Frightened by exams

Posted on 31st January 2023 by Ian

Can one have a vicarious sinking feeling? Is it possible that the apprehension felt by others is something that might be fully sensed by oneself?

The Leaving Certificate mock examinations have begun. A room filled with people of seventeen and eighteen years old sits staring at the pages on the desk in front of them. Some write furiously, some stare into the middle distance.

This afternoon it is the first paper of the mathematics exam, the students are a mixture of higher and ordinary level candidates. The candidates’ level can be deduced from the colour of the cover of the examination booklets, pale blue for ordinary level candidates, pale pink for higher level candidates.

Sitting at the front of the room an hour before the end of the exam, it is not hard to see that a number of the ordinary level booklets already lie closed on the desks in front of despondent faces. Finger-tapping by one disengaged candidate necessitates a glare across the room, a hand is raised in apology.

Exams never seemed to make sense,

Being a lazy sort of person, I developed skills in doing just enough to get by. Being reasonably literate, there were exams where I managed to score highly without ever having done the work that might have merited such a mark. It always seemed unfair.

In 2023, do school leavers really need the sort of mathematics that can be measured in the twenty-four pages of an examination booklet?

Undoubtedly, there are aspects of the mathematics in the booklet that are essential to many future qualifications and careers, but does sitting in a room for two and a half hours provide an appropriate means of means of measuring the proficiency of the candidates?

It was from an old episode of BBC television’s QI programme that I discovered that written examinations were a recent phenomenon. The first written exams were at Cambridge University in 1792. Presumably, prior to that date the cost of paper militated against students sitting and spending hours writing answers.

Discussing examinations with my supervisor, who is a professor of education, he pointed out that oral examinations have survived, but at doctoral level. Candidates for doctoral degrees are expected to give an oral defence of their thesis.

If qualifications at the highest level can be awarded on the basis of a process that does not require the lottery of examination rooms, surely it’s not beyond the wit of educators to devise better means of assessment.

 

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A man sitting in the pub

Posted on 29th January 2023 by Ian

The ‘English’ pub outside of England never has the atmosphere of the ‘Irish’ pub outside of England, perhaps the Irish are more homogenous. Perhaps it is the case that an Irish person can walk into a pub and almost be certain to find a person who knows someone that they know.

Not that you can’t be anonymous in an Irish pub. I remember places where no-one asked who you were and no-one was interested in what you were, as long as you paid for your beer.

There were two pubs in Manchester we would go for music; one was crowded and had a younger clientele, the other was more spacious and had a more attentive audience.  People would stop their conversations and listen when the musicians played, and when songs were sung every face would turn to the low rostrum where the singer would be sat on a high stool, flanked by her accompanists.

Ulster songs found a place amongst those like The Cliffs of Dooneen, From Clare to Here, and The Rare Old Times. Star of the County Down invited lively participation, but My Lagan Love was a time to be quiet and reflective.

There was a man who sat halfway down the pub, in the same seat whether you were there on a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday.  He sat alone, his pint of Guinness on the table in front of him.  Each week, the same flat cap and the same distant look presented the exterior of a man who seemed filled with an unspoken sadness.

Perhaps he had once been married and his closest friend and companion had died; perhaps there had been a sweetheart whose love he had lost.  He would stare into the middle distance, without a sign of emotion or awareness of anyone around him.  His face was timeless, the lines like the contours on the map of his life.  No-one would interrupt his reverie; perhaps no-one knew him well enough to speak; perhaps they knew him too well to speak.

Often, in retrospect, the man’s lot seems an enviable one; to sit with a pint of stout and listen to music that would move the heart, without fear of disturbance, without being annoyed by the trivial and the banal.

Some Fridays, a man with a large basket would come through the pub selling shellfish.  His arrival was a moment marked by the band striking up Molly Malone.

The man never bought a bag of cockles; he barely looked up.  Perhaps he was not from a coastal town; perhaps seafood was no part of the diet on the farm his family worked; perhaps it was simply that he did not like shellfish, or that the pension could better be spent on another pint from Saint James’s Gate.

He’d be long dead by now; maybe they played an air at his funeral; maybe someone sang a lament.  Maybe his friends raised a parting glass to their old friend, and declared, ‘There are damned few of us left, and most of them are dead.’

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Cider days

Posted on 27th January 2023 by Ian

The last bottle is being drunk. Four half-litre bottles came as part of a Christmas hamper that also included an assortment of cheeses and crackers.

Harry’s Cider comes from the orchards of Harry Fry in the village of Long Sutton in Somerset. Having been baptised in the parish church, it is a village dear to my heart. It is a place of memories and continuity.

Harry’s Cider has the taste of the cider I remember from my younger days. ‘Medium and sparkling’ says the label for the Applemoor variety.

Its taste is far removed from the gaseous liquids found in most pubs. The taste is full and crisp. The gentle aroma evokes times in cornfields under August sunshine, it evokes the laughter of teenagers sat outside the pub of a seaside town, drinking the pints of sharply dry cider bought for them by indulgent parents. It evokes the apple time, the orchards of trees laden with red fruit, the scents of autumn beginning to fill the Somerset air.

Harry’s Cider is also far removed from the scrumpy drunk with bravado by foolish teenage boys. Rough cider made in local farms, with no hygiene, no quality control, and no idea whatsoever of the alcohol content, it could have a detrimental effect both on head and on the gut.

Raising my glass to my lips, I recalled a story told me by an Irish farmer who spent years working on building motorways in England.

There was a Saturday when I lived in Brierley Hill when some of us went out for the day. We went to this cider house, a place full of these huge wooden barrels; strong stuff. We sat and ate our lunch and drank cider from the barrels. ‘Don’t be drinking too much’, said the man.

I had three pints and when we were leaving I stepped outside into the sunshine and didn’t feel well. ‘I’ll sit on this wall a minute’, I said to the man with me.

‘What wall are you talking about?’ he asked. There was no wall there.

We got back to the boarding house and I told the landlady I didn’t think I would be down for tea. I crawled up the stairs and slept till Sunday dinnertime and, even then, woke up feeling drunk. The man with us had drunk six pints and had driven us home. I stayed off cider after that.

One half-litre bottle of cider is quite enough for me.

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So near, and yet so far away

Posted on 24th January 2023 by Ian

In 1981, the 1960s seemed a different world. Going to the Monsters of Rock Festival in Castle Donington in August of that year, AC/DC, the band at the top of the bill, seemed as far removed from the bands that played at Woodstock or the Isle of Wight as those bands were removed from the rock and roll groups of the 1950s. Yet, in memory, 1981 seems part of the present, whilst the 1960s seem part of the past.

The temporal perception was challenged today.

A colleague aware of my magpie-like inclinations handed me a brochure that some forebear had brought home from a holiday forty years ago.

Discover Weardale, Allendale, S. Tynedale might have been a publication with a very specific geographical locus, but browsing through its pages there is a sense of engaging with a time that was very definitely not part of the present.

Published in 1981, the guide has more in common with the world of two decades previously than it has with the world of someone reading it in 2023. There is a sense of homeliness, a sense of security, a sense of a world that seemed more settled.

Of course, the perception of 1981 as a time that was stable and predictable is entirely nonsensical. It was a time of violence and instability, a time when the world was in the state of flux, yet the world that filled the television news headlines did not intrude upon the pages of the guidebook.

Among the cultural artefacts to be found are advertisements for accommodation. One might have had bed and breakfast for £4 and an evening meal for £1.50 extra. Most of the establishments had three digit telephone numbers and hardly any included a postcode in their address.  (What use was a postcode to someone seeking a bed for the night? It gave no information about how to find a place). Hotels advertised amenities such as central heating and a television lounge.

One inn includes its menu, presumably to entice visiting tourists. The fare is that of former times, with prawn cocktail appearing among the starters, gammon and pineapple included among the main courses, and sherry trifle being on the dessert menu. The landlord of the inn is titled ‘mine host’ at the foot of the advertisement.

One of the larger hotels has forty rooms, it says that it is ‘unlicensed,’ but also that it has a ‘sauna.’ There seems an incongruity between the absence of alachol and something as exotic as a sauna.

With its pen and ink sketches, hand-drawn maps, and diversity of fonts, the guide is very different from anything that might be published today. In 1981, it would have been a definitive source, for where else would you look for information?

 

 

 

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A disused station

Posted on 16th January 2023 by Ian

Joining the Facebook group, ‘Disused Stations,’ I wondered what it was that prompted a fascination with former railway stations, some of which closed sixty years ago.

Among my railway books, there is one with a particular capacity to revive vivid memories from early childhood days. Branch Lines Around Chard and Yeovil from Taunton, Durston and Castle Cary by Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith was published in 1999.

There are photographs of Thorney & Kingsbury Halt on the Yeovil to Taunton branch line. The authors note that ‘the halt was brought into use on 28th November 1927, but there were few dwellings in the vicinity. It was more than a mile north of Kingsbury Episcopi . . A siding was ‘provided on 21st November 1932 for the Nestle and Anglo Swiss Condensed Milk Company.’

The branch line did not survive the Beeching cuts and was closed in 1964, the track and salvageable parts of the station were sold. The salvageable parts of the station included the flagstones from the platform. The removal of the flagstones represented the removal of the last vestiges of a station

I remember my uncle’s white Bedford van being reversed towards all that then remained of the railway halt. The back doors were opened and flag stones from the platform were loaded into the back.

It seemed like the end of a world. Taking the stones from the platform would mean that the trains would never run again; that something was gone forever from life and history.

Asked now to find Thorney Halt, I would be hard-pressed to do so. Perhaps there are still signs that once one could reach the world from this hidden corner of rural England by taking a train to Taunton and from thence to London. Google Earth shows traces of the former track bed, but if one didn’t know that a railway had run through this place, would it be discernible as anything more than a farm track?

Thorney Halt still has the power to evoke a sense of uncertainty.

Perhaps it derives from a childhood sense of mystery that the railway had been closed, that childhood questioning of everything, that need to ask why there was no longer a railway. Perhaps it is about a curiosity as to what had happened to the rest of the station, didn’t railways stations have all sorts of things, tracks, signals, signs? Where had everything else gone? Perhaps the uncertainty comes from a sense of memories being lost.

Now the omnipresence of smartphones would ensure that no detail of the branch line or the stations would ever be lost, but in the mid-1960s, who would have thought such things worth the expense of photography?

Perhaps no child looking back in sixty years time will feel such a sense of loss.

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