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.