A Somerset Lad

Secondary school students love conspiracy theories, they love a sense of secrecy, mystery and excitement. Stories concerning Area 51 in the United States provide an endless source for speculation, particularly among teenage boys. So it was that, yesterday morning, I sat at a classroom desktop computer, unable to avoid the exchanges between boys sat at terminals, each at least two metres from the next.

“There’re definitely aliens in Area 51. They have a crashed alien spacecraft there.”

There seemed little point in suggesting that beings with the technology to travel from a distant planet would not have crashed in an American desert, nor would human beings, who were primitive in comparison, have the capacity to detain beings of infinitely greater intelligence. It seemed the sort of storyline from the 1990s television series The X Files. Perhaps there is some equivalent series for the 2020s.

Meeting the absurd with the absurd, I made a throwaway comment that the Teletubbies were, of course, aliens that had come from Area 51 and that anyone who did a Google search would find proof of it.

Some of the younger students are ingenuous and one girl took my words at face value and immediately typed “Teletubbies” and “Area 51” into Google. A wealth of images appeared of the brightly coloured children’s television characters as aliens.

There was much laughter. There were pictures printed off and stuck on the board. One picture has the caption, “These creatures came from Area 51. They are a threat to the future of the world.”

When I was the age of the students in the early-1970s, I would not have taken the issue of alien life forms with such light-heartedness. Fifty years ago, aliens were a much more serious topic.

Perhaps there was a convergence of factors. The Space Age, culminating with the moon landings, had allowed people to glimpse the possibility of space travel. Science fiction had become popular in films, on television, and in books and comics. Satellite technology was developing, allowing signals to be sent through space. The psychedelic, hippy era had brought a questioning of every piece of received wisdom. The decline in religious belief had allowed opportunity for the emergence of all sorts of alternative cosmologies. The development of theoretical physics allowed the imagination of strange, indescribable realities.

Whatever the reason for the seriousness with which I regarded the subject, the thought of aliens was not one to be taken lightly. It was certainly not one to be confused with Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa and Po.

Dad had a work colleague by the name of Smith whose life seemed full of unexpected moments and hilarious interludes. Some of his experiences were quite bizarre. Dad would come home with the latest tale of what had happened to Smith and it seemed extraordinary to an impressionable teenager that one person’s life could be so filled with memorable incidents that could be shared with all of his workmates.

It was the death of the granny in Scotland that caused the first feelings of doubt. There were inconsistencies in the telling of the story. The story was that they had taken his granny to Scotland on holiday and that she had died. The first inconsistency was in why they did what they did. One version of the story said that the Scottish legal system would have created problems so they decided to take her home to register her death. Another version said that it was going to cost too much for a funeral director to bring her back to Somerset, so that brought her back themselves. The second inconsistency was in how they brought her home. In one version, they propped up her body in the back seat of the car. In another version, they rolled her body in a carpet and put it on the roof.

Anyone now, familiar with television detective series and questions surrounding the place of death and the moving of bodies, would straightaway have doubts about the stories, but it was the 1970s and we were more credulous.

It was in the 1980s that I read a book of urban myths in which the story of bringing a dead granny home from Scotland appeared. In fact, many of Smith’s stories were mythical. Smith was not a man to whom extraordinary things happened, he was a man with an extraordinary memory for stories of the unusual and the absurd.

Did the fact that Smith’s stories were inventions make him a liar? The tales were inconsequential pieces of fiction that amused people, and perhaps most people were a good deal less credulous than I was.

Myths have always been part of everyday life, stories that add something to the ordinariness. In Somerset, they were certainly part of childhood, King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea, the Druids at Glastonbury. The myths were without historical veracity, but they brought a bit of colour to an unexciting world.

Perhaps Smith’s stories are still widespread, still making people smile, still causing boys to doubt.

Apparently, the lockdown has led to an increase in people talking to themselves. This was a development that must have been logically expected. For many people who were socially isolated, if they did not talk to themselves, to whom would they talk? The suggestion was that isolation had made people more reflective, that the lockdown had prompted questioning and an interrogation of a person’s ideas by the person themselves.

It seemed encouraging to think that, firstly, people were thinking more deeply instead of offering quick fire reactions, and, secondly, that behaviour that might have been regarded as eccentric was in fact rational and productive.

Evidence from successive educational studies shows that encouraging reflection on thoughts is an effective method in teaching. Students who question themselves, who ask what it is they have learned, are effective in consolidating their learning. The term used for reflection on learning, metacognition, is hardly one to be used in the classroom, but being able to do it makes a student a considerably stronger learner.

What do I know? What don’t I know? Who, what, where, when and why? How? The list of possible questions is long. Perhaps they will not be asked aloud. Perhaps someone verbalising them would be thought odd. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea if they were spoken. Perhaps effective questioning of students is questioning that prompts them to talk to themselves about what they have learned.

Whatever the educational potential for talking to yourself, it is an activity that might promote good mental health.

My Grandad would often talk to himself when going about the daily tasks on the farm. There would be comments, observations, mental lists. There would be words of encouragement, admonition and frustration.

In my perception, to talk to yourself was a sign of being eccentric, but it seems to have been a much more positive activity than I could have imagined. Farming is a solitary life, most of the time there is no-one with whom to discuss ideas, thoughts and plans. Perhaps the years of spoken thinking, wondering and questioning were important in him being able to retain his place in farming life at a time when many others were leaving the land. Perhaps those years of one-sided conversations were important times of learning.

When the lockdown ends, it will be interesting to see if people have become more reflective. And, if people are more reflective, will it prompt a deeper, more independent and more effective approach to learning?