches. I wouldn't be surprised to see Spain or Brazil win, but just hope we don't go out on a missed penalty.

bank holiday weather

I should have known that, with the first test match of the season being played, a Bank Holiday looming and schools on half term, the glorious weather of a week ago would give place to cold, damp days. Perhaps appropriately, the week's signs of political and financial insecurity have added to the gloom. Autumn ranges of clothes are already appearing in the shops, although more than three weeks remain before the longest day, and what the television companies call 'a great summer of sport', accurately enough this time, is there to be enjoyed.

I am no ornithologist, but it has been a pleasure this year to hear the cuckoo again, after a cuckooless 2009 and a late appearance this spring. Since the death of Solomon, our much-loved ginger tom, several years ago, we have seen increasing numbers of birds in our small back garden, and have welcomed them with a bird bath and various types of food container. Our fiercely territorial but friendly robin (RVP, obviously) is there all the year round, but woodpeckers, pigeons, tits and many other birds, some of which I can't identify, especially as my cataract ripens, fill the garden with sound. The neighbours' cats regard our garden as an extension of their own, and are made welcome despite what they often leave behind, but they are only a minor threat to the birds, who thumb their noses from their high vantage-points.

The grass will never be better than average (slightly above Wembley's pitch, in other words, which has been laid, I think, eleven times, 'more often than Lady Chatterley', as a Grauniad journo put it the other day), and I am not a keen gardener, but it is a brief annual delight to see the clematis (accent on the first syllable rather than the second, for preference) burst out in purple and mauve between the garage and the fence. There, the Japanese would be proud of me.

turned out nice again

One night less than three weeks ago, Chesham and somewhere in Surrey shared the dubious distinction of having had the lowest overnight temperature in England. We woke to frost-covered roofs and were glad we had brought our hanging baskets into the porch for protection. We had had little rain but skies had usually been grey, interspersed with very few of those warm, sunny days that make people think that the longer hours of daylight really are having a beneficial effect. There were the usual second-wave conversations with friends, after the initial comment on the weather, about how it was hard to know what to wear.

Now everything is different. For the past few days there have been sunny, often cloudless skies and temperatures in the low eighties (or high twenties) over large parts of the country. Last year we were promised a 'barbecue summer' - and any q found trying to pinch the c's place should should be returned to the discotheque where it became confused - but the abuse that rained down on the weather forecasters when we endured another wet summer was largely misplaced, I gather, because apparently it was not the meteorologists who had used the phrase in the first place but a journalist who told us what we were hoping to hear. Not that barbecue summers have any particular appeal, as I am not particularly fond of barbecues, even when my son is skilfully supervising the whole thing. This time we are said to be in for an 'ice cream summer'. That is a far less risky prediction as far as I am concerned, because I am perfectly prepared to enjoy ice cream all the year round, regardless of the temperature. Indeed, when we eat out I am as likely as not to choose ice cream for pudding/dessert/sweet/afters - fight among yourselves - in preference to muctions such as tiramisu, sticky toffee pudding, chocolate mousse or, as we belong to say over to Newlyn, what you mind to.

Already the moaners are complaining about the heat, longing for an end to what will probably be described as Sizzling Britain in tomorrow's papers. I suspect that many of them were complaining after the second fall of snow in the winter, as if any departure from the meanest of average seasonal temperatures indicated that we had somehow become displaced from the Northern Temperate Zone and had no right to be subjected to any departure from the norm. I appreciate that sustained high temperatures can cause severe problems, as can sustained low temperatures and any number of climatic conditions and events over which we can have little or no control, but, perhaps selfishly, I intend to enjoy the long days, the better light - despite the difficulty it causes my cataract-clouded right eye - , and all that goes with them, including, this year, World Cup football, test matches, and meals in the garden. Whatever the meaning, often disputed, of the saying about not casting a clout 'till may be out', I have put away my winter clothes, taken out what I like to regard as my summer wardrobe, including shorts and sandals, and hope the present fine spell lasts until October.

a stranger in these parts

I am a newcomer to what are now known as the social media. As silver surfers go - and I'm still partly a pepper and salt surfer, thank you very much - I have a fairly limited mastery of the various technological means of communication. I use my five-year-old computer, which now makes even me look sprightly, for emails, web searches, writing on Word, this blog and, tentatively, Facebook. I say tentatively because I have only a few 'friends', all of whom invited me to join their list. I issue no invitations of my own, give little information away and refrain from the common practice of telling the world how I am feeling every five minutes. In a way, I suppose, I am not playing the game; but isn't that the point? We have a choice. Similarly, I use my mobile phone only rarely, almost always to make a call when I am out, and very occasionally to send or respond to a text. I do not use it to surf the web, take photographs, play games or do any of the other things I could choose, and pay, to do. In short, it is used only on the most important occasions, such as when, on holiday, I texted from St Mark's Square, Venice (yes, that one, not the one in Milton Keynes) to find out the result of an Arsenal match. Some things really matter.

As in an earlier post on my attitude to English 'accuracy', some may see me as a dinosaur, others as a bit of a groundbreaker (What, he's sixty-eight and is on Facebook?), and a few may see my abilities as about right for a crumbly, although I do have my own teeth and hips. What I do find annoying is the assumption I have heard from several people of my age that all these media will never be more than trivial timewasters. There is every scope for bombast and self-indulgence, but why should we measure the worth of something by its least welcome uses? Now that we live in Chomski's global village, these media enable us to gather around the parish pump for the purpose of relaying the phatic, the fatuous or the fateful, as we choose.

choices

Those weekend blog posts seem to be turning into midweek catch-ups, not that it matters. A quick tour d'horizon, if that's the phrase, is all I feel I want to write about at present. Just back from a long weekend in Worcester, I almost felt that I got close to the spirit of the much-derided speech John Major made about a country at peace with itself. Oh yes. We went to Evesham for the day, our bus going through pretty villages like Wyre Piddle with cricket pitches being prepared for play, found a rowing regatta going on by the river, walked around a delightful park full of families enjoying the excellent, unvandalised facilities, looked around a couple of churches and came back to Worcester for an organ recital in the cathedral. If it sounds like twee Middle England it didn't feel like that, just a slice of the not-particularly-posh Midlands enjoying its weekend. Then on Sunday we went to Evensong at the cathedral. A good choir, or rather Kwa, as the (female) priest kept calling it (in fact ordination seems to require the kind of RP Alan Bennett made fun of almost fifty years ago, for everyone had the cut glass C of E accent and intonation), sang Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, with its setting of what must be among the most eccentric texts used in a place of worship, Christopher Smart's poem in praise of his cat, mice and musical instruments. I buy my tuna fish by the pound wouldn't have been a bad encore, with its decent tune and words that at least make sense. I suppose my wish to hear something by Adrian Batten was pretty optimistic, but I would at least have liked to hear something Elizabethan. The weekend was very relaxing, and we had a meal at perhaps the best Italian restaurant I've come across outside Italy. Unlike Chesham and Worcester, Evesham had plenty of political posters and declarations of allegiance. That kind of thing seems to have fallen out of use since 2005.

Monday's defeat at Blackburn left us feeling utterly fed up. It was a feeble performance, admittedly by a team weakened by yet more injuries and illness, but we still haven't secured third place and there's only one game to go. With Man. U. or Chelsea as champions in waiting , Man. City and Spurs vying for the last Champions League place and tomorrow's General Election likely to lead to several years of continuing national decline, things aren't looking too good. Oh well, we may buy a player or two, you never know. Chamakh looks as if he may be the first, but if we play badly on Sunday I think there will be a lot of discontent at the Emirates, not all of it due to the election result, our immature democracy or the greed of the wunch.

Now that the ash has settled

The absence of a blog post for almost a fortnight may have been due to the amount of rubbish spouted into the atmosphere during the election campaign, or perhaps I was just too busy or too lazy, or had nothing worth saying (No change there then, Main Man). Although I have no one theme this time, I do have a few comments to spread before an uninterested world on this St George's Day.

First, on that very topic, I saw three flags bearing St George's cross flying from house windows in a nearby street this morning. Perhaps the day is being celebrated by the owners, but the flag has several other political or sporting connotations, so I can't be sure. The media found time, amid the protracted discussion of last night's political debate on Sky (now I know why they call it analysis) to air the usual discussions of what Englishness means, and there was a quick burst of Jerusalem on the radio, but although I shall happily support England during the World Cup, my two flags are St Piran's (I refer mystified readers to my earlier posts) and the Union Jack - all right, Flag.

Back to politics, or, more specifically, the language of politics. I am equally amused and annoyed by the tendency of some politicians to pronounce the indefinite article ay instead of a. Perhaps the ay form sounds more emphatic and weighty than the usual zero or Schwa vowel. Another pronunciation that caught my ear, this time from Nick Clegg, was crate for create. I have often heard this before, usually, for some reason, from men in their thirties. Whether this is temporary or the beginning of a permanent change I'm not sure. It is probably what my grandsons would call random, which seems increasingly to be used of anything bizarre, unusual or even mildly interesting. That's the way language changes, so fair enough.

Finally, I must come to the defence of the useful word nice, not in formal written language, outside informal dialogue, but in everyday speech, where it usually means no more than that the speaker likes or approves of whatever is so described, without needing to go into detail. It may also, now I come to think of it, carry subtext without strain. These peas are nice, Norma, may be ironic but may also convey gratitude, and even if the word only hints at the pleasure the speaker is deriving from the taste, perhaps the most difficult sense to express in words, surely that is enough? There is usually no problem for the listener in understanding what the speaker means, so the description of a meal, person, day, time, house, job, car or holiday can be suggested rather than given in detail by this convenient adjective. Perhaps we make too nice ay distinction at times, and so crate ay problem where none need exist. I wonder what the National Institute for Colloquial Excellence thinks.

The Companionship of the Long Distance Walker

When Sue's leukaemia was diagnosed, just over two years ago, I naturally decided to help her in any way I could, but it was only when the chemotherapy began that I realised that I wanted and needed to do more. This led to the idea of doing a sponsored walk in aid of Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research (the charity's new name) from our house to Wycombe Hospital, following the scenic route via Holmer Green taken by the bus, our preferred mode of transport for the increasingly frequent hospital visits. The distance is about fifteen miles, and although I would have liked to walk (and would like to have walked) a slightly longer distance, the symbolic route seemed appropriate. Family members, friends and Sue's consultant liked the idea, so I approached the charity with my plan, receiving enthusiastic encouragement, sponsorship forms, bright red t-shirts with the new logo, posters and a large banner. I began to collect sponsors months in advance, aiming at raising £1,000 but without any expectation that I would make four figures. I walked the route twice, using the pedometer Sue had given me as a Valentine's Day present. The main reason for the first 'training' walk was to see whether my old trainers, what the incomparable Robert Pires would have called 'my Pumas', were up to the job. The were, despite the snow that fell but did not lie that day, and I caught the bus back with some satisfaction. The second walk was to see whether I could improve on my time of four hours, not that the real thing would be concerned with speed-walking. Despite drizzle and then heavier rain, I walked the route in three hours and forty-five minutes.

The real thing, on Easter Monday (5 April), was very different. Responses to my plan had ranged from embarrassingly fulsome praise for 'someone of your age walking that far', although I played it down by using the modest, diffident 'shambling wreck' persona, to surprise that it was only fifteen miles and that I was only walking it. Many people had paid me their money in advance, and quite a few had added 28%, without incurring any extra expense themselves, by ticking the Gift Aid column on the form, so by Monday morning I had collected over £1,200. Six of us walked: Martin, my daughter's partner; three grandsons; John, a good friend who is a serious walker with many charity walks under his boots; and I. (Pedants, language nerds and people who don't get out much may care to notice my use of semicolons there, without which a reader unfamiliar with my family and friends could have thought there were seven of us.) Sue and Julia, my daughter, drove 'support cars' to provide food, water, lifts, first aid and rendezvous

at car parks and public toilets. Wearing our t-shirts (Come on you Re-eds!), we took photographs outside the house and set off at ten o'clock on a grey, coldish but dry day, just right for the walk. Reuben and Joseph walked the first and last sections, down to Star Yard, Chesham, aand from RGS, High Wycombe to the hospital, and did very well, but Zachary was an absolute star, walking all the way to Holmer Green playing field, where we enjoyed a windswept picnic lunch (sandwiches, tomatoes, cucumber, Tunnocks), and then the last part with his brothers, a good ten miles in all. Our arrival at the hospital was the antithesis of the London Marathon, not that it mattered to us. The doctor had rung to wish us all the best but to tell us that he wouldn't be there, as he had hurt his back gardening over the Easter weekend, and the hospital reception area itself was deserted as it was a bank holiday. That didn't matter to us; all had gone well during the five hours of the walk, nobody had blisters, was in a strop or felt anything other than quiet satisfaction ('Can we do it again?' asked Joseph), and although Zachary was aching when we went out for a family meal in the evening, we all felt we had done a Good Thing. I now think the final total will be somewhere near £2,000, but I don't think I shall accept the doctor's offer of one of his five guaranteed places in next year's London Marathon.

Five days after the event, Sue has finished her last cycle of chemo for the foreseeable future and is feeling pretty rough still, but we are looking forward to better times.

Easter

Easter, as well as being the principal event in the Christian calendar, always brings back memories, sacred and secular, of past years, especially thos in Cornwall over fifty years ago. It was the custom to walk to Lamorna and back with friends on Good Friday, either after church or instead of it. There were two routes, the main road and the beautiful coastal path via Mousehole, and the object for many, although not especially devotional, was to walk and talk on a quiet, restrained sort of day. I don't suppose anybody does it now, as in later years there were stories of drink, drugs and violence, but I suppose the growth in car ownership and the growing reluctance of many people to walk anywhere have had their effect. We always had fish, often a tin of salmon, on Good Friday, either for 'dinner' or 'tea'. The touring rugby teams from the London hospitals and Welsh clubs would come down and play on Easter Saturday and Easter Monday, but never on Good Friday, against the Pirates at the Mennaye Field. Easter Day itself always involved at least one service and sometimes more, but this was not unusual at a time when on a normal Sunday I attended morning and evening services as well as Sunday School in the afternoon. All these years later, I shall be going to just one service today, and we shall have a family meal here this evening, remembering 'absent friends', but my thoughts are increasingly turning to my charity walk tomorrow, of which more later in the week.

The not-completely-retired teacher

Like my father, when I retired from English teaching in 2002 I was sixty. In his day that must have been regarded as unusually early, but in mine it was quite common, although it is now far less so. I had enjoyed most aspects of my career, but when I was asked whether I would be willing to have my name added to the list of supply teachers I firmly said no. Retirement was to be spent in a very different way from my working life.

About five years ago the school at which I had taught for 33 years asked me to come back for a few weeks, as a former colleague had been off sick for weeks and the succession of supply teachers who filled in for a few days each did not set or mark much work. There was no continuity, and many parents, especially those whose sons were in examination years, were expressing concern and irritation. I knew the syllabuses/syllabi - sorry, specifications (old habits die hard) - so was begged to return. I did, for two or three weeks before Christmas, but was unavailable in the New Year, by which time the sick colleague was able to return. My extra stint of teaching was enjoyable in many ways, quite apart from the extra money I received, and despite having to be CRB-checked to work at the school at which I had spent most of my career without any such red tape. I found that I was teaching many of the people I had said goodbye to when they were a size or two smaller, and their warmth towards me, no doubt linked to relief at having someone in front of them whom they could depend on, was gratifying. I had quite a bit of work to do to get up to speed with what was going on, and found I was very tired each evening, when I faced a large pile of marking, but it was good to be back in the swing of things, surrounded and supported by many old colleagues and by several new ones, who weren't quite sure what to make of me. At the same time, I realised afresh why I had decided to retire in the first place, and was happy enough to reach the end of term.

'Once a teacher, always a teacher.' Perhaps. Over the last seven years I have given private tuition at home, at levels from KS3 to university entrance, and have enjoyed the one-to-one contact with pupils. Gratifyingly, I have not sought, or needed to seek, customers/clients: I'm not really sure what the right word is. (Really? Bit unusual for you, Dad.) I now have three pupils, one of them the sibling of someone I tutored a few years ago, whose parents have come back to me. The other two came to me because their parents were friends of someone whose child I once tutored, and who recommended me. A fourth pupil, whose parents are friends of mine, will be returning for some pre-GCSE top-up lessons after Easter. I've been able to put all my recently earned money into the sum I'm raising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research when I do my charity walk on Easter Monday, and I'm pleased about that, but there's also the feeling that I'm still a teacher, need to keep my hand in and enjoy doing it, partly because, despite not being the most versatile of mortals, it's one of the things I do well.

Language hobbyhorses

Because I was an English teacher, people often assume that I am a staunch defender of 'correct' English, although the denotation of that adjective varies with each person's understanding, or misunderstanding, of what 'correctness' means. No doubt what I say, write or comment on confirms one person's view that I am a reliable linguistic ally, another's that I am an arch-pedant, and yet another's that I am far too lax and permissive. At various times I probably justify all these opinions, which neither surprises nor bothers me, for as a nation we are very good at being linguistically judg(e)mental. Almost eight years into retirement, and with both my children approaching middle age, I no longer spend much time with teenagers, and so am less aware of linguistic changes among young people than I was, although my three grandsons are a new and increasingly interesting source of language use. I suppose I have a range of responses to the language I hear or read. They may be merely interesting (the use of random to mean unusual or bizarre), slightly surprising (the use of toxic to cover anything that is harmful or dangerous), mildly amusing (the use of rising intonation at the end of a statement that then sounds like a question), irritating (the thing is, is that I never ever want to go there again), or incorrect, such as the failure to make subject and verb agree, although Arsenal are at home is perfectly all right, I would argue. I still find it odd to see or hear they used instead of he or she when the gender is not specified, but I know there is sound historic precedent for this, and it does not bother me, although I prefer to avoid it myself. It must be difficult to write dialogue for a play or film set in a previous age, and obviously compromises have to be made if the period is, say, the late sixteenth century, but I sometimes think that in BBC costume dramas the period detail of clothing and decor is given more careful thought than the language. In a recent production set in the late Victorian era one character told another Get over yourself, another said that No way would she do something or other, and a third asked Aren't you just doing that to feel good about yourself? It must be difficult to get the balance right, admittedly. In case any putative reader has received the impression by this stage that my default linguistic mode is pedantic - perish the thought! (subjunctive) - , perhaps I should end this post by making it clear that I welcome and enjoy many of the developments in language use. I do not fear for the language when texts include forms such as CUL8R. The use of the form texed as the past tense of to text is interesting, though, possibly because we often don't pronounce final consonants, inni' ? The fuss about 'verbing', using nouns as verbs, as in medalled,

ignores a practice centuries old, whether we like it or not. Finally, those who talk of a golden age when the English language was used properly, with correct grammar and aptly chosen vocabulary, are deluded. If I look at early editions (1920s) of my old school magazine, The Penwithian, it is obvious that we need not be despondent about the state of our language, about which it would be unwise to generalise too harshly.

The Joy of Books

Today I'm shattered. Observant readers (the implication that I have any is a tired joke) will have noticed that this is the first post not to have been written during a weekend, and that is because Sue and I, with the help of many others, have been busy organising and running our church's annual book sale, and we have then had our three grandsons to stay while our daughter and her partner spent some time in London. Add the nervous exhaustion induced by Arsenal's late winner at Hull and there's probably every good reason for me to feel I could do with an easier day or two, not that there's much hope of that. But this short, belated post is just a little thank-you to Gutenburg, one of Strasburg's two greatest sons (Wenger, durr!), for the portable packages of pleasure, information and opinion that he made possible. Strictly speaking, it was a Book and Media Sale, the media bit reflecting an extension of our previously tome-based fund-raiser to include CDs, DVDs, audiocassettes, videocassettes and records, but which some chose to believe covered bric-a-brac and entire years' worth of magazine tat. Apart from the obvious aim of fund-raising (our takings were well over £200 up on last year's), the event was a success in terms of outreach, co-operation and social interaction. It was also an enjoyable way of redistributing books at low prices. The beneficiaries, apart from the church, include those who wanted to get rid of books, those who wanted 'new' ones - and some seemed never to have been read - , book dealers who could buy cheap and sell at a big profit, and charities, who received leftover books in their shops and can sell them at prices a little higher than ours. All in all it was a

good thing, and although I'm relieved that the next one is a year away I shan't be sorry when it comes.

St Who?

Yesterday, 5th March, was St Piran's Day, not that anyone I met here in Buckinghamshire, or anything I read or saw during the day, gave any indication of the fact. When I was growing up in West Cornwall I hardly ever heard his name mentioned, but over the last fifty or sixty years he has become a symbol of varying degrees of Cornish identity, from the minority who would like to see 'Kernow' regain its independence after centuries of English oppression and neglect to those who, like me, see the cross of St Piran (a white cross on a black background) as a cheerful statement that 'we do belong'. The flag is waved at county rugby matches, flies defiantly on Cornish vessels of all sizes, and appears on many Cornish products, including the wrappers of a well-known Cornish pasty company (which, perhaps incongruously, sponsors Plymouth Argyle) . Google marks days deemed important by modifying its logo, but ignores St Piran. Perhaps this is not surprising, for the importance of a Celtic saint of whose contribution to world history not much hard evidence remains is disputable. Fanciful tales of his Irish (others say Welsh) origins survive. One version has it that he was thrown into the sea, tied to a millstone, at the command of an Irish king because he would not renounce his Christian faith, but that the millstone floated and bore him across the sea to Cornwall, where he converted the locals. The remains of a shrine are buried in the sand, and a few place-names (Perranarworthal, Perranporth) commemorate him. He became the patron saint of miners, his cross suggesting white metal in dark rock. Nowadays there is not just a single day of remembrance in Cornwall but a county-wide sequence of events lasting over several days of 'Pirantide'.

But yesterday, when I wore my small lapel badge with its cross of St Piran, only Sue knew what it signified. My mind went back to the day in 1991 when Cornwall met Yorkshire at Twickenham in the final of the now emasculated County Championship, a game which, despite its relatively provincial title, was regarded as a match of virtually international significance by the spectators from two of Britain's proudest and most distinctively independent-minded areas. It was a game that made the tame encounters of several of this year's Six Nations games look like a different sport. There were St Piran's flags all over the stadium, the overwhelming Cornish support overturning the huge population imbalance, and when we won, having come back to draw level and go into extra time, it was the finest example of the joyful, unaggressive side of the Cornish identity that I have seen.

It's not yet time to write us off

We Arsenal fans haven't been having the best of times in recent seasons, for despite playing some superb football we haven't won anything for a long time. Defeats by Man. U. and Chelsea have helped to establish the widely held view that we may be a top four club but aren't good enough to entertain serious hopes of a trophy. They may well be right. After all, our lack of serious interest in the Carling Cup and our unusually early exit from the F.A. Cup blocked two of the four available routes to silverware, and we shall have to make up for a 1-2 defeat in the first leg of the knock-out round of the Champions League (debatably, there's never an apostrophe after that final s) away to Porto to get any further. Some of the keenest fans have even been airing the often-heard opinion that it's time for Arsene Wenger to go. But now, with ten matches (just over 25% of the Premier League season) to go and thirty points to play for, we lie third, just three points behind Chelsea, who were beaten at home yesterday, and we have the Champions in our sights. When Eduardo sustained a horrific injury almost exactly two years ago, our season fell apart. Yesterday, when Ramsey suffered a fracture so awful that the incident at Stoke was not shown again on television, his team-mates' facial expressions reminded me of those I had seen in the away match at Birmingham in 2008. This time, however, we converted a draw into a 3-1 win. Admittedly, we were playing against ten men for the rest of the match, but we seemed to show the 'mental strength' Wenger regularly mentions but is not always seen. I have a fantasy that as we raise the trophy in May before flying to Madrid to win the Champions League (hey, steady on!) we shall look back on yesterday as the time when we decided that we could do it, not just 'for Aaron', poor lad, but for all of us.

Cloud cuckoo land ? Maybe. We have an allegedly 'easy run in', which includes a visit to a certain rival north London club with the ambitions of playing European football next season and beating us for once. We are more than capable of falling on our faces, and have done it before, but now we have the chance to show that the most entertaining football in Britain can also, over a season, be the most successful too.

'By memory's chain we linked remain'

I've only recently joined Facebook, and then only because a fiend (lovely typo there - he's actually an ordained minister), or rather a friend, asked me to become a 'Friend'. A few days later I had a similar request from someone who remembered me from our days in the same year at Penzance Grammar School, or Humphry Davy Grammar School, as it became in about 1960. The line in the school song about being linked by 'memory's chain', a metaphor which has opposing connotations, certainly applies here, and for positive reasons in this case.

On a wider scale, although I haven't lived in Cornwall for getting on for 50 years, I find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that much of what I think and write is strongly affected by Kernow. This is not the picture-postcard cliche of miles of golden sand and rugged cliffs beloved of holiday companies, although the image is borne out by part of the reality, but a much more varied and contradictory place.

This week I have a new poem which, although not strictly autobiographical, does reflect one part of my experience. I realise that there are so many others in this category.

AT PADDINGTON

Forty minutes late

After a week in the west,

And fancying a snack

Before he took the tube,

He approached the gaudy kiosk

With its garish, corny pastiche

Of harbours and boats he knew,

Placed his order, paid,

Asked the Polish girl,

Pointing over her shoulder,

If she'd ever been down there

(Tired, she just shook her head),

Took his food and drink

And sat at an unsteady table,

Ignoring the pushy pigeons.

He sipped, then took a bite

And tasted salt on his tongue

As Brunel's echoing metal roof

Slid back, to reveal the sun

In a sky of wind-tossed gulls.

picking and walking

My son's description of a strawberry-picking session in Japan and his quotation, from one of my father's books, of a passage about blackberrying in West Cornwall in the early 20th century prompted me to dig out a poem I wrote a year or two ago about picking blackberries with my wife near our home in Buckinghamshire.

BLACKBERRIES

A hundredweight of fruit they picked one year,

My mum and dad. That's, say, a dozen trips

Over a season of about six weeks,

So they must have brought home nine or ten pounds

Of blackberries between them every time,

Enough for bramble jelly, pies and tarts

For family and friends, a bowl or two

For Harvest Festival, and plenty more

To keep and eat themselves. No freezers then,

And soon they were all gone.

Once Dad came home

After a solo trip up on the moors,

Where he knew all the finest cuddies were. places to pick

His hands were purple and his fingers scrawed. scratched

He did not speak, but just put down his pail

Full of great sooters topped by cool green leaves. the largest, blackest berries

Mum handed him a two-pint milk jug, full

Of shandy made from lemonade and beer

Which had been waiting in the fridge all day.

He lifted it in both hands, and he drank

And drank, quenching his eight-hour thirst

In mighty gulps, then wiped a wounded hand

Across his mouth, put down the jug, and smiled,

Murmured a 'Thank you' and admired his fruit,

A full day's berry-harvest, which, though free,

Had been won by discomfort and mild pain.

All these years later, many miles away

From where he picked, my wife and I go out

With plastic bags, hoping, each summer's end,

To find and pick and eat, and so to join

In secular communion with the dead.

The finest poem about blackberry-picking I know is by Seamus Heaney, while the best one about picking apples is After Apple-picking, by Robert Frost. Both of them are about so much else.

To change the subject completely, I end by referring to the walk I intend to do tomorrow, unless the weather has it in for me. As Sue has chronic leukaemia, I'm planning to walk from our home to Wycombe Hospital on 5th April, Easter Monday, to raise money for Leukaemia Research. As the distance is about 13 miles or so, I'll be in walking a half-marathon in effect, and as I'm no athlete, although I'm used to waliking reasonably long distances, I need to practise. Hence tomorrow's effort. I'll just go for as long as I feel reasonably OK and get a bus back, using my senior bus pass, when I feel I've had enough. There will be ample time for other practice walks as the weather, I hope, improves.

forty years on

One of the continuing joys of having been a teacher is renewing contact with former pupils. I must have taught thousands of boys in my 33 years at Challoner's alone. Most, I trust, will remember me, if at all, with at least a degree of gratitude. The very small number with whom I didn't get on at all probably wouldn't want to speak to me if they saw me in the street, although that is not necessarily true for my part, while a rather larger number (I hope) seem to enjoy a chat. I've had people come up to me on trains, in bus queues or in distant places, introduce themselves and remind me that I taught them some text or other, or that I did or said something they remember, although I usually don't, many years ago. Generally I can't recall much about these people, and more often than not I don't even recognise them at first. After all, everyone probably has fewer than fifty or so teachers in a lifetime, and they are all already adult, and so not too different from their future crumbly selves, whereas a teacher has generations of pupils in varying degrees of maturation, little resembling the people they will become.

This week I had an email from somebody who was in my form, 4D, when I arrived at Challoner's in 1969. Rob knows someone on the staff, googled me and sought me out. It doesn't always happen, but I remember him well, and with considerable affection. He played a small part in my first production at the school, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, in 1971, and Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun the following year. I recall his quick-witted ad-lib in one performance when a soldier dropped his sword, and I also remember his Streets of London duet with another pupil at an Evening of Music and Poetry. We had lost contact for years, and it was good to read about what he had done with his life (a great deal, although he was not parading his achievements).

At my school, Penzance Grammar School, or Humphry Davy G.S., as it became (alas, no more) we sang, at the end of every term and on Speech Day, what I thought at the time was a rather florid Celtic Twilight school song linking the school with King Arthur, a fanciful connection in view of the school's foundation in the 1920s. I sang it smiling then but I think of it wistfully now, and although I have never been able to attend any of the Old Penwithians' annual dinners in late December, I am told that the song is sung with both gusto and reverence, and even a tear in the eye, not all of which need be attributed to the consumption of alcohol. One phrase often comes to mind, and it is true of all the schools I have attended or taught at (Tolcarne Primary, Newlyn; P.G.S./H.D.G.S.; Nottingham High School, and Dr Challoner's G.S.):

By memory's chain we linked remain,

Whatever may befall.

I think that is true in many cases, and many teachers, including perhaps my son (for teaching seems to be a benign inherited disease in my family), will agree.

Metroland

I belong to Metroland, a group of poets most of whom live in Buckinghamshire, although some come from much farther afield. We meet monthly in Amersham, and last night I went along for the first time since October. The usual format is to spend about an hour and a half on reading the work of published poets (although occasionally there is a 'forum' in which a member talks about a topic of poetic interest), and then, after refreshments, to devote a similar time to workshopping members' poems. Last night we had been asked to bring copies of poems by poets whose surnames began with T, U or V (we work our way throught the alphabet so as to avoid repetition as much as possible), and I took Edward Thomas's Lights Out, written in 1917 just before he was killed at Arras. I thought most people would know the poem, but nobody did, and it was a popular choice. Later I read an untitled poem I had written for Sue, intending to amend it in the light of friends' comments, but unless people were being tactfully charitable (Yeah, probably, Dad) they reckoned it was fine as it was, and were almost embarrassingly effusive. Some of these people have had much more work published than I have, and really know what they are talking about, in my opinion at least, so their views matter to me. When I got home I gave the poem to Sue with the notes I'd made on others' comments scribbled all around it, but today I've printed a pristine copy and written a little dedication to her. It's given us both a lift. Here it is.

Now it is clear that we reached the highest ground
A while back, although neither of us said so.
For some time I have felt that different muscles
Were taking the strain. We have come by a winding route,
But hardly noticed how far, as we climbed and climbed,
Our upturned faces always searching ahead
To pick out the path, avoid the dangerous scree,
And we rarely stopped to rest or look around us.
Whatever we missed, the flowers to left and right,
The tiny lakes below, the neighbouring crests
Of other peaks we might have climbed instead,
We can tacitly accept it is too late now,
But we shall not soon forget the many moments
That made the climb worthwhile: the frozen pools,
The sudden stag, the eagle, poised to stoop,
Cloud-shadows moving over rock and heather.
And now, as we go down into the valley,
In the hours before the light begins to fail
There will be time to pause and enjoy the way
The grey gives way to green, and the lower crags
Are lit by slanting rays, and we shall know
That we have made the most of the last of the sun.





.

The end of Scryfa

This week the twelfth and (probably) final number of Scryfa was published. I received my copies with mixed feelings. As I had hoped, it included my long poem Men of Great Spirit, about the voyage from Newlyn to Australia last year of the Spirit of Mystery, commemorating the 1854 Mystery voyage. It had already been published on the website of Pete Goss, the captain of Spirit, but it was good to see it in hard copy. On the other hand, this was the end of Simon Parker's attempt, for the time being anyway, to publish a series of selections of the best new work by Cornish writers. He and it have done me proud, for I have had a poem or a story in six of the twelve numbers, including the first and the last. I am sad, though, to see Scryfa meet the same fate as the two series of the Cornish Review, and for similar financial reasons. Over a hundred writers, many of them new and/or unknown and otherwise unpublished, have seen a major outlet discontinued. To use the Cornish dialectal expression of a bygone age, 'Woss do wed'n?' ('What can be done about it?') Nothing, I imagine, at least for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean that the writing will stop. No doubt other opportunities will arise eventually.

So what is a haiku/

According to Higginson, it is simplistic to say that a haiku has 17 syllables in three lines of 5-7-5. Japanese poets do not count syllables but onji, sound symbols reflecting phonetic characters. For example, manyoshu has three syllables but six onji. Traditional haiku have two rhythmical units, one of about 12 onji and one of about five, the break between them often marked with a kireji, or cutting word. As the break between the two units can occur after the first five onji or the first twelve, the normal rhythm is 5-7-5 onji. The traditional haiku (hokku)form originated in the incomplete opening stanza of a longer poem, a renga, and the haiku form is rhythmically incomplete. Haiku often omit features of normal grammar, such as complete sentences and complicated verb endings. All this means that although there are both Western and Japanese 17-syllable, three-line 5-7-5 haiku, as well as many other haiku-type poems which adhere neither to this convention nor to the strict traditional Japanese form, there is far more to the construction of such a poem than has been assumed by teachers such as me and taught to generations of English-speaking schoolchildren.

correction

So much for 'traditional form'. I omitted a word from my haiku, which should have read:

do not threaten me
with your beautiful ice-sword
you will soon be gone

Haiku

My son gave me Basho's Complete Haiku and Higginson's Haiku Handbook for Christmas and birthday, both excellent reads. The best haiku a pupil wrote for me, years ago, was a riddle:

formed by falling snow/it drifts towards the dark sea/a silver ribbon (a river or stream)

This keeps to the traditional (but now often ignored) 5-7-5 syllable structure and makes the once obligatory seasonal reference. It also avoids repetition of any complete syllable sound. I now have a seven-foot icicle stretching from a drainpipe to the roof of the front porch, so thought I would attempt a traditional-form haiku:

do not threaten me/beautiful ice-sword/you will soon be gone

A haiku master would write perhaps a thousand in his life, of which a dozen might be highly regarded, so maybe I need to do more work on this. I find it remarkable that when Basho was at the height of his powers and output in the second half of the 17th century, Milton was writing Paradise Lost.

Last year I devised a Cornish verse form, the bezant, and will post a few next time.

New year, new blog

Happy New Year to anyone who has stumbled upon the first of an approximately weekly series of posts on my new blog. Only time will tell whether what a 68-year-old Cornishman living in Buckinghamshire has to say will be of interest, but whether you are Cornish or not, there will be a wide variety of subjects week by week. Anyone for whom the mention of Newlyn, the Mennaye Field, Tolcarne (school or pub), H.D.G.S., Scryfa, the Mystery, the Spirit of Mystery or the Rosebud has any meaning is likely to find a kindred spirit here, but equally, those who are interested in writing, Arsenal or the theatre may feel at home. From time to time I shall publish extracts from my own work as a writer or comment on some topic that interests me, and I shall welcome comments, preferably polite but not necessarily agreeing.

As it's New Year's Day, here's a brief nostalgic detail (and I'll try not to include too many of those). Does anyone remember the days when boats welcomed the new year by sounding their horns, as in Newlyn harbour in the 1940s and 1950s? I wonder whether anyone heard such a sound anywhere last night. Next time I'll post some poetry.