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.